|
Day 2, December 28, 2005
Orlando Journal
By Audrey & Sarah
Greetings from Izola! We have left Venice and are playing our first tournament in Slovenia. Venice was cold, crowded, full of pigeons, smelly, did we mention cold, and spectacular! We ran across some rude waiters, a beautiful church, and an Italian McDonald’s complete with a Ronald. Unfortunately, the bus ride to Izola ended up being over three hours. When we got here it was raining. However, the city has turned out to be more of a quaint seaside town than we expected. We walk everywhere, even to the gym that is about ten minutes (walking distance) away. We are quite a sight to behold traveling to the gym in our bright red warm ups, which are supported by multiple layers of anything we can find to put on. Literally, our awesome jerseys (thank you First Place Volleyball ) are not unveiled until the last second before play. The European girls, on the other hand, walk around the gym in their spandex. We’ve gotten some weird looks, but mostly the girls have been really nice. We have played three games. The first, against a team from Italy, we won! Yay!
The two afternoon games were against another team from Italy and one from Slovenia. We lost both of the games pretty badly. It was really interesting to see the Slovenian girls play. They were super disciplined and played with precision and strategy. They were huge, but we managed to get some awesome digs and blocks! Today (Day 3) we only have one game after opening ceremonies, so some of the girls are going to go exploring, while others plan on catching up on some much needed sleep. We’ll have a full update on that tomorrow though. We’re still jetlagged, but it’s been awesome so far. Thank you!
OVA vs. Italy 23-24, 25-15, 15-5
OVA vs. Italy 14-25, 16-25
OVA vs. Luka Koper 4-25, 10-25
Jacksonville 14’s
By Kamryn & Mariah
We woke up at 7:30 to be down for our match at 8:00. We walked to the gym with a local and played one match that we lost. We came back and me, Mariah. Tess, and Holland took a nap for three hours in our room. We woke up and went back to the gym for two matches. We lost the first match and won the second in three, our first European victory! Jessica went to save a ball and jumped and twisted her ankle in the third game of the last match so Kamryn had to go in and set a five-one. Thankfully we won. We walked back and it was snowing. We ate dinner and came back to our room and showered and watched TV. We had another big day this morning (update coming tomorrow) so we went to bed early. It’s been a great experience and we are all psyched to be here.
Jacksonvs.ille 14’s vs. Lazarevs.ac II 13-25, 10-25
Jacksonvs.ille 14’s vs. Blok Aut II 16-25, 10-25
Jacksonvs.ille 14’s vs. Lazarevs.ac III 21-25, 25-21, 15-8
Jacksonville 16’s
By Alison
Ciao! We are all so glad to finally be in Izola and not on planes and buses. Izola is a cute little city. This morning we played at 10:00 against Koper (Slovenia) and lost miserably as you can see from the scores. We did reach double digits in the second game and so we were somewhat pleased with that. Then most of us came back to the hotel and slept until we had to play again at 6:00. We played Pula (Croatia) and lost miserably again. The first game was a big improvement but then we went backwards in the second. We are all still unused to the time change and playing together and I’m hoping that once we grow accustomed to each other we’ll start playing better.
Jacksonvs.ille 16’s vs. Luka Koper 9-25, 13-25
Jacksonvs.ille 16’s vs. NB Pula 20-25, 5-25
Westcoast
By Chelsea Fowles and Leslie Schipper
Hey everyone! Well we are finally in Slovenia! We had our first day of playing yesterday, and we lost both games! We played Lazarevac (Serbia) the first game and we played ok for it being the first time we ever played together. Also, we only have 7 players on our team, so that’s interesting. The second match we played a team from Croatia. They were amazing! So we played not so great and lost .by a lot! We also found out that the refs don’t like us very much! After our match we were outside waiting for the rest of our team when some drunks walked out of the bar and threw something over by us. We didn’t think much of it, until it started smoking and they went inside to watch it. We got kind of scared so we started to back up - then it blew up. It was really scary! (New Years Fireworks) We got to experience this again! Rather than our losses we got to stop at a little café and drink REAL hot chocolate. Melted chocolate mixed with milk, It looked like melted pudding! It was amazing! Chelsea had two cups! The town is really cute even though we haven’t had much time to look around. Hopefully after our matches today we can look at more of the town.
Westcoast vs. OK Lazarevs.ac 17-25, 18-25
Westcoast vs. Rijeka 5-25, 3-25
|
