It is Sunday night, we are about to hit the ice for a practice in a few hours and I thought I would get a quick blog in here. I just got back from visiting my good friend Adam Spinarsky in Holland where he is playing hockey. "Spinner" as he is known, has been one of my best friends for a long time. We are both from Windsor, Ontario and live in the same neighborhood. We went to high school together and played on the same junior hockey team in Leamington, carpooling to all the games and practices together. At the age of 25, this is Spinner's first time leaving home and he seems to be adapting quite well. He plays in the Dutch Pro league in the city of Eindhoven and lives in a house with 4 other Canadian players.
Myself and Ryan Caicco, (who played with Spinner at St. Clair College in Windsor the last 4 years) drove 5 hours to Eindhoven and spent a few days there with our good buddy. It was a nice change of pace and scenery going to a big city with a little bit more going on. We spent most of our time in the "Centrum" (centre ville or city center) where we spent lots of time catching up and share some great stories of our experiences so far playing hockey in Europe. One of the main differences from France and Holland for me was the bikes! Everyone is on these old grungy bikes riding all over the city, sometimes the bike lane proves to be more dangerous the car lane. My bike experience got off to a rough start, and I can sum it up pretty easily. It was STOLEN! I was borrowing an old beat up, rusted, brown bike from one of his teammates and when we went back to the very crowded bike racks and it was gone! Not a big deal, the value of the bike was probably at its peak in 1970 when it first came out so it was not a huge loss.
The next few days, we took in one of their team practices. They have a very nice rink, and attached to it is a speed skating rink, as well as an outdoor rink. After their practice we hit up a few pubs in the Centrum, much different than the life in Epinal, but not far off the life in Windsor. There were plenty of options for us to hit up so we went to many different places to try to take in the whole experience. Turns out it was student night and a beer was only 1 euro, good timing on our part. The next day we took the train to Amsterdam, only about 1 hour away and spent the afternoon and evening there trying figure out what the big deal was about this place??? Just a normal city, no? Wow, this place was some sort of bizarro world, I will leave it at that. Amsterdam is like the Stanley Cup, all the stories and rumours you hear about it....They are ALL TRUE!
Since we had to be back in Epinal the next day to hit the ice, we did not stay the night in Amsterdam, and boarded the train that evening to head back to Eindhoven, then depart in the morning. Turns out we got on the train that stops just about everywhere, so instead of taking 1 hour, it took us almost 4 hours to get back to Spinner's place. Leaving us very little sleep for our voyage back to France. What I thought was so cool about our trip is that we passed through 4 countries on the way, in only 4 hours, starting in Holland, Belgium, Luxembourg and finally arriving in France.
On the hockey side of things, I was not able to write about our big win against Strasbourg last week, as we advance to the second round of Coupe de la Ligue where we will face Rouen on Tuesday. They are one of the best teams in the league and having beat them in their own building this season, they are going to have a little more incentive to knock us off. Our defense will have to be solid, as they possess some of the most dangerous scorers in the league.
2 comments:
so jealous... im sitting in my classroom.. waiting for another group of 15 yrs olds to make my monday even worse and you're playing hockey and travelling europe and going to see spinner... envious.
miss ya Voy! wish u were here. Sounds like you're doing great!
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