Last weekend Moose Jaw, this weekend Fussen

It’s funny how the other weekend our family took the “big” trip to Moose Jaw to go to the spa and then the first weekend I’m back in Prague, Chelsa and I decide to head to Fussen, Germany. What a contrast of places, granted nothing knocking Moose Jaw as I had a great time there. So the reason we decided to head to Fussen was because the U18 Women’s World Championship was taking place there. We have three girls from our team on the Czech National team, and then along with that my old coach from Wisconsin, Mark Johnson, was the head coach for the US.
We drove there on Friday morning to catch two games, the first one being the semi final of Canada vs. Sweden. Then the second one that night with the US vs. Czech Republic. The drive there was awesome to say the least. It’s been cold here (well for this region) and there was hoarfrost all over the trees as it was sometimes quite foggy. Then as we started heading towards Fussen, which is southwest of Munich, you get into the wine region of rolling hills and cute little renaissance looking towns.

The first game we watched was fairly interesting until the second period. Sweden scored first to scare the Canadians, and then the Canadians answered back with 8 goals. So they took it to them. Then the second game was so hard to watch as the Americans annihilated the Czech’s 18-0. There were a couple of problems with that game. One the Czech’s only have two lines so were double shifting those girls and they had zero energy left. Second, they had no goalie and I mean no goalie. The poor girl got just lit up on every shot taken. It was a great time as after the game Chelsa and I were able to head out for pizza with Mark and his staff and catch up. I also met a friend of his who was coaching in Switzerland, well actually he just got fired and is now the head coach of the Slovenian team and is about to try and qualify for the Olympics. So great stories coming from both of them.

Saturday morning we had time to tour the Neuschwanstein castle. Stunning is all I can say. It is the castle that Walt Disney modeled the Disney castle after. It’s a romantic medieval castle that King Ludwig II built. The crazy thing about it was that he only spent 170 in residence and it was never completely finished. Really crazy as you can see the enormity of it. It’s also a fairly new castle as it was started in 1869. The tour was great, granted we had a really weird tour guide, who was fragile as Chelsa described him. I could just imagine as a squire back in the day living in the castle, although we had our own theories that he still lived there. The inside of the castle was amazing with this one particular room standing out to me with all the wood carvings in it. I was told that it took 14 carpenters four years to finish it. Unfortunately we could not take pictures inside the castle as I would love to have put the picture on it.

So after the castle we watched the bronze and gold medal game. The Czechs were blown out of the bronze medal game losing 8-0 to Sweden which was too bad. Then there was the gold medal with Canada vs. US. It was an awesome game with the US taking the lead going up two goals then to have the Canadians tie it up to force OT. Really exciting, but the Canadians took a penalty while playing four on four and the US scored on the power play to win. It was a great goal and shot which was nice to see instead of some little weak shot going in. Of course I was happy to see Mark win gold but of course deep down wanted Canada to bring home the gold.


The hoarfrost from our drive down to Fussen




On the walk up to the castle


Pretending I'm a photographer


The castle


It's quite big!


Chelsa and I


View from the castle


Streets of Fussen


Canada vs US Gold Medal Game

Back to Prague and back to salads!

I just arrived back in Prague yesterday after being at home for about three weeks. Yes I know that was a pretty long break from hockey at Christmas, but for some reason our coach was feeling nice and decided to let us go home early. We did have some games but were able to miss them. One of them was a Euro League game but since only three of us foreigners can play in it we were okay to miss it as the two Slovak girls on our team were still around.

For some reason I had this idea in my head that when I was going home that I would have all this time to relax and catch up on emails and so on. Well nope that wasn’t the case or never really is the case so I’m not sure what I was thinking. I did have a bit of time to relax but that felt funny as I was usually on the go. I did have an awesome time at home hanging out with family and friends and with that mostly my friend Andrea who was back in town from Australia. I hadn’t seen her in a year so we spent as much time together as possible and even at that I’m not sure when I’ll see her again. I had an awesome Christmas day which was spent at home but unfortunately my brother was sick with the flu so he pretty much stayed on the couch the whole day and luckily he didn’t give it to me. Then on the 27th my family headed out to Moose Jaw for my cousin’s soon to be wife’s bridal shower. Had a great time at that, and then my dad booked us in for two nights to stay at the Mineral Springs Spa. That was just awesome as there is an outdoor part to the pool so you can sit in the hot water outside when it’s about -25C. Kind of like a hot tub outside but only bigger with salt water. Then from Moose Jaw we headed up to the farm for a few days to spend some time with the Willms clan. This is my first year without a Willms family Christmas as my grandma died last year. So it was a bit different but was still awesome to get out to the farm for our annual wiener roast. Then it was back home to head to my cousin’s, Mel, 30th birthday party which was a blast! Finally I spent New Year’s with my friend Chan and her fiancé, Mike, and had an awesome time with them going out for super and then hanging out at their house ringing in the New Year. Granted we found it strange as Saskatchewan is not lined up with any of the major time zones, aka the eastern time zone, so there is no real “ball” drop when it hits midnight, you just kind of celebrate it on your own.

