Ataturk Memorial

After practice tonight we went to a memorial for Mustafa Ataturk. Today was the anniversary of his death. It was an orchestra playing with some opera and a video playing overhead of Ataturk's life. The music was lovely even though I couldn't understand anything they were saying. I suppose it's even hard to understand opera in English anyways.

We had our first Euro Cup game yesterday. We played a very good team from Israel and lost. It's a different atmosphere for me to be on an underdog team, but we keep playing hard and that's what it is most important. I believe you can follow these games or at least the scores at eurobasket.com. Just follow the links to my team (Botas). We leave tomorrow for Istanbul to play Migros on Sunday. This was the only team we beat when we had a preseason tournament in Kayseri a few weeks ago, but I hear they got some new Americans so they might be a different team. Hopefully I will be able to meet up with Seb (a former Stanford teammate who is playing on another team in Istanbul) while I am there. We will eventually be playing her team. We will stay in Istanbul until Tuesday where we will then fly to Yugoslavia to play in another Euro Cup game on Wednesday. We can play all of our Americans in the Turkish league games, but unfortunately only 2 Americans can play in Euro Cup games, so we will be without Lisa and Carmen just like we were for yesterday's game.

Be sure to watch the Stanford women's team on ESPN this Sunday when they take on Rutgers. My parents will record that for me so I will be able to watch it. I will be cheering from afar!