Only in Indo

We beat Bogor Prayoga 3-1 in what was a very ugly match and after an altogether ‘gong show’ weekend. I guess I’m just not used to the way things are done around here, but let me take a few minutes to paint you the picture.

After our loss on Friday we woke up early on Saturday and had a team weight session in the hotel fitness centre. We then proceeded to have a 2 hour meeting about the previous night’s match. You can imagine how spell-binding this is in a hotel room with a Chinese-speaking coach and 12 other Indo speaking team members where the lines of communication are definitely not english. Although our translator tells me the gist of the meeting after it’s over, the content that was covered in 2 hours was condensed into a 2 minute English re-cap. Good times.

Thinking that we would have the afternoon off, I scheduled a long overdue massage to get my legs rubbed out. But as it turned out, the team management thought it would be a good idea, due to the loss, to have the year’s hardest practice on Saturday night in some random gym with cement floors on, what I think was an army base.

Coach Huang then decided that we would get up at 6:30 the following day/Sunday/game day and practice again. At this point, I just had to laugh and shake my head. Chayo! (that’s Chinese for digging deep, sucking it up, giving it your all) When it hurts....Chayo!

So this brings me to game day (or what’s left of it after my 2.5 hour afternoon nap) and we arrive at the gym to begin our warm-up at 3, as the game is scheduled to start at 4. It’s the rain season here (In Indonesia there are only 2 seasons: rain and no rain, aka hot and hotter) and every afternoon there comes a downpour. Thank Allah, as it gets to be pretty humid every day before the skies open up. Anyways, at about 2:45 it begins to rain....hard. Lo and behold our match has now been delayed. The roof in the gym in which we are playing begins to leak in several areas on the court. Oh yes, a rain delay. They don’t even have those in beach volleyball!

At this point I am just trying to tell deal with all the psycologically distracting factors as, well into the 2nd set of the match, there are about 8 towel boys and girls running out onto the court and wiping up the puddles between points. You can imagine that, well, Izzy isn’t having the greatest match of her life at this point and the fans just love to heckle me as it is. The crowd goes wild when I get subbed out of the match, they boo and whistle when I come back in (must be the hair). So there comes a point in the match, we are up 1 set, but down in the second and I get set a ball from the back corner of the court, I approach hard, slip on a puddle and go down hard, unable to save the ball and we lose the point. Well, you can imagine how the crowd went wild then!

So everything worked out fine in the end. My ego has taken a bit of a hit and I’m currently working on letting that go, but the double-yew is what counts. It’s days like these that make everything else in life seem easy. Things don’t happen the way they should, they happen the way they do and it’s how we choose to react that really makes us who we are.