Australian sports

Lessons Learned

/ chrismoorman13 / 1 Comment

So when I started on this journey, I threw up the obligatory WordPress site and decided to be a diligent blogger of the trip. So far I’ve had 19 posts in 40 days, and while that isn’t amazing, I’m not totally ashamed at my laziness either.

However, I’d never really been a blogger before this, so it has been interesting to see what works and what doesn’t.

Lesson 1: People go goddamned bananas for any post involving food.

I started to notice this early, when I was posting pictures of the seafood feasts from Hamilton Island. Quite frankly yes, it was one of the more unbelievable meals I’d ever had both in terms of Nick’s cooking ability and the preposterous freshness of the food.

Mudcrab in Shanghai Sauce

The scenery didn’t leave a sour taste in my mouth either.

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People went bonkers over the food. I got more comments and emails about that that just about anything else I’d posted about from Australia. People wanting recipes, more pictures, the whole 9 yards, so I decided to be a little more accommodating here in Hoi An, by taking several cooking classes at local restaurants.

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I was pretty excited to expand my cooking horizon, but Lord, people love reading blog posts about food they aren’t eating. Crazy to me but there’s something about food porn that reminds me of crack fiends. Guess I need to sprinkle a little more around.

Lesson 2: If there is water in a picture, everyone likes it better.

The whole time we were in Australia, I think that we were a maximum of 5km from a beach of some sort. Good country Australia, but they don’t get off the coasts much.

The Lookout

The Lookout

People seem to love the pictures of water, wherever it is. Murky river in a rice paddy outside of Hanoi? Yep, I’ll like that. I don’t get it, but give the people what they want. The Conquest hasn’t been properly dry since I landed here in Vietnam anyway.

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Lesson 3: If it ain’t on the front page, people aren’t fooling with it.

The blog posts on a daily basis are half me getting things down so that I remember them, and half so that other people can take 10 minutes at their computer to zone out and imagine being somewhere else. I’m glad that it is a symbiotic relationship from that perspective.

However, the whole point of the life transition was to work into more serious writing. The short stories on the site are really what I’m trying to develop more of (my current effort on one about the Alligator Man is coming…someday…I think.) People don’t tend to wander around on the ancillary pages though.

I guess that is my shameless plug to get people to read some of the short stories. There’s the link. Click it. I dare you.

Hopefully more will be coming soon.

Until then, food porn and water shots. The bread and circuses of the blogosphere.

Foreign Sport in Foreign Lands

/ chrismoorman13 / 1 Comment

And now more dispatches from the front lines.

The weather in Perth hasn’t been fantastic for us, but we’ve been making due. Saturday it was a bit on the drizzly, overcast side of things, so it became an Australian sports primer of a day.

I’m going to state for the record, that I am now firmly sympathetic to women who learn about sports later in life. Asking the average American male when he learned about football or basketball is largely like asking when he learned to walk. “Hell I dunno, longer than I can remember.” Sports ends up being a second language, and most guys really can’t understand how anyone doesn’t understand these “simple” games. There are comedic monologues, constant blog posts and a whole cottage industry within humor related to teaching a girl how to be a sports fan.

Try picking up a foreign sport that you’ve never watched a minute in your life at 26 and then get back to me.

Instead of battling weather, Benny and I grabbed some food and watched both AFL (Aussie Rules Football) and international 20/20 Cricket.

Benny has been training me over the past few years on footy, which is a rugby-esque game with fewer rules. The long and short of the game is that two teams of 9 men compete to kick an oblong leather ball through a set of uprights extending upwards from the ground. There are no pads, tackling is constant, and the rules on illegal hits are more based on the “sniff test” than some canonical law. It is a fun game to watch, and while strategy takes a while to understand, the rules are largely simple enough that most people will have a decent grasp by the end of their first 4 period (20 minute/period) game.

Cricket on the other hand is a convoluted morass of rules, tradition and abject jackassery that requires 2 whiteboards, a scale replica, and a first year law textbook to explain. Some forms of cricket go on until one side concedes (this could take literally 5 days) while others have a pitch count for expediency (until the bowler (pitcher) rolls a non-ball, the definition of which has more loopholes than American corporate tax law.)

Cricket is essentially a game which resembles baseball in the most general of senses, but with an esteemed rulemaking assembly of demon monkey trial lawyers. After watching about 2 hours of the Australia/West Indies 20/20 Match, I now have a reasonable idea of the vocabulary/scoring but will still be surprised every 15 minutes as something completely inexplicable elicits a round of golf claps from the crowd, commands the highest announcer praise in British commentary “OH HO, good form there,” and causes the nearest Australian to pour another large drink while shouting about an obscure rule that he is either unwilling or unable to divulge to me.

To all the women who learned about sports later in life. You have my sympathy.

More to come after we attend a polo match on Saturday. I’m told it involves heavy drinking while wearing bowler hats in the presence of ponies. It all sounds terribly exciting.