Maribor and Pumpkin Soup!

Hello Friends and Family!


Tomorrow is the four-week anniversary of my departure from the US of A, and I'm happy to report that it's with nostalgia but not too much homesickness that I think back to that last day at JFK! I'm still pinching myself often, wondering when this honeymoon phase might end, but I'm hoping that I've really just found myself in a honeymoon-ish life!

Since my last post, after spending one last day tourning around Klagenfurt, Jason took off, heading first for Vienna, then on towards Italy. With the help of facebook and Skype, I hear from him rather often, and I get to keep updated on his crazy Euro-trip stories. It was great to have a friend in town for a couple days, and there's a chance that he might stop back through here before he heads home in early December!



On Thursday, my friend Britanny came back from several weeks in Germany, where she had tried out for another team there. Unfortunately, she's struggling to get back from a knee injury, and ended up deciding that maybe she should head home to the states for rehab before possibly trying to find a team in January. Anyway, she came to spend a last weekend in Klagenfurt, and we spent Friday morning at the lake, laying on a dock with our feet in the water.







Later, on our way home, we realized that there was a festival of some kind going on in downtown Klagenfurt, and we took a short video to document the fun!








That afternoon, Helli came by the flat to pick the "Rupees" up for our first team trip to Maribor, Slovenia (our apartment is on St. Ruprechter Strass, so Sophie, Birgit, Ellie and I call ourselves the "Rupee Gang"). From Klagenfurt to Maribor it is approximately a 2.5 hour drive, but it was through some of the most beautiful countryside I've ever seen! We arrived at our hotel on Friday evening, and left soon thereafter for a scrimmage with the team from Maribor. It was difficult to be playing so late and after a long day of travel, but we played well at times and ended up taking a set off of them, which was encouraging. We got back to our hotel close to midnight, and it was the start of a long volleyball weekend!








The next morning, Helli allowed us to sleep in a bit, but we met in the late morning for a team hike up the mountain next to the hotel. At the top of this mountain, we there was a large ropes course, and more importantly, a huge alpine slide! It reminded me of summers in Vermont where my Grandma and Grandpa would take me, Talia, and our cousins to ride the alpine slide at Bromley mountain, only this slide was a little more sketchy and made me fear death by bob-malfunction a little more than I did back in VT. Fortunately, the slide was better constructed than I had imagined, and we all made it down alive!



That night, we played the team from Maribor again, and it was good to see that we're showing improvement. We're playing with a strange rotation right now, several girls are injured, and we're still waiting for our second foreigner (an outside from Canada) to arrive (this Saturday! YAY!), so we're somewhat incomplete. But we did well with the personnel that we have, and we're getting better!


Sunday morning we played the team from Innsbruck, Austria, who are also in our league. We took them to 5 sets with our incomplete roster (the middles were playing backrow some of the time!) but ended up losing a tight game in the 5th. That concluded our weekend of volleying in Slovenia!


Helli gave us Monday and Tuesday off from practice, but surprised us on Monday with a team cooking class with a nutritionist. The 9 of us divided 5 recipes amongst ourselves, all meals that were designed to be quick, healthy, and practical for athlete's schedules (I know, what schedule is that, you ask? Lay by the lake between practices? I could probably cook a 7-course meal every day! But I think my teammates do have real lives that are busy though, so maybe the recipes were more designed for them..)


I was paired with "Anna Kleine" ("little Anna," because there are two of us, and they distinguish between us with the vast differences in size. I'm "Anna Grosse," haha) and we were assigned the pumpkin soup. I had never made pumpkin soup before, but as the weather starts getting colder, I'm realizing that it may be a go-to recipe for yummy fall comfort food! The other gals made such recipes as millet (?) with apples and cinnamon as a breakfast food, sesame seed and cornflake crusted chicken, and DELICIOUS potato pancakes. Everything was really really good, but the soup was pretty legendary, so I'll share the recipe:

• Take a small pumpkin, and after cutting off the stem and taking the seeds out, cut it two inch cubes (the recipe says 400g of pumpkin, but we grams are hard for Americans, and I really have no idea what a gram is... except a singing gram that I was always hoping to get around Valentines day in middle school..)




• In your favorite stew pot, saute a diced onion in a couple tablespoons of olive oil



• When the onions are soft and almost transparent, add the many grams of pumpkin, as well as a liter (a 4 or 5 cups ish? Again, a standard of measure that means nothing to me) of vegetable stock. Simmer for 20 minutes, or until pumpkin is soft.



• After 20 minutes, puree the pumpkin in the pot, until the soup becomes an evenly smooth consistency



• At the same time, add a cup of milk, a cup of cream, a teaspoon of salt, and two tablespoons of soy sauce

• Puree until all ingredients are mixed



• Prepare to be amazed with your own chef mastry, and maybe steal a bit of soup for yourself before everyone realizes how good it is and gobbles it down!

