Chapter 39 - State of Origin

In which our hero receives more education in the sports department ...

So. There's this thing called State of Origin. It's a three game rugby tournament between Queensland (QLD) and New South Wales (NSW). Queensland wears maroon, NSW wears blue. The teams are made up of Rugby League players, and they're not based on their state of birth, but on whichever state they began their career in. Hence "State of Origin".

The first game was on the Wednesday of study week, and I got invited to join some friends that were doing a sort of dessert crawl thingie. Basically we went to one house, had some sweet snacks and beverages. There were coloured cake pops, dyed lemonade (essentially Sprite), brownies, and cupcakes.

Mmmm... blue cake pop ...

I also painted my nails blue rather than studying that afternoon. We then moved to a second house for the first half of the game and a magical ice cream/frozen yoghurt strawberry raspberry cake thing, then to a third house for sticky date pudding with caramel sauce and the second half of the game. It was really fun.

Some of the gang watching the second half. You can see the distribution of blues and maroons. I apologise for the quality of the picture. My phone doesn't have flash.

I had decided to wear mostly blue, with a red t-shirt, so that I wasn't completely choosing sides. But before the game started I decided to commit to supporting The Blues. I wasn't the only one in the group wearing blue, which sort of boosted my confidence. I had other reasons too. The main justification is that the first time I ever landed in this strange and upside-down country it was in Sydney, which is in NSW. The second reason is that blue is the best colour. Everyone knows that. Anyone who says otherwise is simply in denial. The other sub reasons are things like that I don't actually own anything maroon, and it's very easy to wear blue as most of my t-shirt collection is blue. Also, Josh, my lab partner, who originates from NSW, told me I had to wear blue. So there it is. And the blues won.

Anyway. The game looked a bit like this:

Except that the other team was maroon, not yellow. Apparently the Blues haven't won the series for seven years. Some of the maroons supporters in the group were giving the blues a hard time, going on about how the last time the Blues won iPhones weren't a thing, and so-and-so was the prime minister, and what not. It was all in good fun, though, especially because the Blues won that game.

The first game took place in Sydney. The second game was just a week and a half ago in Brisbane, and the Maroons won easily. Like the Canadian Women's Hockey Team vs. just about anyone else. I was super tired and practically falling asleep by the end. I think that was the day I'd been out with Wen Ying to plan our expedition, and I'd stayed up too late the night before and gotten up too early.

The day after the first game I was wearing an orange t-shirt, and #1 and #2 were as well because it was orange t-shirt day at their school, and #3 happened to be wearing something orange-ish as well. Sitting around the dinner table the kids were asking me where I'd been the night before, and why my nails were blue, and I was explaining about State of Origin, and #2 said "State of Oranges?", and then we had some fun jokes about how we were all playing in the State of Oranges, and it's a really confusing game because you can't tell which team is which because everyone's wearing orange. Even the players can't tell each other apart. It was good fun.