Day 1 in Samoa

Day 1 in Samoa
We finally arrived in Samoa after a very entertaining plane trip sitting next to duke and brownie most the way. It took about 5 hours to get here on Virgin blue and by the end of the trip I was getting pretty hungry because you have to buy your own food so I just had a protein bar and I thought a bit of starvation on the way over would be ok for losing weight.
Samoa is exactly 19 hours behind Australia and so we arrived into Apia at midnight local time. Upon arrival we were hit by the humidity as well as locals giving us some flower necklaces. Callaway=, Brownie and I got a good photo of us in our flowers. We then caught the bus to our hotel and it took about 30 minutes and along the way I saw about 20 massive churches. I figured out straight away that Samoans must be very religious because the guys cd on the bus had ‘Jesus take the wheel,” and other Christian songs and I also thought they were very Christian for the fact that the judo comp is on fri and sat and on Sunday morning there is no training camp obviously due to the locals being at Church.
I’m lucky enough to be rooming with brownie which is cool because we always have a stack of fun but always manage to keep enough headspace to concentrate at training on why we are here and to train hard. Many people when they are away sit in their rooms all day stressing and thinking about making weight and competing. After a few days these people are usually mentally fried and sick of judo and everything that’s come with it like training dieting weighing in warming up etc.
But Brownie and I are very experienced now and know when to concentrate on judo and when to forget about it.
Due to the fact that we arrived so late at night we didn’t end up getting to sleep until around 3am. I was soon up at 630am with one of the Aussies playing music very loudly through the paper thin walls. I believe the culprit was Mark Anthony but I am yet to approach him about him not doing it tomorrow. 
Today we didn’t really get up to too much. We trained this morning for a hard hour (which is great especially after the plane trip.) It’s good to do a few good hard practices before tapering off a day or two before the competition depending on how much weight I have to lose etc. After the session this morning I was only 2.2kg over which is pretty good even though I sweated a stack of weight I was pretty hydrated so I am pretty confident of making pretty easy.
There are many teams entered in this comp which is rightly so due to the fact that it’s a world ranking tournament. Teams from USA, Canada, Czech, Russia, Brazil, china and Japan all have teams as well as all the Oceania countries as well. I’m pretty excited to see who I draw and am keen to win a few fights and get a medal.
Today Brownie and I went and did some shopping and scout the area and this place is a massive dive. The ‘postcard’ beaches are all on the other side of the island which was the part that got hit by the Tsunami so apparently they are still a bit dirty. We will try to get a few guys together and catch a taxi over there and have a look anyway. It would be an eye opener to see what the beaches look like and the after effects of the Tsunami.
We found a Maccas which was pretty sweet and we bought a thing called a Coke float. It just a spider (coke and ice cream) but it was good and drinking that plus the heat I wasn’t hungry for hours.
The local people here are pretty nice and everyone says hi to you when you walk along the street. At the place we are staying all the workers are really nice and I guess they have to be at the moment because if we were not here (40 Aussies) there would probably only be another 10 tourists here and they probably wouldn’t have jobs. Already looking around the local community you can see that any extra money they get would help them so so much. After talking to 2 taxi drivers it seems that this country absolutely loves Rugby union and I have seen 2 guys walking round in Tuggeranong Vikings rugby union shirts (I have no idea where they got them from.)
I don’t think we have much time to have a look around the island due to the training camp but hopefully we get half a day to see at least a little bit of the nice aspects of Samoa.
The weather is not too awesome it’s very very humid and it’s been overcast all day. The internet here is very expensive so it’s hard to get on the internet so I will only write small emails to people or just write stuff up on here.

Catch you soon
Matt