Surprisingly, I slept pretty
well last night. The beds weren't all that comfortable and I had to share
a full with Marielle, but I was able to sleep through the night. We were
also afraid there were going to be bed bugs, but I woke up bite-free! We
had breakfast at 9am and toast with butter just became a delicacy. I had
that, a soft-boiled egg, watermelon, and I tried this vegetable dish for
breakfast. Toast was a favorite this morning. There is a very
strange stench when you walk into the dining room. It's hard to describe
the smell but it is definitely not pleasant. For
drinks, Tito told us to avoid the juice so we are left to drink warm bottled
water for the week. We were also instructed to brush our teeth with bottled
water, and avoid any faucet water getting near our mouth. The same rules
will hold for me in Tanzania.
Tito Ernie has been trying to
get the AFC to move us into a new hotel, but I don't know if that is going to
happen. The one we're at right now is a 3-star hotel, but would probably
be considered a no-star hotel in the states. Motel 8 would earn 5 stars
compared to this one. Sarah and I were joking and wondering what it takes
for a hotel to earn a star. We decided that this one got 1 star for the
nice chandelier in the dining room, 1 star for the presentation of the napkins
inside of the water glasses, and 1 star because the waiters wear ties. So
it's not the nicest place, but again, I wasn't expecting much more. I mean,
we are in a very impoverished part of the world right now. Today we were
able to see the view from our hotel room for the first time since it was dark
when we arrived last night. Monika pulled back the curtain and literally
just gasped. If you look to the left, you see trash for forever. If
you look to the right, you see the same thing. It is very dirty. We
aren't allowed to leave the hotel except for when we go to training, and when
we were exiting the hotel to leave for training today, there were so many security
guards surrounding us. It's crazy. The political scene is a bit
shaky right now and apparently there has been a lot of riots and protests
lately. It's a little scary, but I wasn't planning on leaving the hotel
anyway.
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| view from the hotel |
Some of the girls have been
saying they couldn't believe we were staying in a hotel with these conditions. I'm thankful for being well-traveled and exposed to countries with conditions equal to here...so, it
is not that big of a culture shock to me, and I think that is helping me adjust
a lot better than the others. It is definitely very humbling though, and
it truly does seem like a whole other world out here. I guess from a
national team standpoint, I can understand why Tito Ernie and the girls are upset
that the host country didn't make nicer accommodations for us. But Thailand
is in the same hotel…I'm currently sitting less than 10 feet away from one of
the Thailand players... she seems nice though. Tito Ernie just gave her a piece
of chocolate lol. And they put Iran in a hotel over an hour away from the
field--so that sucks, but looks like we aren't the only team receiving poor
treatment. Apparently, Bangladesh didn't have enough money to place us in
a nicer hotel... so they probably shouldn't have hosted the tournament.
Also, at training today... Iran showed up halfway through our practice.
Tito Ernie was pissed and started yelling at the organizers. Why
would you schedule two teams to overlap training times?? They didn't see the
problem...
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| my room--actually not too bad at all! |
The dress is very different
here, as expected. You do see some men wearing regular pants and
t-shirts, but a lot of them wear these white gowns (some embellished, some not)
and circular white hats (which I don't really know how to describe). The
females either wear colorful pants and tops with scarves, colorful floor-length
dresses with scarves and burkas, or full-length black dresses and burkas that
cover the entirety of their heads, including their eyes. Sometimes all
you can see is a persons hands. It's a custom that I am not used to and
basically, clothes that we would consider to be conservative in the US are not
remotely appropriate here. When we leave the hotel, we have to wear long
pants and sleeves. We cannot change out of our pants until we get to the
field. It's 95 degrees outside, but that's just the way it is here and we
obviously do not want to offend or disrespect the culture here.
When we were stuck in traffic
on the way to practice, there were men who would come up to the window and make
faces at us. One guy came up to my window and started making kissy faces,
so I shut my curtain. When I opened it up again, he was still there so I
just looked away. That was a little creepy. Others were knocking on
the windows asking for money. One was a mother with a little baby who
looked ill, and two were guys missing an arm. That was extremely sad.
It's hard to ignore and you feel like you want to help everybody, but you
can't and that is super sad.
PS: in case you didn't know,
Bangladesh is a country not a city. My sister just texted the fam group
text "so, not gonna lie, I thought Bangladesh was a city in India. And
then I was at my friends house yesterday and his roommate has a shower curtain
of the world map so I was looking all over India to find Bangladesh and then
noticed it was its own country right next to it... whoops" to which my dad
responded: "double douche bag!!" so, in case you didn't know... now
ya know.
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