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Bowling Green State University Athletics
Postcards From Ali: Mann Checks in From Luxembourg
September 05, 2007 | Women's Basketball
Sept. 5, 2007
CONTERN, Luxembourg (written by Ali Mann for BGSUFalcons.com) - Ali Mann's professional career has begun. The former (and yes, it pains us to say 'former') Bowling Green State University women's basketball star is in Luxembourg, and has filed her first report from her new home:
PHOTO GALLERY
Hello all! Or as they say in Luxembourg, moien! I've been here for a little over a week now, and I absolutely love it so far. The trip over here was long, to say the least. I flew out of Detroit, had a 3 hour layover in Philadelphia, a 5 hour layover in Rome, and finally arrived in Luxembourg 19 hours later. My mom also flew, but she took a more direct route and made it here in 10 hours. She was worried about me flying alone and tried to convince me that there would be gypsies in the Rome airport that would try to steal my backpack. Needless to say, both me and my backpack made it to Luxembourg just fine. My luggage, however, was a different story. I had two bags when I left Detroit and only one made it to Lux. I didn't have any basketball gear ... I'm talking shorts, t-shirts, cutoffs...nothing! My luggage showed up 5 days later, but it was not a fun 5 days!
My apartment here is nice. I live on the third floor of a school house. I know it sounds strange but it really is very nice. The apartment consists of a long hallway with 5 doors leading off of it. The first door opens to my living room/ dining room/ bedroom, another leads to the toilet, another to my kitchen, the fourth to my laundry room/shower, and the last is a guest bedroom. Having my mom here for the first few days was nice. She helped clean the place up and made it feel a little bit like home. Along with the apartment they got me a brand new car. It is a red Honda Civic sports car complete with GPS (thank god). I had a little trouble at first trying to figure out how to drive a stick shift, but I'm finally getting the hang of it and holding my own on these crazy little streets!
I live in a little town called Contern which is about 10 minutes outside of the city of Luxembourg. I have no gas station in my town and only 2 restaurants. I think i've been to each restaurant 5 times already! I have had a little trouble with the language barrier here. Everyone speaks Luxembourgish, French, and maybe a little English. Everyone here is very helpful though and most are big basketball fans and supporters of the team.
We have practices here twice a day, once in the morning and once in the evening. We usually only have 5 or 6 girls at the morning practice because everyone else works, so we just do a lot of shooting and conditioning things. Most of the team is there for the evening practice so that's when we work on our offense. They just built a new gym that is almost completely finished, but for now we are practicing in the old gym. It kind of reminds me of a smaller Anderson Arena (hard to believe I know) :-) The orange paint on the front of the rims is worn off and the first thing I thought of when I saw that was Coach Miller always yelling at us in practice to "get off the front rim" and "don't be short."
We had our first game on Saturday. It was more of an exhibition game and it went pretty well considering the team had only practiced together for 3 days. We played a team from Holland and won by 30 points. We are still missing some of our top players who are playing with the Luxembourgish national team for another 2 weeks. It will be nice to start playing with them.
Well, that's all for now! I'll be sure to keep the updates coming. I hope that everyone in BG is doing well! Love you all!
~Ali
