Spring Break, Couple Extra Days

Uni Games officially ended on Friday night so most of the team left on Saturday.  The rest of us hung around Perth and watched the footy Grand Final replay (the week before the two teams tied at the end of regulation, so rather than go into overtime, the rules said they had to replay the game the next week).  After that—Collingwood demolished St. Kilda by the way—I read in a park and then ate fish and chips with a couple teammates.  We stayed the night in a hostel and then everyone left on Sunday morning.  Except me.

 To get the cheapest airfare I booked my flight home on Monday night at about 11 PM so I had some time to kill.  Luckily, a couple fellow Exchange students from Ormond who played on the baseball team at Uni Games had the same idea.  So on Saturday I met up with them—Tripp from Wisconsin and Augusto from Mexico—and we rode the train down to Cottesloe Beach and then rode the train further down to Fremantle.

Fremantle is the shipping port of Perth.  It’s right on the Pacific Ocean while Perth is about 10 miles up the Swan River.  All the tankers arrive at Fremantle, and all the business goes on in Perth.  You’d think they’d do it all in one city and save some trouble, but I guess that’s the way things happen sometimes.

This place was bustling. With people in their late 20s/early 30s.

Fremantle is a small city with lots of quaint brick buildings.  It’s looks kind of like a college town, like Cambridge or Princeton.  We went for the Little Creatures Brewery (/Bar/Restaurant).  Even for a Sunday night at about 6 PM this place was packed.  We enjoyed a pint of the Pale Ale—best I’ve had in Australia—but the price tag was so high ($9) it stayed at one pint.  Me and Tripp's island adventure after the jump...

Spring Break, Week 2

Now to the actual tournament.  Monday started out pretty slow—we only played one game—but over the course of the entire five days we played twelve total games that were almost an hour and a half long each.  It was a lot of Ultimate Frisbee.  I didn’t play as much as I wanted to, though, because I was injured on the second day when I landed with all my weight on one knee and hyper-extended it (maybe a minor ACL sprain?).  I had to sit out the rest of that day, but on Wednesday I got it checked out by the physio and he cleared me to play.  Just needed an entire roll of tape around the knee for the next three days.  The hairs are actually just starting to grow back.

Hammertime!

Nonetheless, I still made meaningful contributions.  Like when we played Newcastle, who ended up finishing fourth in the tournament.  The day before (Wednesday) was our game against Macquarie, who we needed to beat to keep our medal hopes alive.  We ended up losing on Universe point (next-point-wins) and handed Newcastle our would-be spot in the semifinals.  So on Thursday against Newcastle we played for pride and a little revenge.  After falling behind early and down a couple points at half we fought back to tie the game at ten.  Then the hard cap went off (the time limit was reached) so it turned into a game to one—next point wins—the same situation we were in the day before.

I took myself out of the game because I thought I was a defensive liability.  I couldn’t move very well because, on account of all the tape on my leg, I couldn’t bend it more than 70 degrees.  Not ideal for sticking with your man.  So for the beginning of the point I watched from the sidelines.  That changed when one of our guys took an elbow to the nose and I got the call.  The rest of the story after the jump...

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...