Update 22!

I have been sending out these emails the whole time I have been in Germany, and I am just realizing that I should have been putting them on here too! I will start now! :) Enjoy
 
Hey Everyone!!

Happy Monday! Hope you are all doing well. It has been a pretty good week here.  We have had some really warm weather, but with the warm weather comes rain...and it has rained A LOT...everyday at least for an hour or two.  I am not used to the rain, and I have never really been a fan of the rain, but it is kind of a neat sound to fall asleep too.

Reggie and I went to our assistant coach’s house last night to watch the Super Bowl, but because we are 8 hours ahead it didn’t start until 12:30am...needless to say we only made it to halftime before we decided to go home and sleep, which is too bad because it sounds like it turned out to be a pretty great game.  I know that my granddad and Aunt Vera Lou were probably screaming at the 49’ers the whole night.  I bet that my granddad would have even left the room a few times because he would have been so frustrated. :)

Anyways, I realized after I sent the last email that I kept calling Johnette our “new player” and never said her name.  We have had some fun with her this week showing her around to our favorite places and going on little adventures.  There is an US Army base near by, that she has been working on since the summer, and they have a bunch of American restaurants so she took us to get food there one day...there is also a bowling alley and a movie theater and a shopping mall so we should have some things to do over the next few months with her which is kind of cool.  We also took Johnette to our favorite restaurant in Heidelberg called “Mandy’s”.  It is an American diner and it has all sorts of American meals, including breakfast allllllll day long.  Usually we will go with a teammate that has a car but this time we didn’t have anyone to go with so we decided to take the train...it was an adventure!! We are really experts with public transportation yet. :)

Another cool thing is that we are starting to get used to playing with Johnette, and her style of play, which is really helping our team out. We only lost by 4 this weekend to a team that we lost to by 48 I believe when we played them earlier in season.  We still had a few lapses, and that is what hurt us, but we fought the whole game, and we played together, which is something we have been struggling to do all season.  It is all starting to come together and it is exciting to see how the rest of the season will end up.  This week we play a team that we lost to by 60+, so we are hoping that we can play better defense so that we can keep it close and maybe have the chance to be in it at the end of the game and then it will be our game to win.  We play Thursday this week, so that is a bit of a tough turnaround but thankfully we only play about 10 minutes away and not like 3 hours or something.

I definitely have had my fair share of adventures since I have been over here, and when I look back on my 6 months of being in GERMANY, living away from home, and getting paid to play basketball, I amazed that it is actually real and that this is my life right now.  I don’t often think how big a deal it is that I am over here, but sometimes it will just sneak up on me that “I am in Germany right now” and it really is one of the coolest feelings.  What makes it even more special is knowing that I have put in the time and work to get me to where I am, and that I set a goal and actually achieved it.  People have told me that I should be proud of what I accomplished (especially after graduating from the U of L and my basketball career there), and I am just realizing that they are right.  I am proud of what I have accomplished, but I am also proud to say I have one of the greatest support systems around.  I know that it would have been so much harder to get to where I am now without the support of my family and friends, and I am so thankful for you all everyday.  I know that I don’t say it often, or even talk to some of you very much at all but I thought that you should know how I truly feel.

Thank you all for encouraging me, for kicking me in the butt when IF was being a brat (because that wasn’t very often.. ;) ), for giving me a hug when I was down, and for supporting my dreams.  You are all, in some way, a part of my accomplishments and I wouldn’t have it any other way!

I hope you all have a great week!

Talk to you next week!

Lauren