Hello,
 
For starters I just want to say I miss you all back in the states!! This experience has been awesome and truly a blessing. To start off, our training camp for preparation for the U20 European Championships was in Ivanjica. Ivanjica is a town in the mountains, so it’s basically like Denver with the high altitude and all. We spent a week there and it was basically conditioning and weight lifting with practices at night where we learned the system and got used to each other. The conditioning was rough because of the altitude, but we all managed and survived it.
 
Our next place that we went to was located in the northern part of Serbia - a small little town called Novi Becej. In this small little town, we spent two weeks training. Here the practices got a lot harder and more serious. In addition to our practices at night, we would have weight lifting in the morning followed by shooting practice. That's how it was every day.
 
After a week of training there, we played our first three exhibition games against Greece. We ended up winning all three, which was really good considering we all haven't played with each other that long. When we were finished with our three games in Serbia, we headed off to Pesaro, Italy, where we played Italy. The place we were at in Italy was beautiful - we were right on the beach. It was just an awesome place that I hope to visit again in future. In Italy, we played two games against them and won the first before losing the second game.
 
After Italy we headed back to Belgrade, which is the capital of Serbia, where we got two days off before starting the last cycle of the training camp. We trained in Belgrade for about 8 days, which also included three exhibition games against Sweden. In Belgrade, we had morning weights with shooting afterwards, followed by night practice. Some mornings, we would get off and just have practice at night. The three exhibition games against Sweden were our final tests in preparation for the European Championships. We won 2 out of the 3 games, and played good in all three and improved each time.
 
Right now we are in Turkey for the Championships.
 
Nevena