Hey everyone, I'm back at it again with the blogs. Although I don’t own a pair of white vans. I have just my final exams for semester 1 and thought I better finally finish this first blog that I started a while back. So starting from the beginning is in a sense starting from the end, but let’s not get into the inception of my blog series. A third semester of my college experience has flown by very fast. In terms of Volleyball the semester comprised of 6 weeks of lifting/conditioning 5 days a week, then 5 weeks of practicing every day with 2 lifts a week and 3 days of scrimmage thrown in amongst all that. After that it was “Gobble Gobble” day otherwise known as Thanksgiving, and from then till the 26th of December we have had a break where we can choose to lift which most guys do. Then obviously finals week and its break time which is the last real break we will have before the end of the volleyball season.
One of the best parts about my time in the US thus far has been the vast array of things I get to experience and be a part of here. I will try and list a few of them for you now: because my team won the NCAA Div. 1 championship last year we were invited to dinner at the president of our universities house which was a quite formal event. I've been lucky to enough to go on two pedal wagon tours which is a large 15 person bike of sorts which you ride around and go to different food and drink places in town and both were a lot of fun. The pedaling was actually a lot harder than I thought it would be. I got to spend thanksgiving in Chicago, where I saw the famous Bean – much bigger than the beans most kids don’t eat as kids. We also tried their famous deep dish pizza which was very very good. Pizza here is almost a national language, around campus there must be only 12 pizza places on the edges or within campus. As part of our recognition for winning the NCAA last season we got free tickets to a night football game which started at 8pm and then finished at 11:45pm which I stayed till the very end with my Roommate from last year partly to just see how late it would finish. But also when you get free tickets to an OSU football game in a really good section you take the most of that opportunity because it doesn't happen every day. I more recently went on a gallery hop in a trendy area of Columbus called the Short North. Thanks to my girlfriends Internship at the local NHL team I was able to watch the one and only LeBron James in a Cavaliers pre-season at the Basketball stadium here on campus. Just recently I explored more of campus and buildings I had never been in to find a good place to study for exams, and still have much of campus still to explore thanks to the sheer size of its which I am now kind of used to but with the recent drop in temperature and snowfall it makes walking places seem a lot farther.
I've also recently began working at the closest food establishment to my dorm, at the Marketplace on Neil you can find me making toasted sandwiches (which they call Panini’s here) on a Friday and making pizzas on a Saturday night. So with school, volleyball and work weeks were quite busy in the thick of the semester but as bad as you think it will be beforehand you get by day by day, you get good at napping and learning how to skim the thin line of too little sleep and just enough. I now have a better understanding why the blog extraordinaire Gerrard Lipscombe with his eloquent blog posts were only once a year. Because as busy as this semester was the spring semester will be more busy and for the entirety of the semester.
Well I hope this again gives an insightful glimpse into what college in another country is like to you all. Don’t be afraid to share this blog with friends and family because it’s nice to think more than 10 people read this. But I won’t stop writing so don’t worry if you are one of the keen followers, I know Linford Bennett is one of those ten so shout out to him and give that guy a high five if you see him around. To all the young guns and kids at GMVA keep getting to practice early, keep grinding through the repetitive and consistent skill training drills because I still see the difference that makes with certain skills such as being able to be confident of setting a high ball in non-perfect situations during games at the level I’m at now; and you can never stop improving both physically and skill wise. Well hope you’re all well and enjoying the warmth of summer, enjoy a great Christmas and a Happy New Year!
Darcy Taig
One of the best parts about my time in the US thus far has been the vast array of things I get to experience and be a part of here. I will try and list a few of them for you now: because my team won the NCAA Div. 1 championship last year we were invited to dinner at the president of our universities house which was a quite formal event. I've been lucky to enough to go on two pedal wagon tours which is a large 15 person bike of sorts which you ride around and go to different food and drink places in town and both were a lot of fun. The pedaling was actually a lot harder than I thought it would be. I got to spend thanksgiving in Chicago, where I saw the famous Bean – much bigger than the beans most kids don’t eat as kids. We also tried their famous deep dish pizza which was very very good. Pizza here is almost a national language, around campus there must be only 12 pizza places on the edges or within campus. As part of our recognition for winning the NCAA last season we got free tickets to a night football game which started at 8pm and then finished at 11:45pm which I stayed till the very end with my Roommate from last year partly to just see how late it would finish. But also when you get free tickets to an OSU football game in a really good section you take the most of that opportunity because it doesn't happen every day. I more recently went on a gallery hop in a trendy area of Columbus called the Short North. Thanks to my girlfriends Internship at the local NHL team I was able to watch the one and only LeBron James in a Cavaliers pre-season at the Basketball stadium here on campus. Just recently I explored more of campus and buildings I had never been in to find a good place to study for exams, and still have much of campus still to explore thanks to the sheer size of its which I am now kind of used to but with the recent drop in temperature and snowfall it makes walking places seem a lot farther.
I've also recently began working at the closest food establishment to my dorm, at the Marketplace on Neil you can find me making toasted sandwiches (which they call Panini’s here) on a Friday and making pizzas on a Saturday night. So with school, volleyball and work weeks were quite busy in the thick of the semester but as bad as you think it will be beforehand you get by day by day, you get good at napping and learning how to skim the thin line of too little sleep and just enough. I now have a better understanding why the blog extraordinaire Gerrard Lipscombe with his eloquent blog posts were only once a year. Because as busy as this semester was the spring semester will be more busy and for the entirety of the semester.
Well I hope this again gives an insightful glimpse into what college in another country is like to you all. Don’t be afraid to share this blog with friends and family because it’s nice to think more than 10 people read this. But I won’t stop writing so don’t worry if you are one of the keen followers, I know Linford Bennett is one of those ten so shout out to him and give that guy a high five if you see him around. To all the young guns and kids at GMVA keep getting to practice early, keep grinding through the repetitive and consistent skill training drills because I still see the difference that makes with certain skills such as being able to be confident of setting a high ball in non-perfect situations during games at the level I’m at now; and you can never stop improving both physically and skill wise. Well hope you’re all well and enjoying the warmth of summer, enjoy a great Christmas and a Happy New Year!
Darcy Taig
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