Battling a sunburn from hell but having a hell of

  Ostend, Belgium
Thursday, May 24, 2007

So I'm slowly but surely fitting into the European scene. This past week I've been doing a lot of running and working out. The last game really left a bad taste in my mouth. On Wednesday I went to help the younger kids out at practice. I just hit them infield and helped them with some fundamentals. After the practice I did my workout with Nikki; one of the better young pitchers. On Thursday and Friday I woke up early and went down to the beach to work some camps. Over a thousand 12-18 year old kids were out on the beach doing what they call "Zee van Sporten", or "Sports at the Beach" for us who don't translate Flemish very well. They had about thirty stations set up, each with a different sport.






They had a wall climb, flag football, trampolines, kraggball, a military obstacle course, amongst many others. Tom and I handled one of the baseball stations and Sofie and Greit (sp?) handled the other softball station. Sophie and Greet are from the city of Ghent. They are really cool chicks who are as laid back as they are fun. They say they are going to show me the club scene in Ghent which is supposed to be the best in Belgium!  I've only driven through Ghent and it looked awesome.....lots of history there! 



The camps were a lot of fun and some easy money. It was weird to find that a lot of the kids here have never played baseball and the rules were new to most of them. I don't know how many times I had to tell the damn kids to switch there hands around so they were holding the bat correctly! With that in mind, more advanced instructions were out of the question. The kids seemed to enjoy the game however, with a lot of them coming back to our station multiple times over the course of the day. Tom would give the kids his little shpeel about the rules of the game and he explained that I was here playing professionally from the States and all the kids eyes lit up. He said this all in Flemish of course but I could get the gist of it all. I signed a bunch of autographs and hit for the kids and they all loved it. After the camps were over, Tom, Sofie, Greit and I, all went to the clubhouse and had a beer or two. I had some spaghetti at a restaurant on the boardwalk as  I smelled some greenery being smoked by the surfers. These guys would just walk down the boardwalk with a lit blunt in their hand like it was nothing! Pretty sweet if you ask me. It is illegal in Belgium but the police are really relaxed about personal use. As long as you aren't distributing then your ok, at least that's what Erwin has told me. I think I'm going to keep the smoking thing to a minimum and just focus on my training and traveling.