Pordenone, Italy
by Stephanie Mason

We woke up this morning for an early practice... Ok, so it wasn’t that early… but 10 am is still pretty early for us. We went and practiced at some nice school of music in their oak wood floored gymnasium…at least we think it was oak wood. We walked in to find 2 shopping carts full of the hardest volleyball we have ever felt. And yes, they were in shopping carts. It was a pretty good practice. It was nice to get in the gym and work out after a few days of eating and walking miles upon miles. After 2 hours of intense practice, we went and ate another wonderful lunch at the warehouse lunch hall. All the meals in this joint are similar.; Pasta and red sauce, meat, vegetables, rock hard bread, and water.  We then all came back to the hotel to prepare for the opening ceremony of the tournament. Many of us took naps because we were so worn out from out practice.  While we were all getting ready, we had a little problem with all of our flat irons. First of all, Abby’s didn’t even heat up, and mine (Steph’s) started melting from the inside out… it was not a good thing and most of us went to the ceremony with frizzy hair.

At about 4:30 we hopped (but not literally) on the bus and over to our warehouse food hall. Every team was to meet there and get the sign that said their team name on it to hold up at we walked around Pordenone. We were one of the first teams there so we had to wait quite a while for the rest of the women’s volleyball, men’s volleyball, and boy’s soccer teams to come. During our time of waiting, we made friends with a team from Nigeria. They were a boy’s soccer team, and they spoke English! They were only about 13 or 14, but it was nice to hear someone speaking English instead of Italian. We could actually understand them. We chatted with them for a while, and we took a nice picture with them. It was fun and they were very nice boys. They even gave us little flags that they had. Now, being Americans and all, we seemed to be getting a lot of attention. All around us you would hear “ooosa, oosa”, which was the Europeans trying to get our attention by saying “U.S.A.”. We are pretty much treated like celebrities because of where we’re from.

We walked around with everyone from this tournament into the square where there was an assembly. The assembly was pretty cool because everyone in the tournament was there and we were the favorite. Other people would see our sign, and whip out their cameras to take pictures with us/of us. We even caught a few snapping pictures of our behinds… that was awkward. For the entire ceremony, the only thing we understood was “Northern Lights, U.S.A.” Every team walked up onto the stage to receive a certificate of participation and a bottle of wine, which is now in the hands of Deb even though it was handed to me… As we walked off, a few soccer teams lined up and gave us high 5’s. It was neat. Went then walked back to the food hall and enjoyed yet another delicious meal and then headed back to the hotel to rest up for our day of actually playing volleyball.