IASAS Exchange

Being part of an international school means that our "district" of schools is other international schools. Since it's not all that convenient to travel to other countries for games, the Interscholastic Association of Southeast Asian schools plans 3 meets a year where they schools exchange athletes to compete in weekend tournaments. Our first IASAS exchange since the kids have been in high school was rugby and we were pretty excited to be involved. Not as players, but as hosts and part of the Booster Club. All of the students are hosted in homes and we got two 11th grade boys from Taipei American School.

I was busy at school helping to welcome the visiting parents and students through the Booster Club. We sold lots of merchandise and food and drinks. Ironically, this tent was set up on the site of our old store and is almost as big!

I was proud that we got our new signs installed on the real store just before the exchange.

The tournament itself was three days...the first two were round robins and the last day was the playoffs. JIS was eliminated early with tons of injuries so we were thrilled to watch our Taipei boys take on Singapore in the finals. The Taipei girls won the championship just before this game so the boys were pumped with excitement as they took the field.

This was my first time really watching rubgy and it's a brutal sport. These are tough kids and the Taipei boys played their hearts out and brought home the championship for the first time.

One of our boys, Max, was able to celebrate with his parents.

Our other boy, Aidan, made the winning goal and was about the happiest kid I've ever seen!

They had an award ceremony and missed dinner because they were too excited to eat. By the time they got to our house they were starving and this is what two hungry rugby players eat, in case you were curious. They didn't quite finish the second pizza or the third burger, but they polished off nearly everything.

It was a great experience to host the boys for 4 days. They were really polite and friendly kids and it was fun to hear about life and school in Taipei for them. Oh, and turns out Max broke his hand during the first game and continued playing on it all weekend. He even scored in the final game with one good hand! Amazing kids.

 

On the Course

We've really enjoyed golfing on the weekends but Alex has started playing more tennis and generally doesn't join us anymore. Sometimes our Swedish friend Erik will be our fourth and he's always a lot of fun.

The course is a nice play to enjoy a sunset because it's about the only open sky we can see around here!

And the full moon from the 19th hole was memorable one night as well.

Some of the golf course kitties don't have the best manners!

Thankfully we did not see this happen, but I believe it now when the golf cart screens warn you that they won't stop flying balls.

Any day we see monitor lizards (naga kecil or biawa here), it's always a good day! This one was extra lucky with two big boys.

Ben loves to play the game of "how close can I park?" and I'd say not much closer.

I always figured it would be one of the boys that got a cart stuck first, but Matt was the big winner!!