Rugby in Alexandria

For the first time in my life I decided to strap on some rugby boots (well, running shoes actually) and head out to play the hard-hitting, unpadded, and gentlemanly sport of rugby. All in Arabic, of course.

Two of the other students on the program play rugby in college, and one of them had gotten in contact with the coach of the club rugby team at the university. I decided to tag along with them to the first practice more out of a desire to find a fun team sport to play here than because of my love for rugby - in reality I didn't even know that forward passes were illegal until practice started.

Despite my lack of knowledge about the rules and the difficulty of trying to learn a new sport exclusively in Arabic, practices have been quite fun so far. We practice three times a week and have games on Fridays (the first one is later this week, إن شاء الله God willing). The sport itself and practices in general are quite intense. Lots of conditioning and lots of hitting, but also a great deal of strategy, which I am slowly picking up more by watching than by listening. Also, the coach is quite a character. In what I think is a perfect example of the Napoleon complex, our 5'4" coach packs a lot of punch and is not afraid to use it (sometimes literally with the Egyptian players) if he is not happy. But he is also a very nice guy who is bending over backwards to teach us, a group of rookies, about the game and be patient when we don't understand basic aspects of it.

And we also have some opportunities to practice our Arabic. For example, we can all now count very quickly in Arabic because we have to shout out the count for each stretch during our warmups. My sports vocabulary is expanding, too (run, catch, jump, etc.) as a result of trying to understand where to go and what to do on the field. None of us are sure if we are going to actually play in the games, but at the very least I love the opportunity to get out and run around during practice. We've also had a chance to get to know some of the guys on the team, but I will save insights from that for another post.