København

The last weekend in April I travelled to Copenhagen with the Swedish Fish for the three-day Wonderful Copenhagen Ultimate Tournament. Just like the Tallinn trip, Emilia and I headed to the tourney a day early to take in the sights. We hit up the castle, the mermaid, opera house, waterfront and the star-shaped barracks island. It was a lot of nice walking. I think it was a holiday, but the city seemed really empty compared to Stockholm. It was nice and open; old, yet designed. There were bikes everywhere!

Everyone wanted lots of pics with the mermaid.

I was more interested in this power plant,
which.I think was burning trash

I ate this delicious cookie sandwich, which i now realise must have been some sort of precursor to the poptart.

We didn't win a game at the tournament, but lost several by just a few points and had some really great moments. And some not-so-great ones, like when we were up on a team 10-6 when the time ran out. The way this tournament worked, when the time runs out, you finish the point and ad one to the highest score (unless one team has reached 15) and play to this score. We scored that point, so the game was to 12. We lost 11-12 and the match lasted all the way through our bye, almost two hours long; we had 15 minutes to rest and walk across the complex to our next game. We were only 10 players, so we were all pretty exhausted the rest of the weekend from this marathon game.

Here I am (looking awkward in 5 shorts) with teammates. Beautiful sky and weather on Days 2 & 3.
(Photo from Get Horizontal)

After that game, the team got pretty dysfunctional: not warming up together and having very little patience for mistakes. So dysfunctional that we didn't even get a photo in the official team photo photo-album on facebook (even though they took one).

It seemed to be a lot about pushing myself as a player. I was mostly handling. When a fellow handler asked me why I didn't throw the disc across the field (through the cup and into the wind) to her I was taken aback-- such a throw is way outside of my comfort zone, but the next point I started looking for these cross-field swings and they (mostly) worked out.

One (sort of) funny bit is that we were accidentally awarded the spirit prize. Em and I were the only Fish left at the fields after finals (the rest of the team preferred hanging out at the airport instead of watching ultimate) and they announced "Swedish, uh, Fish" as the women's spirit winners. We looked at each other confused, because our teams actions weren't particularly laudatory, but ran up to grab the prize excitedly. We started eating chocolate from the bucket they gave us and took some selfies with the sweet Viking trophy. We even started making plans for the trophy's role in the team: he would travel with us to all the tournies as a totem of sportsmanship. We got on the airport bus, ran into one of or pickup players and offered her some of our spirit chocolate. She told us that she had heard that the U23 Swedish national team had won. We felt horrible. Em ran back to the TD and asked them about it. Apparently the paper had been folded and they had only seen the Swedish part and just "guessed" it was us. We passed off the trophy and remaining chocolate to some of the youngin's on the bus. We will always have those precious few minutes with the Viking. All three of us even made it into the tournament video (near the end).

WCU - Wonderful Copenhagen Ultimate from Get Horizontal on Vimeo.

So photogenic! (and sunburnt!!!)