Stephanie McKenzie: Germany

Guten Tag,

Greetings from Cottbus, Germany! Just thought I would let you know that we are still alive as we haven't had much luck with connecting to any Internet so we came up with an idea to head to a cafe just in the square and hook into their wifi and connect with the outside world and have a coffee whilst doing so.... we all thought it was a genius idea!

So here I am having a coffee at a cafe called the Mosquito, we have also had dinner here a few times which was pretty amazing, but it seems like the Europeans don't have much consistency with the size of their meals or maybe the chief gets bored with making that same meal because one of us would order a meal one day and the next day we would order it again and boom it's completely different, but hey we didn't have to cook so that was a bonus. I'm not going to lie but one of my favourite dishes was the massive desserts we got after racing! Both stu and I got the fresh strawberries and chocolate ice cream, we all looked at the prices and they were nearly the same price as our main dish!!...... But once we got our dessert we knew why, check it out! And it was amazing, just to let you know :D

I have to say that Germany could be one of my new favourite places! The square is only a few k's away from where we are staying, it has all sorts of shops and a really good variety of restaurants and cafe's it's just so convenient... Just sounds like Invercargill...

Sooo we arrived last week a couple of days before our first weekend of racing in Cottbus we were lucky to have landed in Berlin because just as we arrived they closed the airport because there was a massive thunder and lightening storm that greeted us. The track here is semi covered which leaves the middle of the track open it's also 333m just like Moscow's track buuuuut here you don't feel like our falling out of the sky when doing your 200m! Even though it's summer here and the weather is now bearable compared to Spain they still have to deal with all sorts of weather conditions, if it's raining or even hailing you just have to get over it and still ride our bike which I think is awesome! Some crazy Germans will still ride on the track when it's covered with snow up to the red line they just ride high!

Racing last weekend didn't go so well for me I qualified just over half way in the field with a 11.76, plenty of numbers and an awesome quality field! The sprint rounds here are a little different but a great opportunity to learn they tend to make them 3 or 4 ups match sprints unfortunately, between my qualifying and match sprint we had a little disaster with my bike, it was misplaced in our pen and fell onto the forks causing the bottom of the fork to snap off....so it looked like I wasn't going to be riding for the rest of the weekend which was a bit of a shame! But thankfully I was lucky enough to be given a spare bike, I was expecting to be given an old steel frame but was so thankful to have been given one of the German FES bikes! Lucky they had one there that was rideable and my size and just so happens to be Miriam Welte's old bike. So after all that sager I was able to make it to the repercharge and race the rest of the weekend :)

On our rest day we had a wee ride in the morning and just followed our noses around the outskirts of town then later in the day we caught the train and headed to Berlin for the day, what an amazing experience we were lucky enough to have gone on a sunny day and see such an historical city!

Now I am looking forward to rest of the week here in Germany and also the last weekend of racing this Friday and Saturday and then it will be my time to say adios to the team and head back to New Zealand.