Saturday, September 29, 2007

Today was the "Superbowl" in the Australian Football League (AFL). Being so close to Australia and because 4 of our POC staff are from Australia we all took time out to celebrate the big day.

Our lunch was traditional AFL game food--meat pies with chips (i.e. fries). The meat pies are similar to our American pot pies only without the vegetables; ours were mostly ground beef with a bit of sauce. You eat them topped with "tomato sauce" (i.e. ketchup) by picking them up with your hands.

The game is an interesting combination of football, basketball, soccer and volleyball! The guys do a lot of running and kicking like soccer but every so often you have to either bounce the ball (like basketball) or pass the ball (with the kind of uderhanded serve/punt that is used in volleyball) and like in American football you can tackle people on the other team to keep them from catching the ball (without the protective padding that is used in American football). There are 4 posts on each end of the field. If the ball goes between the two middle posts the team scores 6 points, if it goes between the two outter posts the team gets one point. It's quite an exciting game.

As in our Superbowl, we all thought that the commercials were actually worth watching but for very different reasons...we students hadn't watched any Papua New Guinea TV yet--and the commercials really are something else. Many are so very cheesy, we had some good laughs.

Final score? 163 to 44 !!

No comments: