Deutschland!!

So after a brief and eventfull stay in Australia it was time to head to Wupppertal, Germany. I had been looking forward to getting back to the professional season again after having a fun and successful year last year. The German league is a considerably higher standard than Denmark, and it will be a great test for the team and myself throughout the season. After been met at the airport by one of the team managers I was whisked away directly to a 12 team tournament in which we were playing in. To my suprise there were a lot of international teams playing such as Omniworld & DOC Orion (The Netherlands), Hallen (Belgium), Liberec (Czech Republic), as well as an assortment of teams from the German Bundesliga and 1st division. I arrived just as we beat a lower German team and were about to play DOC Orion for top of the group. As it turnt out we were running short of outsides with Mads back in bad shape and David having a badly injured ankle. So in this case I volunteered my services to play only 3hrs after getting of the plane. As one might expect I was pretty tired after the 36hrs of travelling, but I was also excited to be playing a match against a team that finished 3rd in The Netherlands (I think!) Suprisingly I didn't start to badly and did my part as we won the first set. However by the 3rd set it became pretty tough. It was pretty hard to concentrate and the match seemed to be taking forever. So down 2-1 we manage to take it to a 5th, by this point in time I was starting to regret my desicion to play a little! But winning the match and enabling us to play for gold the next day made it all worth it. After about a 40min drive home it was a case of eat and then sleep to prepare for the next day.
After getting up at 6am due to time zone problems, we headed off to Bottrop at about 9am. I actually drove my own car down to the club. Which was a scary prospect considering I had driven a manual on the road maybe 2-3 times before. So after surviving that we headed off too Bottrop for the final day. Our first game was against Duren, who were 2nd in the Bundesliga last year. After dropping the first set in a close one we came back to take the next 2 fairly comfortably. There was a slight hiccup with Artur our middle blocker smacking his right thumb into my right thumb as we went to block. This sent Artur to the hospital for examinations after the game and left myself with a heavily bandaged thumb and incredible amounts of pain when i went to hit. Unfortunatelly I was the last outside in the team and decided to try and play the final against Hallen. This in the end was probably a bad idea, personally I couldnt really hit at all due to the lack of movement and pain. As a team our passing was shocking and we were beaten well and truly 2-0. I ended up coming off in the 2nd set to make way for our 2nd libero Julian, who at about 175cm made an imposing influence on the court as we fought back from 6 points down to almost take the 2nd set. However second place in a tournament where we did npot win a game the year before is a decent build up too what would be an exciting start to the Bundesliga the following weekend.
It was an interesting week in itself. As well as getting to know the guys and the way around town a bit I was also learning how to drive. Which to some people (especially Jordan) was at times pretty funny. Yet after much stalling and over revving and what not I was starting to get the hang of everything. Now I just gotta wait till the snow starts, that will be even more interesting! So all in all the set up here is quite different from Denmark. The apartment is much bigger and nicer, and I'm sharing with Andy and David 2 German guys from the team. I have a brand new Ford Fiesta to drive around in (which I have nicknamed Fritz) All the guys in the team are really easy going and helpful and it's also good too have some familiar faces around from my time last year in Denmark. The language is going to be difficult. Although easier to pronunce thatn Danish it's grammar is really tricky so I dont think it's gonna be fluent German for a while. I'm getting lessons at the club with a few other people, the trouble is Winfried the teacher doesn't speak English and has really only taught us objects rather than how the language worls, this makes it rather hard to put a useful sentence together.