| We arrive in Budapest or (B-u-d-a-p-e-s-h-t) as they say it here and we meet our tour guide named “henny” a 29 year old volleyball player who is very nice. We are all extremely exhausted and want to find the nearest bed. Unfortunately, its 11:30 am and we have a full day ahead of us. We hop in a bus and start our trek to the town of Szekesfehervar, it's impossible to pronounce so don’t even try it. We were stunned by the beauty of Hungary and couldn’t wait to begin exploring the country.
After arriving in town we go to lunch as we are all starving and cant wait to see what the Hungarian cuisine has to offer. Unfortunately, I didn’t enjoy the food and ate very little but the team seemed to think it was okay, nobody like the carbonated water though.
We are anxiously waiting for the arrival of our foreign friends from Slovenia, their names were Marko and Jernej and they are both 16. After they arrive we head to the gym for our first team practice, besides the language barrier between the Slovenians and us, it went very well as both the Slovenians are very very good. After practice we find out there is a beach volleyball tournament the next day and we all got very excited to play in it. We ate dinner and then went immediately to bed.
We wake up from a good nights sleep to eat breakfast, to our surprise breakfast was very similar to back home as we ate ham and eggs. In between bites we were singing “like a virgin” by Madonna because vh1 greatest hits from 1984 was playing.
After breakfast we head to the lake to play some beach volleyball. As it turns out the tournament was actually fairly big with over 20 mens and womens teams. We were all paired up and entered into the tournament. I played with Paul, our assistant coach, Marko and Jernej were a team and Bryce and Tyler were a team. Paul and I were disappointed we had to leave the tournament early because we were 3-0 and felt we had a chance to take the tournament, Marko and Jernej went 1-1 and Tyler and Bryce went 1-2.
We had to leave the tournament early as we had a match against the Szekesfehervar city team around 4. The match went fairly well as we took game 3 from them and we lost game 4 26-24. We gave them a battle in every game and I was happy with the whole teams performance.
After the game we had plans to take a train to the neighboring city for a huge lake party, about two minutes of quick observation it was clear that the vast majority of Americans cant keep pace with the Hungarian party scene. Too sum it up in two words, chaos and commotion. Naturally we wanted to stay all night, but fatigue set in and we bowed out at the stroke of midnight.
~ Preston Beer
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