Entry 1: May 22, 2002
You gotta love tourists. I mean, I have a soft spot for 'em since we're
assuming their role for basically the next two weeks. Take this cute old
foreign guy in Chicago -- classic case of tourism: broken English, slightly
confused and asking (Director of Basketball Operations) Heather Clay if she
needs help in taking our picture. "No," she responds, "but thank you." So what
does the guy do, but pull out his OWN camera and star photographing. Weird.
But the sad part is he probably makes us look bad. Of course, a few in the
group, most notably Coach McGraw, have employed our team's favorite Italian
phrase -- "Basta!" (which means STOP!). Thankfully, no one's "basta!" has been
followed with a wallet chase ... ha ha!
You gotta hand it to the Italian men -- our radars have already detected a few
foreign hunks. Katy (Flecky) was the first to spot one, with all the Italian
features: dark, wavy hair, chiseled face and brown eyes. But although Katy had
first dibs, Le'Tania (Severe) had the guts to talk to him. If I remember
correctly, Le' boldly said "Hi ... is that your newspaper?" The team nearly
deemed her bold performance worthy of monetary compensation (i.e. she almost
won our bet about striking up a convo with him for $5), but he only responded
with one word, so we voided the bet!
Today, our team toured the Colosseum -- a testament to Roman heritage and
glory. Of course, being Americans, we failed to act as Romans, although we are
in Rome, and we re-enacted scenes from "Gladiator". Karen (Swanson) and Teresa
(Borton) battled (obviously the most evenly-matched duel!) and Jackie
(Batteast), Jill (Krause) and Jeneka (Joyce) decided their fate. Fortunately,
no one was fed to the lions.
The only hard part about the day was how long it was. We had to stay up for
roughly 30 hours straight. It's taken its toll on everyone, most notably
Alicia (Ratay), who didn't quite make it 'til outside of South Bend before she
began cat-napping.
We finished our day with a visit to an American university here in Rome and
with our very first full-course Italian meal -- my favorite part, of course!
Ciao,
Kelsey Wicks and the world-traveling Notre Dame b-ballers
