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Our second trek over seas to Eastern Europe was another incredible experience. It was somewhat nice to only have to drive fifteen minutes from the Zagreb airport to Hotel I, where we would be staying for the week. It was a giant hotel with about a hundred rooms on each floor (well, maybe a little less), and so we shared our floor with skaters from about 10 different countries. The breakfast was disappointing, but the other meals were fine, and the rooms were fairly nice.
Never anywhere else have I seen so many cafe-bars on the streets. The Canadian ambassador in Croatia (that we got the chance to meet) told us that virtually everyone there ran on coffee. There were about 30 cafes within walking distance of the hotel, and one restaurant (where the parents and coaches ate virtually every night).
The Dom Sportova, where we competed, was a beautiful rink, painted in very bright colours (orange, yellow and blue). Its liveliness certainly made some of the early morning practices a little less harsh. We could also run to the gym located in the basement, where we would play soccer, run around, and pretend to do gymnastics, or in Vanessa's case, actually do gymnastics (it must be her Romanian blood kicking in). It was also entertaining to watch the ping-pong players practicing in the adjacent facility. The practice rink was also very nice, with a giant running track on the roof.
We arrived on Tuesday with time for a short practice (with nearly every competitor in every discipline on the ice at once), and then we had team dinner, which to no one's surprise was pizza once again. The second practice day, Wednesday, went quite well. During these to days, we met Petra, one of the volunteers, who was named after Petra Burka, a world champion in the 60's. Ironically, Petra Burka was our team leader at the event. On Wednesday night, we had a meeting with the Canadian ambassador, who told us a little more about the country.
The competition started on Thursday, with the compulsory dance. We skated it quite solidly, basically concentrating on picking up our feet on the cha-cha steps. We ended up in second place, about a point behind the Russians, a very respectable result as they had been 4th at last year's Junior World's. The next day was the OD. It started out very well with one of the best circular step sequences we had ever done; unfortunately, Paul decided to try his new "go on extremely deep inside edge and fall on his hands" feature on the twizzles. However, we still managed to get a personal best on that segment, and only find ourselves two and a half points behind the Russians, a great place heading into the freedance.
On Saturday morning we had our freedance practice. We had to be extremely careful as the majority of the teams there were particularly aggressive. We managed to stand our ground and make it to the competition without a collision. We had a great skate for the freedance, beating our previous personal best by nearly seven points. This great score also managed to catapult us into first place.
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