This entry is kind divided in half…some of it is from the train ride home on Monday, and some is from right now (2 AM, Wednesday morning).
I think you can figure out which is which.
***
On the train home from
That familiar feeling keeps coming back to me in these games: that same feeling I got during Pelham football games, and Vanderbilt football games, and some Titans games from senior year, and some 49ers games from last year. That feeling that, “Maybe we can just hang close with these guys.” Then, reality sinks in and they run away with it. Like, we’re just hopeful that we win—not that we’re expecting to. (That’s a Mike Nolan-ism for all of you who are keeping score.)
The game started as usual for us: three and out. We punted, and they ran it back for a score. About 90% of the team packed it in..they were done. Beaten. Just like that, four plays into the game. We never threatened.
Just like Vandy and Pelham before that, we rolled out the red carpet for their running backs. They ran for 201 yards on us, marking almost 400 in the last two weeks. Sha-ron Edwards, one of their running backs who played for the Thunder in the first half of the season, had over 80 yards and a touchdown. Charles Anthony, a guy they cut after training camp and signed back because of injuries, had 101 yards and 2 touchdowns. Yes, a guy they cut and a guy we gave them destroyed us in the ground game.
I kept trying to explain to Scott last season in
It’s not that I can do anything about it. It just sucks, that’s all.
***
Before I left for
Almost everyone responded the same: there are none. It’s a boring city.
And, it’s not that I’d call it boring. It was like
They had a fun little downtown area, and Beth and I (and Cem eventually) found home in a tourist-trap Irish pub. I even had the “Galaxy Special,” thanks to Beth. It tasted like a strawberry milkshake, and it looked like one, too. There was a rumor that it had some liquor in it, which after having the entire drink, I could not confirm.
(FYI—Beth is
Besides that, I took the weekend to relax a little bit. The wear of the season starting to hit everybody, myself included. The losing doesn’t help, obviously, but you can tell that guys are starting to get irritated and ansy. Some guys just want to go home, and they act like it. Coaches have shorter fuses, with everyone—myself included. People don’t want to do the little things anymore. This is the part of the season that’s just difficult to get your job done, because no one is any fun to be around.
As you read from above, it’s something that I’m used to.
***
The stadium itself had some interesting qualities to it. Rather than have a retractable roof, they put up a retractable umbrella. Seriously, if you could picture a stadium-sized umbrella above the stadium, you’d probably have a good idea of what I mean.
There were about 30 poles reaching from the top of the stadium and meeting in the middle, acting as the umbrella spines, while also holding up the Madison Square Garden-esque video board and scoreboard at the middle.
Even though it didn’t rain, I saw a few pictures of the umbrella in action. It’s really just a big, tan umbrella that covers just about the entire stadium. It must be cheaper than a retractable roof, but there were some parts of the stands—and the playing field, especially at the corners—that still would suffer from the elements.
***
Cool events in the last week:
Went to dinner with a few of the coaches and our general manager, Joe Cealera on Thursday. We ate at a place called Felix, which is apparently one of the more trendy clubs in all of
I didn’t understand how we’d be eating dinner an upscale club, but around 9 PM, when they pulled all the tables away and about 30 of the most unbelievable girls I’d seen in my trip walked in, it all made sense.
We even got a little VIP section in the back, which was cool.
I got to eat dinner with my parents before they left, too, meaning I got to see them three times in the week they were here. Funny enough, Chris Gearing ate with us, where he met my family for the first time. Yes, my little brother (fraternal, not biological) met my family for the first time in
I’m getting pretty good at the subway-train-bus system here in
***
New Linkin Park CD: Pretty good, for those who are wondering. It’s a totally different sound from what they’ve put out before, but I like it. Now, everyone is saying that
It reminds me a little bit of how Incubus changed with “Make Yourself.” People don’t realize that before that CD, with songs like “Drive” and “Stellar,” they were mainly a grunge, punk band. Take a listen to “S.C.I.E.N.C.E.” if you want to hear an Incubus that you’ll never hear again.
