Nikki Has Arrived!, Winobranie Has Begun, and Auschwitz Mishap - Blog #34 (Sep. 1 - 7)

Basketball Update:

We had our first official scrimmage against Wałbryzch on Thursday. We still have a couple of guys dealing with small injuries who were unable to play, so we were a bit shorthanded. We got down in the first half and went into halftime with a deficit of about fifteen. We settled down in the second half and played much better. I played a lot of minutes and had a solid game. We have another exhibition game this Saturday.

Leadership Lesson:

From a basketball perspective, coming to Zielona Gora has been a big step up in terms of the resources they have here. A great lesson I have learned is to take full advantage of the resources you have around you. In Leiden, we had limited gym time. We only had court availability for 2.5 hours per day most days, and they were spent practicing. There was always another event in the gym immediately after practice, so there was very little time to do extra work. In addition, we only had one assistant coach who had a separate full-time job and did not have time to do player development. This was a big adjustment from CSU when I had 6 or 7 assistant coaches with managers to help rebound. This year, I am taking full advantage of the resources we have here. Our top assistant is an American who coached for the Cavs organization for several years and is focusing on skill development. He is always willing to do extra workouts or just rebound for me. It has been amazing to have. My point with this is that whatever organization you may be in, there are likely resources easily available to help you improve. Even a boss could be helpful in giving some kind of development plan for any skills or areas of improvement you want to focus on. It is stupid not to take advantage of it.

Top 5 of the Week:

Road Trip Songs

1. Life Is a Highway by Rascal Flatts - If you have seen The Office, then you know. This is the goat road trip song

2. Send Me On My Way by Rusted Root - I definitely had to look up the artist of this song... talk about a one-hit wonder. Anyways, a great one to drive to and reminds me of Ice Age too.

3. I'm Gonna Be (500 Miles) by The Proclaimers - Classic. Banger. Not much else to say.

4. American Pie by Don McLean - A great road trip song because it's super long with a great chorus that everyone knows. I will never sing this song the same because of Dom's wedding. "This'll be the day at Phi Psi!!!"

5. Unwritten by Natasha Bettingfield - This is slowly but surely becoming an American classic. In all honesty, it should be higher on this list. Just an automatic vibe booster that is perfectly sing-alongable.

What Else Did I Do This Week?

Lot of anticipation this week getting ready for Nikki to visit. She got in late Saturday night to the Poznan Airport, and I picked her up with some flowers & some little presents (good boyfriend alert). We came back at went straight into the center to check out Winobranie. Winobranie is a big wine festival that is held in Zielona Gora every year. There are a bunch of tents, wine stalls, live music, food stands, carnival rides, and good vibes. It was amazing. So many people out and about, and most of them pretty drunk. We each had a glass of wine and some great Polish bread dish with sausage, caramelized onions, and pickles. We called it a night because we had a big day ahead of us on Sunday.

We had off Sunday, so our day revolved around a trip to the concentration camp, Auschwitz. I have shared this before on this blog, but I have become much more interested in WW2 history since coming to Europe. I booked tickets for Nikki and me a couple of weeks ago, so it was all planned out perfectly. It was roughly a four-hour drive from ZG which is pretty long, but we thought it would be worth doing for a day trip. We also wanted to stop in Wrocław along the way. It is the same city I went to a couple of weeks ago, and Nikki loved it. We arrived in Wrocław which is a great in-between point two hours away from ZG and on our way to Auschwitz. Once arriving in Wrocław, I looked up our drive and we were surprised to see that it was 3hrs and 10min away. Hmmmm... longer than expected. Oh well, probably just traffic or something. We had a great couple of hours walking around the city, going to the bridge in St. Mary Magdalen's, strolling around Cathedral Island, and grabbing some sandwiches to go before our drive.

Vibes were great, and we headed out for our tour. I actually made up 15 minutes or so on the drive because you can drive very fast on the highways in Poland. We were about 10 minutes from our destination, and we both thought it was weird that such a historically significant place would not have a single sign for it. We pulled into the destination, and it was an apartment building in the middle of nowhere. My heart dropped all the way to my rectum. Nikki looked up "Auschwitz," and we were 90 minutes away. Turns out when I went to the email they sent with the tickets, the email gave me an address for parking with a street name and numbers. I clicked that link, and it took me straight to Google Maps without checking if it was near Auschwitz. There is a random apartment building with the exact same address as the parking lot of Auschwitz. I went through all the stages of grief. I was in denial, then I was angry, then I started bargaining with Nikki to convince her to still try and make our tour. The tours are roughly four hours long, and we pulled into the correct place an hour late. The workers at Auschwitz could not have been less empathetic to the situation. They were very rude and not helpful in the slightest. We then made our long trip home. We clocked 10.5 hours in the car on Sunday. Pretty brutal, but we got some nice quality time in the car together. We turned the vibes around and got back in time to watch the Packer game (huge dub) which we originally were not going to be able to do. We also had time to go on a run and get some pizza for dinner. All things considered, great day.

Top Meal of the Week:

The Polish bread thing we had at the wine festival Saturday night was very good. It was pretty heavy but had great taste. Pics below. Thanks for reading!