Spinning in Paradise - Jelsa, Croatia

"Pomalo!"

The Croatian term for "take it easy" or "chill out, dude" was a perfect summation of our week of true paradise on the Croatian island of Hvar. Since we knew we would be traveling for a while before the World Ultimate Club Championships, we thought we would try to find opportunities to play/coach while we were traveling the continent. Our friend Brummie from GB, famous from such blahg posts as "Cheerio, Mate!" in July of 2010, told us about an opportunity to coach a weekend of skills clinic in Croatia, so naturally we jumped on it. 

It turned out to be an absolutely incredible week of new friends and old flames. New friends because the people at the weekend clinic were amazing people from all over the world. Turkey, Australia, Italy, Germany, Croatia, Slovenia, Canada, GB, France, and the US were all represented in the pool of players. These people were kind, funny, talented, eager to improve, intelligent, interesting, fun to be around, and they love Ultimate SO MUCH. It was a true time warp back to our roots in the sport, a reminder of one of the main reasons we fell in love with the sport (the community), and a perfect way to begin to wind down a 14-year period where Ultimate dominated and dictated our calendar, decisions, destinations, and life goals. It was a tremendous gift to be surrounded by the collective enthusiasm and joy for the sport that brought Mike and I together and shaped our lives for so long. 

The coaching crew (Mike, me, Holly, and Brummie) and Vinko, the man with the vision and ambition to put this incredible endeavor together. 

Clinic crew plus some early tourney arrivals: Martje, Zan, Levke, Baris, Sev, Brummie, Nejc, Marko, Mafia Marco, Gerard, Zoltan, Mike, Carly, Sofie, Spela, Paul, Adam, Callum, Vinko, and Holly (less Jaka, behind the camera, and Ofolko and Ricky). An amazing group of people!

We woke up early to work out before training, then had a three hour training in the morning from 9-12, then hit the beach or mountains for 6 hours, then came back for another night time training from 6-9, then hung out at night. 

Mina Beach.  Another amazing shallow bay to play picigin and frisbee.  This was our daily hangout spot during the clinic.  Frisbee, Beach, Frisbee, Shower, Eat, Party...REPEAT!

Plenty of room to lounge and take a nap when you grew tired of the water.

More and more players rolled into camp throughout the weekend for the Hat tournament.  This is the final crew.

View of Jelsa, the city where the clinic was held. It was a 5 minute walk from town up a mountain to the fields/gym where the clinic/tournament was located. People camped in tents behind the handball gym, and we slept dorm style on gym mats on the floor.

Our snorkeling gang post swim and cliff jumping (from the left: Sev, Martje, Zoltan, Levke, Sion, Holly, Paul, Cara, Mike). Brummie caught some footage of the cliff jumping and snorkeling on his GoPro...can't wait to see it!

View of Hvar City from the castle atop the hill. Hvar City was beautiful, but packed with tourists, where as Jelsa was as beautiful and almost empty. After a day of snorkeling and cliff diving, we borrowed Barbara's (awesome Swiss player) car and explored the rest of Hvar island by car. 

Hvar city harbor

Prom pic! Beautiful Jelsa harbor 

Texas frisbee friends have arrived! The last day we were there, Charlie, Walch, and Edith came to chill on Hvar and take our place for the tourney. 

Sorry about the earlier picture Brummie.  Here is the most flattering picture of you we could find.  Peka!!! What seemed to be a whole roasted goat in a huge pan with roasted potatoes and onions. It was incredible. Let's make it a goal to share another meal as amazing as this in the future.

Huge hvala to Vinko for putting this amazing week together for the love of the game. And thanks to everyone at the clinic for the amazing times! 

Dubrovnik and Split!

After our visit to western Europe it was time to explore central/eastern Europe.  From Paris we flew to Dubrovnik, Croatia to meet Holly and see the Dalmatian coast.  This part of the world lives up to the hype.  It has become a popular tourist destination in the last few years and it's easy to see why.  The Adriatic Sea is a beautiful green and blue that can be as calm as a lake.  I was actually surprised the water was salty the first time I jumped in.  Dubrovnik is a beautiful walled city nestled between the mountains of the mainland and the coast.  There are islands to explore, beaches to relax on, and cobblestone alleys to stroll along.  Croatia here we go!

