Cultural Experiences

I was really excited to witness the Australian Football League (AFL) Grand Final game this last Saturday. Sport and competition are extremely important to Australians. The sport played in the AFL is Australian rules rugby (I think) and the finals game is many times more anticipated than the Super Bowl is to Americans. To raise the hype even further, both teams in the finals are from Melbourne, the city in which I currently reside. A Melbourne final hasn't happened in 8 years and everyone was decked out in team colors, uniforms, face paint, body paint, etc. eager to claim the team they were rooting for. Melbourne has eight football teams so many of the fans didn't have their exact team in the finals but you wouldn't know it by the way they were cheering. The fan favorite was the Hawthorne Hawks, the underdog by far. They were playing against the Geelong Cats who had only lost 1 game the entire season. I decided to go ahead and root for the underdogs as well.

This being the first AFL game I'd ever seen, I decided to observe closely and take notes. In the book I'm reading, the author described watching a football game and laid out the basic rules so I had somewhat of a head start. Here is what you need to know about Australian rules football:

On both ends of the round field are 4 goal posts lined up side by side. To score, you have to kick the ball through these uprights. If you get it through the middle, it's 6 points and if you get it through the side uprights, it's 1 point. You can only run with the ball if you dribble it on the ground and to pass it forward, you have to punch or kick it. That's basically it. It's a constant mad scramble for the ball and eventually someone ends up close enough to the uprights to try to kick it through. It's very simple but extremely entertaining.

Here is a transcript of my game observations:
-coolness of sport on par with ice hockey (which is amazing, in my opinion)
-the only sport I've seen where you can cheer when the other team scores. There are many times during the game in which a player gets a free kick at the uprights. Since there is such a difference in score between the middle and side uprights, if the opposing player misses the middle and scores one point on the side, you can cheer loudly because they missed out on a good opportunity for an easy 6 points.
-Dangerous when the ball is loose. You can bend over to grab the ball and stand up into a sprinting player's elbow or shoulder. Despite this, nobody exercises an ounce of caution. They do not wear any padding, helmets, or protective gear. The most protection they have is some type of fabric taped against their shoulders, perhaps to protect against burns from the ground. Players drop like flies throughout the match with injuries from big hits. Many other times, the players bounce up from crushing blows that would put those wussy, dive taking, flopping, world cup soccer players in the hospital.
-The ball is quite bouncy and awkward shaped. A loose ball bounces around and slips in and out of dog piles like a wet bar of soap. Underneath the dog pile, you can see short, sneaky jabs being thrown into ribs, like something out of a cartoon. It's like watching the scramble for an NFL fumble except it happens once per minute.
-I get the feeling that something illegal is constantly going on. The referee uses some type of arbitrary judgment to decide which fouls are serious enough to be called.
-The players have achieved super hero status. They are probably many times more important to the people than political figures.
-110,000 people can fit in the stadium.
-They use a defensive move like the Harlem Globetrotter weave by passing backwards several times to players moving in opposite directions.
-There doesn't seem to be many flops in rugby. Australia would hate you.
-A guy hobbles out of the locker room on crutches. He has a giant bruise on his shin. He is making his way along the sidelines to his team all by himself. He doesn't have a trainer's shoulder to rest against or an injury wagon to cart him around.
-Aussie men know a decent amount about American sports. Upon hearing of my nationality, they want to know which teams I follow and cheer for. They know and watch ice hockey teams on Fox Sports, which makes me happy because I didn't think I would see a single game this season. One guy started talking to me about recent trades involving the Sacramento Kings. He knew way more about what's going on with the NBA than I do.
-One of the AFL players has a bandage around his head after taking a hit. The bandage is so loose and is flapping around that I can't imagine it's serving any purpose other than showmanship.
-Australians really do love to bet. There are several boards posted on the wall with various categories and names of people who have filled each betting field. They bet on who will score the first goal, the margin of victory for each team, a couple of other things I don't understand, and even the crowd attendance predicted out to the thousandth of a percent. I don't know why it wouldn't be 100.000% at the grand final. Maybe some people get so pissed (drunk) that they never make it to their $500 seats.
-The player who won their equivalent of MVP for the game started with broken ribs. He refused a pre-game x-ray because he thought that if his ribs were indeed broken, they would not allow him to play.

