May 29, 2007
ATHENS, GREECE – – The Hawkeyes had a long day on Wednesday, as they finally were able to tour all the ancient structures on the Acropolis and also played their second game against the Greek National Team.
After a day of poor weather, today was picture perfect. It was 80 degrees and sunny all day, which made viewing of the Acropolis that much more enjoyable. Again, the team took numerous pictures and thoroughly enjoyed their time learning about the history and spending this memorable moment with their teammates.
Iowa concluded the day with another game against the more experienced Greek National Team. Although the Hawkeyes fell once again, they played much better and improved in many areas. Iowa and Greece will play one final time on Thursday.
Below, JoAnn Hamlin discusses her day and trip so far in today’s blog. Tomorrow, the Hawkeyes are scheduled to go on a day cruise to three Greek Islands. Cliff jumping was mentioned to us before we got off the bus tonight as one of the potential attractions to tomorrow’s activities, so I am sure Wendy Ausdemore will have plenty to talk about in Wednesday’s blog.
As always, daily photo galleries and video postcards are being uploaded to hawkeyesports.com, so for maximum and exclusive coverage of the Hawkeye women’s trip to Greece click on Greece Central to follow the team’s adventures.
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Hello Hawk fans!
Today we had a morning tour of the Acropolis, which has three buildings on it. The Parthenon is the main building of the worship of the gods. Then, there were the Erechtheum and the Temple of Athena. The city of Athens was named after Athena because when the Greeks were looking for a leader, Poseidon offered them the sea and its fruits, and Athena offered them the olive tree and olive oil. The people chose the olive tree, and that is the reason the city is named after her. One more interesting fact that I learned today on our tour is that the temples that were built on the Acropolis are all built in the same fashion. If the building is to have eight columns on the short side of the building then the long side will have 17 columns.
Enough with the history of Greece for the day; the rest of the day we all got to chose if we wanted to again do some more shopping or go back to the hotel and lay in the sun. For me and a few others on the team, we decided to come back and relax. Although the shopping here is amazing, I had had enough shopping for a while. We had our training table at 4:30 p.m. and we all had to be ready to leave for game two at 7 p.m.
So far the trip has been a lot of fun, we have done so many `once in a lifetime’ things that it is truly amazing. Last night we went to the highest point of Athens and it was beautiful to see all the buildings and lights. Our tour guide was not lying when she said that the population is around four million, and this is not counting the country people who live outside the city.
The only thing that has happened so far on the trip that has not been fun was when we got to the airport in Thessaloniki and we were all waiting for our luggage. One of my bags did not make it across the Atlantic Ocean and I had to go two days without a lot of things, like my hair brush, some shoes, and of course my basketball stuff was in there too! Thank goodness we got my suitcase before the first game, because I don’t know if I could have sat out one more game!
There are a few things that I have seen here that I have really liked and that was the Acropolis and the highest point in Athens. In these two places you get to see how much history there is and how many people are packed into this city. The thing I am really excited to do is the one day cruise, which we are going on tomorrow. We get to travel all day to three different islands and shop swim and whatever else we want to do!
Tonight when we played the Greek National Team for the second time, the score didn’t show our effort and how hard we worked as a team. We lost the game by a little more than the first one, but we improved on a lot of things. And in our eyes, that is what we are here to do, is get better at the things that we have been working on for the 10 days of practice that we had.
Well Hawk fans thanks for keeping up with our team, and we hope to see you soon back in the states!!
GO HAWKS!