In beginning of September I gathered up my standard Slovenian supporters (Ana, Lojze and my father) with a very clear purpose - to explore Istanbul and cheer for our national basketball team. An important place that basketball holds in my history, combined with great company and national pride, I was very excited about this trip. We decided not to play the role of bloodthirsty tourists and therefore visited only one site per day. This tactic proved very good, since there was lots of time for Istanbul gourmet's, shopping, drinking beer, long evenings of playing cards and most importantly warming-up for the big basketball games. I must say that Slovenia has probably the best supporters in the world. For example, in this championship, there were around 5000 supporters on all (group-stage) games. The second most numerical supporters were from Lithuania and counted 2000 (excluding Turkey, that was the host and always played in fully packed arenas). My father and I still cannot completely explain the Slovenian exodus phenomenon that always happens on bigger sport events. Anyways, we cheered like crazy and our team won all the opponents in the group except America, that proved to be two classes better then all the others. At the end of our trip my father reunited with Bahram - a friend from Iran (they didn't see each other for more than 20 years). To my delight, Bahram is a very enthusiastic alpinist and even holds his own alpinistic club in Teheran. You can imagine the big plans that quickly started forming in my head:) But to keep it real, let's conclude that the trip to Istanbul was a big winner.
Next year Bratislava will host the hockey (Devision A) championship.. and you can definitely count on the Mlinar-Bajt supporting squad.
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