Viareggio, Italy

06-07/09 USM: Uppsala, Sweden (coaching)
14-15/09 SM Dam (Women's nationals): Linköping, Sweden
21-23/09 Burla Beach Cup: Viareggio, Italy
26-29/09 eXtended European Ultimate Championship Finals: Bordeaux, France (watching/volunteering)
04-06/10 Oktoberfest Hat: München, Germany

I was in Italy for the Burla Beach Cup, where I picked up with a London-based league team called PAF, which is short of Pyramus and Frisbee. After every match we acted out the play with members of the other team. For this tournament they made the team name Pafacino, since we were in Italy.

This is a sand tournament on a beautiful beach with a sweet view of crazy mountains.

The beach, pine forest and mountains. It was the end of the season, so most of the chairs were put away and there war room for 8 pitches. Photo from here.

The first day of playing was a bit rough, as we lost our first two games 15-0 and 15-1. We closed out the day losing by a much smaller margin, plus I scored the least exciting Callahan ever. A Callahan is when a player catches a disc that is thrown by the other team to score a goal. These are fairly rare and usually require athletic moves. I didn't have to jump or layout. Just took a step and caught the disc right above my head with two hands. That evening my team played a lot of monopoly draw (a card version of monopoly).

The second day went marginally better: losing 15-0 and 15-3 in the first two games. The party that night was pretty cool. The theme was Big Circus and my whole team went in animal onesies.  There were aerial silk performers, sweet jams, and weird foam to dance in.

Big cats and misfits (penguin, owl, non-onsie zebra, and a cow) at the party. Photo from Mic.

The third and last day of playing was really nice. We lost to a team from Kopenhagen, but it was the best we played all tournament. They were really nice opponents- it was definitely one of the best spirited matches of the weekend We lied to one of our teammates about what time the game was, so he'd show up on time (only he and I were there when time started running... I'll have to lie to the whole team next time). After losing all of the matches, we faced off against another London team for the game for not-last place, which we won! I got my toe broken, but we won! (It didn't hurt that badly... I didn't notice until I was swimming in the ocean before finals and saw that it was crazy-purple).

The team then sat together to watch the finals, eating and sharing a massive watermelon that we had gotten for free from a local shop keeper. We just asked about it after we had checked out and he motioned for us to take it. Bonus points for the language barrier! A teammate carved it up arranged the slices on a disc and passed it around to other teams. Perfect in the sun! There are photos of this somewhere on the internet, but I decided to go ahead and publish the posts, instead of waiting for them to come out.

Teammates enjoying watermelon! Photo from Mic.

I spent the day after the tournament reading on the beach before carpooling with other ultimate players to Bordeaux.