Beebe, Arkansas

It is the end of what is the first day of the rest of my life. Today, at approximately 2:25pm we (my Dad and I) finally got on I-35 North and left Austin. I am currently sitting in a Holiday Inn Express off I-40 in Beebe, AR. I just had a shower and finally feel clean. This morning was… interesting. It definitely did not go the way I had planned. Am I crazy to think that all my shit was going to fit in my tiny Corrolla?? We ended up shipping 3 packages on Greyhound to Watertown, NY (about 30min drive from Kingston) and it cost over 200bones USD. I would like to say at least we got it all in, but that would be a big fat lie. I purged and purged and purged again. At this point I don’t really know what I got rid of and what I still have. My Dad did all the packing as I ran around like a chicken with its head cut off, trying to throw things away slash avoid the homeless man scouting the dumpster, feeling bad about parting with things I hadn’t used/wore in at least over a year. By the end I was totally distraught. I would like to give a shout out big THANK YOU to Tinnon. You saved many of my personal belongings’ lives today and made me feel less of a horrible person by taking that car load of shit to Goodwill/ adopting some shit too. Thanks! Also, Thank You to Deals for the moral support and for taking my pillows. I will probably cry over the loss of them later. I apologize to both you though, for my distraught goodbyes. Sweet jesus.
Okay, so time for bed. We drove roughly 850km/530miles, and it took about 8hours I think. We stopped a few times for bathroom breaks, gas, and dinner at a hole in the wall BBQ place in Mt Pleasant, TX. It was called Texas BBQ Corral. It was good.

My Parents new place... kinda nice, eh?

Those islands are the Brothers. Cormorants live there.

WOW... long time!

So it's been a while... a long while!
Pan Ams ended well... 2 bronze in the backstrokes and then our relay got silver! It was an incredible trip with incredible people!
Since then though, a lot has changed in my life... this past swim season did not go as well as I would have liked and I knew it was time to make a change. So I retired! Love it or leave it has been my motto and I stuck to it.
I am now at the beginning of a new chapter in my life. It is both exciting and scary at the same time! This new chapter starts with moving back to Canada. On September 26th my Dad and I will drive back to the Great White North! Wooooooooo to 30hours in a car! haha After the big drive I'll be hanging around my parents new, awesome house on Lake Ontario for about 4 weeks. After that... the fun starts! October 26th I'm off to Honolulu, Oahu, Hawaii for about 10 days and then November 4th I take off for Australia! I am planning to stay for around a year, but we'll see. When I arrive in Brissy I'll be somehow meeting up with Diva and Kate, who will have already been there for about two months. We'll surf, party, and maybe work (since our Working Holiday Visas do allow for it) and it will be wicked!
Although the previous chapter is full of good memories, experiences, and lessons, it is definately over and this next one looks like it could be pretty stellar as well!

200 Back Prelim

This wil be quick, as it is getting late.
I swam my 200 back prelim tonight and I went a best time and am 2nd going into the semi-final. It felt really easy and I was almost shocked to see the time. Well sort of, haha.
Only 2 more days of the meet remain! Our team is awesome so it is sad to think that this will all have to come to an end!!
bed time!

LIz deux

Shucks.

So the 100bk final happened this morning. I really thought I chance of winning it but I ended up with the bronze. It was a best time (by just a smidgen) and I took the first half out faster then anyone else. I realized at the 50 that i was first and I think that got my overly excited, so the 3rd 25 was probably overswum/crazy lady style and left me with no juice by the last 15m. When I got to the 15m rope and saw people catching me all I could do was grit my teeth and think "Fuck, fuck, fuck." It hurt. But it was a good learning experience and nice to know I can go out that fast, that I do have speed. PLUS I will get to swim another 100back in the medley relay, and the time will count since backstroke leads off. so another chance for another best time. I will take it.
Regardless of not winning, coming third was pretty cool. Marching up to the podium and seeing your team cheering for you from the stands is a very nice feeling. And seeing the Canadian flag be raised, and knowing it was my Canadian flag being raised made me very proud of myself and made me realize it could have been worse, I could have come, gasp, fourth! So look for my quotes in the Canadian papers. My brother told me his friends heard my name mentioned on KROCK in Kingston. so that's cool too!

Tonight I am just taking it easy in the village and will probably watch prelims on TV (the village has a Pan Am feed, with almost all the sports being broadcast live on about a dozen channels) in the Canadian Athletes lounge. Then tomorrow night is when the fun begins! The fun being 200bk aka what I train for. YAY!

OKay, so Jill Sterkel is here being an official. She is in the Readyroom being clerk of course or head marshall or something. Basically making sure things happen as they should. I don't even want to know how she managed to get this gig, but I will ask her next time I see her. Oh Jill and your connections.

I guess I promised I would tell y'all about the village and food and stuff, so hear is the something about the food...

