Wow, time goes by fast! I have exactly a month left in Ireland and I'm not really sure what happened to the last four months. I've got 3 days of class left, a week of studying, then 5 exams spread out over 3 weeks before heading back to the States for 3 days and back to Europe (Germany this time). Crazy!
Since you last heard from me I've done a lot of studying and played a lot of frisbee (yes, it is taking over my life). The studying part is really uninteresting and involves me, the library and terms like "branching ratio of a complex logarithm" and "spin and parity of nucleons"so I'm assuming you don't want a detailed description of that. As for frisbee I played in two tournaments, mixed nationals in Dublin and Tom's Tourney in Bruges.
Mixed nationals was a club tournament for the various Irish clubs, there were 8 teams playing, mostly from Dublin. I played for Open Club Sandwich, a beginner's club mostly from DCU and DIT. We came in 8th but played a lot better than we were expected to. The team had me handling, which was new but probably good for me :P We had a lot of fun, and the weather even turned gorgeous for the second half of the day! I was voted team mvp and got chocolate :)
The next week went by really fast, as my flight to Brugge was early thursday morning (and over 100 euro cheaper than other flights, hence the skipping of class) I had to turn in assignments early so spent a lot of time in the library. My friend Jen and I did have a cooking date wednesday and made fajitas :) I decided against sleeping in the airport and just woke up really early to make my flight. There were 3 of us from the team, Deadly Buzz (Irish women), on the same flight and after having fun with ryanair's baggage restrictions made it to Charleroi and a bus and a train later to Brugge (definitely starting to get tired of ryanair and their out of the way airports). We spent that day grocery shopping, throwing, and basking in the sun - glorious! Kebabs for dinner, party on the pitches that night as the 4 Irish teams gathered (the other teams were Jabba, Broccoli, and Johnny Chimpo), and learning how to throw hammers and scoopers rounded out the night.
The next day our first game wasn't until 1, so 4 of us girls went in to town in search of waffles and chocolate (we were successful) and were back in time to watch a bit of Broccoli's game and then on to our day of ultimate. It was our first time to play together (I hadn't met about half of the girls before the tournament), so our first game was really rocky - 15 - 2 not in our favor, but as the weekend went on we got a lot better. We lost all 3 games our first day but learned a lot, and ran a lot - European teams are really fit! Our last game of the day we lost in sudden death, which was disapointing but showed how much we had learned during the day. That night there was a bbq which was really good and then a comedy show. We hung around afterwards, the Irish girls tried to have bonding time but the guys ended up joining us for a fairly epic game of never have i ever which ended with Kevin playing his guitar until we were kicked out of the tent at 3:30.
Saturday was our toughest and best day - we played 4 games and won 3 of them (technically our record for the day was 4-1, but we won the last match because a team dropped out). We started at 11:30 and played 3 games in a row with an hour in between. Our team of 17 slowly dropped in number as 4 people got injured, though thankfully not debilitatingly so we could still keep 2 lines. We played hard and won our group for the day and then decided to immediately play a challenge match to try and move up to the top 8, but lost that game and then found out we had to play a cross-over match. When we realized that we were "playing" the team that dropped out I don't think any of us have ever been so happy to not play a game. Instead we celebrated with showers, watching Jabba play, and going for dinner. After dinner we headed to the tournament party. That was great fun, lots of dancing and the vegetable game (try and say various fruit/veggies without showing your teeth or laughing). The Irish definitely won the party award - they danced all night and apparently were again the last to leave as the club was closing.
The next morning this was very apparent as all 3 teams (I don't know about Jabba) lost their early morning games. We couldn't get together the flow we had on Saturday and dissapointingly lost to a team we had beaten before so ended up playing in the semi-finals of the plate division (lower half). It was really windy and we started out quickly losing, but fought back and as time ran out scored a hard fought point to tie it, so continued play but sadly lost in the end. We did yoga with the team to try and avoid sore muscles (didn't work) and then celebrated a good tournament with champagne showers (apparently a tradition for one of the other Irish teams that we stole), watched the final, and headed to the airport.
Four of us were flying out of Charleroi, and could make the flight if we left Brugge at 4 am, and made it in 2 minutes from the train station to bus stop. We decided this wasn't worth it and so just headed there that night and slept in the airport. I was tired enough that I slept surprisingly well, then woke up dealt with the annoying baggage rules for ryanair, and made it on the plane back to Dublin. Great weekend, though I'm pretty sure I only got 18 hours of sleep the entire time and now my legs are competely exhausted. Gotta love frisbee :)
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