Spring Break, Week 1

Time to start tending the blog again.  I’ve been back at school for two weeks now since my two-week spring break.  It’s been a pretty busy two weeks so I haven’t been able to write about the break, but I’ll take a few posts now to do that.  The vacation got off to a little of a slow start (see the last post) but really picked up when I left for Perth early on Wednesday morning.

The main reason for going over to Western Australian was for the 2010 Australian University Games as a member of the University of Melbourne Ultimate Frisbee team.  The competition was the second week of the break, but I headed over to Perth a little early to spend some extra time over there.

The city of Perth, from Kings Park 

Without having any real plans, the week actually worked out pretty well.  A couple teammates had flights over on Wednesday as well, and we spend the morning walking around the city before taking a bus south for three hours to the Margaret River region to stay for a couple nights with another teammate, Jimmy, in the little town of Cowaramup.  That was a lot of prepositional phrases.

Vineyards and house parties after the jump...

The region is known for its winemaking abilities so on Thursday we drove around all day visiting vineyards and wine tasting.  I think we went to four before lunch and three afterward, but I don’t really remember now.  Could have been a couple more.  By the end of the day I could only really tell the reds apart from the whites.  I had what the lady behind the counter called “wine fatigue.”  But that didn’t stop her from letting me try $70 bottles of wine and giving me tasting notes that I had no chance of appreciating.

Hmm, grapefruit and pear you say?

On Friday we drove back up to Perth.  Friday and Saturday night we crashed at the house of one of Jimmy’s Cow Town friends.  I’m not exactly sure how many guys actually lived in the house, but there were a lot.  It was in the suburb of Cottesloe, which they billed as the wealthiest suburb in Australia (The whole state is really rich because all the mining wealth is over there).  If that was the case, I must have stayed in the shittiest flat in the entire town.  Shared living at its finest.

The guys had a house party on Friday night, which involved a lot of the beer of choice, Emu Export.  They all liked it because they said it tasted the same warm as it did cold.  "Yeah, like piss," I thought at the time (It actually tasted just like Natty Light).  We spent most of the night around the campfire listening to the housemates tell stories about their childhood together (someone was injured in pretty much every one) as they tossed petrol onto the flames.  We spent the weekend at the beach and then checked into the team hotel Sunday night and prepared for the Games.

Cottesloe Beach, minutes from the house