Tour!

After a stressful and sleep-deprived spring quarter, a two-week rugby tour to Fiji and Australia was a great way to relax and catch up on sleep. Every two years our team has gone on tour abroad to play rugby and travel. This time we spent one week in Fiji and one in Australia. The week in Fiji we played three games - one against the University of the South Pacific, one against the Under-23 National team, and one against the local team in the town of Pacific Harbor. All of our best players were still in the states trying out for our Under-23 National team, so we got clobbered in the first two games. We also lost the Pacific Harbor game, but only by one or two tries, so that was slightly less embarrassing. But the Fijian teams were really welcoming and laid back, so they helped us from feeling so completely humiliated. The rest of the time we weren't playing rugby, we were at the beach or wandering around town. There wasn't really much to do after the sun went down, so we all got a lot of sleep. It took me sleeping about 12 hours (or more) every day to finally catch up on my sleep debt before the end of the week, and I felt so much better after that. I also read the whole Hitchhikers' Guide to the Galaxy series, which was very amusing.


[In Fiji: 1-on our way to go snorkeling off one of the smaller islands;
2-Me and my teammate Percy on the beach]

In Australia, the other girls who were still in the states trying out for the U-23 team joined us, so we were looking forward to not getting trounced in our games there. However, all of the games ended up getting rained out (they didn't want to mess up their fields). I'm not really complaining, though, because I was pretty much rugby'd out by the repeated beatings we got in Fiji. We spent the whole week in Sydney and got to know a bit of the city. Some of the highlights were the great aquarium, a harbor tour by boat, eating really fresh fish at the fish market, going out to pubs as a team, and wine tasting in nearby Hunter Valley. Shiyan also took me to a really nice restaurant called Tetsuya's - there were 10 small courses, each of which was amazingly delicious. I could probably write a whole blog entry reliving each course, but I think I've written enough today as it is. True to form, I didn't know how fancy the restaurant was and I showed up in sneakers, a Wallabies rugby jersey, and carrying a box of Krispy Kremes (which they put in the coat check for me), but they treated me just as well as all of the other people in dresses or suits.


[In Sydney: 1- A rainbow over Sydney on the Harbor Tour;
2- Me at the Fish Market]


[3 - On a hike in the Blue Mountains near Sydney. It had been raining all week and that day was no different. It was so rainy and misty that we couldn't see much, so some of us called it quits early and went back to town, ate some kebab, took the train back to Sydney, and watched a movie instead.]

Anyway, the whole trip was a lot of fun and just what I needed after such a rough spring quarter.

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