I’m giving in to doing a blog. Mainly because I’m here for so long and I have kind of a lot of free time on my hands. I’ve been here a week so far and already it seems like I’ve been here a month. I’ll catch you up on everything that has happened in the short time I’ve been here. Not too much, to be honest.
So I left the good ole US of A Tuesday, April 9 at 730 in the pm. Flew from Orlando to ATL, ATL to Amsterdamn (8 and a half hours), and finally Amsterdam to Stockholm, where my team manager and his 2 daughters picked me up to drive me to Tierp, about an hour away. His 2 daughters are on the team and all of them are very nice and really accomodating. I couldn’t get internet in the Stockholm airport so I was pretty much just standing there like a lost little puppy and thankfully they found me and all gave me hugs. Nice little welcome after crossing the large pond and not sleeping but mmmm maybe 2 hours. The flight from ATL to Amsterdam was… terrible isn’t the right word because the inflight movies were on point, but I’ll go with not comfortable. I slept maybe 15 minutues (felt like 5) and watched silver linings playbook and frankenweeney the rest of the time. Both were so gooddd. I didn’t think about the long flight and scoring the window seat as being a bad thing. Well sorta bad. It’s just awk when you have to go to the bathroom and you have to wake up your neighbor. Hard for non social people like myself. I asked her once and the other times she would get up so I just went when she did. The flight from Amsterdam (and yes it was a hUGE tease only being there an hour) to Stockolm was about 2 hours and I slept almost that whole flight, after not sleeping at all that night. Worst neck cramp of my life when I woke up, but whatev, sleep is sleep. I needed it bad because, if you know me well, you know paying attention isn’t my strong suit, so my body was exhausted after having to run around foreign airports and customs to find my right gate.
Once I got to Tierp, my manager and his daughters took me to and helped me get set up in my temporary apartment. The apartment I’m living in the rest of the time was being used by American volleyball players (nice) and then being cleaned out so me and my new roommate could move in (which we havent yet, supposed to this weekend!) Pretty much set my 70lb and 50lb bags down, had an emotional breakdown (felt fine after I got it out), turned on the tv and fell asleep at 8pm. Woke up at all random hours of the night and then slept till 1pm the next day (missed lunch with my manager) and 1pm hasn’t happened for me since I was like uhhh 12. We are living out of suitcases now which sucks, but glad they have been so accomodating for us with the apartment we are in right now.
Thursday was my first practice with the team and of course I was beyond nervous. It was just a light practice thankfully- my legs were donezo, I felt like I hadn’t exercised in years. Got over my nerves and through that and had all of friday off because they get the day off before a game here. Thursday was also the day my roommate and other American got here. So nice having another English speaking person here with you, even though mostly all Swedes speak English (but hate it because they think they are bad..but aren’t). It’s funny because my coach is so nervous to speak English with us because he thinks he’s really bad at it. He says he understands it but just can’t speak it well (true in his case). BUt realistically, they speak to us and we can get the gist of what they’re saying and figure it out. We have 2 girls on the team who are the main translators and they do fine with it. Have to help them with words here and there but it’s fine.
Friday Carson and I did not a damn thing. Jet lag is real. It was nice to have that day and have the coach be understanding to how tired we were. We realized that the building we live in right now has hot water for our shower for a total of no joke 5 mins. It’s been interesting with that situation. I usually go upstairs to a girl on the team and shower in hers (soo thankful for that option) Let me tell you how terrible it is showering in the cold when it’s cold outside… actually you can just figure that out yourself. Miserable, especially after practicing in the cold.
Saturday we had a practice scrimmage. I would say sometimesss I tend to exaggerate, but not in this case. It was bone chillingly cold and SNOWING. Maybe slush is a better word. The field was one giant slush puddle. They literally had to get it off with a tractor type thing that is similar to how hockey does it. And that didn’t even work. It was hard to pass a ball and even harder to figure things out when we had never played together before. We did fine for the most part despite all of that, but the 2nd part of the 2nd half we got scored on twice and ended up losing 3-1. It was just miserable and I don’t really ever want to think about how cold it was again. Diva status.
Sunday, Monday and Tuesday we just got used to things and were trying to figure out Swedish life while going to soccer practice at night (on Mon and Tues) That leads me to today, Wednesday, which was an exciting day for us, so I’ll just start a new blog for it
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