Journal Entry #2

July 20^th 9:40pm

I woke up at 6:50am, just before the alarm today and got ready to go out and explore the world of Macau on my own. I remembered to grab a bottle of water before I left, and I must say that was one of my best decisions of the day. As I made my way around the corner and up the hill from the hotel, I finally found the park that Erikka told me about yesterday. She was right, there were a ton of native people up there doing Tai Chi, walking and running. It was almost as though it was a social event here in the mornings.

The temperature outside was a balmy 85 degrees at least and I was sweating even before I started to run. As I weaved in and out of people avoiding the stares, I started to understand why everyone here is so thin. It’s not because of the myth that all they eat is rice, it’s because they are out exercising in heat and humidity like I experienced today!

Throughout the run (when I wasn’t feeling like one of my lungs was going to collapse), I started to become very aware of my surroundings. I think this has a lot to do with the fact that I knew I would be writing this journal tonight. As I look back on today, I can’t help but feel like I should be journaling every day if would continue to have this same affect on me.

Aside from the complete torture of running in this kind of weather, my alternate senses picked up on a couple of interesting things. First off, I believe that people were burning incense while doing Tai Chi and other forms of exercise. Secondly, I’m pretty sure that the air around here is relatively polluted as my skin left a residue of a color that doesn’t indicate only sweat all over my towel AND there were more than a half a dozen natives wearing face masks this morning. Lastly, I’m confident that I will never learn the languages of Mandarin or Chinese as every word they say just seems to sounds exactly the same, only taking on a different tone and pitch.

After I got cleaned up, we made our way down for the hotel breakfast. Honestly, we truly are eating like royalty here. No losing any weight for meJ That is unless I continue to spend more time outside!

We started practice at 10am at the facility across the street. We ran some offensive combo drills and got into some 6 v 6 drills that brought some impressive play out of our players. Megan Hodge was attacking the ball harder than I’ve ever seen her hit it before, today in practice. All in all, the players gave all they had and the coaching staff left there feeling very confident that things were moving in the right direction with the improvements of the team.

A quick change of clothes later, we were on the bus and heading towards the Macau mall. Our tour guides, Wendy and Stephanie (I found out today that they picked those names for themselves while they are with us?), were almost more excited to go to the mall than our players were. As we got off the bus and told the players to meet us at 2:30pm, we had no idea what we were getting ourselves into. We all went in the same entrance and tried to find out way out of the department store and into the main part of the mall. We went up one floor, than another floor and finally the last floor, only to find that a mall here is just that, one big store. That’s it. It’s kind of like a Super Walmart, but not nearly as fun. The girls were disappointed and honestly so was I, mostly because I wanted to get some tourist things to take home.

We had a small lunch trying some Chinese food and pastries, of course, and made our way back to the hotel. Wendy and Stephanie (who has since been re-names Mary Kate and Ashley Olsen…since they look very similar) promised to take us tourist shopping tomorrow.

After lunch at the hotel, Kris and I found out way to the local library. Both of us wanted desperately to get online and no one could get a wireless connection in the hotel. So, we signed up to use the computers, but were told that we would have to come back between 5-6pm to use them. That would be an hour and a half later. So, Kris came up with a better idea and we made our way back over to the Bank of China (where we exchanged money yesterday) and used their internet. Neither one of us is all too sure whether or not that’s what the computer is there for, but no one seemed to care.

Ok, on to the good stuff. We scrimmaged a club team from Italy tonight. They came to watch our match with Macau last night and Z (Rich Zeciski, head of delegation), arranged a match between the two teams.

After having such a great practice this morning, all of us were anxious to look at another team across the net. The first game started out going back and forth. We struggled a little bit in serve receive and Italy remained steady with their ball control. We finally got into the swing of things and they were no match for the strength of our outsides and the height and speed of our middles. We ended up winning that match 3-0 with scores of 25-23, 25-28, 25-15. We took a quick picture with both of the teams and headed back to the hotel for dinner..yes, time to eat again. UGH!

Dinner was our second opportunity to eat with the team from Russia. We also saw them at lunch and they looked almost afraid to come in and eat with us. I can’t help but think that might be some foreshadowing for our time here at the World Championships. Traditionally I hear that Russia is not allowed to do a lot of socializing between teams while at these kinds of tournaments. This afternoon, Christina Kaelin and some of the other players, approached them in the hallway as fellow athletes not at competitors. In fact, there were at least four players from Russia wearing US clothing. Everything from a KIVA (Kentucky, Indiana Volleyball Academy club team shirt) to Long Beach and Florida shirts. One can’t help but feel that we live in a great place when confronted by young adults living in other countries. Seemed like they felt the same way.

Tonight came to a close as we were giving our formal tournament packet with an update of the upcoming practices, meetings and competitions. At this point, I can’t wait for Saturday (our first competition date)!