June 22, 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 first week of training in the Czech Republic. Stay tuned for her next blog post Tuesday after her first weekend in Brno.
The 2013 U.S. Women’s Junior National Team
Hello!
I have now been in the Czech Republic for a couple of days now. Since I have written last, a couple of things have happened since I have been in the city of Brno. For starters my team and I have changed hotels which can be seen as both a good and bad thing. Our new hotel is called Hotel Vista. Although the hotel is very nice and beautiful, it doesn’t have great Wi-Fi reception, and no air conditioning. This can easily be seen as a bad thing, but the lacking of those things has caused my team and I to become creative and get know each other better in the process. For example we thought of creating a wind tunnel from room to room, so we have our own natural air flow; it’s quite interesting.
My daily schedule consists of waking up around 7:30 in the morning for breakfast then heading to the gym for practice. After that we have lunch and some downtime with a film session a little later. If we don’t have a game that day we have a little more downtime, but if we do then we head to the gym early afternoon to prepare for the game. After we play we have dinner following another film session, then we are able to return to our rooms to retire for the night. When we have practices, they only last about an hour and a half and they are only once a day. Our practices usually consist of a lot of team play, and game situations which I really enjoy. The practices help strengthen our team chemistry, which I love as well.
As far as the do’s and don’ts in the Czech Republic, they are similar that of the U.S. There is mainly not a difference for my teammates and I because we don’t speak Czech very well, so we just smile and wave. We also don’t test or try to do anything out of the ordinary to make sure we don’t offend or cause any problems. Ways the Czech differs from the U.S. besides language is that there is rarely any air conditioning in public places. Another thing is our meals. Lunch seems to be the big meal of the day where you are always served with soup first, then your meal following a desert. The cars are also a little different than that of the U.S. I don’t see to many familiar brand name cars.
More later, thanks for reading!
