Fun and Games...Yes, Real Games

The UK Flames Bundesliga team competed in their first friendship game this past week. As far as the game goes, that is all I want to tell you about it...

No, but really. We played our first game in the Czech Republic this past Wednesday. We played a first divsion team from the city of Brno, which is only a two hour drive from the city of Vienna. We piled into a small VW golf and a 10 seater van and made the trek North. Since both the Czech and Austria belong to the European Union, there was no border control, which I found amazing conidering the fact we had just passed through a region that was once part of the Iron Curtain.

The gym was nice in Brno.We arrived over an hour prior to tipoff and were escorted to our dressing room. The gym was occupied until 20 minutes before game time so we warmed up for a measley 15 minutes or so and began our game. They jumped on us from the start and sped to a 10 point lead in a matter of minutes and we never really gave them the need to look back. I'm not positive what the final score was, but we were definitely on the losing end. (I'm not holding out...I really don't know the final, but it was about a 40 point spread. Lets just say 100-60?) There were some bright moments for our side, but those glimmers were simply not enough to keep us close, and our weakness were made obvious by their quicker style of play.

Ignoring the final score, it felt good to play a REAL game. Not counting my recent summer league venture, the last real game I played was in May of 2008. A year and a half later, here I am, playing basketball halfway around the world. It's amazing how things can turn out so well, despite how bad they can be at times.

Despite the flu-type sickness I am convinced I picked up on our little road trip, Osier and I made an effort this weekend to be social. Saturday, following our morning practice, we attended the Vienna sports day, which was held at the Volkstheater in front of the national library. We handed out flyers for our season opening, without speaking of course, and walked around the venue to chek out all the sports Austria has to offer. We left after 20 minutes. Later that evening, we took a short drive to Traiskirchen to see the BasketClubs Vienna Bundesliga, which is our brother team if you will, in action. I was surprised at the attendance, which had to be a couple hundred, but just overall excited to watch some basketball. Unfortunately, they lost. Oh well
To end our day (OK, maybe not) we returned home, changed, and headed to the opposite end of the city to the birthday party of the Vice President of our league. His daughter is also on our team so we made the trip out for a little celebration at a bar in the Northern part of Vienna. We were then driven "downtown" to our favorite German club, which plays 99% german music all night...which can be suprisingly fun. I knew exactly two songs the whole night.

We just returned from our second exhibition game, which we played earlier this evening in Sopron, which is the first city you hit coming from Vienna into Hungary. The drive took about 45 minutes. I am happy to say that we came away with our first victory. WE WON! The final score was 64-63 in our favor. We got some point production from a few different girls and took baby steps towards being a better team. I was pleased with the playing from my teammates and hope that we can build on this experience in the coming weeks and months.

Ok. So I have never really had the opportunity to complain about refereeing in any form of media (It's against CCAA and NCAA rules), so thanks to my deprivation in this area, here we go. Before I begin, I would like to add that the referees were clearly parents or even COACHES for the opposing team. I have never been so frustrated in my life with refs. True story. It's one thing to make bad calls, but at one point I felt like we were being straight cheated. It makes it all OK that we won the game...otherwise I would be calling this a friendship game rather than an exhibition. There was a highlight of the game, and it had nothing to do with basketball. During halftime, I was informed that I had 4 fouls. I knew I had 4 fouls. Nevertheless, I looked at the ref (who speaks Hungarian) and held up three fingers and said "I only have three". He looked at me like I was crazy, looked at the scorekeeper, looked back at me, held up three fingers back, and nodded. So essentially, I talked myself out of a foul. Later in the game when i was called for my 4th and the book said I had 5, I looked at the table and held up 4 fingers. The same ref ran over and nodded. I was still tempted to hold up one finger to the ref after the game, but decided against it, due to my 15 extra minutes of playing time.

When we arrived back to our apartment about 10:30, I unlocked the downstairs door to the elevator, pushed level 5 and opened the elevator door to let Osier out. Usually, I go out first, turn on the hall light, and open the front door. Osier reached for the light switch, which is surrounded by a red light, and pushed it twice. No lights came on, but we could hear a faint double ringing of a doorbell in our neighbors apartment. It wouldn't have been a big deal if these neighbors hadn't been over to our apartment 5 times to tell us 1) not to slam the door 2) not to do dishes 3) not to bang our hands against the wall 4) not to walk so loudly etc,...and we never even have people over. Anyways, we were aware that they were most likely in bed. Our door has a double lock, so I knew that I would never have had enough time to run and unlock it before angry neighbor #1 came out to yell at us. Our first thought was to bolt up the stairs to the next floor. From there, we took the elevator down to the basement, where we sat for 20 minutes just talking, and waiting to return to our floor and act as if we had just arrived home. Luckily when we went back up, neighbor man had already returned to bed so we made it in safely.

