This weekend we drove to Awaji-shima for a soccer tournament. We had to wake up at 4:30 am to make it on time. Luck be a lady, I didn’t have to drive. Our ride was with Chris in his kick-ass Subaru Legacy. Not only was there legroom and air-conditioning, there was a 12-disc changer and automatic windows and doors. Oh, the luxury.

We caught sunrise on the expressway to Nakoku, which runs high above the city streets along concrete tunnels through the mountains. Chris put on some drum’n’bass around then and we were chilling like in a Philip K. Dick story.

We won our first game in the overtime shootout. The other team, which looked like they knew what they were doing, was pretty pissed. Before the game we had to do introductions, because not everybody knew everybody. They other guys had obviously been practicing together, yet we stole the win.

We won our second game handily. Our goalie, a fellow Canuck who hasn’t played soccer since his elementary school days, was awesome. Defense was strong and out front we were passing and creating opportunities. After the game, some of us started to develop a Mighty Ducks complex. That’s probably why we lost the third game. That and the jerk-face team we were playing against were cheap and dirty and also happened to be better than us. They wanted the win bad and they got it.

That night there was a party at a bar in the middle of nowhere. Capacity was 120 people, but there were probably 200 people crammed inside. The bar staff was worried the floor was going to collapse, so they told us to go downstairs. We went home instead, to get some sleep after one of the longest days in a long, long time.

The next day we lost and that was that. We stuck around to watch a match between Osaka and Team Jerk Face. This one guy was screaming obscenities and generally being an ass brain. At one point Nancy laughed out loud, which everyone in the crowd thought was hilarious. Ass Brain turned a nice shade of red then. He didn’t shut up though. Not until the second half of the game anyway, when he took a blistering shot square in the nose. Everyone in the crowd cheered and clapped and Ass Brain didn’t say a word the rest of the day. Nice guys finish last, though, and Team Jerk Face won the game and the rights to play in the finals in Saitama’s World Cup Stadium. Jerks.