Sunset from our apartment.

The first morning we ran up the mountain that separates Dubrovnik form the mainland.  You can see the city just to the left of Cara.

The view from the rocky beach we spent an afternoon on reading and swimming.

These purple flowers seem to be everywhere in Croatia and were in full bloom.  Any flower experts know the name?

Throughout Dubrovnik there are narrow stairways to get you from the coast up to the apartments and shops spread up the hill.

Nothing needs to be said for the next two photos.  Dubrovnik is that beautiful.

After our short stay in Dubrovnik we boarded a bus for the 4 hour trip along the coast to Split.  Split is a larger city with an international airport and the jumping off point for the ferries to most of the islands.  We had a day to relax on the beach and walk through the city before Sion "Brummie", our Great Britain frisbee friend, joined us to travel to the island of Hvar.

Enjoying a few drinks in the alleys of Split before dinner.  We found a vegetarian restaurant that was amazing!

This beach on Split, like another we'd find on Hvar, was great for throwing a frisbee and playing Croatians favorite game Picigin.  We would play this A LOT on the island.  It's basically hacky sack with your hands with the goal of making it a little difficult for the other players to return your pass.  You pretty much try and force layouts and great plays.

Split is also famous for Diocletian's Palace.  Diocletian is an old Roman emperor famous for persecuting Christians.  What's left of the palace has been turned into restaurants and shops.  It was nice for a quick walk.

Another view of the bell tower.

Brummie's here!

We then boarded our two hour ferry ride to the island of Hvar.  On Hvar we would meet Vinko, the mastermind of Spinning in Paradise:  a two day clinic followed by a 5 day hat tournament.  We had a weekend of coaching ahead of us and some amazing people to meet and hang out with.

Versailles, France (not Ohio)

On the recommendation of an old friend/teammate, Graham, we signed up for a a Fat Tire bike tour of Versailles.  Riding through the massive grounds of Versailles on a bike was the perfect way to take in all of the palace.  Our tour guide also provided a great history of France through the reigns of Louis XIII thru XVI and the start of the French Revolution in 1789. When you see this place, it's no wonder that the people revolted and targeted the upper class bourgeoisie during and after the revolution. 

Each tree lining this road was removed from another location, transported to Versailles and replanted because the Louis's weren't patient enough to wait for saplings to grow.

Queen Marie Antoinette, wife of Louis XVI and hailing from Austria, built a peasant village near the back of the grounds.  It was her sanctuary from the demands of being the queen.  It was just a model and she had laborers from the castle dress as peasants while she was there to give it the atmosphere of being a real village.

A residence, Le Petite Trianon, built for King Louis XV's mistresses (specifically Madame de Pompadour, who apparently had more political power than most of the kings advisors and, by some accounts, the actual king himself).

And...another castle (Grand Trianon) built for the next Louis' mistresses.  Can't count the courtesans! 

Lunch on the shore of the huge man-made lake.  The castle is way off in the distance.

The main palace adorned with gold!  The original castle was truly covered in gold plates.  These were stripped and sold during the French Revolution.  Recently the government decided to re-gild the outside of the palace, but the project was halted during the recent recession.  

Not many photos to show form the inside of the palace.  Just imagine room after room intricately decorated with paintings, tapestries, and busts of King Louis XIV, V, and XVI. The most impressive thing was the amount of marble throughout.

Paris!

More than any other city on the world, Paris has some big britches to fill. Travelers go expecting to be wooed and awed by the elegance, romance, and culture and off-put by the stereotypical Parisian iciness and French pretensions. It's an intimidating city to be a tourist in, so Mike and I tried to go in with neutral expectations and an open mind. We kept our agenda pretty low key and hung out with locals, and I can tell you that Paris was a gloriously mixed bag. 

