Today’s orientation actually started later than I had thought. We all got there around 9:30, but it didn’t even begin until 10:30. So we just hung around and ate free muffins for the extra hour. They told us about some useful information today, including traveling, sports, and health insurance. When they were talking about life in Australia, they mentioned “queues.” Here, they don’t call them lines; they say they are queues. It seems to be the same thing in the UK. They also told us about a trip to Sydney in a few weeks for the Sydney Mardi Gras that I had seen on the Real World last season. The people on the show who went all said it was so much fun, so I think I’m gonna try and find some people to go with me to that. After about 4 hours of orientation, they said we could meet them on the fields to learn some Aussie sports. I was not aware of this a few months ago, but here, they play rugby and another game called Australian Rules football (“footy”). I had thought they were the same thing until recently. The guy in charge was explaining the rules of Aussie rules football and demonstrating. It seems like a wild game. It has tackling like American football, but that’s about where the similarities stop. You can pass the ball by holding it in one hand and punching it with the other, giving it backspin, or by punting it. If the ball hits the ground, play continues. You can run with the ball, but every ten meters, you have to bounce it. It’s hard to bounce, though, because it is shaped just like an American football. There are no pads, and players try to bring down the man with the ball. At the ends of the field are four posts, two smaller ones on the outside and two larger ones in the middle. If you punt it between the two posts in the middle, it’s 6 points, and if you get it inside the outside posts, it’s 1 point. We did some drills, and then a group of us decided to get a game going. It was a lot of fun, but very tiring. We eventually turned our game into an Americanized version, as we stopped following the real rules because they were hard. While this was going on, people were learning cricket, but it seemed really boring. After that, I went up to play some soccer on another field. Towards the end of one of the games, the ball hit me right in the nose, so I left. A BBQ was about to start, anyway. It was put on by the mentor program, and they were grilling sausages. I found it funny that they were serving orange juice as the beverage. So they don’t open the dining hall for breakfast, but they serve OJ for dinner? This is backwards! Tonight is my first Thursday night going out to the Nott, so I’m looking forward to seeing what that’s like on a big student night. Also, I think pretty much every exchange student is going to be there, so that should be fun.
No comments:
Post a Comment