Bird Brains and Mud Wrestling

Right-O

I'm getting better! Its only been 5 days since my last post! Woot!

The day after my last post (Saturday I believe) I traveled to Bath again, but this time with the Swansea City lacrosse team, the Hawks as they like to be called. Don't ask me why they are called that though, because I haven't seen too many birds, let alone hawks, while I've been here. In fact, my first judgement about many of the birds was that they were lazy. I remember leaving my house one day to go someplace. It was around 11 am or so and it was a pretty beautiful day.and the birds seemed to be singing their very own version of my mom's up song- except they have slightly better singing voices! :) And I thought to my self, "What a bunch of lazy birds!"

That being said, I think I misjudged the birds. Last night, unable to sleep around 3:30, I decided to read, maybe to make my eyes tired or get bored or whatever. Well, that didn't work and soon (and by soon I mean three and a half hours later) I was finishing the last page of the book, "The Sun Also Rises" by Ernest Hemingway. It was a pretty good book, and I'll talk more about it later, but one thing I began to realize while I was reading at about 6:30, was that the birds were chirping. But, when I was getting on the bus at 9, not one measly note from the tiniest wren. And then, when I came back home at 11, they were chirping again like a bunch of old hens at a weekly canasta game!

I realized then that these birds weren't quite as lazy as I thought, but actually pretty smart! They get up early, which I assume is probably pretty hard because I heard the birds have a pretty crazy night life here in Europe (actually in the student village here there is a bird house called Rockin' Robin's, no one really knows how it got there but there are rumors that it is both a birdie bar and brothel... Riddle me that!) But anyway, they get up early, eat the worms like the early birds always do, and then take a nap for a few more hours until it warms up a bit and their hangovers are a little more manageable! Brilliant!

So I guess to sum it all up, our lacrosse team lost on Saturday, 2-25. It was a dreadful performance that I never want to relive again.

Sunday afternoon I started reading the book that I mentioned earlier, and I read that off and on until I finished at 7 am this morning. It was a good book, and actually a fairly autobiographical one too. I really like Hemingway's writing style. It's very simple, descriptive and has a lot of dialogue. He did this instead of having to describe the whole scene of events so the readers themselves could each have their own version of the story. One of his golden rules was, "for each complex sentence, you should have 5 simple ones." Which I personally like because it seems things can be made fairly over complicated these days, not just writing.

On Sunday night my housemates and I went on this thing called "Carnage" which is a giant pub craw that most of the university students participate in. It was themed "Barbie and Action Man." I didn't really feel like spending money on new clothes so I put on a black shirt and wore some face paint. It went fairly smoothly and when we got back to the house we cooked a pizza and went to bed.

Monday and Tuesday were Quieted.

Today (Wednesday) I had class and lacrosse practice. Class went pretty well. About as well as it could go not having slept last night anyway. I got back and took a nap for and hour and then went to the muddiest lacrosse practice I have ever had in my life. There were plenty of places that weren't as muddy, but the captains insisted that we need to practice in the mud, because next week at our game we will most likely be playing in worse mud. I find that kind of hard to believe and kind of intimidating at the same time. At any given spot you could step in the mud and not see 75 percent of your foot anymore and if the ball hit the ground, it stopped on impact. They also made this the first practice that I have been to to practice ground balls, hitting and even some weird sumo wrestling drill. Woof! I hope our game goes well and is not that muddy next week, but if it is I suppose I'll be prepared.

Really thats all I have for now. Its actually a lot longer of a post than I thought it would be. Sorry for the length without pictures, but hopefully I'll see some more picture worthy stuff soon. I think I might walk to the Mumbles on Friday if the weather is nice, so that should be good!

Will he really be going to the Mumbles Friday? Are the birds really that smart or just lazy? What the heck is going on right now?! Tune in next time to figure it out!

The Last Week and a Half

Well,

It certainly has been a while since I posted last. And for the most part, I have just been settling down into a routine. I had my first classes last week and they are going pretty well as far as classes go. I only have class two days a weeks so most of my time is taken up with lacrosse or just wandering around town.

I started playing for the city lacrosse team as well as the university team, and although it has some good players, its pretty bad - we lost our last game 17-1. One thing that is funny about the city team is the coach, who is a 40 or 50 year old American and simply called "Coach" (I don't know his real name). He doesn't travel with the team and, as far as I've seen, doesn't play in the second half. He's a weird guy I suppose. But I think I'll be traveling with the team to Portsmouth and South Hampton for a double header in an upcoming weekend and hopefully get some sightseeing in while I'm there.

I also started planning my month long spring break trip. So far the only thing set in stone is a cruise I'll be taking from Lisbon, Portugal to Venice, Italy. The cruise starts on April 4th and we'll stop in Gibraltar; Cartegena, Spain; Valleta, Malta; Split, Croatia; and ending in Venice on the  12th. We're planning on getting to Lisbon a day or two early to check it out before we get on our way.

I'll try to post more often now, especially now that I know what my schedule looks like and what not. You can also skype with me- I figured out how to do it. I think you can just search Dylan Gove but otherwise my skype name is dylan.gove and i have a little cartoon character as my picture.

Stay safe and I'll talk to you soon.