Throughout this cooking session, I honestly felt like I was back in home ec. in 7th grade... Did I mention it was at the local high school with the cooking teacher? Yeah. I forgot what it was like to be constantly trying to follow the rules, especially rules in German! Don't sit on the counter! Don't add the cream too quickly! Warm the bowls before serving the soup! Can someone translate for me??

After we were all done with our recipes, we sat down to taste our culinary experiments. The nutritionist explained (in German) the importance of fueling our bodies correctly, and how we can all find time to prepare good food for ourselves blah blah blah. Wait, what was that last part?? Oh yeah, I only heard part of it because I was too busy scarfing the deliciousness!

Yesterday and today were pretty low-key, because my body is just so darned tired from volleyball! I did, however, manage to find time to finished my latest read, The Life of Pi by Yann Martel. I LOVED this book! It was a really quick read, which I like (of course, until the end, when I wanted it to keep going!!) and basically a great work of fiction. I have a copy if you want to come borrow it! :)

I miss you all and hope all is well in your neck of the woods! Remember, send updates to acmaylo@gmail.com, I love hearing from you!

LOVE,

Anna

The Worthersee

Hello Friends and Family!

Since my last update, the city of Klagenfurt has been bathing in California-esque sunshine almost everyday! It's not super-hot, but it gets to be in the high 70s, which is perfectly perfect for me. I'm all for avoiding the fact that someday the sidewalks might be covered in a thin sheet of back-breaking ice, and when that sun hits my skin everyday, I almost convince myself that this weather will hold 'til March...

Last week was my first time going through the regular schedule of practice and weights, and it's looking to keep me far more busy than I was in Switzerland. Our gym is a pretty awesome facillity across town, and we have practice 5-7 times per week, which means that we have double days on Tuesdays and Thursdays (usually). On the other days we have weights in the morning at a local fitness center called Atlantis (which is an amazing multi-colored, prayer-flag adorned, environmentally friendy hippie version of a 24-hour fitness) and then practice in the evening.

If practicing twice a day has been good for one thing, it's been helping me get over my illogical fear of public transportation! (Anyone who knows me knows that I stress out major over pubilic transportation. I'm always afraid that I'm going the wrong way, going to miss my connection, going to somehow die on board, etc. I think I was traumatized once while taking NJ Transit from Penn Station back to Madison and I ended up going to the wrong town an hour away. Oops?) Anyway, Sophie, Birgit and I take the bus to practice everyday (twice a day!) and I can say that I now saunter onboard with confidence, I know how to buy a ticket, and I have even explored some of the other bus lines around town. Baby steps!!

We had a scrimmage against a team from Slovenia (Kamnik) last Wednesday, and it was definitely fun to play against another team for a change. One of Kamnik's foreigners is a gal named Emilie Toone, who was a standout middle for the University of Utah for the last five years, and who I've been playing against since our days in club volleyball! I know that I'm a pretty nostalgic person, but I don't I'll ever get over the weird feeling of seeing people that I know from home while I'm all the way over here.

After a long week of practice, we had an unexpected day off on Saturday, and Sophie helped me take full advantage of it. Her sister Lena and her fiance Claus came by our apartment in the morning to start us off on a fun day of simple pleasures:

Pleasure 1: IKEA :) With the expert help of Sophie, I invested in some throroughly mass-produced artwork that has helped me cover my walls and create my own home space in Klagenfurt. Martha Stewart and Mr. Feng Shui would be proud. Woot!

Pleasure 2: ICE CREAM :) Has anyone here ever tried poppyseed ice cream? I mean they're good on bagels, so maybe they're good in ice cream too?? Welp, check that off my bucket list!

Pleasure 3: THE WORTHERSEE :) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/W%C3%B6rthersee

Due to the clouds and gray of the week, I had yet to see the huge lake that was rumored to be beautiful and nearby. After finishing errands at Ikea, Lena and Claus brought us on tour of the Worthersee, starting with the shores on the eastern Klagenfurt side, and continuing with a trip to Velden, a pretty cute town on the western shores of the lake. In Velden, Lena and Claus decided to treat us to a touristy boat ride around the lake, and I couldn't seem to capture the amazing beauty in pictures!

On Sunday we played several matches against another Austrian team from the first league, and it was good to get some experience playing in a match-situation. We're all still getting used to playing with one another, but we seem to be making strides towards getting better, which is all I can ask for!

