Lecco, Italy *UPDATED* now with video

A week after returning from Kenya, I headed off to Italy for the World Ultimate Club Championships. This event is held every four years and the best club teams from each country are invited to participate. The number of teams from each country in each of the divisions (Open, Women's, Mixed, Masters Open, and Masters Women) is dependent on a number of factors, such as past performance and participation in other world ultimate events (for clubs and national teams). The summer before I moved to Zürich, the ZUF women's team won the Swiss championship and the right to take the sport reserved for a Swiss lady team at Worlds. Most of the tournaments I have been to (and non-work travel) in 2014 have been to prepare for WUCC. Right now I am taking a little break from ultimate to heal up and hopefully not take it so seriously for a while, but I hope to be able to play some beach ulti in the fall/winter (I have not thrown a disc in 19 days).

Despite all the preparation, the week before I got really nervous. I was a little sick from my trip and at practice I just kept thinking about all the things I had meant to work on, but for some reason or another hadn't. Not the best physical or mental space to be in, but c'est la vie.

All packed and waiting on the train to take me to a mini-bus filled with German strangers en route to Lecco. 

The drive through Switzerland was stunning - I need to remember to get out of the city more often. I can see snow-capped mountains from my balcony and office, but to see the mountains and crazy blue-green rivers up close (from the window of the van) was fantastic.

Going into the week we knew that there could be some issues with the tournament. One of our players was at junior worlds two weeks before, which was at the same site and run by the same people and she sent us some really sad photos of the food they were serving and there were some folks who were disgruntled about the dormitory accommodation they had booked. Dormitories as we know them in North America don't really exist in many parts of Europe, so people were upset when what was called a "dormitory" really turned out to be shipping containers or tents with cheap furniture (described as "purpose-built accommodation venue, consisting of a variety of different temporary and portable enclosed sleeping quarters" on the website, which I think is a fairly accurate description). My team chose a hotel option, so this was not a problem for us. There were several thunderstorms and lots of rain leading up to the tournament. There were some minor inconveniences, but nothing major or tournament-altering (except changing the number of of teams that made it to the power pools). You can get the impression of the muddy fields and pretty mountains in the photo below.

With Sin City from Singapore after out match. Our team cheer claims that "We are short!", which was relatively not true for this game. (Photo from Lillian)

The first day of games was canceled due to water-logged fields, which gave the team some time for enjoying the local sights (including a trip to Decathlon - a sports retailer that sells its own  brands and is very affordable - something unheard of in Switzerland - I bought socks and a collapsible stool to take to the fields {as a team we bought all the stools that were left in the store}) and cuisine.

Google made this cool Italian street look fancier.

Mmmmmm! Pizza! The gelato was even better, but disappeared before I remembered to photograph!

Then we played a lot of ultimate, but it didn't seem like that much since there was only one or two games a day (the rest of the time was spent watching other matches). We were in a pool that (coincidentally) only had European teams, so we wanted to do well so that we could place better in the tournament, but also to be able to play teams that we don't usually get the chance to play. Unfortunately, we lost a game that we really needed to win and dropped into the 17-32 place pools/brackets. Where we played another European team that we have played before this season, a team from Singapore, a Japanese team who trounced us, and an Italian team who we beat on double game point  (it was at 16-16, game to 17) to secure 19th place.

After our final game, with some little fans. Nice to go out on with a win! (Photo from Lilian)

Call often heard from our sideline, also found on the floor of
a Swiss grocery store. ("move forward!" or "close the gap!")

Teams from the US swept all of the medals in the non-masters divisions. The men's masters team from Raleigh, Boneyard, won their division! I didn't really know anyone who was playing with them, but it was still nice to be able to root for an NC team. 

I traded my fuchsia shorts for this Hanabi
(a mixed team from Japan) jersey. One of my
teammates noted that it was "Very Caroline" 

There was a trading night, where people display old jerseys and walk around asking if they people want to trade with them. I do not have that many jerseys with me in Europe, so I didn't bring anything along to trade, but while I was waiting in the refreshment line two Japanese girls approached me. One girl translated for the other, indicating that she was interested in my shorts and could we trade after finals? The shorts she was wearing were okay, but not that exciting, so instead I asked if I could trade for her shirt, which worked out just fine. I was a little scared that the deal would fall through, because when she tried my shorts on in the stadium during finals, they were huge on her petite, short frame, but she gave me two thumbs up and I came home with this beauty -->

What I like about this is that I have a souvenir that is indicative of the spirit of worlds and that I didn't have to drop 50+ Euros on. I also needed another white jersey for practice. I can just play in black shorts until the team makes another shorts order. The ones I traded away had the worlds logo on them, so I think we will order new ones for next season anyway.

