The Race Has Begun..

Sunday we had our first games since the 3 week break. We played the Blue Stars at their field which was not nearly as nice as our field. I could barely stand in the dugout without hitting my head so that was awesome. I started the first game pitching and did well, but still not that great. I think I gave up like 4 hits, all on screw balls that were not screwing. None of them could hit the outside pitch so we just stuck to throwing a lot of curveballs which did not help my back situation so much. I also "hit" a girl, but thats debatable. The ball went behind her, on the ground, and the umpire said dead ball but the girl never moved towards first so i'm still wondering how it hit her and she didnt feel it, but oh well. We won the first game 2-0. I didnt hit because of my back. OH and we were given orange socks from our coach Gyselle so I officially feel like a soccer player in my dumb shorts (i miss wearing our pants if you couldnt tell) and bright orange socks. They go really well with my MAROON cleats btw..heres proof:

My coach came up to me between games and asked if we really really really needed it could I be the reliever the 2nd game and I told her of course I would. We were winning the second game 4-0 going into the last inning. Then we kind of fell apart a little bit and they scored a run so it was 4-1. Then a couple of walks and hits and Gyselle told me to go warm my arm up. After I got warm again, the bases were loaded and she made the decision to put me in. The umpire from the first game was on the bases this game and he spoke pretty good english I noticed the first game. After I threw my few pitches on the field he came up to me to let me know the situation I was being brought into. He said "one out, bases loaded, good luck" before walking back to his position. Haha I thanked him for the luck and got to work. The first batter I faced popped up a curve ball to our catcher, Denise. 2 outs with bases loaded. The last batter gave me a bit of a struggle but she eventually had a weak ground ball to me that I tossed to Denise and the game was over. We won 4-1.

This was the most fielding i've done in a long time. During the first game I fielded a few bunts and a couple ground balls, as well as the last ground ball of the 2nd game. And I only had ONE semi-bad throw that was a little low and catchable but she didnt catch it cleanly so oh well. It was fun to be playing the field again from the mound instead of letting everyone else take everything.

After the game Elmo told me that he was proud of me. I asked him why and he said because even with my back killing me I went back in the 2nd game and did well. I thought that was very nice of him. Between games Margreet brought me one of their chairs with a pillow for my back and gave me a very big hug and a kiss on the cheek. It was really sweet. Barbara massaged my back for me again after the game and after being stiff the past few days I finally felt good again yesterday, just in time for practice! I felt good and had a good throwing day. I felt strong and threw my pitches with more precision than I have been. I also played 2nd base today and I did legit. ha.

After practice on Thursday night I will be going with our other coach, Ed, to a really famous physiotherapist here to have him see what he can do for my back. My coach Gyselle and her dad, Ed know him and hooked me up so Ed will take me after practice and then bring me back home. Hopefully he can help in some way!

Today is Lotte's 16th bday so there have been family and friends in and out of the house all day. The weather sucks. Cold and raining off and on. I miss the sun right now!

We have home games on Sunday against Wassenaar. We are currently in 3rd place and have to win the rest of our games from here on out to get 2nd place and move up to the top level for next season. I think we can do it, my team is very good on defense and offense. I'll let you know how bad we kill Wassenaar on Sunday :] until then...Doei! (means bye bye, ta ta, so long, see you, etc)

Love, Olivia

Lotte, Me, and Thari at the games Sunday.

Our catcher Denise, and the other pitcher Anja.

Euromast

Hello! Hope everyone had a great week and a good weekend so far. My week has been great. The family got back Monday night and everything has gone back to normal. I am back to being busy and hanging out with the family, which I am loving. Tuesday we had practice, it was my first time being back on the field in 3 weeks and it showed haha. I am very sore from the first week of practicing again, cant wait for the soreness to pass again though. Thursdays practice was better than Tuesday and afterwards a woman on my team, Barbara gave me a massage on my lower back since my injury i've been playing with since January has come back in full force and I could barely bend over to field a ground ball. So frustrating!! I am already feeling a little better though so hopefully we can work it all out of there.

Anyway, on Friday I went with Frans and Lotte to the center of Rotterdam so she could go shopping for a couple new shirts. We thought it was funny when we were looking at the brand of clothing that is her favorite because they are called "LIV" haha. So we took a picture at the store..

