I went and picked up our very happy soccer star last night at 1am. Where we live, 95% of the time flights arrive and depart between the hours of midnight and 6am. I see planes taking off and landing all day long, but whenever I need to travel, the only options are in the middle of the night. I used to think it was related to the heat/sand since it was true in Oman too, but now I think it’s to catch connections in major cities. A 10 am connection in Istanbul requires a 4am departure from here. I guess that’s what you get when you’re at the end of the line . . .
No photos at the airport. Trying not to be that mom. He had a great time and is full of stories about how green Germany is and the weird food products they have. Spaghetti ice cream? He says they take ice cream and run it through the pasta maker so it comes out in little strings and cover it with strawberry sauce. Ok, I think I could go for that. They also have a soda called MezzoMix which is orange and cola mixed together and bottled. Um, no. He also showed me a photo of cola beer which sounds gross too. I’m not really a fan of mixing things. Unless it’s chocolate mixed with ice cream, peanut butter, or more chocolate . . .
If he were to tell you about the tournament, this blog post would be 50 pages long as he described every detail of various shots, penalties, and who was down by how many points with so many seconds left in the game, but the short stats are they made it through the first round of pool play into the quarter-finals where they lost 1-0. They were at a disadvantage coming into the tournament because they were seeded 13th out of 15 so they had to play 2 very strong teams on the first day. The other teams play each other during the season (can you imagine traveling from Italy to Germany for one of your weekly soccer games?) so they ranked the other teams based on those standings and then tossed the Bahrain school in at number 13. The bottom 3rd of this article in Stars and Stripes describes their first day in a bit more detail. Tournament coverage, day 1
Calvin messaged me a few times during the week so we could keep track of how they were doing. He was really excited one day because he GOT TO PLAY (his text was in all caps — I loved “seeing” how excited he was) for a few minutes when they had to pull their goalie out to change some equipment. Other than that he cheered them on, watched a lot of great soccer and is dreaming about next year when he has the potential to become the starting goalie.
It’s all been worth it, but we’re both happy tomorrow morning doesn’t start with a 5:30am drive to practice . . .