Game Advisers, WFDF's baby step towards
observers, in use for the first time.

Ultimate prides itself on being a self-arbitrated sport, but in the US Observers have been used for quite some time in high-stakes games or ones where there is a lot of tension. Throughout the five years that I played in the US, I played in perhaps 8 observed games (placement games at sectionals and regionals). These are third parties who know all the rules and interpretations. If players cannot come to a consensus about what happened they can ask the observer for a ruling. This idea is kind of offensive to some people in the ultimate community, because they feel like it goes against the principles upon which ultimate was founded. I think it is pretty practical. The ultimate governing body allowed for "Game Advisers" who could tell whether the play was in or out of bounds or if a disc was caught or already on the ground and could recite relevant rules, all other calls were still left to the players. We didn't have a game with advisers, but some of the ones that I watched had interesting moments - the players had a taste of not having the full responsibility of decision making. They wanted the advisers to "describe what they saw" or give their opinion about plays.

Friday night party. Dancin' in the rain!

Initial seat for watching finals. Forces to move because they
 hadn't labeled it the VIP section before we arrived.

EDIT: The one good thing about getting kicked out of the VIP area was that we had to move to the end of the stadium for a sweet view of this play:


I have been told that there wasn't enough ultimate in this post, so I will also share what I think one of the more impressive points filmed of the tournament was: these bookends by a Swiss player in a game against a Canadian team (the Canadians ended up winning, but this break kept Basel in it). I can't seem to embed a video that starts in the middle, so skip ahead to 1:15:13 of this:


 /EDIT

I didn't make the train, so I had to spend the night at a
teammate's converted farmhouse with this cool breakfast view.

I rode back to Switz with a teammate in hopes of  catching the last train back to Zürich, but crazy traffic made this impossible. On both the drive to and from Italy much discussion was dedicated to whether to drive over the Gotthard Pass or through the Gotthard Tunnel, a 15 kilometer (9 mile!) long tunnel through a mountain. They stagger the vehicles entering the tunnel; there is a stoplight on the highway, which leads to a massive bottleneck, which was reported to be over two hours long on the way home. Going over the pass affords stunning views (when it is clear) and takes longer (vs once you actually get in the tunnel). We attempted to go over the pass, but it was blocked - they don't want people returning from vacation driving through the little villages. Fortunately, this put us close to the tunnel entrance so we only had to sit in traffic for about 15 minutes before entering. What was cool about this is that all along the way we ran into other ultimate players and could get their take on the traffic speculation.

Poor decor choices at a wild west themed chain restaurant in Italy.

Nairobi, Kenya

I was in Nairobi for work at the end of July. This trip was ridiculously short. We landed Monday evening and flew out late Friday night. I didn't even really eat particularly Kenyan food. I would have liked to have stayed longer or seen more of the city, but there was not really time to get comfortable in navigating and can be risky to explore alone. Next time I go somewhere outside of Europe, I need to try to get more out of the trip. The purpose of the trip was to check out the operations of some of the players in the water and sanitation field there and conduct a workshop. All of this went really well, but I am not supposed to talk about what we did, so instead of riveting discussion about the trickier bits of running your own water or sanitation service, I will just quickly show some of the other bits of the trip. One thing that I did notice was that it was much calmer than Accra or other cities in Africa that I have visited. When I did walk around some parts of the city, only once did I get called after and there was no hissing.

You don't get to escape toilet talk that easily, I paid ten cents to go into a public toilet in a park (I was just curious) and the attendant handed me some toilet paper. The stall didn't have enough depth to get a good photo, but it was a squatting toilet (very common in other parts of the world) and the tank was tied together with string. Overall pretty clean and functional. 

The hotel I stayed in made a pretty okay burrito (better than my Estonian Burrito) and a surprisingly giant and yummy choclate chip cookie. They also carried the locally produced Sierra beer, which had the silhouette of an ostrich on the bottle cap.  I bought fancy Kenyan coffee and postcards of the more exciting aspects of the country in the giftshop.

I took notes during a workshop with an "Obama Smoothline" pen.

Prototype of a new squatting model. 

Lunch at the workshop came in these cool containers with special sections for soup and rice!
Sort of like source separating toilets, but on the other side of the equation.