Martha and Susan’s Excellent Adventures

On Friday, UNSW women’s soccer team beat Macquarie Uni for the bronze medal at the Australian UniGames! So yeah, we’re the third best soccer team in Australia!

The day before, we played Sydney Uni in the semi-final match, and lost 2-0. They went on to win the gold. The Sydney girls are probably the best team that I’ve ever played against - the way they move to the space, their passing, everything, is pretty much professional. They said they played their best game of the tournament against us, so we did extremely well to keep them out as much as we did. Playing them before Macquarie I think helped us a lot too. When we went to the bronze medal match the following day, our marking was waaaay tighter than the first time we played Macquarie in this tournament and our passing and moving was far superior (despite the fact that most of the girls were out until 5am the night before playing and only got 2 hours of sleep….). Sioban, this cute little innocent looking freshie, scored the game winning goal in the dying seconds of the match. It was a sweet end to the tournament.

Winning bronze also meant we got an extra $70 back in subsidies for registration and such. They make you pay a lot up front to join the tournament, but then you get money back at the end depending on how well you did and whether you caused any trouble or not. It’s the Games Committee’s way of trying to keep students in line. It’s cool to be winning money though.

So a little about the social life at the Games: Every night had a theme, things like Tight & Bright, Team Colours, Heros, etc. Every night before going out, teams “hold court”. We ran our court along with the mens soccer team in one of their rooms. Basically the two captains are the court leaders (I feel like saying king & queen, but I don’t think that was their names) and each team has a judge. First you have the match reports, then bring up all the on field errors and accomplishments. For every mess-up (own goals, cards, puking on the side of the field due to going too hard the night before, air swings) you get punished - either drinking so much of your drink, or a “lay back”. For a lay back, they have a box of goon (cheap boxed wine), you lay on the floor and the judge for you team pours the goon directly into your mouth for as many seconds as the punishment states. A 5 second lay back is the typical punishment, although 20 is sometimes done for serious mess-ups. Then they move to off-field punishments - generally stuff that went on the night before at the bars and clubs. “Pashing” is kissing, “incest” is when a guy & girl within the soccer teams hook up.

Cute littly innocent looking Sioban got punished for a lot more of this stuff than you’d suspect. She was also punished for stealing accreditations from athletes from other universities, although her method was hilarious - she would go up to a guy, look at his accreditation, and start asking about his university and sport (it’s like a name tag you need to play and get into bars). She’d flip it over the guy’s shoulder while dancing with him, then the Italian guy, Francesco, from the men’s team would come up behind the guy and steal the accreditation out of the name tag holder. She felt pretty bad about it the day after, because losing your accreditation is fairly serious - $30 fine plus a pile of paper work. She was caught by one of her victims on the night and Francesco at first abandoned her, then had to save her. She tried to give all the accreditations back the next day, but still, it was not a good thing to do.

And the men on the guys team - what can I say about them? Most of them were between 18 and 20 years old, and complete man-whores. So dirty! But a lot of the girls there were like that too (not my team mates though - thank god!). The girl who dished out the sloppy 6th was apparently going for the world record of 84 guys in one night. And seriously, she could have made it. I went to court every night, but I only went out after that on two of the nights, and stayed in a did homework for the others. I can’t handle the just out of high school stuff for too long.

I arrived back in Sydney Friday night. Yesterday I joined a couple of the guys from school to watch the Sydney FC match. Today I’m going over to Yee’s (friend from soccer) for her birthday, and then tonight I’ll watch the women’s world cup finals - Brazil vs. Germany. And so soccer continues. We’re going out for a celebration dinner sometime in the next week, a party at my place the next weekend, and we’ll probably keep up with the running as well. Should be good.

I am currently in the Gold Coast for the Australian University Games for soccer. So far we’ve lost one (5-1 to Wollongong. Our first game. We played the first half with only 9 players, and Wollongong is the defending champ), tied one (1-1 against UNE), and won one (1-0 against Macquarie Uni). That’s good enough for second place in the group, so we’re on to the semi’s tomorrow (which is like a quarter final, since we end up playing in 2 semi-finals. I know. Weird).

Eventually resuts will be posted here, but maybe not until after the games are over.

And as for the social bit: Ho.Ly.F*&% Batman. I read an article about the enormous amount of condoms that they go through at the Olympics every time those are on. The athletes here would seriously give the Olympic athletes a run for their money in terms of volume of condoms gone through. You may have hear of sloppy seconds? How about sloppy sixths? Anyway, I think I’ll have to do another post on this a bit later. I want to get back to the beach & barbecue & such. Ciao for now!

Saturday was a lovely, sunny, warm day. By 3 in the afternoon, there was only so much cleaning and paper-reading that I could handle, so I decided to go for a walk down to the south cliffs of Maroubra Beach and enjoy the day. Watch the surfers, and the fishers, and the waves, and the birds.

When I got to the lower rocky areas, there was a boy and his dog running along near the water, up and down, back and forth, playing. I didn’t notice at first, but then I looked past them in to the ocean, and there were dophins! A whole school of them, or clan, or whatever they call a group of dolphins. And only a stones-throw away, travelling up the coast. I joined the boy and his dog and we ran after the dolphins for as long as we could (a bit hard on the rocks, but truly amazing!). You never expect to see dolphins in your backyard, but Saturday I did! An amazing day!

Saturday night I watched Canada beat Ghana in Women’s World Cup soccer action. It was over the internet, watching a Shanghai channel, so all the commentary was in Chinese, but that was awesome too.

I arrived back in Sydney on Monday, and was planning to come in to school to say hi to people, but didn’t quite make it. I slept until about 4:30 in the afternoon, rolled out of bed, had some soup, then did in fact make it to campus, but only because I wanted to see Jorge Cham’s talk (yes! The PhD comics guy came to my university!!!)

I learned:

and

So you can see it was a very important talk. I made it in to school yesterday, and made it to my tutorial, but not the class. Was in bed by 5pm. But, I did get up at 4am.