Another Day in Paradise

Phil Collins style. Sort of. Except way less depressing than Phil Collins style. This past weekend Chris, Jessica, and I spent 3 days in the beautiful, sunny, warm, precious, Canary Islands. A quick glance at a map makes you think, "huh, the Canary Islands really aren't anywhere near Spain. Weird..." Well, no, they aren't. But they are amazing.


The reason for the vacation was the 10th annual Las Palmas de Gran Canaria Hat Tournament. 3 days playing frisbee on the beach in perfect weather with people from all over Europe, drinking "Tropical" one of the beers made in the Canary Islands. Life is tough eh? The tournament was outstanding. Really well organized and very well run. For those of you that dont understand the concept of a "Hat tournament", it's as if they draw names out of a hat to form teams. So you play with randos.

To top off all of these good things about the tournament, it also took place during Carnaval, a festival similar to Mardi Gras minus the boobs and the beads and plus a lot of this.


The Canary Islands are one of the premier destinations for Carnaval, second only to Rio de Janeiro. Everyone dresses up in costume and heads out to a big park and drinks and has a good time. The Canary Islands (Gran Canaria in particular) are really famous for being gay friendly and Carnaval has morphed into a bit of a drag ball.


Needless to say, Jessica and I partook heavily in the festivities. I dressed up as Peter Pan while Jessica walked the streets as TinkerBell. It was a bit of burning the candle at both ends, staying out until 4ish and then playing frisbee all day. But it was totally worth it.

We saw some very interesting people. Including an older woman dancing at the concert with a water bottle balancing on her head. And an Arab man who got in our face asking us (his words not mine!) why the United States was allowed to take people to Guantanamo and analy violate them. Hand and full-body motions were included.

In terms of frisbee, it was a lot of fun. My team ended up getting third out of nine but thats not really important. I made a bunch of new friends and the tournament was (miraculously) able to bring back my love for ultimate after so many moths of playing sub-par/boring frisbee in Madrid.


After 3 days of ultimate and a weekend in paradise, we arrived in Madrid at 6:30 AM Monday morning, in no way prepared to work through the week. But so it goes.