Romania - Skåne Old Boys Rugby - Part 3 - Rugby! (3-6 June)

Saturday afternoon was the main feature (or secondary feature after the cheap beer...) the Skåne Old Boys rugby games.

We played a younger Romanian team first and then the Romanian Draculas Old Boys Team.

First views of the park

Entry to the sports complex

The field

Getting ready for warm-up

Dracula Old Boys

The trophy

The weather was originally set to be over 30 degrees and 90% humidity.  It was still fairly humid but overcast so the temperature didn't get too bad.  The Old Boys play slightly different rules - uncontested scrums and line-outs and no counter-rucking.  They also have colour-coded shorts which allows older players to play without full impact - red shorts mean that a player can be held but not fully tackled and white shorts mean that the player is only allowed to be touched and not tackled.

There are over 300 photos of the game, but I've only put up ones showing me - mostly because I'm narcissistic but also because I didn't want to put up too many pics of other players without permission.

The boys played really well, unfortunately the younger guys managed to beat us in the end with their younger legs finding overlaps on the wing.  The Draculas game was much closer but it was our second game of the day and we went down by a try.

Tackle

Maul vs Draculas-  Im the set of legs in the middle (with the Canterbury boots)

The line-up vs Romanians

The Line-up vs the Draculas

The teams

Me looking very fit...

Puplett 22

Straightening up the nose again..

Crouch... Bind... (uncontested scrum - hence why we are so high)

Line-Up

After the games we had a BBQ and plenty of beer. We headed back to the hotel around 1:30am.

Romania - Skåne Old Boys Rugby - Part 2 - Walking Tour of Bucharest (3-6 June)

The next day I started a little slowly, sleeping in until about 9, before heading down for a buffet breakfast.  Then we decided to go for a walking tour around Bucharest with a couple of my team mates.

Here's some of the sights of Bucharest:

Life and Death shrines at a church

EU building

Quite an impressive building

The church

An interesting wiring job - seen all around Romania

An old Communist era block of flats

Academy of Economic Studies

Not sure what this sign is - I think its a school zone.  There were some interesting suggestions on my facebook page

Some very interesting scaffolding outside a church

More scaffolding

The view from my hotel window

We came across the Romanian Athenaeum, a concert hall in the centre of Bucharest. It was opened in 1888 and is the home of the George Enescu (a famous composer) Philharmonic.

The Atheneul Roman (Romanian Athenaeum)

The dome

The front

 

Some more shots of Bucharest central:

The art museum

Carol I Royal Foundation Palace

The base of the statue

King Carol I

The ornate doors to the Central University Library

This next building was pretty interesting:

A glass building inside an old shell

Through the window you can see that the glass building fills the whole inside

The rear of the building

It turns out that the shell was the Headquarters of the Union of Romanian Architects. It was destroyed during the revolution in 1989.  When it was renovated in 2003-2007 it was decided to retain the historic outer shell and build inside it.

An interesting church hidden between two large concrete buildings

Another church

An unfinished cement building

When we arrived back at the hotel the boys were having lunch and starting to get ready for the game:

Lunch