May 26, 2006

Throughout their 12-day trip to Brazil, Illinois soccer players will update their voyage through the team's Brazil Blog on FightingIllini.com. After a physical 1-0 loss to Salto yesterday, the Illini spent a day away from soccer. Today, sophomore-to-be Jessica Levitt reports on the whitewater rafting trip and the shopping excursion that filled the team's fourth day in Brazil.

Today was our fourth day of the trip and it was very exciting! We woke up early again but we didn't have a game today. Instead, we went whitewater rafting and then shopping later. Today was for sure one of my most favorite days of the trip! We got picked up this morning right after breakfast by the people who ran our rafting trip. We all got into this run-down bus and took a ride for about a half an hour to our destination. As soon as we got there they began instructing us about what was to come on our rafting trip. We learned a few Portuguese commands such as back, front, stop, and sit down, to keep us safe on our trip.

We had 5 rafts total, 3 players' rafts and a parents' and coaches' raft. Lucky for us, each raft also had an instructor. The rafting trip started off exciting right away because there were a few pretty big rapids right away. EZ (Emily Zurrer) and (Kristy) Weeks even got thrown off the raft midway through our trip! It was a little scary at first but once we found out they were OK everyone started laughing.

This trip was full of laughs, in fact. Toward the end of our trip, the rafting instructors (who hardly spoke any English) pulled us all over to the side of the river and directed us up a small hill. Not many of us knew what was going on but soon we figured out that they wanted us to slide down on the bottom of the rafts which were leaned on the hill into the water. The water was freezing but of course all of the players went in. Janet and Dale weren't afraid to slide down into the water, either! The funniest part of all of this was how we got the parents to slide down as well! Rick, Kara's dad, tripped and fell as he was trying to slide down, and my mom, Kim, had a little trouble sliding down, so she ended up bouncing down the slide! All of us couldn't stop laughing. I'm sure that all of us loved the rafting trip and wished it would have lasted longer!

The rest of the day was pretty relaxing. We came back for lunch and showered and then left for a town called Serra Negra to go shopping. The town was very cute and it was a lot of fun bartering for some of the things that we were buying. We had dinner at a very good Brazilian restaurant called Chopp 40 after shopping. Overall, today was a very exciting day and all of us had a lot of fun. We all can't wait to see what more is to come the rest of the trip!