May 26, 2012

ANTWERP, Belgium - Today's destination was the city of Antwerp, Belgium's second largest city. We explored the city as a team, led by Tony Johnson and Rob Delaney. We were fortunate enough to see the nice parts as well as the sketchy ones.

European Tour Blog

Rising sophomore Joey Ptasinski is chronicling the Lafayette men's basketball team's 2012 European Tour with daily blog entries. GoLeopards.com is also chronicling the trip with photo galleries, video updates and game recaps. European Tour Coverage | Roster

Similar to Amsterdam, Antwerp had a "red light district" separate from the rest of the city. After making a lap, just so we could say that we experienced it, of course, we sat down on some benches and had a team tanning session. The tanning was started in large part by Les Smith's love for taking his shirt off and showing everyone how big he is. Unfortunately, some of us did not fare too well. For Dan Trist specifically, the tanning resulted in more of just a burning.

After about four hours in Antwerp, we got back on the bus and drove to our game. We played against a club team from Belgium and had no idea what to expect from them. We quickly learned that they were grown men and were going to play a physical style of basketball, but we jumped out to an early lead behind a very energetic Jack Detmer and never looked back. We were winning 81-63 when the referees called the game with about the minutes left, since we were down to just six healthy players.

Tomorrow is our final day trip. We are getting up early in the morning to take the bus to Paris.