A horrible thing happened on the way up, however. We were in a small, 4 person gondola together and Dan was playing his harmonica until he ripped a big one. Now, this is one of Dan's favorite past times, but man, was it strong. The worst part was that the gondola was tiny and so were the windows. It smelled so awful and was so suffocating that for the rest of the ride up, I was trying to stick my head sideways though the small sliver of a window as Dan laughed uncontrollably and video taped my reaction. I couldn't breathe.
Anyway, once we got up to the top, we did some on-piste skiing which was ok, but the snow had a really weird consistency and there weren't many open trails. We weren't sure, with such spring-like, melty conditions, what off-piste skiing was relatively safe, but we went looking for some anyway. We decided to follow some experienced-looking people and ended up taking a full mountain run down a steep slope and then through trees, all the way until we hit the line of no more snow. Then we had to take off the skis and walk the rest of the way to the bottom through the mud. We did that run a few more times because it was incredible.
I had made fun of Dan earlier for not wanting to go on a slope that looked pretty baller because we didn't see any tracks that had gone that way. He changed his mind on our last run, but I had become reluctant. We ended up taking it, which was fine, but was a potentially bad idea, because as it turned out, this steep corridor was nothing more than an old avalanche slide path. I guess skiing on an avalanche is a pretty cool story though.
To sum up the academics that week, we didn't have to present our Phuket bullshit and my genres litteraires teacher made fun of my accent again when compared to the next American presenter. One more time and I was going to throw my SIGG water bottle at her face.
The University of Fribourg finally had some end of term university events that week. We went to Campus Fever on the weekend, which was a bunch of student bands performing with food and a carnival outside. It finally felt like college. I think that was the first time I had seen so many Swiss students in one place!
The concerts were good and a bunch of Erasmus students were there so we danced all night. At some point in the night, I met a Swiss/Serbian friend's friend who said some of the most sovenistic things I have ever heard. I had recognized him from futsal and he was like "oh? were you there? If there are girls there I just ignore them, I think it's disgusting when women play sports." He went on to tell me that he believes equality of women has been imposed on us as a society, and that he doesn't think women should play sports or do anything else that men do because these activities are for men. Little did he know how basically my entire life/personality is dead set against these claims. I really only said agree to disagree though because we had just met and he seemed way too thick-skulled to be open to discussion. Gross.
After the concerts, it was about 1 or 2 in the morning and someone made a decision to go to a club called Frison instead of the disco that was part of Campus Fever. By the time we got everyone ready to go there and actually walked there it was like 2 am. Meanwhile, Marta was so um out of it that she was (trying to) speak English and offering her left-over sandwich to people on the street. All of this was hilarious and captured on video. Anyway, so it was 2am and me and Pinar were exhausted so we slipped out of the group to walk home. Took almost an hour to walk home, not sure why.
So now I am going to skip forward to that Thursday, because it is such a good story that whatever happened Sun-Wed (even if I could remember) is just wasting your time. Thursday was the Fribourg Football Festival. Around noon, another American, Sophie Allen, and I walked along the train tracks to the big outdoor turf complex. There was going to be this huge soccer tournament run by the school. 48 teams showed up, so there were people everywhere and vendors and red bull sponsorship and a dj and massive amounts of alcohol.
The tourny was supposed to be "fair play" so they made some rules to favor the ladies in this coed event. Rule 1 was reasonable--always have a minimum of 2 girls on the pitch, but rule 2 pissed me off--every goal scored by a female player counts twice. What kind of trash is that? My goal for the day became to use my anger against this rule by fully taking advantage of it.
We had a really good line up for our team, mostly international--only one Swiss. We had me and Sophie obviously for the girl requirement and both of us played in high school and college, then we had Bernardo, a Mexican/Swiss guy that was semi-pro in Mexico, Greg, who plays for his uni in England, Pawel, who was once a professional goalie until he busted his knees, a French guy Mika, another Swiss, a Spanish, and then some cheerleaders. No one on the team was a weak player.
Since there were so many teams, you were put into brackets with elimination. In the first bracket we never lost a game and I think only 1 goal was scored against us. In the second game I dominated Rule 2 counting for 4 points in a 20 minute game. That rule actually ended up making me the team's leading scorer with like 12 points total or something.
We continued to win game after game. Some were more difficult or closer in score than others. All the girls though, I noticed, were terrible. They needed rule 2 to ever be passed to on the field because they were just so awful. To solidify my beliefs that Swiss girls are terrible soccer players, there were 2 wearing baseball hats with the brim in front (not even pretending there's a chance they'll head the ball), one wearing jean capris, and another I saw loaded down with make up and jewlery. It's kind of sad. But I think the reason good female soccer players in Europe are so rare is because they don't have opportunities to really play as they grow up like we do in the US, which hopefully will change.
The whole day I found it interesting how many people were smoking and drinking in between games--even our goalie! We made it through the next round and the quarter finals and the semi finals. All the way to the finals! At this point it was our 9th game, and remember with only me and Sophie we had never been off the pitch except between games. Everyone was watching and there was someone making loud commentary on the loud speaker in Swiss German. In the end we tied. So it went to penalty kicks. Good thing we had an ex-pro! and that's how we became the champions of Fribourg.
We were so excited and people were ripping off their shirts and spraying everyone with water. There were lots of photos and we were video taped in an interview for TV. Then the bar gave us a winning handle of Absolute vodka, so we took victory shots. Lets just say after spending a day in the sun and playing hours of soccer, that stuff will hit you fast.
The celebration and prizes would take place at the Irish club around 10, so we hung around there for awhile not believing we were #1 out of 48 teams. I ran back to st. justin, elated, almost drowned in the shower, and headed down to our meeting spot. We got some pizza and then headed to Irish. Greg was giving out team prizes and I got a drink for being the top scorer :-) Everyone was so happy, it was wonderful.
Then we went up stairs for our prizes. They didn't come right away so we danced until we were called up to the stage.
We got a giant trophy cup that came with endless refills of beer and 1 free day entry to these new thermal baths/aquapark at Bern. The TV guy was there again for more interviews and the Swiss player said I was American/played at home/top scorer, so he turned to me and interviewed me on tv in english and I was super embarrassed and ran away as quickly as possible.
This day was unquestionably the best day I spent in Switzerland. I even made a bunch of new friends from my team, even though we really only had 2 weeks left to spend together :-( Plus the celebrations didn't end there--we still had a day to spend at the baths which I will talk about another time.
I haven't done Swiss observations in awhile so here's a few:
-Swiss females can not play soccer well at all.
-There seems to be more conservative beliefs towards women in general.
-My feet are wayyy above average in this continent apparently.
-Smoking/alcohol is perfectly acceptable during a soccer tournament--even for the players.
-Pillows in Switzerland are terrible and flat, I'm surprised the whole country doesn't have a stiff-neck epidemic.
-Douvets are too hot for spring.
-I was excited about the beauty of spring, and it definitely is beautiful, but they really don't cut the grass so it's so high on all the paths! I even found a tick on my leg after a run, luckily I found it.
-Air-conditioning is not a standard in buildings or homes.
No comments:
Post a Comment