Dogs and Brats

In Europe dogs really are man's best friend. Dogs can go everywhere that people go here, including grocery stores and restaurants.....but, I've been hearing dogs bark all weekend and I've been seeing them walked around the neighborhood a lot more than usual... at first I thought it was a little strange but then I realized that they were having a German Shepherd Expo. at our stadium which is right around the corner from our apartment....and actually the window of my bedroom is at the backside of our building so, I'm facing the stadium. Anway, I'm not really sure exactly what the Expo entails, but from what I could see it was like an obedience and "looks" competition. I never thought about the fact that "German" Shepherds would be such a big deal in Germany.

On Thursday night we had a preseason home game against Goettingen, a team that is in our league and is supposed to be very good.... we won by 10 points. It was a very fast paced game, and it was probably the best we've played together as a team since I've been here, so it was really fun. They happened to put a pic. of me from the game on the website next to the article. ;) Our next and last preseason games will be next weekend in Luxembourg.... I looked online at Wikipedia.org and found out that Luxembourg is a small landlocked country bordered by Belgium, France, and Germany, and it has a population of under half a million people in an area of about 2,600 square kilometres (1,000 sq mi). It'll fun to travel to another country, and I'm sure I'll have to take some more pictures ;).

On Saturday (yesterday) 5 of my teammates, my coach, and I went to a promotional day for one of our sponsors.... We have their logo on our uniforms, so they wanted us to wear our uniform to the event... there were a lot of people there from the community and they had a bunch of stands, a D.J., and some food and drinks. We sold some things of our own and signed a bunch of autographs.... and then later had some games and shot around with about 40 little kids on a portable basketball hoop. It was really fun. One thing that I thought was kind of funny was that almost everyone was eating a bratwurst on a baguette type roll... so both ends of the brat. were sticking way out of the ends of the roll and had ketchup and mustard all over their faces... so of course I had to try one, and it was pretty good. ;)