All in all though, I like it. Check it out.
***
Okay, back to Wednesday-at-2:30.
Yeah, it’s 2:30, and I’m updating my blog. Today was a pretty neat day, so I wanted to get it out there!
Coach Allen cancelled practice to give the players the day off (and I assume to give the coaches a chance to game plan). Instead, we had a team trip to Sachsenhausen—the site of the biggest concentration camp of the Nazi regime. It took us about an hour to get there, putting it right outside of what’s considered the “suburbs” of
It was as cool as a concentration camp could be, really. I mean, I love stuff like this—I’m a museum and a history guy, so this is the type of stuff I wanted to see when I got here. Granted, a lot of it was…pretty disturbing.
When they said this was the biggest camp, I really didn’t grasp just how big this place was. It was about the size of Vanderbilt’s campus, or, like, a couple of city blocks. This place was huge—and according to the camp information, always FULL of prisoners.
Lots of the buildings or still standing, or at least have been renovated well. Obviously, their living conditions would make a janitor’s closet look like the Hilton. Some of the original beds still “stood” in the prison cells. I put “stood” in quotes because most of them were just straw heaps on the concrete floor.
At this camp, they killed their prisoners by hanging them, shooting them in the head, torture, and incineration—no standing gas chambers. They did, however, start testing the gas chamber here, by piling 30 Jews at a time into the back of a cargo truck. They would fill the truck with carbon monoxide, thus, obviously, killing everyone inside.
The truck then drove outside the camp, where they would pile the bodies up and burn them.
Lots of the “human ovens” still stood, and were in good enough condition that you could get an idea of how they had to contort—or cut—a person to get them to fit in there. Truly sickening.
This camp also housed some of the major medical “research” of the time—essentially, when people would get cut up and messed around with. One of the nastier recounts was from a doctor who administered “tattoo removal,” when they would just cut off the skin, or the entire body part, of the tattoo on your body.
The two most disturbing things from the trip:
1. Going through the prisoner cells. In some of the cells, the name of the person who lived there was posted on the wall. Families had come back and put up plaques, or memorials, or dedications to their family member who might have died in that cell. That was an incredibly eerie feeling: seeing a picture of someone who might have died 65 years ago, a few feet from me. Of course, in the picture, they were young, and healthy, and probably successful. They all died withered, starved, sun deprived, alone, tortured, and not sure why they were there.
2. The patches marked, “Ashes of Unnamed Victims.” Apparently, in 1996, some people found areas of ground that went a few feet deep in ashes. Yes, human ashes. After people were burned (alive or dead), they would sometimes just scoop up their remnants and dump them into these piles—like, a human dumpyard. There could be between 300 and 500 people’s worth of ashes just heaped into these unmarked, unknown piles. The grass grows on them differently; you can’t miss them.
Some of the players got really disturbed by the whole thing. To my complete surprise, and enjoyment, a couple of players wanted to follow me around so I could explain to them some of the historical background of what happened here. (Special thanks to Mr. Moskowitz, Mr. Capposella, and Mr. Orfei. go pelicans.)
I took a whole lot of pictures. They’ll be up soon.
***
I also had dinner downtown at a place called “Andy’s Diner and Bar” (I ran the place!) with Chris Gearing. Had a chicken sandwich, fries, and mozzarella sticks. Incredible.
I almost walked right through some major German movie premiere on the way there—they had the red carpet and everything, and there were a whole bunch of media there taking pictures of the movie stars as they came in.
As one of the German kids put it, “They’re making a big deal about nothing, really.”
Geez…that sounds a lot like how it goes in
***
This week, we head to
***
To round things up tonight…it looks like I’ll be spending a few days after the season ends in…(drum roll) London! The clincher: Jane (yes, that’s the Explo Jane!) will be there with her family, outside of the city a bit. Translation: a free place to stay, a built in tour guide, and the suburbs. Count me in.
That’s it for this evening/morning. I’ll come back once the pictures are all up.
No comments:
Post a Comment