Aug. 14, 2001

By Jamaal Harris, Senior

Today we had breakfast at our hotel but it did not include any meat--just fruit, bread, cereal and crackers. I was upset at their idea of breakfast, so all I tried was the orange juice. After breakfast, our whole group got on board a large boat for a two-hour cruise of Lake Lugano. From the boat we had a great view of the towns around the lake like Lugano and Paradiso as well the mountains rising behind them. Theo Dixon and I sat in the back of the boat before we all went up front for some group pictures. When we got back on land, we went to the bank to exchange our money and it was really packed. Their money is very confusing, especially the fifty cent piece (which is smaller than our dime) because it only has ½ marked on it. Finally, we found a place to eat on a plaza in Lugano. Unfortunately, the prices were very high. Pizza here with cheese and ham costs 15 Swiss francs, which is almost $9 dollars. It is very hard to keep money over here because everything is so expensive.

After we ate I tried to watch TV, but I couldn't because all the channels were in Italian or German, except CNN. So, Jermaine Robinson and I decided to go exploring for a while. We walked very far along the lake away from our hotel. We saw lots of shops and most of the other people were also walking or riding on bikes and motor scooters. When we finally realized what time it was, we knew we didn't have time to walk back to the hotel in time to go to practice. So we had to get back on some type of red train without windows. We just laughed at the way we felt it made us look.

Practice was hard and short and we just got it done. We showered, came back to the hotel and got ready to go out for something to eat. Jermaine, Theo, Tahric Gosley and I decided to go to Burger King. The people at Burger King couldn't understand that I didn't want tomatoes or onions on my sandwich. I had to point towards them and say "no, no, no." After we got our orders and sat down, we noticed that our drinks weren't filled up all the way, so we went back to the counter to complain. Again, we had those communication gaps. We had to put our fingers up to the cup to say "fill up" and "too small." They were disputing what we were saying, I think, but they were using words we didn't understand. They did fill our drinks up without any problem, except for Jermaine because they said he drank some. He argued back and they finally gave in, and we were happy we finally communicated with someone even though it was a disagreement.

On our way back to the hotel, we tried to make some girls understand us by saying "Say-ma-ta-bay-la" (you're beautiful) in Italian. Our only other words were "chow" (for hi or goodbye). Then we took a stroll back up the mountain and found a kind of bus-type transportation that cost us 90 Swiss cents each way. It seems like nobody has their own car here--at least not the people we've run into. Back at the hotel, we talked to each other out of our bedroom windows because they were so close together. That lasted until Coach Happy (Dobbs) and P-Mo (Paul Molinari) poked their heads out the window so we had to chill. Joe Rogers and I thought we would just watch CNN. But before we went to sleep, we went to the room next door to see Theo and Percell Coles. They were laughing and taking pictures of each other and the walls of their small hotel room. They were also trying to write raps about Jermaine and me. I was thinking up some good rhymes when I went to sleep.