After she got some shirts we ate some lunch and then went to the Euromast. Im so glad I brought my camera with me because the pictures I was able to take of Rotterdam are breathtaking. It was so high up and it was raining off and on but luckily it was clear enough to really see so far. It was so beautiful. I took tons of pictures all the way around the Euromast. Here are only some of all the pics I took..its a 360 view of Rotterdam basically..from very very high up!

<-----The elevator we took to get to the top.

this is the view of the euromast from the bottom...I had to get very far away to get all of it in the picture

this is where we were, up at the very top. All of the windows below is where you can eat in a restaurant.

I've got some more pictures from up top but they are all pretty much the same, all very pretty though. We went home afterwards and then went and watched Niels and Elmo's softball game. Today the grandparents and some other family came over because tomorrow is Niels' 18th birthday and on Wednesday is Lotte's 16th birthday so we ate some pie and visited. I also read another book..The Kite Runner. Wow is all I can say. The family has the movie and im debating on if I even really want to see it in a movie. Great book..sad story. Anyway, we have games tomorrow finally! Ill be sure to update with how they go, and hopefully some more pictures of the team. Bye for now!!

Lots of Love,

Olivia

Munich and Dachau

Wednesday morning we woke up early and went to the train station. We left at 8am and got into Munich at 11. It was a long, hot train ride since the air hasnt really been working in the trains but we were too excited to really care. The picture above is of the Munich train station.

We walked out of the train station to find our hotel which was in a great location. It was not even a 3min walk from the train station and very easy to find. It seemed to be pretty safe too. We couldnt check in until 2 so we decided to walk around a bit and try and find something to eat. About 2 hours of walking later we settled on somewhere to eat and got some pizza that tasted nothing like pizza. It was an incredibly hot day and we were just so sweaty we didnt care about the taste of the food as much as the fact that it was cool where we ate and we could finally sit down. Here are some pictures we took while we walked around..

We got back to our hotel after eating and were able to check in. We got our room key, which is really high-tech...heres a pic of our key

hahahha. we were seriously busting up about this room key. We went up to our room on the second floor and were very sad when it wasnt air conditioned but nothing here is so we shouldnt have been that surprised. We also came to find that even though we booked a room with 2 beds that actually meant that we got one bed with 2 separate comforters on it. We had a room with a small balcony in front of it though that looked out onto the main street we walked on so that was nice. Here is a pic of our view..

We hungout in the room for a while, just letting our feet rest and relaxing before we decided to shower and start to get ready for the night. We planned on going to visit the two major beer gardens in Munich. The English Beer Garden which is the largest in the world I think they said or something like that, and then Hirsch Garden. We started out with the English Garden by taking the subway which took us about 30 mins to find and figure out which one to take. Then when we got off at the exit it was actually nowhere near the exit so we had to walk like over a mile to find it. We ended up asking an asian man with a europe book and he said he was looking too so we followed him and eventually found it. Well neither of us realized that it was actually a huge park with beer gardens throughout it and you either had to find them or read in German on the map where and what they were. So naturally we kept wandering foward until I spotted a group of 4 guys who were walking very fast and I guessed they were looking to drink so we followed behind them and of course..they led us straight there! We took some pics of the English Beer Garden here they are..

We got to the Beer Garden and went and got our first beer. People were not kidding when they told us the beers were huge here. We went up and got our LITER of beer and found a table. We ended up staying there later then we planned on but after 2 beers we were ready to go to the next beer garden. Here are some more pics from the English Beer Garden..

