It’s been about three days since I landed in Oz! I have always heard about how big swimming is in Australia, but its one of those things I never really believed — until now! When we got through customs in Melbourne, it was the coolest thing … the actual floor of the airport was carpeted to look like the World Championship pool, including ten lanes, lane ropes, black lines and all! Talk about rolling out the carpet … it really got Team USA excited to see something like that at an airport.

After escaping the herds of press that came to greet us, we got right on the bus and headed for the small town of Geelong, about an hour outside of Melbourne, where we will be having our training camp for the next week or so. A typical day includes morning practice, breakfast, maybe a nap or watching some TV, lunch, another practice, dinner, a team meeting then lights out. The food here is top notch! We have a buffet line for all our meals with a huge variety of healthy food. The fruit is my personal favorite; it’s all grown locally and is perfectly ripe.

The down time can get to be a bit monotonous at times so the staff tries to do little things to keep it interesting for us. Last night we all received per diem and we were able to go out on the town for dinner. I went out with Natalie Coughlin, Jessica Hardy, Elizabeth Beisel, Tara Kirk and Mary Descenza. There were so many small restaurants within walking distance of our hotel. We settled on this place called Savaah’s that was highly recommended by the locals.

The food was very similar American food and they served a great three-course meal. I had minestrone soup, veggie crepes and a vanilla pudding with strawberry sauce for dessert. The owner of the restaurant was so friendly and brought over complimentary samples of delicacies the restaurant served as well as items for us to autograph. The last thing he brought over was brains of sheep! I must say that I am not an adventurous eater and was one of two people at the table that did not opt to try it out. And good thing because from what I hear it was about as good as you can expect sheep brains to taste!

More from Geelong in a bit, back to the pool now for another practice!

This entry was posted on Monday, March 19th, 2007 at 1:27 pm and is filed under karalynnjoyce. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.