First Days Down Under

G’day mates!

Been down in Brisbane for a few days now so I thought I would let everybody know how the first few days are going.

My flight got in on Monday morning at about 7 AM Brisbane time after a full 24 hours of traveling. The flights weren’t too bad, except on the flight from LA to Brisbane only one side of my earphones would work while watching movies. That was annoying! My coach picked me up from the airport and we went back the house he rents on an island just off mainland Australia. The island and his house are gorgeous, it’s like being on spring break, but for 8 months and with a little bit of soccer thrown in. The first day here all I did was sit outside and read and was able to get a little jog and swim in their pool. I was surprised at how good I felt while jogging, other than sweating after about 2 minutes from the heat.

However, that all changed on my second day... I woke up and was feeling a little bit woozy but didn’t think much of it. I got up and ate breakfast but I kept feeling dizzy so I decided to try to go back to sleep and see if it went away with some more rest. No luck. I couldn’t fall asleep and my stomach was starting to bother me. I ended up reading for a couple of hours, although I couldn’t roll onto my left side because my vision would go out of focus and I would get dizzy. I took some airborne, but that only made me throw up. (To put in perspective how awful I felt, I haven’t thrown up in over 10 years. Serious) So I ended up spending the entire day in bed, on my right side, and finished one of my books by reading about 600 pages of it that day. What made this even more frustrating was that we had a preseason game and my coach wanted to give me some playing time to get my lungs opened up. Nothing like being called a pathetic Yank on your second day!

I woke up Wednesday morning and felt 100% better. I was really happy about that because we had another preseason game that night. I spent the morning reading outside and sitting in the pool. In the afternoon I went and hung out with one of my buddies that plays on the team here, Drew Jeskey. We hung out by his apartment close to the city of Brisbane. He lives by their biggest mall called Chermside so we went and checked that out and met up with his girlfriend at the movie theatre she works at. They are trying to get me a job over there because it is an easy job and all the people who work there are around our age and cool people. After hanging out for a while we headed to our preseason game. The game didn’t end up kicking off until about 9:30 which was frustrating because I was so excited to play. I ended up going the full 90 minutes and felt pretty good until about the 80^th minute when my legs started to fade. I played well and fit in with all of the lads, who were all really laid back. We won our game 2-1 and advanced to the final of the tournament where we will play Rochedale, one of our rivals and the team that won the league last year.

The weather has been great. Around 75 all 3 days and slightly overcast, a break from the 90 degree weather they had been having before I got here. Australia looks just like Florida. But,I can’t wait to be able to get out and see all their unique things Australia has to offer. However, now that the Bulls game I have been watching is finishing up I need to get out to the pool and spend some time working on my tan!