On Monday morning, I woke to a surprise when I realized that I had a visitor! As some of you may know, one of my best friends from school (Brody) is playing professional basketball in Poland this season. Brody is one of the friendliest guys I've ever met, and his network of friends is making the world smaller every day! Case in point: One of his best friends from his hometown of Redding is on this side of the Atlantic for a couple months of Euro-tripping. When I heard that Jason was on this continent, I extended the invitation to stop by Klagenfurt if he was interested! Well, after two days of debauchery at Oktoberfest in Munich over the weekend, Jason hopped on a train to Klagenfurt on Sunday night (forgetting the small detail of notifying me), and arrived early on Monday morning! When I rolled over to check the time on Monday, my lovely phone was blinking with several new messages saying "I'm in Klagenfurt! Where should I go!??" and "I'm at an internet cafe near the train station, how do I get to your house!!??" Ha.

After we played the "where in Klagenfurt is Jason?" game for a little while, we met up at the train station and started the visit off right! I had a day off on Monday, so we spent the morning walking around downtown before hopping on a bus toward the lake! After my adventure there on Saturday, I felt like I was practically a local, and I was excited to share the awesome beauty with Jason!

We walked around the lake for a while, and later in the afternoon Sophie and Birgit joined us for some hangout-with-feet-in-water time. It was PERFECT weather (as you can see, I'm wearing shorts, sandals, and a t-shirt!!!) and I was on cloud 9.

That night, Sophie and Birgit had the great idea of trying out Klagenfurt's Mexican restaurant, and I was in full support. I hate to say that I was expecting the worst, but I was definitely not expecting it to be as yummy as it turned out to be! Jason and I had chicken fajitas (yum!) and we came home entirely satisfied by Klagenfurt's version of Chevy's (but no big hats for fake birthdays. dang!!).

Yesterday was busy for me, so I wasn't able to do too much with Jason, but fortunately he's a really easy guest and didn't complain about settling for a long walk through downtown. It's really nice to have a visitor around, and I'll be bummed when he takes off for Vienna later today.

OK, I'm headed off to Atlantis for a morning lift. Love you all and talk to you soon!

xox

Anna

Back from Hochkar!

Hello Everyone!

It's finally sunny after 2 days of gray here in Klagenfurt, and I'm loving it! I have a little time before our evening practice, so I thought I should update the blog!

We left for training camp last Sunday, and after a 4 hour bus ride, arrived in the mountain town of Hochkar, which we would call home for a week. We stayed at a mountain sports training facility, which was comprised of a huge dorm building that was connected to several gyms, a bowling alley and a fitness center through a series of confusing tunnels. There were also tennis courts and a track outside, as well as rock walls and a ropes course. Apparently Hochkar is a popular ski resort in the winter months, but it was sunny and green while we were there, and it was pretty ridiculously stereotypical Austrian mountain scenery-esque..

Our days at training camp were pretty funny and brought me back to double days at Santa Clara. We would wake up at 7:45 to go to breakfast in the cafeteria at 8, and then we would have weights and/or practice at 9. Following weights or practice, we would have some sort of agility training outside, and then we would head to lunch at noon. Helli tried to organize some fun team-bonding events for the afternoons, one day we had a team-building activity and we had a mountain hike on another day.. We would fill any unused time with naps, so we were always pretty well-rested :) In the evenings we would practice for a couple hours and then head to dinner, sometimes following dinner with a sauna session. Basically, it was a schedule of sleep, eat, volley, eat, sleep, volley, eat, repeat! (Anyone who has gone through double days or perhaps the Volleyball Festival definitely knows how this feels!!)

I loved our time at Hochkar, because it really gave me a chance to get to know my new team at warp-speed. I met them on Sunday afternoon, and by that evening we were all living together, sharing almost every hour together... My roommate was a gal named Sophie, who also lives in the same flat here in Klagenfurt, and we had a great time hanging out between sessions.. I'm one of the oldest people on the team, so we're pretty young, but all of the girls speak nearly perfect english (which is amazingly awesome!) and are super welcoming and friendly. By the end of the week, I felt like I had known them all for a lot longer than just 7 days!

One of the funnier stories of the week came on Friday, when Helli had scheduled a "team challenge" between sessions. While the first 4 days in Hochkar were sunny and beautiful, Friday was foggy (as in couldn't see more than 20 feet ahead) and gray, with spurts of rain throughout the day. Helli sat us down to explain our challenge (by the way, I should note that he speaks in German all the time in the hopes that I'm going to just pick it up day by day. It's kind of working, but really???) and he stops to translate every 17th sentence into english.. I get the gist of what an "initiation course" is (it's a scavenger hunt!) and basically we each have a child's map of the area and 11 stations to hit (the station clues are "insect mound" for ant hill, or "rope garden" for the ropes course.. awesome :).. each station has 2 letters in/around it, and one of those letters is for an english word while the other is for a german word. After finishing the hunt and collecting all the letters, we can unscramble them to solve a puzzle.