So now I’m back in Prague and like I said back to salads as I sure ate a ton over the holidays! The constant eating was topped off with my going away five course meal that my sister-in-law put on! It was amazing to say the least. My brain hasn’t quite turned on the Czech yet but I knew I was back when the customs agent smelled like B.O. and when I went to the grocery store today all they had was beef, no chicken. Yes, back in the strange but never dull ways of the Czech.

Here are a couple of pics from my time at home...


Out for supper with the family for my mom's birthday


What I woke up to almost every morning while I was home.


Me standing on what will eventually be the front of my parents new house in Deer Valley!


The Valley at sunset.


Amanda and I shopping in Moose Jaw.


Scrappy and the cats, along with my two cousins starting a fire. Within 5 seconds of your mitts being off your hands were frozen so hats off to them for getting that fire going!


Me and Scrappy.


Off roading with the Hummer.


Making our own trail through the snow.


About to start our five course meal...not a bad going send off!

The Christmas Market

A couple of weeks ago, I know it's been a bit since I've updated things, a couple of my teammates and myself went down to the Old Town square to hang out at the Christmas market. One thing that Europe knows how to do well is Christmas markets. The ones in Germany are fantastic and Prague has a pretty good thing going on as well. We were able to spend some time down there just looking around at all the little shops set up for the occasion along with eating some of the Czech traditional food that they have for Christmas. The weather was really nice as it was only 0C so it was perfect to be outside drinking svarak, which is hot mulled wine and eating kolbasa's. They also have this traditional pastry/cinnamon bun type of dessert that they bake over a fire called trdlenik, so I was pretty excited to eat that. I'm pretty sure I blogged about it this time last year. All in all a great afternoon/evening hanging out with the girls and getting in the Christmas mood!


A view of old town square with the Christmas stalls


More stalls...the big roll thing that you see hanging from one of the stalls is called a trdelnik - my favorite!


The huge Christmas tree in the square - it's actually real!


Hanging out with the girls

Passionate for Pivo!

Well it's Wednesday and I'm of course procrastinating packing as I leave tomorrow for Regina for the Christmas break. We're currently sitting around, talking about what Czechs love most - beer - also known as pivo in Czech. They're not just passionate about beer but they perfer it in the purist form possible. If not directly from the brewery tank, then from the tap. Case in point...it's not uncommon to go down to your local pub with plastic pop bottle in hand, requesting a fill of whatever they have on tap. We've seen teammates do this on many occassions and thought we would try it out tonight. "When in Rome" I guess... make that Prague? So Chelsa went down to our local pub - or more like a small one room pub that is underneath our building of flats - and proceeded to fill a 1.5L water bottle with Gambrinus...so Czech. Well the beer was pretty good, slightly flat, (even though I'm not a huge beer drinker) but when you pay $3 for a litre and half of beer you can't really complain!

Losing Sucks!

There’s really no other way to put it but that losing sucks. So as you can tell we didn’t fare so well in our tournament on the weekend. We gave it our all, or at least I did judging by the fact that it’s Tuesday and I’m still sore, and we couldn’t quite get it done. Our first game was against Finland which we suspected would be our hardest and it definitely was a hard game. The first period we did not play well at all, mainly due to the fact that I think our bodies and minds were just trying to get adjusted to the speed of the game. Luckily for us our goalie kept us in it and we were only down 1-0. We were tied 1-1 in the third period thanks to a great goal by our captain, but unfortunately they scored with about 10 minutes left to go up 2-1 and we just couldn’t recover. The game was really bitter sweet because we were right with them and really could have won the game and on the other hand I think we did better than anyone expected coming so close to beating them and playing right with them. So that made the next game super important as we needed to win the next two.

Saturday was then our game against Kazakhstan and we knew it would be another tough game. After the first period we were tied 1-1 and I was pretty pumped as I scored the goal while we were on a 5 on 3 thanks to a sweet pass from Jeni. Then in the second period we had a defensive mental break down for about five minutes and they scored two goals within that time. It was really bad! So going into the third we were down 3-1, which a comeback from that score is quite doable. Our coach finally and I mean finally put all of us Canadians together on a line along with Sonja, our American/Czech teammate, and we started a comeback. I was able to pass it out front to Jeni who had an awesome tip in for a goal, so now it was 3-2 but it was too little too late. Our line dominated them but ran out of time for putting the puck in the net and we ended up losing 4-2 as they scored with a horrible give away at the end of the game. Therefore with that loss it meant that we would not be moving on to the next round. Disappointing? Very to say the least considering last year we lost in shoot out to go to the finals and now this year we come up short again. The next game we played Denmark and killed them 10-0. Where were those goals the day before? I’m still pretty bummed about the losses but definitely know I gave it my all as after the Kazakhstan game as I think I sat in the dressing room without moving for about 30 minutes partly due to shock that we had just lost but mostly because of exhaustion as I couldn’t move. There’s of course always the should of and could of’s that you think about after the game. But I guess losing is part of sports and something you have to live with if you play any sort of game...but it still really sucks!

