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It’s been a month since my last confession. Been reading (currently: Common Wealth: Economics for a Crowded Planet) and sharing though.

Instead of doing a recap of the past month, I’ll just pretend nothing happened and focus on recent history.

Mario from Croatia’s in town, with this new girlfriend, Tanya. I’ve been hanging out with them from time to time ever since they arrived, on Wednesday. Yesterday we played some basketball on the Museumplein while Tanya went to Van Gogh’s, where we learned that Mario is still the master of us all. Hey, he does sports for a living! In the evening we went to a jazz club, which I enjoyed more than I thought I would. Music and atmosphere were great.

Today we were supposed to be playing rollerbasketball with Mario. Not sure about that now though. From where I’m sitting the weather looks pretty shitty!

On a future note: this is an infomercial for the tournament in San Fransisco I’m heading to in about a week:

Amsterdam is such a small town. Yesterday, on the way to rollersoccer I bumped into Annemieke and on the way back I bumped into Jochem, a colleague.

Don’t play rollersoccer just after having had dinner, especially when you’re still recovering from a flu. Pfff, my poor stomach! Still, I’m an idiot, so I’m gonna play rollerbasketball this afternoon. Lunch afterwards!

Afterwards, my mom and I watched the relatively new Zhang Yimou flick Curse of the Golden Flower. Good enough, but wouldn’t really recommend it.

OK, so I wasn’t ready for basketball just yet, but I did play some rollersoccer at the Olympiaplein yesterday. Just four of us: Danilo, Matteo and Danilo’s girlfriend Federica. Still, once we had a cage to play in, it was quite entertaining. Afterwards we all trooped back to my place and watched the remainder of the Russia-Spain game and ate some Thai food.

I was proud to show my comic book collection to Federica after the game. She’s a comic book artist herself (wow!), so she knew quite a bit.

Danilo put up some pictures of rollerbasketball on his website:

http://digitallex.badoo.com/e171119

http://digitallex.badoo.com/e181606

http://digitallex.badoo.com/e177240

http://digitallex.badoo.com/e165486

After skating all the way up the Notre Dame de la Garde (some kind of church dedicated to rollerbasketball ;-) ), we had a much deserved downhill.

Here’s what we had to climb:

And here’s the way down. We were so slow pedestrians could pass us by :-) But letting yourself go here would be death!

Got back from the Marseille tournament yesterday. We did better than expected. We beat Paris and got even with Toulon. We got beaten by the other Dutch team and slaughtered by Marseille. Weather was better than expected too.

Watch us and the other Dutch team get slaughtered by Marseille here.

I’m not much of a talent in this sport, which was frustrating sometimes. But I enjoyed skating through Marseille enormously.

Milton made this flyer for our tournament in November:

Pretty cool, I think. The player on the right is Tom LaGarde, the founder of rollerbasketball (as we play it). Milton even removed some unseemly features on the canal houses at the bottom, like GSM antennas.

Technorati Tags: rollerbasketball

Joost and I came back from Koblenz-Güls with a shared third place. Hamburg came first, Bremen second, and Berlin shared the third place with us.

We had a really nice team, with two players from Koln, one from Braunschweig and us. One player from Koln had an injury so could only play a little in the semifinals. He was our coach for most of the matches, which is a real luxury. He coaches kids usually, so he knows at what level to teach :-) The other player from Koln is female, which made it possible for us to play with four players on the court. Yeah, I know, ridiculous rules :-( She was a really valuable asset, made a lot of our points.

The finals were between Bremen and Hamburg, two teams with only three players (no girls…). Kind of defeats the point of the mixed teams rule, doesn’t it? I hope next year they change their minds, or that we have so many high level girls playing in our group that it doesn’t matter.

On Saturday night we participated in the Güls Blütenfest, drinking beer and wine with the locals and our fellow rollerbasketball players. The next day we drove back home early so we could play rollerbasketball in Amsterdam with the stay-behinds. I was totally wasted when I got home. Watched Run fatboy run with my mom. So-so, bit too cheesy for my taste, although quite funny in the beginning. Happy ends suck. Misery is funnier.

My camera’s battery is still f*cked, so I didn’t take any pictures.

This November, the 8th, my fellow Amsterdam rollerbasketball players and I are organising a rollerbasketball tournament in Amsterdam.

Last November, we had a tournament in Berlin. I overheard the organiser, Peter, saying that he wanted to organise it sometime in the summer. So I thought: that’s an opportunity for us to host it in our town. I thought November would be good, not too many people on holiday, not feeling too shit about spending a whole day in a sweaty sports hall :-)

I sent out an invite last week. Looking forward to a heavy attendance! I think we can get at least three Amsterdam teams together, one from the Survivors, two from Dribbl. For the rest I’m counting on some German teams. Anything we can get from the rest of Europe (or the world) would be a bonus.

This weekend, I’m off to a tournament in Koblenz with Joost, where we’ll be promoting our tournament, and hopefully perform better than we did the last time in Berlin. We couldn’t get a full Dutch team together, so Joost and I are teaming up with players from Köln and Braunschweig. There are a few reasons why we couldn’t get a team together this year. Injuries for one. But also the fact that they put a rule in place requiring a girl on each team. Maximum number of men from your team at any one time: three. This put some of us in mind of boycotting the whole thing. But, even though we strongly disagree with such a rule, we won’t boycott.

Technorati Tags: rollerbasketball

The outdoor rollerbasketball season has started again. We were lucky today. I was expecting a miserable day like yesterday, but we had a beautiful afternoon. So much for meteorology…

Last year all we did was play games. This year I decided to start each session with half an hour of training. After that we play games like before. Good for when new people join our group so they can practice without the pressure of an actual game.

Today we just did the basics: shooting and layups. Got some good feedback from the group so I’m happy.

You could tell we all needed to get used to the Hygeiaplein again, but the level of the game soon went up.