Bonus post: Frisbee

Frisbee last night was nearly miraculous.  I say ‘nearly’ only because to call a no-consequence, pick-up game ‘miraculous’ would be a bit more grandiose than I am willing to claim.  But it was definitely fun and gratifying.  I played better last night than I have throughout
my entire three-year career in Tirana.  I caught leaping points after running the length of the pitch, I caught passes that were behind me by sticking my arm out like a sword, I caught a score by jumping up and taking it out of the grasp of a defender, I ran in front of an opposing player to knock a disk away.  These are things that I routinely screw up on most nights.  Two times I said aloud to anyone close enough to hear that I should quit before I start to mess up.  I wrote in this blog yesterday that I hoped I didn’t scrape my knees.  Well, I did, but not seriously.  The ‘good’ thing is that the playing surface consisted of fake nylon grass ‘planted’ into black rubber-like stuff. Therefore, my knees were dirty and black to a point that the blood did not run down my leg.  I nearly made a diving, lay-out catch that would have made the crowd (three guys sitting, smoking, waiting for us to get off so they could play soccer) sigh with boredom.  But, in the split second before I needed to commit, images of shredded knees and blood-stained socks kept me on my feet.  I didn’t catch it.
An added bonus was the attendance of Marina, a delightful young woman from Russia.  She is in Tirana learning Albanian for a month, after which time, she will return to Moscow.  So I have already begun to grow my group of acquaintances in my new town.