At several points throughout the game, blokes notice that I'm writing and want me to share my observations. They read over the observations and laugh aloud at the arbitrary judgment of the refs, constant breaking of rules, and the lack of concern for sprinting and crashing straight into each other. A couple of the Aussies play soccer and groan when they read that I called soccer players wusses. One of them agrees that they are indeed wusses because they play soccer and not football. Another points a finger at the Italian soccer team for being the worst when it comes to dive taking and says that it ruins the sport. The Aussies praise me for catching onto the elbows and jabs in the dog pile and say that it's quite brutal, especially in the finals. However, apparently, the league is much more tame these days compared to the 80s when there was often an obvious aim to injure.

I saw a large public disturbance a few hours after the conclusion of the footy game. The city was quite rowdy for the rest of the afternoon and night, seeing as how nearly every person was partying all day and all through the game. There were between 100 and 200 mohawked, studded jacket/fishnet stalking looking people making a huge raucous at a train station downtown. They were yelling at the tops of their lungs, wasted, kicking glass around and making a mess. There were around 30 police officers who had formed a rough perimeter at the corners of the block while more officers walked through the crowd. There wasn't any real violence or interaction between them and the mob but they were real mad about something. I couldn't figure out what was going on but I got the sense that I was catching the tail end of it. Most of the people were starting to clear out and the anger was subsiding. Some of the people there were quite ridiculous, including a woman in her 60s, wasted off her ass, wearing a school girl's outfit and pigtails that had half the red die washed out of them, possibly by sweaty dancing and/or beer spilled on them. An 8 year old boy walked by me with his sweatshirt sleeve in his hand and the rest hanging to the ground. He was walking around the cops, whipping them lightly with the sweatshirt, saying, "You're a fucking pig. You're a fucking pig." He seemed to be drunk as well. The cops yelled at him and he walked off, still swearing to himself. He didn't appear to be with anyone else and wandered off alone. The police here actually are peaceful officers. From what I've seen, Melbourne police rock. They were conversing normally with some of the kids who came up to talk to them and genuinely seemed to be there to keep the peace and make sure things didn't get out of hand. The 8 year old kid walked by me again 5 minutes later, still swearing to himself and at others.

I come home to my hostel, which is upstairs from a pub (it's like living above Riley's), and there are loads of cops here too. They're all filling out paperwork and there are two people who are super wasted and lying in pools of liquid, presumably water. A guy comes over with a pitcher of water to a girl passed out on her face in the sidewalk. It all appears to be an alcohol poisoning call and later, two ambulances show up to take the people away. I walk inside and everyone is slurring. I walk upstairs and there are two guys walking/falling their way down the stairwell. I have to step to the side to avoid being checked. One of them is slurring so heavily that I have absolutely no clue as to a single word in the sentence that he speaks but somehow, his mate understands and responds. When the guy speaks again, I realize that he's slurring in French. No wonder...

My female German roommate becomes much more aggressive when she drinks. She woke me up from a nap by pulling on my arm and after pulling me to my feet as if there was a fire and she was to save me, she says I need to come with her right now so she can show me something cool. She hands me a pair of stunna shades, despite the fact that it's now dark outside, and claims that if I come with her, I will thank her when I'm 30. I ask her what she wants to show me but she just insists that I come without revealing any details. It eventually becomes clear that there is nothing to show me and I decline to go with her. She says that she hates me, that I'm not getting breakfast in the morning, and shuts the door quickly on her way out. I didn't know she was going to cook me breakfast in the morning but darn, now I have to fend for myself.

I see her in the kitchen less than 5 minutes later and she engages me in conversation as if she does not hate me. We have been speaking to each other in English for several days now. She says that her English isn't that great because she lacks vocabulary but she uses words like "differentiate" and "colloquial" in casual conversation. Whenever she makes a mistake, I correct her so that she may improve. She asks me why I was sleeping downstairs when she means to ask why I was asleep on the bottom bunk.