Anyway, back to the less-than-desirable weather conditions, when we get outside, someone comes up with the brilliant idea of divying up the stations and meeting at the end (CHEATING!!!) so that we wouldn't have to spend 2 hours scavenging through the rain and fog. This plan is going swimmingly, until we get stuck at the last station, completely unable to unscramble the letters that we have already collected.. Finally, we hear Helli through the fog yelling "Stop," and telling us to come inside.. He tells us that we have 17 minutes to take hot showers, and to meet him back outside in sport-clothes. (Ahh.. the feeling of getting caught cheating by your coach. Stomach drops, and you immediately look for ways to hurt yourself so that you could maybe weasel yourself out of whatever punishment is coming your way.. Throw yourself down the stairs?? Too obvious... Out a window?? Ok maybe that's too drastic.. Shoot....)

Anyway, Helli was pretty angry that we cheated his initiation course, so he invented a new challenge involving a run up a mountain to a lake.. We had 12 minutes to reach the lake, and anyone who didn't make it would have to practice that night, while the rest of the team would have it off. We had hiked to this lake several days prior, but no one knew how long it had taken us, so we didn't exactly know how to pace ourselves. And if you don't know how long you have, but you know you have to make it in a certain time, the only thing to do is run as hard as you can for as long as you can and hope you make it! We did just that, but at altitude and running up a mountain, you can really only run hard for a couple hundred yards before you feel like your lungs might come out through your nostrils and you have to walk...

Fortunately for us, Helli had miscalculated how long he thought it was going to take us, and we all made it with time to spare! But let's just say that I'm EXTREMELY happy that I spent so many mornings running the Los Gatos Dam this summer! It was a definite bonding moment for the team, and I think Helli got over it and was really happy that we all made it up the mountain.

We drove back on Saturday morning, and made it back to Klagenfurt that afternoon. Unfortunately, upon our arrival, Brittany got word that the club wouldn't be offering her a contract for this season, which sent her back to square-one in terms of finding a team over here. Weridly enough, she got a call almost immediately about a team in Germany that had an open spot, and she took off yesterday afternoon after spending one last weekend in town!

We made the most of that last weekend here, spending Saturday night on the town with a couple of the girls, and watching movies together Sunday afternoon. I'm bummed to be living alone again, but I'm really happy to have Sophie and Birgit (another teammate who lives upstairs) in the same apartment building, because I'm able to hang out with them during our down-time.

I went to practice at our home gym for the first time this morning, and it's a really nice facility just a little ways across town. Most days our schedule will involve something in the morning and something at night, sometimes fitness, sometimes practice, sometimes matches, etc, but I'm still figuring it out. I'm loving the girls, the coach seems pretty awesome, and I feel like Klagenfurt is slowly feeling more like home. Cherry on top: I found CHEDDAR cheese in the store today! Can life get any better????

Hope all is well wherever you are, and if you feel so inclined to download Skype, my username is annacmaylo (difficult, I know) and I love having people to chat with!

Love, Anna

Klagenfurt, Austria

It's been 6 months, and I'm finally back in Europe! I had an AMAZING summer back in the states: I got to live with one of my best friends from college, I had a great job at a fun fitness center, and my days/nights/weekends were filled with fun Californified activities. But in about mid-July, I started to get anxious about getting my life figured out, and I was ready to hit the road again! It all worked out in the end, and I signed a contract to play for the Klagenfurt Wildcats this year, in Klagenfurt, Austria!

I'm still getting settled in here, but a gal who I played with at Santa Clara (Brittany Lowe) is on the team here already and has been in Klagenfurt for 3 weeks, so she's helping me get all set up. I went to the grocery store this morning (where I had to leave my groceries on the counter while I ran 3 blocks up the street to a bankomat to get cash because they don't take Visa ("Weesa") and then come back, beet red, to pay for my things!) and I got a phone this afternoon and picked up some post cards, so I'm feeling kind of on top of things! Most importantly, I met the Klagenfurt "Lindwurm" (a flying worm-like dragon thing, in the picture to the left) that's in the center of town. Exciting stuff!

As I type, the sounds from a nearby street fair are coming through my window.. sounds like accordions and songs in German, and smells like cheese.. Mmm...

Tomorrow afternoon my coach (Hellie) is coming to pick me up for a week of "Training Camp" in the mountains... "What does that mean??" you ask? Good question! According to Hellie and Horst (the team manager, great name!): "We spend week in the mountains, we bring things for outdoor and indoor." Soooo I'm in for a surprise, but all I know is that I won't be back until next Saturday!

Love from the land of von Trapps,

Anna