Broomball

by Mark

I'm not even sure how we skipped over this little bit of entertainment from our last trip into UB. We were asked if we wanted to join in on a little Broomball tournament being held at the "ice rink" at the Star Apartments (same place that we had the Thanksgiving meal a couple months back). The tournament was being hosted by the Embassy staff and their spouses, and they asked Peace Corps (PC) to be involved again this year. As you'll notice in the picture, one of the embassy teams even made matching aprons and called themselves "The Real Housewives of Ulaanbaatar"...the entire team consisted of the spouses of embassy staff. The Peace Corps managed to put together two teams, and the Embassy staff also had two teams.

For those of you who don't know Broomball, the rules are simple. It's hockey using shoes instead of skates, a ball instead of a puck, and brooms instead of sticks. It's 4-on-4 competition, with 1 female on each team mandatory. You play two 10 minute halves. There's not too much else to say other than it was a few hours of falling, sliding, swiping, and scrambling to sweep a soccer ball into the opposing team's net in -20 Celsius weather. The two PC teams had to have a tie-breaker game to determine who would face off against the winning embassy team, and sadly Kara and my team fell 1 point short of playing in the finals. But that meant we got to run up and down the sidelines shouting assistance to our exhausted PC friends as they went on to beat the embassy staff 1-0 in the final game!!

Go PC!