Soccer Season Starts

We kicked off soccer season this last Sunday with a hard-faught loss;3 to 2. Our sharp looking jersey´s are compliments of the organization -however there was a misspelling with POPPYS HAUSE. That error is not biggie, the jersey´s still look good. Our team is made up of players who live right around us. There are approximately 9 teams in Santo Tomas, and each street has there own team. Casey and I play soccer all the time down here, but we still have a long way to go. These guys play soccer all the time. As soon as they are able to breath they are kicking a ball around. I have a lot to learn, but it is fun, and the guys we play with are at least familiar. If our team does well, and wins our city league, then we could go on to play at the stadium. Granted, we should probably get a win first, but still, the possibilities...

This is a beautiful picture of my biggest fan. Good thing, everyone else just laughs at me. When a gringo makes a mistake, the WHOLE town knows and laughs about it. After the game, I was still wearing by jersey, all the way home people kept asking me, ¨why didn´t you win,¨ and, ¨why didn´t you score a goal?¨ I told them that Jesus wanted the other team to win, and I wanted to wait for my first goal...abstinence.

Here we are with our game faces on. We are the gringo assasins. But we really just get assasinated on the field alot. You can see the clouds moving in behind us. About 5 minutes after this photo, the heavens let loose. It was fun, at times, to play in the rain. The sad part was that they put away the good ball (which isn´t saying much) and brought out the solid rubber, flat one, to weather the storm -as if playing with the other ball wasn´t bad enough.

Here we are doing our pre-game stretches. Casey is old (not really, but says he is), so he needs to stretch. I was just there for morale support.