a good super bowl sunday

Now that its Monday and by looking back, I can say that it was a pretty good weekend. Nothing too special I must say, but some nice gatherings of friends here in Dortmund and a nice day excursion to Sauerland. It all so happens that everything was crammed into Sunday, since Friday and Saturday were overall pretty quiet except for a Football match in Bochum.

Sunday morning, I left with Miguel, Carlos, and Higinia to Sauerland for a day trip to hike and hopefully catch a glimpse of the Ski Jumping World Cup in Willingen. We arrived about midday and realized quickly that the tickets were just too expensive, so we walked though some trails in the woods and hiked for sometime before finding a view of the Skijump. It turns out there was a little crowd assembled along a trail at a break in the trees to watch the competition. It was pretty interesting especially because it was the first professional winter sporting event any of us had seen. As you can imagine coming from somebody from the south and three from Spain.

Later we were able to enter after the Competition was moslty over so we caught a few jumps up close and were able to see the finish. I believe Norway ended up winning, but a skijumper from Czech Republic was the best with a 146 M leap. Most of these jumpers should be in Torino next week.


Afterwards, we returned to Dortmund and got ready for Ljuba's (Russia) and Helene's (France) joint birthday party. All the guys ended up wearing shirts and ties as a surprise suggestion by Darius (Lithuania). The ladies were quite impressed, but we were more impressed by the wonderful French breads and the Russian salads. Mmmm.

By this time it was about midnight, but the night was obviously not over because it was Super Bowl Sunday. The game would kick off at 12:30 AM in Europe and it would have to be watched, so we had a group of about seven watch the game on Alaskan Andrew's TV. We even had some French supporters who knew surprisingly more about the game than I would have thought. The night finally came to a close after the Pittsburgh victory by going to bed around 5:00 AM. Good thing I didn't have class until 2:15 PM today!