June 18, 2013
Follow Georgia Tech middle blocker Chanell Clark-Bibbs on her journey in the Czech Republic as part of the 2013 USA Volleyball Women’s Junior National Team. Chanell will blog five times during her stay in Brno and today’s blog documents her arrival in the Czech Republic. Stay tuned for her next blog post Friday after a week of training, before competing in the FIVB World Championships next week!
The 2013 U.S. Women’s Junior National Team
Hello from Brno!
The trip to the Czech Republic was a long one, but not too bad since I was able to travel with some familiar faces. Many of my teammates are familiar with one another because they’ve either played with one another before or have played against them. Since there are five girls on the team from Texas we are very familiar with one another and have many things in common, like one of our favorite restaurants in Texas called Whataburger!
After almost nine hours of traveling by plane and then a two hour bus ride, we finally landed in the Czech Republic. Being that this is my first time to Europe and out of the country, the travel time was longer than what I am used to. After landing we took a two hour bus ride to the city of Brno and finally checked into our hotel.
We immediately had lunch which was pork, potatoes, and this very interesting blend of vegetables; it was pretty good. From there we had a four hour break until dinner to explore, which I was very happy about. From lunch my roommate Andie Malloy from Iowa State, went to our room, unpacked a few things, and slept for a little after an exhausting day!
For Dinner more pork and rice was served, it seems Europeans love their pork because they serve lots of it at most of their meals. From dinner we then decided to take a walk around the area as a team. The weather here is almost perfect in the evenings, cool still air with no humidity. The walk was only supposed to last about ten minutes, but ended up being almost an hour and a half due to all the interesting stores, churches, and statues!
Along the walk we saw a McDonald’s and an H&M which I thought to be very interesting to compare to the United States. We couldn’t really go into any of the stores because they were closed but the people here are very interesting to me. Although we haven’t been able to interact with many of the Europeans, we try to learn some of the basic words like thank you or salt. The waiters love to laugh at us when we try to interact with them in their language which is kind of a confidence killer, but we find attempting to speak the language amusing as well.
We took pictures in front of the many statues along the way, and before we knew it our hotel was just a faraway distant building we could see on top of a hill. The walk back was kind of scary because our tour guide decided to take a short cut through the park at ten o’clock at night, but we made it back to the hotel safe and sound. The walk made me excited to see what other attractions the Czech Republic has in store for us to explore. So far this trip has been very exciting, and I am very anxious to see the gym and start practice tomorrow!