A few blanket statements that reinforce or dispel popular stereotypes of Paris: 

• people truly are making out everywhere. On a midnight walk through the city after visiting Notre Dam we were walking across a Seine River bridge we saw a couple making out hard core (woman straddling man on bench), while the bench immediately next to them was a guy playing the Saxophone. Sex/sax on a bench. 
• People are nice. Parisians were the only people that kept telling me that Parisians weren't nice, while they were nicely talking to me. 
• I think they missed the memo about lung cancer, since a ridiculously high percentage of people still smoke. 
• Food and mealtime is sacred. According to Parisians (and all observations upheld this), they don't eat on the go, don't eat on the Metro, and don't take leftovers (a strange phenomena we've encountered throughout Europe is that it is tres gauche to take your leftovers, which is surprising considering that many of these countries are still in crippling recession) 
• if you want to visit any major attraction, it involves waiting in Disneyland-esque lines
• it's a beautiful city, even in the rain

It was raining when we arrived in Paris, and would continue to rain off and on during our time there.  Faiss, Mike's favorite Danish/Frenchman arranged for us to stay with his friend Naz in Paris for much of the time we were there.  Merci a million times Naz for your hospitality! From our base camp in the city we were able to easily access all the sites of Paris.

After we arrived we took the Metro to the Arc de Triomphe de Etoile walk the whole Champs-Élysées. While the Arc itself was impressive, the Champs-Élysées was unremarkable, mostly just hoards of tourists shopping in US based stores. 

This is the third Arc de Triomphe on the blahg so far! Not to be confused with the Arc de Triomphe de Etoile (pictured above) or the Arc de Triomf in Barcelona, this is the Arc de Triomphe de Carrousel which was built from 1806-1808 to commemorate Napoleon's numerous military victories in his attempts to spread his empire far and wide. The reason for so many commemorative arcs apparently harks back to the Roman Empire's penchant for building arcs to commemorate battles. 

While way too sappy for my tastes, the locks on the Pont des Arts footbridge do look pretty cool. Last year there was a big fuss; the city wants to take them off because they are adding so much weight to the bridge that they caused a section of the fence to collapse. 

The church at the top of Montmartre (the "artist quarter" area of the city where the Bohemian ideas held strength), Basilica Sacre-Coeur. 

After exploring Montmartre, we walked through the Montmartre Cemetery, a typical Paris cemetery with above ground sepulchers and mausoleums. From the 4th to 18th centuries, Parisians were buried in the city cemetery called Le Cimitiere des Innocents, apparently holding up up 6 million bodies by the 1700s, mostly in mass graves. In 1786 the government decided it was probably unwise to have the cities largest cemetery located right next to the largest food market, so they decided to exhume 6 million bodies and put them in old quarry mine tunnels in the south of the city (hence the bone-filled catacombs today). 

It was built in an old mining open quarry in the early 1800s. These sepulchers are under the main road.  

Naz and teammates were headed to a free concert in Republic square, so we tagged along. 

After the concert we took a midnight stroll to Notre-Dame.

The next day we went to Versailles (different post to come!) and met up with Nathalie Guimard, a good friend from UT who now lives in Germany with her husband Allen. It was so awesome seeing Nat again and her dad was kind enough to let us stay at his place while he was on vacation. 

The Metro stop at Nat's dad's place. Even the subway entrances are quainter in Paris. 

Needs no explanation...just pretty.

Nat, Mike, and I decided to climb the stairs up the Eiffel Tower at night. Increable! 

Mount Eiffel Tower (I thought it looked like Mt. Fuji from this angle). 

C'est Paris! 

Nathalie's French grandparents own a vineyard near Bordeaux, so obviously we had to take a bottle of Guimard wine with us.  

We later beheaded, Reign of Terror style, this delicious puff pastry garçon. 

While it rained off an on all day, we played a few epic games of Yaneev and then ventured out to watch the finals of the World Cup game. 

Bordeaux & Arcachon, France

With the closing ceremonies (huge rager) of the Meras Olympics behind us, we left our mountain abode for the not so big city of Toulouse. The plan was to spend one night and one day here before catching an afternoon train to Bordeaux.

Our adoptive French family, the Mabilles, generously invited us to stay at their other house in Toulouse for our last night there before heading out, so we took them up on their offer for one more awesome night of great food and conversation. Comparisons, consternations, and cliches about the USA and France took up the bulk of the conversation.  It was fun hearing their perspectives on their own governmental system and culture, and sharing our thoughts on our own.

Meet the Mabilles!

