Canberra and Ultimate

This weekend (I just got back), I flew to Canberra, the capital city of Australia, for an Ultimate Frisbee Tournament. I've picked up with a women's team here called "Honey", and this was my first real experience with them, though I did join them for training on Thursday.

But let me back up a bit. This week was both orientation for Melbourne Uni and O-week (orientation week) for RMIT student apartments, where I'm living. I spent a lot of the week getting lost on the Uni campus figuring out my schedule, which, although classes start tomorrow, is still a mess. When I wasn't on campus, though, I was doing O-week with RMIT. We had a night of comedians (they weren't very good, but it was still fun), a nineties party, and a pub crawl during the evenings, and a variety of activities during the day. I went to St. Kilda's beach, which is about a half hour away by tram, and have decided that I need to spend some more time there on another weekend - it was beautiful even though all the Australians kept telling the international students that it wasn't a great beach. I'm not that picky - the water was clear, the sand seemed clean, and it was sunny, so I was happy. The nineties party was a lot of fun - it was held in our courtyard with a cover band playing all sorts of music from the nineties. My group of friends and I danced for several hours, and then went with a much larger group to a pub about a fifteen minute walk away. It was a great night.

On Wednesday night, instead of going to the O-week activity, Laura, Olivia and I went to the Queen Victoria Night Market. Its held the same place as the day market, but has food stalls instead of produce, and a lot more clothing and knick-knack stalls. I (finally!) had fish and chips, which were pretty darn good, and then the three of us split these funny deep fried dumpling-like things with vanilla ice-cream and chocolate on top. It was fantastic. We also heard some live music and watched a free dance show and then dance class - it was all about Cuban dances! Unfortunately, it was the last night of the Night Market, since it runs during the summer - November through February.

Anyway. Back to the weekend! On Thursday, I went to training with Honey, and met most of the team for the first time. I (successfully) took a tram by myself there and back. They all seemed really nice and it was great to meet some of the team. On Saturday morning, I got up at 4:45 to shower and then catch a taxi to the airport for my 7:05 flight to Canberra. I got in at 8:05, with three other Honey players on my flight. We met up with a fifth player and took a cab into the city to have breakfast at a cafe. We were picked up by teammates at 10:30 ish, and went to the fields for our 12:30 game. Since a team dropped out at the last minute, we only had 2 games on Saturday. We lost both of them, though our first game was much better than our second. It was really hot and dry - I drank four bottles of water in the two games. The teams were from Canberra - Machine Girls- and (I think) Sydney - Sultry. We got back to the cabins we were staying and all jumped into the pool, which felt lovely! We then went to the tournament dinner, and then stayed for part of the party. Since a number of us had gotten up very early to fly in, we had an early night, and I was in bed before midnight. This morning, we got up and went to the fields. We played a team called Wildcard. They were really, really good - they took second at Women's Nationals last year. We scored once against them, but it was a good game, and we really stepped it up. Our second game that day was the first of the semis, and so we actually played Wildcard again. We sort of fell apart during this game, and played fairly poorly, but managed to end on a good note with it. Our next game was against Sultry. At this point, all the women who drove up had left, so there were only five of us. Sultry gave us the players who weren't going to nationals so we could field a team, and it ended up being the best game any of us had played all weekend. We won the game, so our final record was 1-4. We also won the Spirit Award, which came in the form of chocolate bars. Several of us were flying back on the same flight, so we all went out to dinner, and then took a taxi to the airport. We drove past the parliament building, as well as a few other famous Canberra monuments, though I didn't get a chance to take any pictures. I arrived back in Melbourne at 10:30, and am now quite ready to head to bed and get some much needed rest!