She asks me which team I was rooting for in the grand final and I said the Hawks, who ended up winning the game. She says "Yay!" and acts as if she was rooting for the victorious Hawks as well, despite the whiskers painted on her face that indicate she was rooting for the Cats. I point this out to her and she claims that someone painted that on her but she was still rooting for the Hawks. I don't believe her. She shares some gummy candy with me and I say "danke" to thank her. She asks me to pronounce it again and I rattle off all the German phrases I know, which is all of two. She likes the way that I say it, unlike the ugly way that German guys apparently do, and remarks that my accent is sexy.

I have been writing about her while she is in the room and she asks if she can read what I have been writing. I scroll back a few pages to my AFL notes and let her read those. She reads aloud through several pages and eventually gets to the part about her. She reads it and laughs when she sees that it is about her and although she doesn't like being written about, agrees that the assessment is fair. We agree to write in each other's journals at some point.

The Germans make me breakfast in the morning after all. One of the bartenders walks by and Lenny asks her to tell us what happened last night. She said that one guy was really drunk and stepped on a girl's foot. Instead of apologizing, he was really rude to her and this made a lot of the other guys mad. Friends started hitting each other and then everyone started hitting each other. The melee in the pub spilled out onto the streets and the police were called. They sprayed pepper spray everywhere, hence the people lying face down on the sidewalk in pools of water. I should have known that it was more than alcohol poisoning because there were 20 police officers and 4 squad cars out front. I am slightly disappointed that I wasn't there because I've always wanted to witness an epic bar fight but I'm pretty happy about not being hit with pepper spray.

I met up with Kirsten later on that night and met some of her Aussie guy friends. They were much nicer than Michael, who was her traveling partner in China. Michael still has a thing for Kirsten and was subtly unfriendly towards me when he sensed an attraction between Kirsten and I. We were out celebrating a 21st birthday, which isn't as big a deal here since you can drink at 18. I met some Americans who were studying abroad from a school in upstate New York. Kirsten and I spent some time talking about our favorite cheap American beers and agreed that Keystone Light is the top runner of shit beers. She said that in Asia, the one Western beer that they carry is Pabst Blue Ribbon, the undisputed worst beer in America. PBR won the blue ribbon over 100 years ago. It's safe to say that they're a little behind the times now. Kirsten is leaving on Wednesday to go home but is returning in three weeks. I'm sad to see her go and even though she's returning to Australia soon, I have no idea where I'll be at that point.

We talked about the grand final and I shared my football notes with this new crowd of Aussie guys. They get a kick out of it and I try to hide the fact that I'm very proud of myself. Aussies love to ask what you think about their country, their city, or their sports. Several of them asked me at different points what I think of Melbourne and what I think of Melbourne compared to Sydney. Out of all the major cities I've seen in my life, Melbourne is the only one that I could actually live in. Even though it's quite busy, people don't rush around like every little thing is a huge deal. It's a fairly young city and the planning is very good, with an extensive public transit system that makes it super easy to get around. It's hard to find housing but probably not too difficult to get a job. I might consider coming back here to live for awhile.

The guys and I talk about drugs and the differences between price and popularity of different drugs between Australia and America. One of the guys is going to India and is going to get 20g of hash for $20. "Pills" are quite popular here, which is how they commonly refer to ecstasy. The other traditional party drugs are too expensive. They have both been to the states and reciprocating their earlier inquiry, I ask them what they think of Americans. They give me their honest opinion and say that Americans are much more uptight. Small matters that wouldn't phase either of them are blown into a big deal. They like the amount of variety available in regards to goods but don't like the fast paced lifestyle that comes with it. One guy remarked that he had an incorrect notion of Americans after watching all the American television shows that are broadcast here but didn't elaborate as to what that notion was.

By the end of the night, I feel as if these guys are my mates. Aussies have a way of making you feel instantly comfortable and welcome. I'll be headed out of Melbourne soon and into Western Australia. I found some posts for rideshares on Gumtree, the world's version of Craigslist, and am going to meet up with someone tonight to make sure he's not crazy. You have to check out your fellow passengers before you get in a car with them for 30+ hours. I'm really excited about driving through the countryside and seeing the real Australia.