The simple things

While I remember and have a moment to post about it I thought I'd share some discoveries made on the pretour. I often find when travelling that it is the seemingly simple or familiar things that can often contain some odd differences.

Take traffic lights for example. As a pedestrian I have been trained to listen for the change from beep, beep, beep to the wierd computer game shooting type sounds Australian traffic lights made. In California, no sound - however there is a count down for how long you have to get across the road which I rather like. The other thing is that if you happen to find you self j walking on quiet streets, and I certainly don't encourage this, drivers slow down. Also quite strange stop sign arrangements.

Coffee is another one. There are a few team mates who are very partial to coffee but one was quite perturbed when they were asked if they wanted their latte wet or dry. Apparently it refers to the anount of froth and milk. Also the sizes. I like coffee but I trying to get a regular Australian small size is tough, and then when you do ask for an exntra small or whatever you usually get a quizical response.

I also had an entertaining encounter when trying to order a sandwich. Now most of us have managed to pick up a little bit of an American accent, basically to make it easier ie the different ways of saying mocha or awesome. Anyway, I wanted a tuna sandwich, you can probably see where this is going. After me saying 'tuna' times and getting blank looks, I finally pointed at the word on the board, ahhhhh 'toona'. At least I provided some entertainment.

Probably the most intriguing of similar things though is the different showers. I have travelled a bit so have encountered various showers and pride my self on being able to work them out. I think every place I have stayed on eth pre-tour has a different system and I was doing very well. I'd pulled up levers and pulled out taps, managed to balnce water levels and deal with water pressure. So I was pretty confident when turning the shower on at our billets in Portland. Water comes pouring out of the bath tap, no problem, situation normal, but after twising, pulling and wrangling with everything I could see I had to give up and ask. The solution was to pull down the fawcet under where the water was running. Wonders never cease.

Anyway, in terms of ultimate we played our first two games yesterday. I won't write alot as I'm sure Adam will post a blog but just a few highlights for me. Hong Kong first up with us winning 17-5. Bec Carman had a great layout grab to score and there was some really hard pressure on the mark from Chris Friese. We then had the USA, a big game. We came out strongly with us scoring the first point, a beautiful long put from Warwick Shephard to the fastest man in Australian ultimate Peter Blakely. I was on the sideline at that stage and the comment from the Americans near me was an impressed 'oh'. We kept up with them for quite a while but had a slump in the middle which saw us go down 13-7, not great. However with our fighting spirit the Barramundis rallied and managed to claw back with the final score being 17-14 to the USA. I was really proud of the comeback and the determintation the Mundis showed. It was an incredibly competitive game but the spirit from both teams was fantastic. We did slump and we probably didn't play our best ultimate consistently enough but I thought the whole team put in a massive effort. There was some awesome play by Seb Barr, Tex, Warwick and James Yorsten, some very consistent dump cutting from Leanne great D by Vickie too. But really everyone was great, there were too many individual moment to mention here. Thanks too to the number of players who couldn't be on the field, Sweet As, JD and Gaby. They were fantastic support on the sidelines. The Aussie crowd too was tops, so thank you. I particularly liked the cowbell.

We play Italy today so we will keep you posted.

Laina