Wong the beauty Queen of the team

Hey there bloggers!
As you may or may not know, I am the beauty queen on the team. I thought I would share with you my other life. I am an avid participant of the Miss America Organization. I know beauty pageants may seem as though they are filled with bimbos in nice dresses. However, as someone with first-hand experience it is quite the opposite. Preparation for pageants is actually quite extensive. Volleyball has helped me with prep for swimsuit, which I won last weekend! Interview skills come with basic practice. Oberlin has helped me to become more articulate and efficient when speaking both to a panel of judges and on-stage. My weekends typically consist of a pageant or of pageant prep of some kind. The other stereotype is that pageant girls don't eat...that is not TRUE! We eat probably more than most people...but we do want and strive for world peace ;) That's all for now!
-Liz

OCVB off the court!

Hello OCVB world!

Even though season's over, my teammates and I still spend lots of time together. On Monday Laura, Meredith and I (Lizzie) went into Columbus to see a Ben Folds concert. We had some trouble at first -- we went north on Route 58 instead of south, so we were 40 minutes late (eek!) but it didn't matter much. We made it in time to see the opening band, Lady Danville, which was really great. You should definitely look up their music! Two hours later, after the doors opened, Ben finally came on. I've seen him in concert twice before - once in Cleveland and once in New York -- but this was definitely the best he's ever been. He played a lot of new songs from his album Lonely Avenue and a lot of oldies that we recognized. He even covered a new Ke$ha song that was #1 on the charts for a while. We had such a great time, but were exhausted when we got back to Obieland around 2am. This is one of the few times I've been off campus this semester, because normally music groups come to us! Overall, we had such a blast!!

OC volleyball seniors have record breaking performances!

OC volleyball is coming off of a record breaking week! The Yeowomen set the tone of the week by coming back from two sets down to beat OWU. During the course of the victory over OWU senior Amanda Wysk became the kill leader at Oberlin breaking 1,00 kills! Under the leadership of Wysk, Frackman and Jacobson the Yeowomen beat Allegheny College in five sets on Sunday for the first time in school history! Anna Frackman had a stellar week, which led to her breaking the 1,000 dig mark and becoming 2nd in all-time kills with 882!! The leadership of the seniors this week has set the tone to round out the season. Jacobson, Wysk and Frackman have set the standards high in their four years at Oberlin.

Trip to Wisconsin!!!!!!

Hi everyone!

Anna here. This past weekend, our team had the opportunity to travel to Wisconsin (my home state!) to play some new teams and see a part of the country that many of us had not seen before. We drove through the night on Thursday and arrived on Friday morning. We had four matches between Friday and Saturday. Unfortunately, none of them went our way, although we definitely learned some important lessons and found some areas that we needed to work on in order to be ready to beat teams like the ones we saw this weekend.

On Saturday night, we had a rousing round of The Game of Things in the hotel, which none of us had ever played before. Sunday we got to go to beautiful Devil's Lake State park in Wisconsin and go canoeing on the lake and hiking up the surrounding bluffs. The weather was a bit chilly for swimming (though Meredith and Maggie braved the water) but it was great for canoeing and hiking. Later we went to Madison and got to have dinner at my house to celebrate my upcoming birthday (I turn 21 on Wednesday). It was great to be able to show my college friends around my neighborhood, and we had a good time eating homemade food and Culver's frozen custart, a real midwest treat, and buying wisconsin cheese to take back to Ohio. We arrived back to Ohio in the early hours of Monday morning, and we are all busily resting up and preparing for classes to start tomorrow! Hope everyone had a great Labor day weekend!

OC VB summer check in from Laura!

My family took a vacation to Egypt this summer! We started our vacation in Cairo. It was an adventure because our bags got lost and we didn't have them for two days! We toured the city visiting the Muhammad Ali mosque and experienced real Cairo driving. Drivers don't obey lines, run lights, and honk constantly-- quite an experience! We left Cairo on an overnight train where we met our bags. The individual compartments where very small and it made stops ALL night but the views out the window were amazing! We made it to Aswan the next day. We saw an unfinished obilisk, toured the Nassar Dam and the Philae Temple. We flew to Abu Smbel the next morning. This was my favorite temple! It was created by Ramses to show his Southern neighbors that his empire was powerful and to portray himself as a deity. We arrived on our cruise ship that night and begun our cruise down the nile! My favorite part of the cruise was the Egyptian night. Our group dressed up in Egyptian clothes and the workers played instruments and showed us how to dance. We toured a few more temples in Luxor and Edfu. On the last day of the cruise we toured the Valley of the Kings where all the pharaohs were buried in luxurious tombs. There were sixty two temples but we were only able to tour three. I remember that day was VERY hot, almost 125 degrees! We then toured a HUGE mortuary tomb for the only female pharaoh. Our last stop was the temple of Karnak which is the largest temple devoted to any deity in all history. We flew back to Cairo the next day to see the great pyramids. We went inside the second largest pyramid, the walk down was super steep and it was very humid! We saw the sphinx as well and went to the sound and light show.

