June 5, 2008

It's day 13 of our European tour and today we're off to Osijek. We started off our journey with the customary eggs, meat, and bread breakfast (and not to mention our new creative invention, honey butter, thanks to Rachel). We then proceeded to load the bus for another four hour drive.... hooray! Thank God we left early this morning because at least we got more time to catch up on some much needed z's from our previous day off.

We arrived in Osijek around noon with the knowledge of it being a previous site of the Croatian-Serbian war. The evidence of this could be seen on the walls of the buildings. As we were driving through the streets to our hotel we observed countless bullet holes in the building walls, as well as scrap metal alongside a few of the street corners. Although this place has been through much turmoil in its past, it still proves to be extremely beautiful and culturally endowed. We finally got to our hotel and realized that the next two nights in this hotel would be very different from our earlier hotels, and crossed our fingers for bigger beds!

Hotel Osijek is located right alongside a river within the city. It reaches up to the sky with its modern glass style, and the amenities within its walls seemed to be nothing less than spectacular. Each of our rooms is equipped with a card activated door where you simply place your room card in front of a sensor... and voila, you're in! So once we got inside the room we thought the fun would end, but much to our surprise it had just begun.

We thought, at first, that the rooms were American-proof as we started to press every single visible button trying to figure out how to turn on the bathroom lights. Roomie Liz had to make a few calls to the front desk, and soon realized our mistake: the card sensor... again - "Place zee card in eets spot and zeen all zee buttons will work." - Right, how could we forget? Anyway, we finally got situated in our yet again pint-sized beds, watched a little old-school American music videos, and headed downstairs to the café for a little lunch before our evening match.

Okay, so after a day off, another long bus ride, and the exploration of our new high-tech hotel, it was back to business. Usually our matches tend to be pretty exciting, but today our warm ups topped the charts... or shall I say toppled... the camera.

Leave it up to none other than our beloved freshman Amaris to pull off the stunt she did today. I had just set the camera up in its spot on the court and walked away for about 10 minutes to sort out jerseys. Camera should be fine right? Wrong. It was pepper time and I guess we weren't on our toes tonight. As I turned to walk back to my camera station, I see Lindsey hit one high... Amaris jump.... reach... reach.... and it was a no go. The ball tipped right off of her fingers and SMACK... straight into the lens. It looked like it was all in slow motion. The camera lens shot off and everything else started to topple over. Luckily Amaris is one of the fastest girls on the team because as soon as she turned to chase the ball and realized what was happening, I've never seen someone move so fast in my life. She was like the speed of light, if you will...and I will.

She then took quite the dive and slid underneath the camera so that it would fall on top of her instead of hit the floor. You know, the baseball draft started today and judging by that slide? I'd say she could've gone first round, easily.

The camera ending up being just fine, and after a quick heart attack on her part and a few laughs on ours, we continued on with warm ups. We played AOK Osijek for four games and won every game. Even though we were victorious everyone felt they could still improve, so after the Osijek team left we scrimmaged each other for 1 more.

After a day of traveling and some intense volleyball, it was nice to come back to our five-star hotel with chocolates waiting on our bed-side tables. And even though we had no such luck for bigger beds I'm pretty sure there won't be any problems trying to sleep tonight!

Laku noc!

Lauren

2011 Season
Camp Information
Tickets
Links

Follow the Green Wave