Fun in the athlete village

I took some great photos today. There was one with me and Dennis and the entire Cuban field hockey team (one member vigorously trying to sell me some fine Cuban cigars). There were great pictures of our competition venues. And I had some photos of the US men's epee fencing team (two of whom train with us) beating the tar out of Puerto Rico. At least I thought I did. About half way through the fencing match, I started wondering what the little flashing red drawing that looked like a memory card was the kept appearing on the screen of my camcorder/camera... Oh well, I'll have some more photos tomorrow if I remember to put the memory card back in.

We were able to find our way around the village pretty well last night, and today was a training day. We left early, at about 7:45 (4:45 Colorado time) for our competition venue. It is about a 40 minute drive from the village out there, much short of the hour and a half it would take if we did not have the designated Pan Am traffic lanes. We shot and swam at the venue and then took a bus back at 11:30. That is when we ran into the Cuban field hockey team. They were really nice and serenaded us for the 40 minute ride back to the village. They all seemed to be pushing Cuban cigars, and I am guessing that nearly the entire team brought a few boxes to try to sell.

This afternoon, we went to watch Seth Kelsey, Cody Mattern, and Ben Ungar fence in the men's epee team competition. Seth was at the Academy with me and he and Cody are coached by my fencing coach, Janusz. They got off to a rough start, but rallied massively at the end to put a good thumping on Puerto Rico. That put them in the top 4 of the tournament. We left after that, and the team lost to Cuba, but beat Canada for a bronze medal.

The food here is not all the best, but boy do they know how to grow beef! They also have an apple soda that we dont have in the States that we discovered at dinner tonight. I'll try to post some pics of the dining hall tomorrow because it really is amazing. They feed thousands of athletes constantly and it is always a writhing mass of bodies moving through there.

Tomorrow we have another training day. If the weather is nice, we are planning on going down to the Copa Cobana beach to watch a medal round of beach volleyball. Aside from that, we are pretty much settled in and waiting for our competition.

Oh, we did get a couple of pictures off of Mickey's phone. It's not all fun and games here, but there is an awful lot of it!