July 6, 2009
Editor’s Note: Brittni Hamilton was a first-team All-America and national “Rookie of the Year” in NCAA Bowling. She is a member of Junior Team USA and just arrived in Bogata, Colombia for the 2009 Pan American Bowling Confederation Youth Championships. She will offer periodic blog updates on her experiences. Brittni is a rising sophomore from Webster, N.Y.
We got in late Friday night. After we got through customs and all that fun stuff we went straight to the hotel, which is located right in the city of Bogota. The buildings around look very old and worn down. The city is right by some mountains. (I can’t tell you which ones those are though, lol).
Saturday we had a practice session. That practice was basically just for us to get loose and check out the bowling center. We took a bus from our hotel to the center. The buses are very different then ones back home. They are very “old-school”. The area that the bowling center is located in is a sports complex. There are a lot of soccer fields, basketball courts, and other fields.
When we went into the bowling center we were surprised to see that they do not have automatic scoring. They have to have people keep score for you by hand. They write it down on a sheet and it shows up on a projector screen above the lanes. Once we got a couple pairs of lanes to bowl on we practiced for about an hour.
When practice was over we went to a local mall to eat and do some shopping. They had a variety of food to choose from. From chicken to Chinese to burgers to tacos. Most of us decided to get food from a burger place. Although it is a very American type of food, it still tasted quite different then back home. And to most of our surprise, it tasted very good. After we finished eating we did a little bit of shopping. The mall had many stores that you would find in a mall in the states. It also had a few shops that had different homemade items. I bought a few items to bring back home but not too much. Of course, I had to get a t-shirt as well as some different bracelets. When shopping was over we just went back to the hotel to hang out for the rest of the night.
On Sunday, we had our official practice session on the patterns that we will be bowling on this week. Practice went very well. I feel pretty good about both of them. Starting Monday we all bowl the singles event. Myself, Christine Bator, Geoffry Young, and Danny Spink bowl at 11 am, Jenn Boisselle and Kristie Petravich bowl at 3 pm, and Jake Peters and Chris Pierson bowl at 7 p.m. We will bowl six games on the short pattern.
