Momotachi and the Sunshine Band go all the way

Weeee, I had a GREAT weekend. Plenty of running around, plenty of alcohol and plenty of happy people to drink it with...

My touch team, pictured here, was called Momotachi and the Sunshine Band. Our uniform consisted of Tshirts with various kanji on them (joyful, bonds, heal, push, vague...) purchased at the China town in Kobe. We ended up splitting the Okayama crew into 2 teams because Yamaguchi never rocked up and that left the competition with only 3 teams. Hiroshima was the other team, they were also divided into 2 so it was a very intimate little comp. We played from 12-5, 20 minute games. The field was covered in deer shit of course. Miyajima has more deer than you can poke a stick at (quite literally, if you don't keep beating them away with sticks they will eat anything you leave alone for longer than a minute). But it was grass of sorts and falling over wasn't catastrophic. The rules were that if a girl scored it was worth 2 points. The holistic drive that Matt taught us came in very handy and I scored a few tries by running through massive gaps created by it. There were a few domestics going on within the team, but luckily, being a newby, I had nothing to do with them and was totally unaffected by it all. The standard of play was great, the Japs on the other team were hella tactical but we had top notch defence. There seemed to be a good mix of people who knew what they were doing and people who were willing to listen to those who knew what they were doing. No ball hogs, only one whinger but luckily they tended to keep to the sidelines anyway.

Saturday night we had a BBQ down by the "beach" and fought deer away from our meat. Sunday morning we got up again for some running around and just played some scratch matches before heading back home. Our breakfast consisted of whatever food was left over from the night before but the other team had Japanese people in it who got up and actually cooked food. Scrambled eggs and miso soup and rice and stuff. Sad to say, but it was an example of what usually happens when Japs travel with Westerners; the Japs ended up doing all the catering and cleaning and organising and the gaijin just waltzed in in time to eat and run off again. Half of me feels embarassed by it, but the other half thinks that if left to themselves, the westerners probably wouldn't actually want a cooked breakfast anyway and would be happy doing what we did and making dodgy sandwiches. I caught a lift in a car and discovered exactly how expensive it is to use the freeways here. 2900yen for about 120km. No way you could afford to use the freeway without someone to share the cost with. I had caught the train down on Friday night which was only slightly more expensive and took exactly 2 hours whereas the car trip was about 3.

Anyway, I forgot to say the most exciting thing. WE WON! Yeah, Momotachi won the trophy, which is pretty small so you might have to squint to make it out in the photo here. I don't know who actually took the trophy home, oh, I will put a close up here for youse all!

We were going to drink out of it, but frankly it wasn't affording us the volume we felt we needed for celebratory drinks...