a crammed bus and a crammed race course!

day four in germany and we are adjusting well to the time change, rowing on international waters, and changes in the weather. what ever happened to the hot and humid weather of virginia?! here it is much colder, windy, and rainy. we have been going to sleep between 730 and 830 pm and getting about 12 hours of sleep each night. this is the most sleep i can remember getting in a long, long time! lisa and i even lay down to "rest our eyes" yesterday, which quickly turned into a one hour nap!
practices have gotten increasingly hectic as we get closer to the start of racing. for those of you who have been to practices at club nationals, or who are there now, i would say its more boats than that, but only by a little. oh yeah, and a minor detail...none of them speak your language, making the phrase "excuse me, what lane are you going to?" absolutely useless. this morning we had an interesting time navigating down the course. first, a russian straight four came full speed at us from behind, only to stop when we yelled at them. apparently they had no idea their bow was only a foot off of our stern. then, at the finish line, i almost laughed at the mayhem when i saw about 10 boats trying to get into the designated singles, doubles, and pairs lane at the same time. but we made it out alive and we are looking forward to getting on the water tomorrow with slightly fewer boats as we warm up for our afternoon heat.
speaking of racing, we are exciting to see how we stack up against all of the other countries tomorrow. we really have no idea how we are going to do against them, so we are just going to put together an all out 2k and see where that takes us. from the heats, top 2 places advance directly to the a/b semifinal, and the rest of the boats go to the repechage on friday. the good thing about this race course is that they have bow holders at the starting line, so this means that we dont have to adjust our point at all before we start. we practiced getting into the bow holders and starting with the starting lights yesterday, so we should be good to go.
i have to get going because there are only two computers for the entire usa and german national teams, so there is always a line to use them and i think ive used up my allotted time. just one more thing about being here though. they pack the busses full!! we take a bus down to the course and then another one to get back to the hotel and i swear ive never seen this many people pack on to a metro bus before. lisa estimates that there are about 100 people on one of them, ill go with more like 75, but regardless, it is a very uncomfortable ride to and from the course!