After finding our way back to the subway we went to our next stop which was the Hirsch Beer Garden. It was almost 11 at this point and we started walking and walking and walking again. We saw lightining in the distance and suddenly it started sprinkling on us a little bit so we ran into a gas station and used the bathroom and bought some chips. As I was trying to figure out the espresso machine, Amanda was chatting up a cop who had come in and asking him how to get to the Hirsch Beer Garden. He told her directions and eventually we went off again. It had stopped sprinkling. We found the Hirsch Garden and started looking for the nearest Beer Garden. Now it started down pouring out of nowhere. There was thunder and lightning and a monsoon on us. We passed a group of guys with their bicycles standing under trees and they told us to come under so we would stay dry...well they lied because none of us were even staying remotely dry. We thought it would pass in about 20 mins since most storms usually do but it kept raining and we kept getting wet so we decided to just make a run for the bar which wasnt too much further. We said goodbye to our friends and took off for the next stop. When we got closer to the tables another group of guys called us under a roof which was actually dry and we started talking to them, only they didnt speak English at all. They were Italian/Polish/German. We got tired of waiting and invited them to come with us to get a beer so 2 of them did and we bought 2 more Liters of beer and sat at a table outside. Everyone was very amused with me and Amanda because we were the only ones soaking wet from the storm. As we were sitting outside the guy who only spoke Italian just kept saying "Italiano" and him and amanda tried speaking in Spanish since he could understand that but then he would speak back in Italian so we had no idea what he was saying.

Then out of nowhere Amanda invited these guys at another table to come sit with us and they did. One of the guys was from Switzerland and he spoke very good English as well as German so he was our translator between everyone. It was pretty funny. We took some pics with all of them...me and amanda were still soaking wet..

The Swiss boy and the Italian boy loved me. Seriously. Eventually we all went our separate ways and me and Amanda got a taxi back to our hotel, where we proceeded to venture to McDonalds and feast. We woke up the next morning and Amanda was still in all of her clothes from the night before and I was so hot I was sleeping on the floor by the door to the balcony with it open and my head in front of it. Hilarious morning, although we werent feeling so hot which sucked because we had planned to go to the Dachau Concentration Camp today. We took some showers, ate some food and got some coffee and made the trip on the train to Dachau.

Dachau

We got to Dachau and signed up for a guided tour which was only 3 euros so that was legit. There were 3 other English speaking people in our group and our guide took us through the concentration camp. Dachau is said to be the first Nazi concentration camp in Germany but there was actually one opened one day before it, either way it was one of the first. Many political prisoners were kept here and eventually many German Jews. You walk down the main road until you get to the entrance of the camp and you walk through the iron gates. When you get inside you really think it is quite huge and it really isnt even all of the space and buildings that were there before. We went through the main museum which is the area where the people were checked into the camp. We then went into one of the old bunkers which is where they were put as a prison, as if they werent already in a prison. It was extremely long and we saw the many different rooms. They were very very small. We also saw the rather larger room that was for the man that tried to assasinate Hitler. They say he had a larger room because Hitler didnt believe that this man acted alone and he hoped to get him to confess about the others eventually but he never did and was eventually killed when they saw the war was coming to an end, as many prisoners everywhere were.

We also went into the old bunkers. Only one is still the original and the other was redone because of the bad condition of the buldings. All of the foundations of the others are still there though so we got pictures of that as well. Then we went into the crematorium. There are also gas chambers in the crematorium but for some reason they were never used at Dachau and they say they may never know why. When the camp was finally liberated they found over 30,000 people there and the camp had a capacity for less than or around 5,000. The American soldier were so disgusted by what they saw that they made civilians from the town come see all of the dead bodies there that had been stacked up from the Nazi's and the people claimed to have no idea of the activities going on at the camp. Behind the crematorium there are many different grave sites that we got pictures of. Here are more pictures of the bunkers, crematorium, graves, etc.

this is the gas chamber above

this is original barbwire fence

you cant really see it that well but this structure was made by an artist to symbolize all of the people that died by suicide by throwing themselves onto the electiricty filled barbwire fences instead of living any longer. This is the original made by the artist. It is supposed to be a lot of skeletons entwined in the barbwire fence. It gives me chills to look at. It is huge in person.

this is an original striped uniform worn by one of the prisoners.

After our tour we went into the bookstore where I bought a book written by a man who worked in the crematorium in a different concentration camp and then as a souvenir and also for more reading on Dachau I bought a book called "Names instead of Numbers" which documents some of the prisoners lives who were in the camp. The significance of the name is that when prisoners were taken into the camp they were given a number and from then on thats how they were addressed by everyone, even fellow peers and they had to learn to say it in perfect German or they were severely beaten. It is a very interesting book to read about some of the survivors and some not so fortunate, I will of course be bringing it back with me for anyone to read if they are interested.

Its a sad way to end a blog but it was also so informative and interesting. Something I think eveyone should see. Im glad my dad mentioned going to see one because it was an experience i'll never forget.