Mike Karas, Jovan Love, Jaye Macumber, Arnold Quirong & Victor Cinco watching an AFL game at the MCG

Victor & Arnold's Blog
Updates from Victor Vinco & Arnold Quirong's time in Australia

1st June 2011
Now that we have lived here for a while, we have gotten used to living here. Footy is a big part of our stay here, sometimes when we find ourselves sitting on the couch watching Foxtel all day we would always say I wish we have a game today. We’ve watched a few footy games live at the MCG, thanks to Cameron Voss for getting us tickets. The atmosphere is amazing and apparently every tackle is a holding the ball according to the crowd. Ahaha! During the footy season, we noticed that we lose by a whole lot but we’ve been improving a whole lot as players to contribute to the team.. We’ve improved our ability to mark and kick the ball, to handpass, to tackle, playing our position if it's forward, midfield or backline and etc. I think it is safe to say that we have improved our ability to play footy. We love living in Australia and we especially love living with Nick Pinto. He seems like a normal man during the week but he’s a different one once AFL footy is on. He yells at the TV, throws things, and yells some more. It is almost entertaining watching the footy. A few days ago we did some volunteer work for the Salvation Army collecting money for 1 hour around Hampton Street and South Rd. In the end we were rewarded with 2 free Big Mac coupons and some orange juice... we saw the coupons just sitting in the back of Freddy’s car, so more like 10 free Big Mac coupons... Sorry Freddy... we're poor!

4th March 2011
The long yellow brick road to the land of oz!
I guess you can call it that... it wasn’t as easy as going to expedia.ca with your credit card and choose a flight and go. There was much more to that and this opportunity would not of happened without the help of Jaye Macumber... the man just doesn’t stop working for us! If he wasn’t singing to his pregnant wife's belly or forgetting to take his arthritis pills - he would be talking to guys over in Australia, organizing where we're staying, who is taking us where and the list goes on. He did all this in exchange for diaper changes to his new baby girl Eva... what a weird bloke!
Righto!
About the flight... it was bloody long... that's all we can say.
Once we arrived in Australia we were greeted with hot weather and cars that drive on the other side of the road and the other side of the car. It was so confusing to cross the street because we would always look one way and see that the road is clear, then as we're crossing all we hear is a car's horn and screeching tires because we looked the wrong way. Now we put what we learned from grade 1 into use and look both ways before we cross the street.
Aussie food is delicious! We tried pretty much everything and it did not disappoint! The only disappointment we had was with McDonalds and it was that the medium size drinks are equivalent to a small in Canada... yes we know how you feel and you may be thinking that its not that bad, you can just get refills – but no they don’t have refills... yes it's sad.... very sad.
After eating all that we had our first footy training with the Hampton Rovers FC, we met with the coaching staff and the players and they welcomed us to the Rovers family with open arms. And then training started... the drills seemed to be more advanced and intense; after an hour of drills we were feeling a bit fatigue and we thought that it was the end of practice, but no, as a team we had to run around the perimeter of the field for 2 minutes as hard as we can then after that we have a minute of rest then repeat 7 times. Didn’t sound that bad when Barney (senior coach) explained it but it was pretty bad... a little part of us died that day.