Footy

We met up with a few Accenture folks on Sunday to go to an Australian rules football game, more commonly referred to as Footy. The game was downtown at the Telstra Dome and featured the Geelong Cats vs the Western Bulldogs. It seems that almost everyone in the state of Victoria is very passionate about footy (the streets and trams are crammed on game days with decorated fans) and it is easy to find rivalries as almost all towns and suburbs have their own teams. Unfortunately Port Melbourne does not have its own team for us to support, so at this time we are still undecided as to which team we will provide our loyalty. The different teams also have clubs that people can become members of to further support their colors.

Footy is an interesting sport that seems to share some similarities with soccer, rugy, basketball, and even volleyball in a small part. It's quite hard to understand just watching it, but fortunately we had an Australian along who was able to explain the rules and answer most of our questions. This particular game was good for the first half, but after that the Bulldogs had it in the bag.

We, of course, were also in it for the food and drink. Traditional footy fare includes hot meat pies and beers. As we had not yet tried a meat pie, we were quite excited to see what all the fuss was about...it was basically a ground beef and mutton pot pie, what more can you say? Not too bad, but we decided we won't be feasting on pies too often during our stay!

Check out flickr for more photos from the game.

Go Team!