Italy

Well, again, it has been a few days since I have posted. However, this time it is because I had nothing to write about. We came to Italy for Round 2 of the Baseball World Cup and it has been nonstop work ever since. Unlike Germany, we are traveling hours to and from a different city and stadium each day. It’s cool that you get to see all of these places, but spending over 4 hours a day on a bus does not allow you have much free time.

Anyway, we flew into Parma, Italy and seriously landed in a one building airport. We walked off the plane and walked through a parking lot and went into a rundown building where we walked up to two guys who were in jeans, a t-shirt and guns, and they stamped our passport. Easiest country to get into, Italy…

We were staying in Bologna, so we bussed there. Italy is dirty. It’s rundown and dirty. I was extremely, EXTREMELY disappointed. I was really upset. The roads, buildings, everything… was all run down, tagged with grafitti and the cities are not clean. So, I have been in a small state of depression because I was very disappointed with Italy.

We’ve won both of our games here in Italy, though. We beat Canada (5^th time in 3 weeks), 8-0, and then we beat Netherlands Antilles 11-1 (7 innings) last night.

HOWEVER! My faith in Italy was complete restored today as we took our bus ride to Macerata. Holy crap! The drive up the Macerate (well, the second half) was awesome! We rode along the Adriatic Sea (if you’re looking at the map, we drove down the calve of the boot ;-p) and it was incredible. The pictures I got were from the bus and we were going by really quickly, so they aren’t very good… but they work!