This season I am playing for Royal Antwerp HC, located in the picturesque Antwerp suburb of Sint-Job-in-’t-Goor.
I am separated from my Canadian teammates in Brussels (Scott and Mark at Racing; “Commissioner” Gordon and Keegan at Wellington) by Belgium’s great French-Dutch language divide. This is particularly frustrating, since — having slaved away through years of French immersion to become fluent — I am the only Canadian player in continental Europe not in a French-speaking area.
Fortunately, with no university classes to take, this gives me a chance to indulge my inner nerd by learning a new language (since there is no way I could have survived a full year without learning something.) I have been taking quite an intensive Dutch class — generously subsidized by the Flemish government — 12-hours per week. I have even started to be able to something makes myself understood to the U11 boys (who speak almost no English) with a combination of vigorous hand gestures and mispronounced Dutch.
This week finds our team doing poorly so far in the standing (1-4-1) and struggling to find our stride. We’ve played well in most of our games, but haven’t seemed able close games out and have lost several tight games in the last 10-15 minutes. However, the ship does seem to be slowly righting itself. Last weekend, after squandering numerous goal scoring chances, we fell behind 1-0 to Daring, and — after receiving a suspect yellow card in the final ten minutes — were nonetheless able to salvage a 1-1 draw. Not the result we wanted, but a small step forward nonetheless.
The next three weeks for us feature three exciting games coming up. This weekend we play our arch-rivals KHC Dragons in what is undoubtedly one of the fiercest rivalries in European hockey, and — from what my teammates have told me — the funnest game to play in all year. The following weekends see two Canadian clashes. First, Scott and Mark make the long journey up to Antwerp for the certainly unenviable task of facing us at home, before we head south to play Keegan and Gordon at Wellington.
Thanks for reading!
-Taylor
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