Friday, July 31, 2009

Santa Cruz Frisbee Golf

There is a serious lack of good frisbee golf courses in the bay area so yesterday we decided to head down to the coast to meet our frisbee needs. We woke our friendly neighbors Phil & Elizabeth early in the morning for the trip down. The course was in the wooded hills behind a middle school just outside of Santa Cruz. The course was on a very steep hill so we spent a lot of time wandering up and down the hills searching in the bramble for our frisbees ... surprisingly more enjoyable than it sounds. Sadly, Dan did lose one frisbee in a giant bush of bramble and poison oak, but for how intense this course was I didn't think that was too bad. This was Elizabeth's first time playing frisbee golf and although it was a tough introduction she did great and was catching on quickly by the end. She also packed an amazing picnic lunch for us which we enjoyed along the coast after we were done with frisbee golf. We finished up the afternoon with a bit of delicious ice cream before heading back to campus. I love frisbee golf!

Wednesday, July 22, 2009

Asian Volleyball Tournaments

One of my volleyball friends invited me to play in two weekend tournaments over the past month. I, of course, agreed but the piece of information my friend left out was that these were Asian-American volleyball tournaments ... not exactly fitting my demographic. Upon arriving at the gym for the first tournament I felt a bit tall and out of place although my friends assured me that "you don't have to be Asian to play." For the first tournament I ended up being the ONLY non-Asian in the gym. However, my team also seemed to have all of the tallest Asians in the bay area so we dominated throughout the day and ended up taking away the gold medal (which has Chinese text on it and cannot read).


Despite my non-Asianess I agreed to play in the second, larger tournament since the first tournament was so much fun. I was a bit relieved to find that there were a lot more non-Asians playing in this tournament so I was not completely out of place. For this tournament we had an EVEN TALLER team featuring Chuck who was well over 6'9'' and Danny who was a former Stanford varsity player. We had a blast playing during the day (I could set the ball anywhere and they would put it down) but we lost in the finals since we didn't have the greatest defense (although it is pretty entertaining watching all those huge guys dive for the ball). So I had to settle with a silver medal for this tournament which, once again, I could not read. Check out how short I look in the picture below.