Paganello 2007 is upon us! For those of you who do not know what Paganello is, it is a beach ultimate frisbee tournament in Rimini, Italy. I have been to it three times and Claire two. It is possibly the best weekend of the year (a five-day weekend with four days of ultimate and five nights of parties with our fellow ultimate players.)  Paganello is the World Beach Ultimate Championships, and we play with LMLP (watch This is Spinal Tap for reference).

Because Paganello consumes our days and nights, the likelihood of us posting for a few days is about as likely as me high-fiving you tomorrow (unless you are a teammate of LMLP), which, like posting on the blog, I’d love to do but just can’t. The photo at the top of the blog is a tribute to Paganellos of the past. I’m sure we’ll have a plethora of stories, photos, and hopefully video to share with you all at the end of the weekend. Professional photographers take and post pictures throughout the tournament, and game results are constantly updated, see www.paganello.com.

Tomorrow we leave Switzerland for Bologna to meet the rest of the team, and Cait, my sister. We’ll stay in Bologna over night then head to Rimini by train in the afternoon. The opening ceremonies will be Thursday night where Cait will meet her teammates and Paganello will begin!

As for the rest of our Swiss Adventures, yesterday we went in to Zurich with Drew. We walked around the city first - heading to an area that I found with my spidey senses - or incredible memory of being there with my family when I was thirteen or so. I’m pretty sure we walked passed the hotel we stayed at years ago, and down the street where chestnuts roasted on an open fire. Nonetheless, Claire, Drew and I hiked through the cobble stone city, climbing stairs, napping in a park by the lake and window-shopping of course! We walked past Universitat Zurich and headed down to the promenade where there were hundreds of people out enjoying the beautiful, warm spring weather. Lunch was a delicious assortment of breads, cheeses, olives and apples. We had a beautiful view of Lake Zurich with swans landing like angelic airbuses across the surface of the sparkling water; how poetic swans can be! Zurich really is a beautiful city filled with ancient architecture, spires from churches protruding out of cityscape, showing the riches the churches used to have; and the bright red letters of the H&M and green Starbucks logos presenting the riches of the modern world on the grimy stones of the old.
We bought a mango at a fruit stand in the city and ate it today, it was good - thanks Drew!

And now we are going to watch the NCAA finals which were on last night but we taped, or recorded, or Tivo’ed, whatever you do to watch things later these days. We watched the UCLA game 2 nights ago at 3am; I haven’t seen basketball played that bad since the night in high school we at 5 boxes of french fries from Legends and played with the lights off.

That’s it for now. Tomorrow we travel again! Go ahead and leave a comment if you feel so inclined.

-Whit (and Claire)