On Wednesday July 7th, the journey started for the U17 girls with almost a 30 hour travelling experience ahead. It involved an 8 hour trip from Sydney to Singapore, no sleeping allowed from the advice of Doctor Kelly but we entertained ourselves with the touch screen games and movies all night. Then a 14 hour trip from Singapore to London where we only had 3 more hours onwards to Barcelona.
Once we reached Barcelona we realised that we had lost five bags including Tess's bags. Don't worry though, the girls have enough underwear for her to last until they get here. After that we had a bus trip to Alagon with the USA team and we taught them how to say G'day and how we ride kangaroos to school but they said "good day". And we knew it was going to be a long bus ride.
Alagon is a small village, as we rolled through the streets with our bus driver Pablo, we noticed that the streets were bare and the roofs were all brown and old. Thanks to the kind old ladies wandering the alleyways we were able to find our hotel. The rooms in the hotel are very small but cosy and the cats and birds outside welcome you in the morning, even our friendly neighbourhood cat, Mr Cow. The sun goes down late and rises early in the morning which makes it hard to sleep but we will get used to it.
We had our first training today and had to walk about 10 minutes to a stadium with a spanish map. But once again we approached an old lady to help us but the directions didn’t make any sense, telling us to go right but then Diego, a spanish hunk, helped (team manager) Donna figure out which way to go before strutting off as all the girls had a stare.
The stadium has lots of lines and no airconditioning but our training was good preparation for our exciting game that night. Spain’s home crowd was there but we were ready to have white line fever and show them what the Australians are made of.
By Saras, Lauren and Alex.
