Left Minded

After spending a few days living in my coach’s house I have moved into what will be my permanent residence in a close suburb of Brisbane. Moving into the house by myself has required me confront a fear of mine quicker than I had anticipated. Driving in the LEFT lane.

Without so much as a crash course to prepare myself I had to drive from my coach’s house into Brisbane to stay with my buddy Drew, who then brought me out to my house in Capalaba after spending a night with him. I swore that driving in the left lane would be difficult to get used to, and I’m not saying that it isn’t weird, but it is much more difficult to drive into oncoming traffic than one might think.

Really it isn’t so much the actual act of driving in the left lane that is difficult. The trick is using your turn signal, operating your windshield wipers, and shifting into gear all with the opposite hand that is hard to grasp at first. Thank god my car is automatic so I didn’t have to learn to shift with my left hand as opposed to my right. After a few days of driving I think that I have finally gotten used to driving in the wrong lane. However, walking on their sidewalks is a completely different story. It took me almost the entire week I have been here before I realized that their malls and sidewalks are no busier than Chicago, but I was completely ignorant that Australians also walk on the left. They stay to the left in everything they do; driving, walking, biking. Even their escalators are on the left side. It was mind boggling when I first realized it.

Anyways, I’ll move away from my mundane observations about the nuances of their culture and move onto some football. We played in the Silver Boot final on Sunday against one of our rivals Rochedale. To give some background on our games, they are one of the traditional powers and ran away with our league last year, but over the past three years Wolves has not lost to them in 12 games, beating them in 10. Needless to say they don’t like us very much. We won the game 3-2, scoring with 4 minutes left in the second overtime period. There were also 3 (2 for them 1 for us) red cards in the game and 2 pk’s (1 each). (This is a pre season match let me remind you, so very feisty) I was fortunate enough to be baptized into this rivalry by falling victim to their final red card offense. If you go to Paulytv.com.au the game highlights should be the first video available. Just ignore the amount of times I try to hand Rochedale a goal.

I am trying to work on getting some good pictures to show everyone but I'm running into 2 problems. First, I can't upload any of the pictures I have taken for the blog because the internet I am using is too slow. Second, it has been too cloudy to take really good pictures, even though I went out to the ocean this morning for sunrise the pictures didn't turn out. I'll keep trying and hopefully have both of these problems fixed soon.