Matt CP #4

Last Saturday Marcos and I met up for a game of soccer. Every weekend my friends and try to get together and play, though there's not very many of us and we're admittedly pretty terrible. So I figured I'd invite Marcos to come out and school us.
I picked up Marcos and his two friends Luis and DJ around 4 and we headed out to the field - a small, weedy patch of grass behind a local high school with two kids-sized goals. We kicked the ball around a little while we waited for my friends to show. It became rapidly apparent that these guys were about to kick our asses. Luis was from Mexico (I think), Dj from Spain, and Marcos from Venezuela, and soccer is very much ingrained in all three of their cultures. So even though they weren't 'competitive' players, they'd all been playing their whole lives - whereas my friends and I just started last year and moreover are shall we say indifferently athletic.
Once we were all ready, we hit the pitch. It wasn't a perfect day for soccer - hot, muggy, and wet - but it turned out alright. The main issue was the bugs. Once we got going the gnats were swarming us in furious black clouds. Everybody had like a halo of gnats surrounding them and had to continuously ward them off by making little gestures like something smelled. Dj and I joked that we wouldn't have to eat after the game, with all the bugs we'd swallowed. Luis coated himself in a formidable layer of AXE in a dubious attempt at repelling the 'mosquitoes' - their catch-all term for any flying insect.
Anyway the game went really well, probably the best my friends and I have played so far. Marcos and I won by a thin margin the first game, and Luis and DJ cleaned up on the second. I'm pretty sure they were taking it easy on us, because whenever Luis would start in with his fancy footwork or shoot the ball with any real force, Marcos would yell at him in Spanish. After the game I suggested that they'd been 'going easy on us,' but, as Sarah pointed out later, I think they mistook my idiom for like a jab at their skills. Either way everybody had a good time and afterwards we all went out to Momo's for some pizza. I think we actually might play again today, so hopefully we can make this a regular thing.