The set up for the "Restaurant" is a big tent. Like really big, I'd say football field size, but wider.
At one side there are tables, some round but mostly rectangular banquet style, and plastic chairs with metal legs. And at the other side is the food. In the middle are drink stations that separate the two sides. There is filtered water, juice, soft drinks, NesCafe coffee machines, and hot water for tea or whatever. On the food side first there is the bakery where you can go to get fresh rolls, buns with cheese in the middle, croissants, wholegrain and white sliced bread and other different kinds of bread. The bread is the best part of the food here. I am eating too much bread. There are two other bread stations on the food side, they are in the middle of the food side, so between the food lines and the drinks. They are just a table with baskets of bread on them that are replenished regularly. Next to the bread tables are little tables with condiments. Mustard, ketchup, a bunch of salad dressing, and some weird jams and shit.
Now the food sections themselves are what they call "islands." Salad island, Grilled Island, and Pasta Island. It is basically a cafeteria style set-up, with a place for a tray and you on one side, and a serve and food behind a glass partition on the other. Everything is usually labeled in English, Spanish, and Portuguese but sometimes it's not, so I have taken to reading the menu near the entrance so I can pick which island I want to visit after the bakery, haha. It is usually pasta island so plain pasta and tomato sauce. Sometimes a piece of turkey chest pastry (a little like tortiere with no potatoes) or lasagna (but not the meat or bolognese kind because that means the left over lunch meat is in there) or pizza (they have dessert pizzas sometimes too, like chocolate or brown sugar). Lunch and dinner are much the same. Sometimes there is lunch meat, turkey chest or ham, and a sandwich with the neon yellow mustard is a save bet. But sometimes it is off to pasta island for lunch and dinner. At the end of each island there is also a place for self serve dessert, which is a variety of cakes and mousses and jello and fruit (salad style or whole). The best dessert and only one i have been brave enough to try was this coconut pudding cake thing that they overcooked and ended up more of a cake then the gooey dry on top, wet on the bottom thing they were going for. It was definitely not as good when they cooked it properly. haha.
Now breakfast is another story. At salad island they have the usual stuff: lunch meat, cheese, lettuce, various fruits and weird creations like chicken tart with broccoli for example (leftover lunch meat and cooked broccoli chopped up and added to a dough like substance and then baked). Grilled island has scrambled eggs and bacon, and I think the sirloin steak they serve 24hours a day. Haven't tried this island for breakfast, or salad island, the eggs look runny and the bacon just looks gross. Pasta island is the best for breakfast. It is self-serve and they have yogurt and cereal (frosted flakes, mini cornpops (unsweetened), and a few different grains and a good granola) and white and chocolate milk. The chocolate milk barely qualifies as milk, it just tastes like chocolate and it super thick. The milk is really sweet by itself too. The strawberry yogurt is sweet and very pink, bubblegum pink. All the other yogurt is plain, not vanilla, plain. And then the bread is as per usual. Breakfast is my favorite meal and I get all my dairy then, as it is the only time they serve milk (they have cheese at other times but it is not clear is it has been pasteurized and some people on the team have been getting sick so I've steered pretty clear except for the occasional piece or 2 or 3 of buffalo mozzarella :) ).
Overall the food sucks. I've already started planning what I'll be eating in Calgary and even at our layover in Dallas, since I know DFW terminal D oh so well. haha

More about the village will have to wait til another time. I hope to take pictures of all of this as well, to go along with the words. You know, give you the full package. haha


LIZ TWO

Finals bound!

Sorry I haven~t written in a few days. With the meet starting for me yesterday I haven't had much time for email etc, sleep and food come first :)
ANyway, a quick update:
made the final, which goes off tomorrow morning. I'm going in 2nd and went a life time best time this morning in the semi-final. I've worked out all the kinks and know exactly what I need to do in order to dominate or as we like to say here "Catastrophize my heat." haha
More to come later!

Liz dos

Stinger, Security, and Smells

Stinger
Last night I did my "stinger" in the pool aka a fast swim that stings and gets me ready to go fast in a few days. I wore one of my new suits and it, the stinger, went really well, as did getting the suit on for the 2nd time, haha.

Security
So let me tell y'all about the secuirty here. First off, on our way from the airport to the village our coach style bus was ascorted, or lead, by a convoy of policia/naitonal forces vehicles, with sirens blazing and some motorcycles speeding ahead to block off/halt traffic. Our bus was able to speed along ignoring stoplights and avoiding all traffic. I don't recall that we stopped even once, which sucked for my drive by shots, but got us to the village very quickly.
Second, at the gates of the village, and at the pool gates, there are armed, like automatic weapon armed, guards. In cameo gear and helmets. One time a car wasn't going to stop as one of the buses to the village was nearing so the armed guard jumped out in front of the car and aimed his big ass gun at the car. The car stopped. I can't remember the name of the guns they carry, some of the coaches were asking them when we were waiting for the bus one time, they told us that when they pull the trigger once, two bullets are fired and that in 1 minute it can do 750 bullets... I think they are comparable to M-16s? Crazy! Also for security, when the bus gets to the driveway into the village they are required to stop, where an armed guard enters the bus and make sures everyone has their accreditation (the tag that hangs around our necks at all times with our picture, name, country, etc on it, basically our life force while at the games). We also have to put our bags through an xray thing and walk through a metal detector when entering the village, like at airport security. But we don't have to take our shoes off :)

Smells
There are some bad smells in this place.
First off, the arrival area where the buses unload and also the bathrooms at the pool smell like "over ripe" porto-potties. Sometimes when I'm swimming at the pool, a strong stench of car exhaust wafts over the pool. There are a bunch of other bad smells. The only thing that smells good is the bakery section at the cafeteria, but only when the weird fish smell doesn't overpower it. The many other bad smells going on around the village and pool i can not identify. Oh, and there is usually the presence of sweaty/dirty man smell. hahaha.

In other news...
THE MEET STARTS TONIGHT!!!!
I'm so excited even though I'm not swimming tonight. I swim 100bk prelim Tuesday/tomorrow evening! YAY!!!! For those of you that don't know, the format is reversed here, they always do it this way in Brazil and will also at Olympics next year too satisfy the wishes of NBC. So that means prelims are in the evening, 7pm start, and finals are the following morning, 10am start. That means the last 2 days of the meet are only in the morning, finals sessions, because they are also doing semi-finals and finals for events 200m and shorter. Fabulous.

Right now handball is on TV. People are trying to figure out the rules. It's a weird game, the score is now 25-19 Dominican Republic.

That's all for now. Maybe later I will write about the pool or the village or the food.

Ciao,
Liz2