Hockey...

I just realized that I haven't exactly blogged anything on how hockey is going over here. Well I guess to me traveling is just so much more exciting and interesting to talk about. So hockey is going pretty well. We are undefeated in our Czech League games and have two losses in our European League games. So we're doing fairly well. It is frustrating although as only three foreigners can play in those Euro League games and those are the best games of course to play in. So that means that there are usually three of us sitting out as we have four Canadians and two Slovaks on the team. Of course there are the usual ups and downs that go along with any hockey season especially when playing over in Europe. Our coach is not the greatest and doesn't exactly have a wealth of knowledge on the game. He tends to yell...alot really and then doesn't exactly correct the girls on what they have done wrong. So really frustrating on both parties. The girls over here have quite good individual skill just have no coaching to help make them better and therefore have no hockey sense.

About a month ago we played in the first round of the European Cup. We played teams from Turkey, Hungry, and Slovenia. We killed all of them as all of us imports can play making our team much stronger. Then this weekend we're hosting the second round of the tournament. That means we play Finland, Kazakhstan and Denmark. We play Finland today and it should be a really good game. We'll most likely struggle in our defence zone as that's our weakness. But it comes by honestly as we usually kill the teams in the Czech league so are never in our own end and then we never work on it in practice. So how are you supposed to get better or have any sense of what to do? Let's just say our goalie needs to be on her game. We need to be one of the top two coming out of the weekend in order to make it to the finals which will take place at the end of January in Sweden. I've always wanted to go there, so hopefully that will happen! I'll let you know how we do at the end of the weekend!

You Never Know When...

The title of my blog should really be the title of my life here in Prague and playing for HC Slavia. Why you’re wondering? Well basically playing hockey in Europe or at least for a women’s team in Europe requires you to be flexible, super patient and being prepared for the unexpected. I have a million examples of this but these last two weeks has provided me with a few I’ll tell you about. For one you never know when your schedule will be changed. Now we do have a hockey schedule, I guess a rough one at that with no times of the game on it. So we have no idea what time we’re playing at when we play away games. But usually with home games we know in advance what time our games are. So to start with this example I found out the weekend of Champions league had actually been changed from Nov. 29-30 to Dec .5-7 only two weeks before. Hum...now this normally would not have caused me any grief but this time it did as my parents had booked plane tickets and were on their way to come out and watch the tournament. Let’s just say I was very frustrated with my team management as they had known weeks before that and had not told anyone on the team. Now how are you supposed to plan for anything...or do people do that in this country? So of course my parents did cancel their trip as we only had one game this past weekend, a Czech game at that so not a very good one and not worth the flight out when currently my dad is extremely busy at work. So they’ve postponed their trip and will hopefully be flying out here sometime in January or February.

Like I said before you never know when...you’re going to leave on a road trip. We found out last weekend Friday night at practice that we were going to leave at 7am to head to Salzburg the next morning. Ouch so that means we were up at the crack of dawn as we had to drive out to our rink pack up our stuff and be on the road at 7am driving there. We then had a game on Sunday as well and just assumed it would be in the afternoon or evening as they usually are. But nope, the game actually started at 11:30am. Normally not a bad time but of course since we were playing in Salzburg that night we figured we would not get home until 2am.

Well you never know when...you’re going to hit a snow storm. That night we drove through a storm for most of the way back to Prague. It was the first snow fall of the year and we got dumped on. Therefore we got back to the locker room at 4am, which leads me to my last one...you never know when...you’ll sleep in the dressing room. Yes that’s right I did sleep in our dressing room, along with about 2/3’s of our team. We arrived at 4am and were told that we had to be back in the dressing room ready to leave at 8am to travel to Beroun where we were playing our game that day. So we did that math and figured we’d get more sleep staying overnight in the locker room as it’s about a 25min drive home to our house, so that’s close to an hour of sleep that we’d be losing. Other girls felt the same way so we found some of our stretching mats and camped out in the locker room. Now this brings me back to the whole scheduling aspect and lack of communication as if we had known we were playing that early in the morning then we could have brought stuff to sleep on at the rink, or even a change of clothes. But I guess playing over here is all about the experience right? Although this experience I could have done without.