Kyoto rugby and the return of Pink the back

I have arrived in Japan! And today I was picked up from my dorm at 8:30am by two Japanese women (Shima, who drove, and Umi, who translated) to go play RUGBY.

We drove across the city (maneuvering streets that I didn't believe that cars could go down and still don't believe cars can go down, even though I was in a car at the time I was on them), ending up at what appeared to be a high school (Umi didn't know, because apparently they change fields every practice, with Shima sending out an email 2 or 3 days ahead of time with directions).

And I guess I shouldn't call it a "field" - it was a big area covered in... sand? I thought that was really, really strange, but when I pointed it out to Umi and said our fields back home were all grass, she looked impressed and explained that around here only the very good schools have grass fields.

Practice itself was a bit of an adventure. Umi and one other girl, Haruka, kind of spoke English, but no one else did, so I mostly hung back and watched to figure out what was going on. The team's ball handling is very good, and after we spent the whole first hour or so of practice doing purely ball handling drills, I figured out why.

We then did some contact drills, which were run very... interestingly. I somehow ended up in the group that didn't do more than very basic contact (just one-man rucking, no mauls, no going down, etc.), and the coaches apparently didn't care if people just stepped out of the drill to hang out for awhile. Because I was the foreigner and apparently very interesting, people kept stopping me and talking to me while I looked wistfully over their shoulders at the rucking going on the background. But it was pretty cool, and I definitely will be improving my Japanese with all that practice.

One interesting "oh hay gaijin!!!" moment was when one girl with kind of a rebel look introducing herself (forgot her name, though), declaring us friends ("Furendsu!"), and then standing up in my personal space to point out how long my legs were and how tall I was. Another was me explaining to two girls, Kira and Azu, that I had a girlfriend - no not a woman friend - no not a boyfriend - no not a girlfriend which is the same as a friend - hey what? Apparently rugby teams in Japan are NOT the same bastion of lesbianism as they are in the US.

Then we split into backs and forwards, and I was told to be a back. Furthermore, I was put into the position of fullback. For those of you following along at home, I haven't played as a back since last fall season, and even then I was primarily a wing and only occasionally subbed in as fullback. Add to that the fact that we were running multi-phase plays, when AUWRFC organizes only one-phase plays, and I was way confused. The coach kept explaining to me in Japanese, and even though the position names are the same and I understood words like "enter" and "right" and "left," it took a couple of tries and eventually the coach just running along after me and pushing me into place before I understood.

But, apparently the team has a game the last Sunday of April, and not enough of the team can make it - so I'll be playing in a game for them in just a month!!!