Moral of the story: Osier is not allowed to push anymore buttons after 9:00 PM.

That's it for now...season opening on Saturday will be worthy of a post so stay tuned, but Old Lady Spencer needs to go ice her hip right now, so good night from Österreich.

Fun Facts: The website (http://www.uk-flames.org/) has been updated. Pictures...yeeeeeee! Also, our season opening will be on Vienna sports TV, along with interviews and profiles. I've never been afraid of an interview until now...should be interesting. Let the games begin! Please.

€1 Lunches and Thrift Stores

Today was our adventure of thrift store shopping. I did hours of research last night to try to find the best possible places for us to shop. I came up with a list of about 12 places and narrowed it down to 5 this morning, set with directions and a list of which U's and buses to take. I also took the time to circle each destination in my transit book, which is a pretty amazing thing to have at all times. I'm over the fact that I look like a tourist, and am tempted to tell the locals who stare "hey, I live here too". But they probably don't speak English...
Anyways, the goal of the afternoon was to find a bomber jacket. They are very in style here and I wouldn't mind having one after a long night at the dance clubs, which they make very possible with a 1-2 euro coat check or rentable lockers. Walking down Wiedner Haupstraße, we almost missed the first store while focusing on avoiding the woman trying to shove some sort of text in our direction. A block and 3 minutes of blankly staring at eachother later, we decided to turn around and head back to the U. Sure enough, there it was in all it's glory, the sign reading "seconhand store". It was very exciting. This specific store, called Humana, was a little pricy for being all used clothing, but had an amazing Dirndl section. If you don't know what dirndl is, you should probably find out. Like, now. We were tempted to try things on, but figured our time would be better spent in a store where we could actually afford the clothes.
While walking to the second shop on the strategically planned list, we spoke of our hunger and about how much we wanted Kebap. As this conversation was happening, we passed a EuroSpar, which is another huge chain of supermarkets. In the window was an advertisement that I have seen nearly a thousand times in my month here for a €1 lunch consisting of a ham sandwich and choice of a coke or beer. We went for it and it was a fabulous buy. We took our sack lunches to go and walked two blocks to a small park to eat and to talk about how good it was for ONE EURO, also while being entertained by 3 old men playing bocce ball, or some form of it, in a gambling sort of fashion. After finishing our sandwiches and cokes, we continued our trek to thrift store number two. The second store was a REAL thrift store or at least it smelled like it. This would be the store where I would enter as a very unstylish American tourist and emerge as a super chic euro wannabe...pshh just kidding. But I did find my bomber jacket and boy, do I love it.
At this point, we still had two hours to kill before we needed to hop our bus to the gym so we decided to try out our third listed shop. The online reveiws said this store carried English books, so i was excited to see what they had for us. We were disappointed to find an extremely small shop with nothing but designer clothes, used but still way over priced, and childrens toys. On this note, we chose to call it a day and head home to prepare for practice.
After taking the U1 back to our beloved Reumanplatz and making our way to our 66A bus stop, we couldn't resist the temptation that is Tichy. Tichy the Eis Salon that is conveniently located at the most central part of our travel. We can't go anywhere without having to pass Tichy and thus have been there three times this week alone. Today I went with the Pistazien, or Pistacio, while Osier went with her usual boring coffee/chocolate (which is reeeaaaaally good in real life), which rounded out a day of well balanced meals. Nicht.
Wednesdays we help out at the U16 practice for our club so we left our apartment early and reached the school around 5:20. After an hour of individual layup practice with our two girls, we were in need of an energy boost before our own practice, so we ventured down the street to the corner market and grabbed a couple Red bulls.
After practice, dying for some healthy food, we were driven to the Schnitzelhouse, which we discovered is just down the street from our apartment and open very late. We ordered the biggest schnitzels possible and took them home to enjoy with a little CNN. Osier likes hers with the ketchup, I prefer mine with just lemon. We opened our boxes to find, not one schnitzel, but TWO schnitzels!!! Just what we needed. My self control allowed me to save about 6 bites for tomorrow, but nonetheless, I am convinced that we consumed about 13,000 calories today.
Fun Fact: "Austria" to the Austrians is Österreich. Naturally, every other country is called something different as well, which makes it really fun when discussing mine and Osier's desired travel plans in other parts of EU.

