MCG and Footy

(click to enlarge)

This is a post I’ve wanted to right pretty much since the first weeks in Melbourne. But (lying) I wanted to wait till I toured the place, which I did yesterday. In the semester that I’ve been here, I’ve been to the ‘g’ (as the MCG is referred to), home of the Melbourne Cricket Club, 4 times. 3 times to see footy matches and once to tour the place and explore the national sports museum. Footy is an interesting sport, but we‘ll get to that in a second, first its venue for 46 games a year.
Seating just over 100,000 in its permanent seating. It was home to the 1956 Melbourne Olympics and 2006 common wealth games. The Victoria cricket club and numerous footy teams call this place home. They lease the grounds along with a multitude of others including soccer, rugby, concerts, international cricket and international footy. It’s also home to the Boxing Day test match, a long held tradition in Australia. The six white light towers light the field, and are the largest for a stadium of its size in the southern hemisphere. In the center of the oval is a unique drop-in pitch for cricket that allows 10 cricket strips to be grown externally and placed into the centre. I saw three footy matches there; coincidentally every time I saw the Hawthorne Hawks…who went on to win the premier ship. I chose to support the Richmond Tigers, as they were the first team I saw win and they looked pretty good…they came in 9th (which apparently is sort of a curse/traditional place).
Footy:
I believe there are four stages to the appreciation of Australian Rules football. The first I experience when I first watched a match on TV. The first stage is characterized by complete confusion at the crazy game you’re watching. There’s kicking, passing, running, jumping, giant banners, oversized pompoms and four goal posts! Then when they win there are team songs, like theme songs for a team which a played and everyone knows the words and sings along. Most of the songs are set to other tunes like the Hawks being set to the tune of Yankee Doodle Dandy. Anyway at the end of the first stage, you’re confused, you want to know more, and you were thoroughly amused by that game. So you look up and/or learn the rules and that leads you to the second stage. I looked up the rules during the first game, and the rules aren’t really that hard. At this point you are completely content with the game, so you watch more. Then stage three hits, and that’s the onset of confusion again. There are more rules to this game that was initially apparent. Rules about tackling, running with the ball and passes—there one particular rule that makes the crowd yell ‘Come On!’ or ‘Awww!’ The next stage I never got to because I only saw three games live and the season was ending. But I assume the next stage is regular seats with meat pies and beers, calling out the player’s names, with radio commentary in one ear and complete understanding.
Whichever stage of understanding you are on with this absurd yet great game, you will undoubtedly enjoy it. And I did see the tigers play once, they lost…to the hawks.

Like the tiger of old,
We’re strong and were bold.
Oh we’re from tiger… (Yellow and black)
Oh we’re from Tigerland!

AusTour 18: Adelaide Day Two

After a less exciting and informational ride back to Adelaide I stored my luggage in the terminal (having to return later that night) for day two in Adelaide. The first stop I made, and one I had seen the day before was the Rundle Street mall. Here I counted no less that 3 clowns, at least 7 instrument performers (including a singer, harmonica-ist, two boys emphatically playing ‘pep-band’ songs on trumpets, and several guitarists), 1 free tattoo lady [i was tempted...], 2 people on huge balls, and a couple of other people I cant remember right now. Rundle Street mall is a pedestrian only section of Rundle Street with more shops than your dog has fleas. Following that I walked up to the Adelaide oval for an actual tour. The old man who led it, dressed to the nines (or perhaps the eights) in a uniform you would probably expect from the turn of the century (20th that is) was fairly informative about the history of the oval and its specific significance in cricket history (host of the ashes in 1884 where England won!) as well as some of the major players after whom the stands had been named. We got to go out onto the oval grass (pretty cool) but the most impressive part was going inside the traditionally kept and still operable scoreboard. It’s a fairly mammoth task of operating this monster, and required at least 4 men on a good day.Following the oval tour I went down to the Adelaide art museum. Mostly this was to see some of their Aboriginal Art (Again for my essay), but I also spent some time in their more classical art of which they have a lot. For free entry it was good just walk quickly through the fairly sizable rooms for a quick glance at the art. As five o’clock neared again and everything in Adelaide began to shut down I headed down through Adelaide Uni to the banks of the Torrens. I sat for a while on the quite banks of the river, watching the ducks, rowers and sun sinking in the sky.
As the day drew to a close I grabbed dinner before heading back to the bus terminal for my bus back to Melbourne to end the trip. It was an overnight bus getting into Melbourne at 6:30 in the morning. It was good to be back in Melbourne, a city that is now incredibly familiar to me, but it was also nice to be away from it. Somehow I managed to get from Southern Cross station to my apartment without a single tram passing in my direction, a 30 minute walk.

AusTour 16: Adelaide Day One

As my first day in Adelaide dawned I decided I was going to follow the walking tour in the Lonely Planet book. We’d followed the one previously in Brisbane and it turned out alright (apart for being tired at the end). I headed north towards the start the botanical gardens and National Wine Centre. At some point I decided I didn’t want to do the tour because it had left out some of the places I wanted to see, so I used it as a rough guide before departing from it completely. My first stop was the Nation Wine Centre; Adelaide and South Australia are where a lot of Australia’s wine is produced (this and the Yarra Valley in Victoria), so I thought it an apt stop. The ‘museum’ was fairly generic and uninformative, the entrance rises above an open cellar and it was absolutely packed with wines of all kinds which was kind of interesting. From the Wine Centre I entered the botanical gardens. Adelaide’s botanical gardens are (smartly) split into two parts the actual gardens with plants of every kind for all over the world and, what most Aussies use Botanical Gardens for, the Botanic Park. The dichotomy allows the plants to grow and be admired and allows a place for Aussies to play and relax on weekends and days off (all the other botanical gardens I’ve seen in Australia mix the two). I walked through the rose garden, a symmetrical walk garden and past a pretty good replication of a Mediterranean house and garden and out past the zoo. The zoo was on my list of ‘maybes’ but looked uninviting from the road so I skipped it for now and continues over the Torrens into North Adelaide. Here I stopped quickly at St Peters cathedral where I was told pretty enthusiastically about their new stained glass windows that apparently represent Australia and its history. My next stop was the Adelaide Oval, I had planned to take a tour there and luckily the afternoon tours would start in the next couple of days. A stayed for a bit (the oval is part of Adelaide parks so you can just walk in) and watched the grounds men converting the footy pitch to a cricket ground. Following the oval I walked back into the CBD towards Tandanya an aboriginal Art museum (at that point I had to write a paper on indigenous Australia art for one of my Uni classes). The museum was showing aboriginal weaving at the time, which was fairly interesting and different from the painting traditionally associated with aboriginal art. With the working day closing I finished off my main attractions for the day in the Adelaide museum. The museum was fairly disorganized; there was no narrative just a show and tell performance. It was funny though seeing some of the North American animals in the mammal’s exhibit—mammals like the black bear which I see all too much off. As the museum closed I went up to Lights Vision which I believe is the highest natural point in the inner city with a view out onto the CBD. There was one thing left to do that day and that was to find dinner which was little problem, what was a problem was finding ice-cream anywhere in Adelaide—I mean proper ice-cream, the homemade stuff not the generically produced. Adelaide for one reason or another is completely devoid of ice-cream. I went back to My Place for the night and talked to some cool people about Kangaroo Island (where I would go the next day) and life in general. I had to go to sleep early because the bus left at 6:45. Yay.