Illinois State not winning, but they're enjoying the ride

"This morning we enjoyed a nice European breakfast -oranges, yogurt and bologna sandwiches ... mmm."

That's Illinois State's M.C. Richmond (no relation to Hammer) talking about breakfast in Brno, Czech Republic, which is...really kinda lame, actually. Bologna? Shouldn't they be eating some kind of exotic pate´ made of poached platypus liver or something?

In setter Erin Lindsey's report, she tells us that they won their first game of their trip against the Azerbaijan national team, but still lost the match. However, after the match, the team got to go to a "disco."

Are Europeans aware that the term "disco" went out with 8-tracks? Why are they holding onto it? The rest of us have mooooved on. But then again, if they haven't discovered the wonders of, you know, frozen water, I guess this isn't that much of a shock.

The best part of the night was not simply that we got to go dancing, but that we went dancing with none other than our referee from our match earlier! He had a great time using his Spanish flair in a salsa dancing lesson with Kasey.

Yeah, I'm not sure I want to know what his "Spanish flair" is. This is Kasey to the right, by the way. Those sneaky, disco-dancing European referees! Lurking in "discos" to take advantage of poor innocent female volleyball players!

Interesting the differences between European refs and those here in America. Here, the ref you ran into later wouldn't be dancing with you; he'd want to explain to you in lengthy detail why he called that ball-handling violation in game 4 when the score was 23-23 when he hadn't called a ball-handling call for the whole match but he's not going to let a little thing like THAT get in the way of ruining a PERFECTLY GOOD MATCH because suddenly HE wants everyone to know that HE'S IN CHARGE, and that's after letting that mangled set in game two go by the wayside as if it was perfectly le--

Whoops.