The New City and our Living Quarters

Ok, so I am fully aware that it has been over two weeks since my last update so bear with me for this scatter-thought post. In general, we have had a lot of free time, but we have also accomplished a decent amount of things in our two weeks in Vienna.
First of all, we have the public transportation system DOWN. It helps that the bus that runs right next to our apartment, but that is besides the point. It pretty much takes us at least 20 minutes to get anywhere, but we have nothing better to do except wait for the bus everyday. The places we go generally consist of the gym of choice for the day, our new best friend Sara’s house, or the Reumanplatz. Oh and the Billa. I thik I mentioned what Billa is. We literally live right on top of one. Yeah, its all fun and games. Except for that its only open until 7:00 each night and it’s closed on Sundays, along with everything else. Our new friend Sara is on our team and naturally speaks the best English. Its such a releif to not have to explain all of our smart ass jokes to her or repeat everything we say.
Rewind back to the end of training camp. We were the initiators of a mini prank war. On the last Thursday, we snuck into the boys’ room and stole all their bedding, which we kept through the night. They were upset, but none of them said anything because they were all scared of me. Julia asked the boys what they thought of the two American girls. They responded by labeling Osier the quiet, shy one and me as the gangster. I guess I’ll take it. Anyways, we were prepared for a retaliation the next night. I strategically moved my sleeping spot to the top bunk in the corner next to the giant cabinet. We outfitted the room with a barricade of stacked chairs at the front door and a bucket of water on top of the cabinet. The girls in my room (age 15) were really afraid of what was going to happen. I promised I would wake up when they came in and scare them off. Still worried that nobody would hear them come in, I had the brilliant idea to put a coin on top of the lock and one on top of the door handle. Sure enough, when they unlocked the door, the first coin dropped and I popped up out of bed and onto the top of the cabinet. The intruders were a bit rattled after the first coin, but proceeded to enter the room a few minutes later. The second coin dropped and they were committed. The barricade served it purpose in the dark, and they eventually turned on the lights. We then blasted a few of them with water and they were gone. I regretted that we didn’t let them make it in the room so I could have really hit em hard. Consensus: Ladies win.
The next day we returned to Pöchlarn for the weekend to prepare for our move to Vienna. We had dinner on a farm, which also had a small restaurant. The meat and cheese assortment was one of the best I have ever had and was all straight from the farm. We took another day trip around the neighboring towns and visited the beautiful Melk abbey. I lost a battle with a bee and ended up with a nice sting on my left leg. That evening we went to a Japanese bbq for a boy who was moving to Japan to go to school. We packed our things and caught up on our sleep and left the next morning for Wien.
Our apartment is in the 10th district in Vienna, which on the southeast end of the city. It’s not really near anything important and it usually takes us about 30 minutes to reach our destination. We have a transit pass that is good for all three forms of transportation in Vienna; the U-bahn, the Tram, and the bus. The Europeans have the transportation thing down…Those who absolutely have to have a car have compacts. I have never seen so many SmarCars in my life. Osier and I make it a point to show each other every Smartcar we see and it’s amazing how many autos can fit on a street block. If Americans drove cars that size, I don’t think parking would ever be a problem.
One of our most exciting escapades was last Sunday around the city with Sara, Osier’s aunt, and her aunt’s mother. We were happy walking around the downtown area near St. Stephans and over to the ring, when we were stopped on the street by none other than Sara’s dad, Christian, who happened to be driving by. Mind you, Vienna is NOT a small city. He took us on a brief tour before dropping us off at the Schönbrun, which is the castle where Maria Theresa lived, as well as Emperor Franz Joseph and his wife Elisabeth (Sisi). The castle was beautiful and we took one of the tours through 29 of the rooms before making our way through the garden and up the hill to have coffee and ice cream at the café overlooking the city. Following our coffee, we were driven around the entire city by Christian and finally treated with takeout Wiener schnitzel, a perfect end to a great day.

We have branched out a bit and made about 5 friends, all of who are invovled some way in the Vienna basketball world. Some days we are afraid to leave the house because we are screwed if someone trys to talk to us, or we make fools out of ourselves while trying to ask if they speak English. Our neighbors are interesting and insist that we are banging our pots in the kitchen every night at 11 pm and rant at us in German, while we nod and pretend to look apologetic. Meat and chesse is pretty much what my diet conists of and I generally eat two meals a day. We cook a lot of our own food since the stores all close before we get home from practice. Mineral water is cheaper than regular water and is easier to find in any store. Wiener Schnitzel is the most amazing thing ever invented and I have bread with either nutella or cheese and proscuito every morning. More on the food scene when we really get settled/brave enough to venture to a restaurant.
Another scene we explored was the club scene. The Austrians impress me in the fact that they don’t even hit the clubs until 1 AM. They go to dance and to listen to house music and don’t leave until 5 AM. As you can imagine, this has really messed with our sleeping schedules and we are constantly sleeping until noon or later. What a job. My favorite club has been the German club. The German music is so fun and peppy and always says “la la la” at some point n the song. What’s not to love about that!? Anyways, hopefully the updates will be more regular now that we have our working internet and I have a new computer on the way. Oida…

Fun Fact(s): McDonalds with a drive in are called McDrive, McDonalds serves beer, its legal to drink EVERYWHERE, and clubs don't ID anybody so we can roll with all our 17 year old friends ;)