Week 22: Playing catch up

Once again I must apologize for the blog not posting last week. I checked it on Friday, and I could see it. But it wasn't there on Tuesday when my Mom called, so obviously something went wrong. Something I forgot to mention last week was that I am learning so much more about football here than I have watching football at home during the last three years. There are several reasons: they're no announcers; Carol, Claire, and I worked as the chain crew three weeks ago; and during our east coast adventure, I filmed all of the boys' games and many of their practices (refrain from the mother-in-law comparisons. Please take no offense, Debbie, it's just too early in our marriage for me to turn into you just yet!)

Before I finish telling about Brisbane and Sydney, let me briefly discuss what happened over the weekend. I got my first semester grades back: two As and a B. Not my best, but probably worthy of the amount of work I put in, and there's definitely no grade inflation here:) Now, the real work begins as I write my thesis. At least I don't have any classes this semester! To celebrate our returning home, 12 friends from the dorm and Karl's regular football team drove into the bush to play paintball. (The close readers will remember me discussing how Karl can conned into buying these paintball tickets for a place 3 hours away.) If you like stomping around in mud, attempting to dodge plastic balls of paint, undoubtedly getting pelted with them anyway, and playing war, then you would have loved paintball. I had never been, and most likely will not go again. BUT, in spite of getting my four-day old bruises that still hurt, I had a great time. Other than these exciting bits of news, we've just been playing catch up with the "real" world.

Brisbane
After our tumultuous Gold Coast trip, Brisbane was smooth sailing. The national team was a bit smaller in build and younger than the last team, but they were there to play football. The boys had never experienced 2 a day training sessions and the luxury of having position coaches (there were 6 coaches in total.) Most thought it was greatest thing. One of Karl's linebackers told him that he'd learned more about football in the past five days than in the 2 1/2 years he'd been playing club ball. While the team did learn heaps, they didn't win either of their two games against Americans. But, they did score a touchdownn which is better than most Australian teams do against American opponents. I don't have any wild stories to tell about these boys because as I said earlier they were there to play football, and most of the time they were too tired to do anything. I did get a crash course on sewing patches on their jerseys (without a machine, too!)

Sydney
Karl and I had a great time doing something besides football for the last three days of our trip. We arrived at Sydney on a Sunday to find that our hotel was in the infamous red light district, Kings Cross. However, it was steps away from a train station and a McDonald (or Maccas as they say here.) We spent most of the first day wondering around the harbour, getting acquainted with the place and doing a bit of shopping. We even ran into one of our friends from the dorm. In a city with 5 million people, thousands of tourists, and several harbours, we found each other! After catching a small dinner at one of the few moderately expensive places to eat, we went up the Sydney Tower, a tall, skinny building with an observation deck plopped on the top. It had a beautiful view of the city at night!

On Monday, we traveled an hour on trains to see the 2000 Sydney Olympic Park. It was big, nice, and empty. Quite a disappointment. If we had gone on a Tuesday or Thursday, we could have had a trapeze lesson, though! After traveling the hour back to the city, we went to the city's botanical gardens and strolled around for a bit. Then, we took some more pictures of the Harbour Bridge (I think Karl took 75 in all) before meeting our friend and her mom for dinner. After dinner, was the Sydney Opera House and a chorale show! I think we all had more fun setting up the tripod and timer and taking pictures of ourselves in front of the bridge and SOH. The SOH is gorgeous, and it doesn't seem real!

On our last day, we did several things. First, we toured one of the first homes built in Sydney in 1823. Then, we took a ferry to Darling Harbour and yes, Karl took pictures of the bridge as we passed under it. Once in Darling, we peeked into the Chinese Gardens but didn't pay the $7 cover charge, tried to see an IMAX show, and finally stopped in the Outback Center. It was basically a HUGE tourist shop with everything outback and pretty authentic. Besides the fact that we're now obsessed with Aboriginal art, there was a free diggereedoo show! I'm not sure if I've explained what a diggereedoo is yet, so here it goes. It's an Aboriginal musical instrument that is made by termites eating through a large tree branch. Once the branch is hollowed out, they play it kind of like a trumpet but the bottom sits on the ground. The guy who performed for us was amazing. He was an authentic human juke box. He made bird noises and talked while continually playing the instrument. Hopefully, the video we took will be small enough to email. He was amazing! After his fantastic show, it was time for us to climb the bridge! It was awesome!!! It's a three hour ordeal to climb the bridge, but it's definitely worth it. The view was amazing, especially since it was daylight on our way up and nighttime on the descent. At the top, we were standing above the busiest strip of highway in Australia at rush hour. Yes, the bridge does wobble a bit, but don't worry, we're attached to it by cables. We ended our day by visiting the Sydney Aquarium, and it was great, too! Karl in all seriousness took over 100 pictures there. There were glow in the dark jellyfish, Nemo and friends exhibit, seals, Great Barrier reef animals, and an underwater shark tank with sharks and six feet long and wide sting rays floating above you. So cool! The only thing we could do to top off such a great day and trip was to ride a ferry and get gelato for the train ride home (Italian ice cream)!

Well once again, I win the award for longest post ever. I think Karl will guest write again next week. You guys need some excitement.

WORD OF THE WEEK

Two words for the week this week. Our first word is sick. We all know this word, but young Aussies (and probably Americans, too) use this word like cool. When they say something is sick, they don't mean it's disgusting, just like cool doesn't really mean cold or chilly. It means they really like it. Our second word is the real meaning of diggereedoo. Today, we know it as the musical instrument, but for the first European settlers it meant a little more than that. When they said diggereedov (notice the Irish spelling change:), they were saying "black man playing a stick." Kind of fun, eh?

Thanks for suffering through the detail. Sorry no pictures directly on the blog page. Karl updated the picture spot instead. Enjoy!

Britt