Tournoi Beach!

This Sunday, for yet another day of my Armistice weekend, I joined my BULF teammates and some other random frisbee players for a day-long beach ultimate tournament at La Plage de la Couronne right on the very edge of Southern France! There are very few sand beaches in the South of France, most of them are rocky, so this was quite the treat! I woke up at 7:00am to get ready and walk to La Rotonde in the center of Aix-en-Provence to meet my ride, a woman named Aliette and a man named Yaria, both from the little town of Pertuis. I had never met them before, but my friend Ivan from BULF set up the ride for me.
Then, I got to enjoy a 40-minute ride through early-morning Provencal landscapes filled with autumnal foliage, little houses whose chimneys had smoke coming out of the tops, all decorated with a light layer of fog left over from the night. When we finally got there, I had the sudden impression that we were in the Carribbean. There were palm trees, the sun was shining brilliantly and the skies above us were the perfect shade of blue. I got out of the car and wandered around and was at first quite disheartened to find out that I wasn't getting to play with BULF, instead, my friend Maria and I were being put on a team with a bunch of ragtag beginniners that Ivan had put together. They were REALLY athletic, REALLY aggressive, REALLY crass men that had crossed over to ultimate from rugby, soccer, and other sports and were playing in their first tournament. Maria and I were the only women...and the best players on the team :)
We started up and our first couple games were rocky. The guys wouldn't listen, they would panic whenever they got the disc, and they would get really aggressive about calls even though they didn't know the rules at all. Then, Maria and I took charge. Maria is probably my best friend on BULF and is in Aix-en-Provence for an internship. She came here from the Netherlands where she was studying for some time, but she is originally from Colombia. She is really good at ultimate, very athletic, very blunt, and basically AWESOME. She and I talk ultimate all the time, and I was incredibly upset to find out last week that this coming Saturday, she is leaving France for good to return home to Colombia. She and I handled for the team and ran our offense and defense, and threw almost all of our points. By the third game, we started to click, and the boys had calmed down, and in the fourth game, we beat Ivan's "A-team" (his other team), in a close match with a final score of 10-9. Overall, we came in 3rd place out of 5 teams, beating Ivan's A-team AND my team, BULF!
Afterwards, Maria and I ran into the ocean to go for a swim, which, shockingly, was still refreshing and wonderful in NOVEMBER. The picture on the left is of me and Maria in our "bathing suits" with my friend Hannah in the middle, a girl my age from Manchester, England who also plays for BULF. Then, all the participants in the tournament sat down at the boardwalk café/bar/restaurant and we all got hot chocolate and beer to talk about the tournament and socialize. During the course of the day, I met SO many different and amazing people!
I found out that Yaria, a French man with bright blue eyes, pale skin, and blonde hair, converted to Islam after a trip to Morocco. He became very interested in Islam and then studied it more and began practicing. He left the tournament at some point to go sit on a rock ledge and pray for about an hour.
I met another American, a young guy from Morristown, NEW JERSEY who is in Nimes teaching English.
I met one guy on my team named Cléri who has anger problems and has been to 4 psychotherapy sessions to help deal with it. What was amazing was that while he started out overly aggressive and boisterous, as he began to understand the rules about Spirit of the Game and good sportsmanship and how important that is in ultimate frisbee, he calmed down and really started to enjoy the game for the game. By the third game, he was shaking people's hands, apologizing for running into people by accident, and participating in the after-game discussions. It really was amazing to see how participating in an activity can help someone learn things outside of the game.
The sun began to set as we sat and chatted it up. Of course, I had to take pictures.

This morning, I got up and discovered that my muscles don't feel like doing any more work. In otherwords, my calves, back, and right arm muscles are really really sore. But it felt SO good to run around outside and be active with a bunch of people I barely knew. That was so much fun! I think it might be just enough to hold me over in terms of happiness until people come to visit me in December :)