Day 1: It's a miracle!!! by Ella Campbell #10

Thirteen hours on a plane causes for many stories. After the twelve hour flight, the trip got off to a legit start! We arrived around 8 am in Sao Paulo only to be greeted by the Brazilian olympic men’s volleyball team. Don’t worry Schrive creepily had Drake stand in for a set up pic with one of the Brazilian vball players. After finishing off customs we met our leader Hugo! He brought us to our new home for the next nine days, “The Golden Tulip Inn”. Brazil is full of square toilets and a wide variety of oogling men. We found ourselves in the middle of an intersection getting hollered at for our amazing looks and hot bods (the man told us we were miracles), thanks coach Berner! Our team then went to practice. For dinner the Brazilian steak house provided us with every piece of the cow IMAGINABLE, even the hump? Dessert was enjoyed to say the least x3, thanks dessert master!! So far, Brazil is everything we hoped it would be!!

Counting down the days!!!

Welcome to Northern State Volleyball Blog. In anticipation to our long awaited team trip to Brazil, we decided to start our own blog. We are now three days away from leaving for Brazil. The last several months have been full of preparations: fundraising, filling out paperwork, MORE fundrasing, getting our passports and visas done, gathering donation items to take with us, and exchanging thousands of e-mails with our trip coordinator in Brazil. We now have one more fundraising activity - car wash :) - and one more practice before we leave. We will be in Sao Paulo for 8 days and Rio de Janeiro for 3 days and play a total of 6 matches. We will also get to do a lot of sightseeing and of course go to the beach which we are super excited about after having a long and cold winter. We are trying to talk our Asst. Coach Murley into wearing a speedo as most men in Brazil wear speedo to go to the beach but it is not going so well :) If we end up convincing him to wear a speedo, we will make sure we take pictures.

It is winter in Brazil right now and they told us it is getting cold but we keeping checking the temperature and it gets up to 72 - 80 every day. I guess they haven't been to South Dakota in the winter :) We also have been learning about the Brazilian culture with our Asst. Coach Ligia since she is from Brazil. Now, we are all ready to experience Brazil firshand. We hope you can join us on our adventure and enjoy our stories as we will be posting them daily over the next couple weeks.