Husker Soccer...GET SOME!!!

            Whew what a day! We were allowed to sleep in until 10 am, and then had a half-hour for breakfast together in our cottages. We drove into Nantwich, which is a town of about 12,000 people 6 of so miles away from Combermere Abbey. We drove into the town center, and walked around the streets for about an hour or so. It’s a very picturesque square, with a large church in the middle and an acre of open green space that serves as an unmarked cemetery (I thought it was much prettier before I found out that people were buried under the nice grass and flowers.) But the shops that closed in the narrow streets were all so quaint and charming, and the people were extremely friendly to us (partly because one of my teammates kept tossing one pound coins to the men playing instruments in the square, thinking they were only pennies. We finally had to tell her she tipped them over 8 dollars in U.S. money!). I took a lot of pictures, and most of them have flowers somewhere in them because the whole town was just full of flowerboxes that say "Nantwich in Bloom", coloring the day with bright reds, yellows, purples. It was a lot of fun to just look at things (partly because everything is so dang expensive! We passed a store that was selling a bottle of Hennessy Cognac for 1,450 pounds! Not that we would actually buy it, but it just blew our minds that it comes out to almost $3,000).

            Our teams has some really good cooks on it. We’ve been making our own dinners, or lunches if we have a game like today, so we rotate which cottage makes the daily meal. Today, the cottage in charge of meals made seasoned chicken breasts with green beans, carrots, garlic and butter potato wedges, and rolls. It. Was. Delicious. My cabin was assigned dinner tomorrow, and we were going to make a Southwest Omelet Scramble, but we changed plans and our going into London tomorrow! I’m so excited!

            Finally, we left at about 3:30 pm to drive to Coventry, England to play Coventry Women’s FC. After 2 hours, a few wrong turns, and arriving at the wrong field, we finally made it, which was good because we spanked them 8-0. They are an Upper Division team, which means that they are a step below the four teams we will play later, but an opening win is an opening win! I played the entire second half, a few mishaps here or there, but I’ll take a shutout any day. Playing them made me appreciate some things about the Nebraska Soccer program. First of all, we have such great facilities in Nebraska! Here we are playing an English Upper Division team, and we have a much softer and grassier field, better locker rooms, and more fans back home. Second, we have come a long way with level of on-field communication. We talked to each other so much more than the other team, that eventually we heard on of the girls shout, “I can’t handle their bloody talking!” and she wasn’t talking about our accents either!

            Random thoughts from the day…

-          Saw my first double decker bus! It’s so weird to see how tall and skinny it is. Come to think of it, all of the cars here are tall and skinny. I still can’t get over the whole driving on the left side thing. Also, I want to know whose genius idea it was to decide that every few miles, on major highways, they would put freaking TRAFFIC CIRCLES instead of exit ramps. We’ll be going 75 mph, and out of nowhere we’ll come upon cars at a dead stop waiting to go through the “roundabout.” Somebody needs to be fired for that idea! Haha

-          Met a lady whose mother lives in Kansas, so she saw our Nebraska shirts and stopped to talk to us. It’s a small world, apparently. But everyone seems to think it’s super cool that we’re here, which is fine with me because I think it’s super cool that we’re here!

-          WHY IS THE DOLLAR SO WORTHLESS?!

-          Day 3 in England = major success.