Dresden und Köln

Saturday morning the girl and I woke up bright and early to catch the charter bus to Dresden with the rest of the kids in my program. Not a bad ride down, I acquainted myself with the Gaslight Anthem albums that Frenchy gave me (in exchange for Ke$ha) and I'm really digging the '59 Sound. We got there after a few hours and first off, Dresden is impressive. I'm a big fan of gothic architecture and the city is filled with reconstructed, monumental buildings. The strange thing is how much construction they have going on, to this day--cranes and huge pits of rock and sand everywhere. I know the whole place was in rubble for a long time, but I didn't expect so much ongoing reconstruction. There's also a bunch of modern buildings scattered throughout the Altstadt and back behind all the older (looking) ones, and overall I was confused by the juxtaposition everywhere of old and new. One building had its old-style facade, detailed ornamentation and heavily blackened stone, but the side of the building was a flat, freshly painted grey wall. It's like they chopped the end of the building off and slapped a new prefab facade onto the side, it doesn't make any sense.

After walking around and taking all that in, making some sketches and notes on the architecture, the girl and I split a really expensive meal at a Dutch place near the old market square (I hate how expensive drinks are at restaurants here). The next stop in our tour was the Gemäldegalerie Alte Meister. We wandered around a bit checking out the paintings they had, which included The Tribute Money, Sleeping Venus, and Raphael's Sistine Madonna. Then after some italian ice and a quick stop to buy athletic tape I boarded an ICE to Frankfurt am Main, transfered to an ICE to Köln and arrived around 1am (the cathedral there is awesome, btw) and took a cab to the fields. The cab driver, sidenote, was badass--driving a stick Benz, he growled at the slowpokes that boxed him in and tried to blow every light he could. When I got to the fields, I was suddenly reminded that in Europe everybody camps out at tournaments...thankfully the British guy let me share his tent and Raz from Chicago loaned my his sleeping bag. After a local beer and some chitchat with those two, I was introduced to the "most important guy on Aachen," an unassuming asian kid into his cups and shit-talking Raz (apparently they used to play together on the German National team). Apparently Aachen was our first opponent on Sunday in the quarterfinals, so there was some discussion of taking one for the team to get this guy to do more shots. I guess they all stayed up drinking for a while, but I was pretty tired from all the travel and hit the sack.

After a decent sleep I showered (without a towel) and grabbed breakfast (without a plate or utensils--it's so weird how everybody brings their own everything) which was nutella and honey on rolls. I ran into Heiko from Mainz and two of his three kids, who apparently had a Pokemon tournament the day before in the same city. Cute kids, apparently the older one was in the semifinals. I walked to our fields and met up with the other guys, Lukas had a homemade boombox blasting Eminem and Kanye (I can dig it) and we warmed up for the game against Aachen, aka the Frizzly Bears. We started out on O and went down two breaks after they capitalized on some dumb errors. A huge layout poach D by the Brit on the Aachen goalline gave us a quick score and we were back in it. I was covering The Asian for most of the game, but at first I was playing the containment D that I too often do, letting him beat me to the disc underneath. After two points of that I realized what I was doing and got frustrated, so when Raz asked "Who can bring a hot D?" I got back on the field and set up across from him again. I maintained my position underneath while they swung it a few times, then I saw the opportunity coming. My guy cut deep and they put up a leading huck, but because I anticipated I was able to get a better read on it, went up early and got the D. We had found our offense by this point and went from being down 3 to take the lead 8-7. Another break and it was 9-7, but then my guy threw a perfect huck twice (I called the first one back because he traveled). At this point the game was a little bit heated because it was tight and they felt that my 3 (total) travel calls were unspirited, but the Wall City guys told me that it was just that people in Europe don't really call travels...and apparently there is a bit of rivalry between these two teams. We ended up winning 10-8 and it looked like a couple of their guys were bitter about it, but I feel like the calls were justified and otherwise the game was entirely clean.

We heard during our bye (yes, a bye after the quarterfinals...weird) that Feldrenner had lost to Köln 8-10 in their quarterfinal, and we watched the Mainzelmädchen play some other women's team. Then after a very brief warmup we started on O vs the only French team at the tournament, Ultimate Vibration. They broke us to start, but then I drove my guy onto his heels and took off deep for a huck and then finished to Raz to tie it 1-1. They score the next point because we let them have a few around breaks (this became a problem for us), and the next point they stepped up their physical D. A guy fouled me hard on the mark while I was trying to break backhand, and their American tried to argue that the foul didn't affect play because "there wasn't anybody on the break side you could have possibly thrown to." Apparently the WFDF rules are more different than I thought. Anyway I got the disc back and hit somebody on the open side, but we gave it back to them and they went deep with it right away. Luckily two of us were ready and I backed up the other Berliner who boxed out the Frenchman and got the D. After a swing I broke open deep and scored our second goal, 2-2. The French scored and then broke, then I threw a huck goal to bring it back to 3-4. We trade to 5-6 and then I broke my mark with a backhand to tie it up, but then the wheels came off a bit. I had the disc on the goalline to take the lead, but the iso wasn't open and the dump wasn't open so I fired a break forehand into the stomach of the Brit, who says he expected the throw but just dropped it. The French scored and broke with time running out. I caught another huck, dished to Raz and scored, but it wasn't enough and we ended up losing 8-11.

After some discussion in the shade of what went wrong and how to fix it (more lateral handler movement, harder marks and be tighter to the downfield cutters IMHO), we faced off against Köln in the 3rd place game. I think we got broken to start here too, a trend I'm not fond of, but we fought back and tied it up with some good D. I got a few deep D's at the end of the game, but early on they kept hucking it to me on O with big German poachers right on my back, and I wasn't able to box them out well enough to come down with it. I did get at least one deep ball, and I remember playing tight D on the Köln handlers, but I didn't take notes for this game so it's a bit more fuzzy. We had just tied it up though when all of a sudden severe storm winds blew in, and thankfully Köln was going against wind on O so we got a quick turn and scored to take the lead. The next point is when I got all my deep D's, when they were basically hucking to play zone, but we were actually doing okay working it up against them. They did score though, and we scored our next downwinder and won the game 11-9.

While watching the French win handily in the finals against Stuttgart we chowed on some delicious grilled steak and Radlers, then showered and packed up, took a taxi to the Hauptbahnhof (us: "ah...wir spielen Ultimate Frisbee" driver: "Ach so! mit die Hünden?" GROAN) and ate some more. We chilled on the steps of the cathedral for almost two hours, listening to reggae on the boombox and chatting before getting on the ICE back to Berlin. During the ride we all did sudoku, I read the Berliner Zeitung and then learned how to play Doppelkopf, an extremely complicated German card game. Overall an awesome trip, and I can't wait to go to Amsterdam next weekend for the three-day tournament there.