Day One, April 5, 2010 by Brooke Zywick, 18 Antare

Today, was the first day of our long awaited trip. The flight was the longest thing I have ever experienced in my whole entire life, not to mention uncomfortable, so I didn't sleep. When we arrived in Paris I was still continuing to run on the sleep that I got the previous night. Once we left the airport, we headed to our hotel. We took a tour bus, and the bus took us through the the outskirts of the big city of Paris, and I can honestly say it was not what I expected it to be. It was pretty much like any other city in the United States, just all of the graffiti was in french, that was weird. And graffiti is better here, it looks cooler. When we got to our hotel, we all discovered that, it was, uhm, small. Extremely small. It took a while for all of us to get our rooms and what not. Alexis was my roommate, so I was hoping for a big room because I knew that with both of our wardrobes combined, it would be A LOT. The room that we got though, was not big, it was very, very, small and compact. But we made it work. Before we went off to play, we walked around the streets by our hotel and found a place to eat. I don't remember what the name of that place was, but it was good. I got a cheeseburger, it was nothing like the cheeseburgers at home. The waiter was really nice, and very patient, but we discovered that eating out in France is totally different than eating in the US. The french expect it to be like an event, a 3 hour event, when we only had about an hour. Once we were done eating, we went back to the hotel and boarded some vans that were going to take us to the place that we were going to play. When we got to the gym we saw the team and they looked very informal.. they didn't really have technique. But when we played them, they ended up being really good. We went 1 and 3. It was fun, even though we didn't play very good. Then we went to go eat with the rest of the french team back at where they normally eat. We didn't eat with them, we ate at a different table. After we ate, we went back to the hotel and decided to take a small group to go see the Eiffel Tower. It took a little while to get there, and it was pretty cold outside, but once we got there it was soooo pretty!!!! I took so many pictures. But I was so tired that I didn't really want to sit and stare at it. Once we saw it, and saw the light show, we went back to our hotel, and I fell asleep right away, and it was amazing to sleep. (:

Editor's note: I am trying to post the pictures but I haven't had the best internet connection. The beginnings of them can be found at http://gallery.me.com/joshua.pickard
The girls are working on the blogs and passing around the computer when they can. It is my hope to have one from each team from each day.