The Greenfield Beat: A trip to the other World Cup

A few weeks ago, my family was fortunate enough to fly off to Logroño, Spain, to watch the World Cup. Not the soccer (or “football!”) World Cup, but the Ultimate Frisbee Junior World Cup, in which one of my nephews represented New Zealand, where my sister and her family have been living for seven years.

We weren’t at all sure that holding an Ultimate tournament in Spain in July was a great idea, but it turned out to be a total blast. Logroño is a small city about an hour and a half south of Bilbao, close to the border of the Basque Country, and is the capital of the Rioja region, which is famous for red wine. Logroño is about the same size as Manchester, but as my son said, “really, it’s nothing like Manchester.”

As soon as we landed in Logroño, we got Iberica ham sandwiches, and we decided they were the best thing we had ever eaten in our lives. This was the first of about 400 Iberica or Serrano ham sandwiches we consumed over the next week. (One cafe translated Iberica ham as “pure acorn sandwich,” meaning ham from free-range pigs who eat about 20 pounds of acorns a day.)

Logroño, which is on the wide, green Ebro River, has Roman ruins, medieval churches, and a cathedral with a Michelangelo altarpiece. The Camino de Santiago runs right through it, and we saw pilgrims with hiking poles and tiny backpacks — what do they do with all their stuff? — wandering along the Camino each day. In the 1800s, the city built an arched stone bridge to make it easier for pilgrims to cross the city.

“Siesta” is still a thing in Spain, at least in the summer. The whole city shut down between 3 and 6 p.m., the hottest part of the day, and nothing really gets going before 9 a.m. It was actually a little challenging to find breakfast at 8 a.m. as we were trooping off to the sports complex for the Ultimate tournament. When we asked for breakfast “a llegar” (to go), the Spanish servers rolled their eyes at us.

“Mismo como ayer (same as yesterday?)” one server asked in exasperation. The message was clear: Seriously, can’t you Americans even sit down long enough to eat?

She had a point. Normally, we would have loved to sit down and enjoy cafe con leche and tortilla española (one of my favorite foods in the entire world!) for an hour and watch people strolling the cobblestoned streets, but on this trip, we were on a strict schedule. All the Ultimate games were scheduled to end before 3 p.m., and we were at each one to cheer on Team Katipo (a Maori word for a type of large spider) as well as the women’s team, Team Kahu (Maori for a type of bird). The kids played in 100-degree heat some days — which was especially hard for teams from places like Ireland and Sweden, not to mention New Zealand.

Every night around 7 p.m., after siesta, Logroño comes alive again, with people strolling the cathedral square and starting to think about where they might eat dinner in, like, three hours. Even the museum was open until 10:30 p.m. on weeknights.

“This is usually when New Hampshire is closing down for the night,” my son said.

It’s true — it must be our rural, farming heritage, or maybe it’s the short days or nine months of cold, but our region is mostly done by 8 p.m. My son, who is a night owl, loved that things got going after dark.

“Mom, some of the bars don’t even open until midnight,” he said.

Logroño and the Rioja and Basque regions are famous for pintxos, the Basque word for “tapas,” which are served on toothpicks at tiny bars and restaurants that line the streets. People just wander up and down the streets all night, trying different pintxos.

We did manage a few field trips in between Ultimate games: The whole family made it up to the stunning beaches near San Sebastian, where we could see the coast of France; one of the Kiwis found a mountain swimming hole, where we watched local kids dive off a 100-foot cliff (we could barely watch this!); and my sister and I went to what is apparently the world’s largest wine museum, Bodega Vivanco.

I never knew there was so much to know about wine. There was an entire floor of nothing but corkscrews; there was a short film about cork harvesting; there was a large section on barrel construction; and there was a special display of the award given to the man who figured out how to eradicate aphids by importing vines from California. The cafe had really excellent ham sandwiches.

Tuesday was the (soccer) World Cup semifinal between France and Spain, and everyone except me went to a watch party at a local stadium with all the other Team Katipo parents. (Jet lag hit me that day, to the point where I fell asleep, in broad daylight, on a concrete bleacher while surrounded by screaming fans, vuvuzelas, teenagers using trash cans as drums, whistles, and the entire Mexican parent contingent chanting “Ole, ole, ole, ole!” every time Mexico scored, which was a lot.)

While I missed the watch party, I didn’t have to be at the stadium to know what was happening. The streets of Logroño were full of entire families gathered outside to watch the game. One group had instruments and were playing music and singing. All I had to do was listen: Each time it went well for Spain, the streets erupted.

Around 11 p.m., I heard a wave of screaming and knew Spain had won. Soon after, my 23-year-old son ran in, changed clothes, and said he and his cousin were headed out to party “with the entire rest of Logroño.”

Reader, they came home at 5:30 a.m. There was singing, there was dancing on a fountain, there was glomming onto a pack of locals who gave them a tour of the city, there was visiting “every bar in Logroño,” and yes, there were ham sandwiches. Just a few short hours later, the boys were back at the Ultimate World Cup, cheering on Team Katipo in 100-degree heat even while catastrophically dehydrated and unable to even look at breakfast (ham sandwich with eggs). Oh, to be young.

The morning we left, as we were hauling suitcases to the car at 6 a.m., beautifully dressed young people were still wandering the streets from the night before, seemingly in no hurry to get home. (My son, who had managed an earlier night, rolling in at 4:30 a.m., was no help navigating to the airport in Bilbao, noting that he was, in fact, still “borracho.”)

The best part of the trip was that Team Katipo came in fourth at the Ultimate Junior World Cup. As the smallest nation represented at the tournament, which included the U.S., Japan, Germany and China, while they had hoped to be on the podium, the boys were pretty thrilled. Team Kahu also had a good showing, and both teams made history for NZ Ultimate.

We were pretty sad to leave Spain, but at least we got a few ham sandwiches for the plane. We hope to be back again sometime, Logroño.