volleyball tales
Our introduction to beach volleyball here started with some brutal days in early August. When it is over 30 degrees, 90% humidity and you haven’t played on sand for way too many years it makes it pretty damn tough. But FUN so much fun. I had forgotten just how fun it is and how much I love it. Throwing yourself around on sand, while enjoying sunny days and hanging with your volleyball mates is the best. Since we arrived we have tried to get down to Discovery Bay as many weekends as we could for a game. At first we were playing with the big mixed group that plays every Saturday afternoon, but I honestly don’t really enjoy playing on the mens net and we soon found that there was a core group of 4 girls turning up so we kinda formed a breakaway group and now just arrange our own sessions, still trying to play most weekends. A few of the better guys have done the same thing and those guys are mostly the other-halves of our girls group so we try and coordinate our sessions and generally spend a good few hours all down at the beach together when it works out. Definitely not how I had imagined spending weekends here but so nice to be back into it.
Out of all this came an idea to enter in the local HK beach volleyball open tournament with the Swiss girl that originally invited us along. After a hilarious entry process including sending 3 cheques by post, being unable to read any of the forms we had to fill in and a last minute cancelled players meeting on a Tuesday night 2 weeks before the first game… it began. It had the most ridiculous format of tournament I have ever played in: pools of 4, with top 2 going to a round of 16 then single elim through to finals, sounds fine right … until you hear it was spread out over 5 different weekends! For us it was probably good in some ways as neither of us had the fitness to do all that in a one or two day tournament. We got lucky and all our pool games were on one day which saved us a couple of weekends, the pool games were reasonably low level and we won pretty comfortably despite playing in really cold wind and rain. It was nice to meet a bunch of the local players and they were all really nice and welcoming and seemed really excited to have us in the tournament, they even invited us to join them for lunch at a very local restaurant, so we got to learn about some random local dishes (most memorable was big slices of pork in a tomatoey type sauce with cheese baked on top, not what I think of when I think of Chinese type food, probably that British influence!).
Our round of 16 game a week later would have been in beautiful sunshine… if our opposition had turned up! Beach volleyball clearly plays second fiddle to indoor here and that game clashed with a club game which they decided to go to instead. So whilst 90mins of travel time to play one game would have been kinda annoying, not even getting to play was super sad, especially as it was sunny! At least there was a sandcastle competition on that we got to check out. Following week was our quarter final against the team that ended up winning the thing, they were good, too good for us that day, so that was our HK open tournament over with a 5th place. There were lots of no shows so the time schedule in general was super loose, the tournament is played on a beach in the middle of nowhere and in Autumn/Winter so the beaches are very quiet, not quite the atmosphere of a normal tournament that is for sure! Although I wouldn’t want to play a tournament in the middle of summer either with the temperatures you get. All in all it was an interesting experience and good to see what it is like here but not sure if we will play in any more of them.
Since then we have been back to our normal weekend games when we can, a few days before Christmas and then today again we played in gorgeous 25 degrees and sunny (but not humid), just perfect beach weather. When you think about the temps in Switzerland right now, (minus something) or how it usually is in NZ in the middle of winter, we have a lot to be grateful to be cranking out the bikinis and sunscreen and able to play beach :)
