Hello Friends and Family!
I'm listening to the newest Norah Jones album right now, and I think it's probably the 10th time it's been played this week. 17 thumbs up for anyone who likes amazing piano-and-guitar-playing jazzy singer-songwriters!
Besides listening to Norah Jones on repeat, life since my last post has been pretty awes
ome! After our brief introduction to the fun of cooking, Birgit went on a short cooking rampage at the end of last week by picking several recipes that she wanted to make for Sophie and I between practices. On Thursday, we feasted on stuffed zucchini, and Friday brought cous-cous salad and tiramisu (prepared by her equally inspired boyfriend who was in town visiting). While we all enjoyed the meals, I think that several days of toiling over confusing recipes (she added too much vinegar to something, didn't have the right mixer for something else) and several days of cleaning up after those confusing recipes was enough to snap her out of her Rachel Ray mood, and by Monday morning it was back to lunches of bread and Nutella for Birgit and Sophie :)
ome! After our brief introduction to the fun of cooking, Birgit went on a short cooking rampage at the end of last week by picking several recipes that she wanted to make for Sophie and I between practices. On Thursday, we feasted on stuffed zucchini, and Friday brought cous-cous salad and tiramisu (prepared by her equally inspired boyfriend who was in town visiting). While we all enjoyed the meals, I think that several days of toiling over confusing recipes (she added too much vinegar to something, didn't have the right mixer for something else) and several days of cleaning up after those confusing recipes was enough to snap her out of her Rachel Ray mood, and by Monday morning it was back to lunches of bread and Nutella for Birgit and Sophie :)On Friday evening, Sophie, Birgit, Birgit's boyfriend and I met some of our teammates downtown for drinks at the local Mexican restaurant. We didn't have practice on Saturday, so we took our chance to have a night out! I'm pleased to report that Mojitos in Klagenfurt are just as delicious as Mojitos in Santa Cruz. Yum!
Saturday morning was really exciting, because it meant the arrival of our newest teammate, and my new roommate! Her name is Kristina, and she's an outside hitter from Sudbury, Ontario. She went to college in Florida, and played last season in Finland. We're the same age, and due to the fact that the volleyball world is super small, we have a handful of mutual friends. We even figured it out that she was in San Antonio for the Final Four in 2005, and was watching as we played against Nebraska and her friend Sarah!
Anyway, Kristina got in on Saturday morning, and in an attempt to jerk herself onto Austrian time, she decided to forego a nap and spend the day touring the city and watching our club's 2nd team play on Saturday evening. We were both pretty wiped that night, so decided to make it an early night be ready for our match the next morning.
Sunday brought a match against Tyrol, the team from Innsbruck that we had played in Maribor the week before. I had a lot of fun watching Kristina coming into the gym, shaking hands with everyone, then jumping right into our warmup! It was a pretty whirlwind team integration for her, but she did great and now it seems like she's been here the whole time!
After the match, our team changed uniforms and re-did our hair for team pictures: first we took a bunch in the gym with our 27 different sponsors, and then we headed t
o the lake for cute team shots. (If you want to see all the pictures, you can go to http://www.qspictures.net/, and if you want to download them, the username is "wildcats2" and the password is "maja") It was a beatiful afternoon, and Kristina and I stayed after our photoshoot was over to have lunch with Lina at the restaurant on the lake!
o the lake for cute team shots. (If you want to see all the pictures, you can go to http://www.qspictures.net/, and if you want to download them, the username is "wildcats2" and the password is "maja") It was a beatiful afternoon, and Kristina and I stayed after our photoshoot was over to have lunch with Lina at the restaurant on the lake!Monday was a day off, and after a morning at Atlantis (the fitness center), Kristina and I spent the day walking around the city and hanging out with some of the guys from the men's volleyball team. It's nice to have other friends that share our same random schedule, where we're ridiculously busy some of the day and have entirely not enough to do for long stretches of time (we exchange pointers on which shows we should watch, season by season, between practices, rough life I know!!).
That night, Crystal and I Skyped with our coaches at Santa Clara, and we got the lowdown on their first conference matches and what's been going on with the team. Crystal is playing in the Canary Islands this year, and while we're much further apart than we were last year, we still manage to talk two or three times a day! Somehow the topic of how much we miss our team and coaches at Santa Clara always comes up, so it was fun to chat with Jon like we were back in the offices at SCU. We're pulling for the Broncos, they're playing Saint Mary's today and at San Diego on Saturday, so we'll be cheering from overseas!
This weekend we head to Bratislava, Slovakia for our first league match. It'll be our first real test to see how we're going to stack up against other teams in our league, and I'm excited!
One last fun point is that a former Bronco teammate is supposed to be arriving in Austria today! Nichole Clark is embarking on an amazing euro-journey, and her first stop is Klagenfurt. I'll be really excited to see her and get to share my awesome life here with another friend from home. Updates on Nichole's trip to follow!
I hope all is well at home, and that you are all getting warm breezes through your windows during afternoon naps too :)
LOVE,
Anna
Still practicing your Norah Jones slap? Oh man...crazy night in the kitchen! Good to hear you finally got your new roomie!
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