International Volleyball

There is a FIVB PanAmerican Tournament going on here in Santo Domingo, last night we went to the semi-finals.  The arena is in the Olympic Park area, recently spiffed up to host this group.  The stadia in  the park are for past Pan American games, they are getting run down in general, but this stadium was nice, and air conditioned, in fact it was too cold at first.

The crowd got a little bigger but not that full,
very loud for it's size!

The anthem is highly regarded, really it is a hymn. 
Some of our team didn't stand so straight for our anthem.



Blurry but they did exchange some trinkets.



Argentina upset Brasil in five games the first semi, then the US won in 5 games in the second, the crowd was almost exclusively Dominican, when they won the second and fourth game it got pretty loud. I had never been to high end VB before, pretty fast game. The US team was not the Olympic team, but a B or C team. Same with Brasil, don't know about Argentina, but they were young. It was fun to be out in the crowd, we got back to the Casa so late it was locked and security had to let us in.