The rest of my summer was far less exciting. Most days I hang out and play around with my friends and sisters. We go hiking often and spend days tubing and discovering new watering holes. But I also had two jobs, one at a nursery and one at an ice cream shop. And I volunteer at my local dog and cat shelter two or three times a week.

I visited Rosie last weekend! We made vegan fudge, went thrift shopping, and watched this crazy Japanese movie called Tampopo.

I can't wait to get back to school and see all yalls beautiful faces!

OC VB summer check in from Kristen!

Hey Guys!

This summer has been great so far. I’ve been working as a tennis instructor for kids at different YMCA summer camps all over Atlanta. Most of these kids have never been introduced to the sport, and it’s really exciting to be able to teach them something new. Some of the kids get really excited about it and are so eager to learn. Those are the ones that make my job fun. But in between dodging kids dangerously wielding tennis rackets and nursing bruises from misplaced tennis balls, I’ve been working out and hanging out with my friends. We’re all big music fans, so you can imagine our excitement when we saw a little impromptu jam session going on at the square in Downtown Decatur. It was a local band just kind of hanging out and having fun with whoever else happened to be there. It’s the kind of thing you see in movies and stuff, but it’s pretty magical to actually be a part of it. We liked them so much that we went to a show they were playing in the area. It was so much fun, and it reminded me how great local music can be.

This week has been the most exciting by far, though. I’ve been vacationing with my family in the beautiful US Virgin Islands. I’ve been taking this time to relax on the beach, soak up some sun, and hang out with my family. It is sooo beautiful here. The water is crystal clear and the sand is white. It’s impossible to not be happy here. I’ve most enjoyed the days when we went on sailing trips. We sailed to the British Virgin Islands and to different snorkeling spots. This was my first time snorkeling ever, and it’s really cool. I got to see all sorts of sea creatures. I am terribly afraid of critters in the land or sea, so I expected to not enjoy snorkeling too much. I thought I would just be a big scaredy cat. But once I started, I was mesmerized by the things that I saw. It was like swimming through my own little aquarium. I saw schools of fish and massive sting rays. I was really freaked out when I saw a huge shark lying on the ocean floor. Our boat’s captain told me that it was a nurse shark and it didn’t have any teeth and mostly slept during the day, but still, it was pretty frightening. Turtles are one of my favorite animals on the planet, so I was really excited when I spotted a sea turtle. I followed it around the reef until I got tired.

This has been a fabulous vacation, but I’m excited to be headed home soon. There’s only one more week before I load all of my stuff in the car and head up to Oberlin. I couldn’t be more excited. So I’ve got a week of packing up my life and saying goodbyes ahead of me. And then I’ll be saying hello to Oberlin and my new family there.

Hope everyone’s summer is going great!!!

OC VB summer check in from Maggie!

After a whirlwind semester studying abroad in France, a return trip involving a lost pass port and a lost wallet in two different cities, I made it home to Carefree, Arizona. Right away, I began working for my cousin doing data entry, which has been an awesome job that has taught me a lot. After three weeks of Arizona where I successfully re-adapted to American things like eating dinner before 9 o’clock, smiling at strangers and tipping at restaurants, I went to Michigan for two weeks to work at my cousin’s office. It was really cool because all of my extended family is in Michigan and I got to hang out with a lot of cousins.


After Michigan, I came back to Arizona for a few more weeks. Thanks to summer storms, I was able to take advantage of the landscape and do a lot of hiking and horse back riding. My favorite hiking story was at the Grand Canyon. A friend from France who spent a year at Oberlin was visiting the Grand Canyon and Monument Valley with some friends so I drove out there to hang out with her. We decided to hike for a few hours down into the Grand Canyon. When we stopped going down and started going back up it was 110 degrees and we thought we were going to die of sunstroke (not really, but that’s what it felt like). However, when we reached the top, a huge storm had come and the temperature dropped to about 60 degrees and it started pouring. We could not believe how we went from baking to freezing so fast.


Next week I will begin the three day, cross country adventure of driving from Arizona back to Oberlin. It should be a blast involving tourist traps, lot's of playlists and 1,500 miles of interstate 40.