Sevens

This weekend was the NZI Rugby Sevens tournament. The sixteen of the best sevens teams accros from across the world decend onto Wellington for a few days. For those who don't know sevens is a version of rugby where there are 7 players on a team and they play two halves of seven minutes. The means the game is very fast, aggressive, and very little deffensive play. Its also a lot more entertaining to watch. The first day consists of the group stages, 4 groups of 4 play and the top two in each group go through to the knockout stages the next day. We watched it on TV as we couldn't afford tickets and England and New Zealand made it to the final. New Zealand won, which was probably a good thing or there would have been so many fights and so many deppressive drunks in town. It was basically like a world cup squeezed into 2 days and happens every year.

It started on thursday with a parade through the city, with each country having its own float and cheerleaders. Everyone dresses up for sevens, its like halloween and some people take the costume aspect seriously. In fact, the sevens is Wellington's excuse to have a missive 3 day party and dress up. Friday and saturday the stadium was packed with smurfs, cowboys, indians, disney characters, builders and all sorts of other crazy things. The best one was the guys who went as a level crossing. There was an article in the newspaper about a group of men from Auckland who go dressed as women every year, about 10 of them go as ballarines, school girls and other things. If they go out of costume, for any reason, they get a $100 fine. Saturday night they closed Courtenay Place, the main road for the bars and clubs, and had a massive street party. There was a band playing and people all dressed up. My friends and I went out as Where's Wally (Waldo) and ran into a group of other BUNAC people who went as tourists. I have never seen town more crowded and the ques to get in the. (Don'e worry Aunt Anne i'm not turning into an alcoholic, its the first time I've been out in ages). All in all a very good night out, got to seen a bit of Kiwi madness.