Pascal quit his job at Motorola about 10 years ago to start a non-profit called Connected Schools that provides technical vocational video training (in their own language) to children in developing countries in the hopes of giving them 1) marketable skills and 2) enough knowledge so they can effectively teach others. Sounds like a really neat project, and they are in the process of expanding (just wrapped up Cambodia).

Brigette, the mom, is a super woman. She gardens (we were constantly eating out of her garden), she welds (welded the fence around their pool), she is a skilled carpenter (built a lot of the furniture in their house), she's a teacher (teaches a technology class to middle schoolers), runs the hydroelectricity turbine at her mom's house, and raised 4 children. She's like the French Jenna! Her productivity, knowledge, and attitude were truly mind blowing.

The kids we met were Gabrielle and his awesome girlfriend Justine, Martin (organizer of the Meras Olympics), and Sophie (just back from a year abroad in Brazil). They were all kind, funny, intelligent, and incredibly fun to be around.

Our now daily ritual. Coffee and some sort of delicious baked good. This one is a crispy almond cookie shell formed into a cavern of delectable diabetes. 

Bordeaux is sometimes referred to as "little Paris" because of it's similarities in architecture. Similar building regulations must exist, because the only buildings in the city center above 4-5 stories are the churches. 

It also has the good ol' rags to riches tale. According to a travel book we read, and later confirmed by our new frisbee friend Cyril, a decade ago Bordeaux was a run down industrial city with one industry to its name (can you guess?). A savvy politician stepped in as mayor and, in what is considered by every French person we talked to an unprecedented era of political productivity, he literally cleaned up Bordeaux. The beautiful white stone buildings were covered in black from years of pollution, so they white washed them. They installed a passenger tram system, public parks, bike baths, art installations, and water features along the Garonne River where there were previously abandoned warehouses and defunct train tracks. They built a fancy new bridge to connect the two sides of the river, and encouraged tourism. 

Cool statue in front of the Opera house. 

This entire statue depicting scenes from Bordeaux life was made of wine corks!! Bravo crafty drunk artisans, bravo! 

Cool water/mist pad next to the river that a million kids were reveling in. 

The Bordeaux Cathedral was built in the 1440s in typical Gothic style of the age. There was an organ concert going on when we went it, which was really interesting. Also, half of the church was not cleaned, and it was visibly black and grungy, so it wasn't hard to imagine how dirty the whole city of Bordeaux would have looked a decade ago. 

Tower (Tour Pey-Berland) of the impressive Bordeaux Cathedral. Interesting side note: the tower was built separately from the church so the vibrations from the bell didn't damage the church structure. Ironically enough, that wouldn't present an actual concern for a long time since after they built the tower they had no money to buy the bells. It wasn't until the 1880s that the bell was finally installed in the tower. 

Sweet French flag pic along a typical Bordeaux side street. 

Archanon, France

Our last full day in Bordeaux we decided (on the recommendation of our amazing hosts Jackie and Bryn...more about them below) to head out 60 km to a beachside town called Archanon, famous for having the largest sand dune in Europe, the Dune du Pilat. Jackie and Bryn let us borrow their bikes, so we rode the train out and biked to the Dune. Archanon was an absolutely gorgeous little town. 

The dune rises out of nowhere and is surrounded by a forest. The dune measures 360 ft. in height, 500 meters wide, and 1.6 miles long. We walked the whole thing and were pretty wrecked by the end of it. 

Sore calves. 

Mike on the sand dune!

Moooore sand dune, with the forest in the background. Obviously we thought this place was pretty cool. 

After the sand dunes, our awesome Canadian Ultimate-playing hosts Jackie and Bryn hooked us up with the local team. So we went out to practice with Cyril and the Bordeaux team! Polar opposite fields from Seville, which were a concrete dirt patch with not a blade of grass that they paid a small fortune fot. These fields were plush, expansive, and totally free! Cyril and the Bordeaux team were super welcoming and we're looking forward to seeing some of them at WUCC in Italy in a few weeks. Post practice beers are a tradition that I'm sad we got away from in Austin, but we'd be drinking a lot of beer with the amount we practice. 

Also, Bryn has a really interesting post-doc physics position which involves parabolic flight (zero-g), so here is a video of him throwing a disc in zero-g. Definitely wins the award for coolest throwing session!