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Aussie Rules Football and the Outback tomorrow

Today was a pretty sweet day. We went to an Aussie Rules Football game at the Telstra Dome. The St. Kilda Saints were playing the North Melbourne Kangaroos. From what I've been told by asking locals about the game, the greater Melbourne area has something like ten teams in the league, most of them from suburbs. St. Kilda and North Melbourne are two of those suburbs. When we were approaching the stadium it was obvious that the majority of the crowd were St. Kilda supporters, wearing their black and red and singing the "When Saint's Go Marching In" song (..."oh how I want to be in St. Kilda, when the Saints go marching in"...) so we chose to be Kangaroos fans. We bought blue and white hats and scarves and were all set. We scalped some tickets and we were in. We found the right guy apparently because our tickets were very cheap and our seats were excellent.

So of course neither of us really knew anything about the game or the rules, but I had watched a game last night on TV and I think I understood the basic rules after that. The most obvious thing you'll notice when first walking into the stadium is that the field is oval. The next thing you'll notice is the four goal posts. You can see both here:

They fought the good fight, but the Roos suffered a tough loss. It was great despite that though. We were told by the people sitting behind us (who were very nice and helped explain the rules once we told them we were from the States and that this was our first game) that a tradition at these games was to eat a Four'N Twenty meat pie. It is what it is: meat and gravy inside a flaky pastry. Very British.

Here's a picture of Melbourne behind the hoards of people leaving the game.

And here's a picture of a pretty sweet looking couple of very old buildings in Melbourne.

We leave for the Australian Outback early tomorrow morning. As is the common theme on this trip, I'm very excited. Cross your fingers and hope some venomous plant doesn't kill me.

Posted by Mike at May 28, 2006 03:52 AM