Day 5: Last Day in Barcelona



Men's Team at Camp Nou

Hola everyone! (hola and gracias are about the only two Spanish words I know and have been using them quite often over here as to make it sound like I know more than I do:)) 

I´m here to give you all a quick update :). Spain has been amazinggggggg!!!! We are all having so much fun and looking forward to what each day will bring us! Yesterday we got to experience one of the coolest things yet--a trip into the FC Barcelona Soccer Stadium. It was so huge and unbelievable. We were hoping that was where our game last night was going to be held.... but I guess it just didn´t work out that way for us :). The stadium was almost twice as big as the Olympic Stadium that we had toured the day before, and I had thought that was pretty big!


Women's Team at Camp Nou

After the stadium, our day was mostly filled with a bus ride to Zaragoza. We are about halfway to Madrid now and going to finish the last three hours today!  We stopped yesterday in a little town with a few different choices to eat.  I think some of us would still be at those restaurants trying to order a meal if we didn't have our teammate Marcela.  She did a great job translating for us.  I was happy to get a little bit of an American meal including steak and french fries.  It really was quite tasty, the only problem is, I keep finding good french fries and ketchup is no where to be seen over here.  I guess we will have to learn to make do :)!



Women's Team at Second Game

We learned quite a bit about the culture of European Soccer last night. We had a rough start considering we hadn´t even touched the ball when they put in their first goal!!!!! They were seriously amazing. We were a little bit frustrated at half time considering we were down 0-5. On the plus side, we made some adjustments at half time and only let in one goal in the second half! After the game, the coaches informed us that the team is actually a professional team here in Spain and ranked like eighth! They even have a few girls playing on the national team, including their goalie... no wonder we couldn´t score any goals!!!! Anyways, we realized what an awesome oppurtunity it was to play such a good team and to be able to see what European soccer was all about and to just see what such a good team looks like! I think we all realized we have a lot to strive for and work towards for next season! 
After the game, we had a social with the other team where they fed us some weird but tasty looking food! They do a little ceremony and honor the teams (with a GIANT trophy we will be bringing back) and an award to the MVP of the teams, Chelsea Frye was ours! The socializing is fun but kept to a minimum as we only have about three people that can actually communicate in Spanish, and they only had about two that could speak English!

Women's Team at Social

We are off to Madrid today!!!!!!!!!!!!!! I believe we are stopping at a chocolate factory along the way, you can only bet how excited we all are for that!



Anyways, Spain has been an amazing experience. It´s awesome to see how important soccer is over here, as there are fields everywhere and people huddled around TVs every night watching the games!

 Hope all is well in America :)!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

 

Cathy Reiter

Class of 2013

Women's Soccer Team