RUF Intern Life: Cube Time in Auckland

Yesterday was a night full of volleyball and I loved every second of it! Inter Hall Volley does indeed translate to intramural volleyball, but they only have one day tournaments once each semester. Bummer! I was put on 2 teams, who fortunately had alternating game schedules, so I ended up playing 6 games straight since one of my teams won the championship! Wooo! It really made me sad that I’m missing intramurals at Furman this fall, but oh well!

Today started off with a 5:56am alarm, but my 6:30am ride was 45 minutes late. 45 minutes! That’s a long time, especially in the morning! I finally opened the door to a car full of 3 other people and said “Hey!”, they said “Sorry we’re so late” and then it was silence from there until we got to Auckland. I thought the silence was probably because of the early morning, but nope, these cube kids just didn’t really get excited enough to talk about anything. Oh well, good thing the scenery is spectacular here!

In my head, I pictured a cube competition in Auckland as me walking into a huge convention center with a stage, projection screens and people everywhere with Rubik’s cubes spinning in a million different directions. Not exactly. We arrived at the cubing competition and little did I know, the cube guy that drove (who had a shirt on the said ‘cubesmith’) was the one running the competition. They set things up in a little lecture room at the University of Auckland and then the 20ish competitors came in… with at least 5 different cubes each. Things got started and I was amazed. There were lots of different events including 2x2, 3x3 (a typical cube), 4x4, 5x5, 6x6, 7x7 (dang!), 3x3 one handed, and 3x3 blindfolded.

This is the way it worked: for each event, each person had 5 attempts and their times were averaged. Each person’s cube was “scrambled” the exact same way (varying each time) and they had 15 seconds to “investigate” and then they had to start solving. I don’t think I’ve seen (and heard) so many cubes moving at once. Even when they weren’t actually competing they were mixing and solving over and over and OVER all around the room. I think the fastest time for 2x2 was around 3 or 4 seconds and 3x3 was around 11 seconds. CRAZY! My camera couldn’t even capture a clear picture of their hands because they were moving so fast! It was definitely an adventure and I'm glad I got to experience a real Rubik's cube competition, and all in NZ!