Sevens Rugby Tournament Weekend

Sevens is a huge rugby tournament that is hosted in Wellington. It is also a weekend-long city-wide party that shuts down Courtney Place (The street with all the bars and clubs) from 6pm Saturday to 6am Sunday. It is tradition that you attend the tournament not just in costume, but in group costume. This is what I remember of the weekend.

My weekend really started out by going out on a Wednesday night as is tradition for our group. We first went and watched part of a New Zealand film at the botanical gardens titled "Shark vs. Eagle" which featured one of the guys from Flight of the Concords. New Zealand humor is interesting (and quite British) to say the least. This night ended up excellently (short-term at least) as I found a very good dance partner who was also interesting and down right adorable once we conversed outside the club. Unfortunately the whole leaving-New-Zealand-in-under-two-weeks thing kinda put a damper on the situation.

Our group visited the American Embassy the next morning which was quite the task to stay awake for. It was interesting so I didn't fall asleep and I was ecstatic at being fed real American-style bagels at the little reception afterwards. The walk back to Wier house was killer and then I then promptly day-dreamed away my Ethics class...oops. The rest of Thursday was pretty tame though somehow once again I ended up being out on the town (with a group of friends of course!) until 4am. Even though I can't remember exactly, I can venture a pretty good bet of how the night went. Started off at the Big Kumara (well known student-bar), then went to Maya and the Establishment (dance clubs) or vice versa, and finished off the night with a visit to the Garden Club. That's how predictable our nights out are.

Friday morning we woke up and got dressed in our costumes for Sevens....Sheri, Charity, and I were flamingos! We bought matching hot-pink skirts an tops and made feather ornaments for about $22 NZ ($15US) and found some tickets online for about $35US. We went to the tournament at 1pm and were among the first there. I'm glad we got there early becasue I might have been overwhelmed if I had come to the game later in the day when it was super crazy. Imagine the best Halloween costumes you've ever seen coupled with the craziest sporting event you've ever attended. Multiply it by ten and you start to get an idea of what was going on. I'll post some choice pics later. By the way, both games I saw the USA play...we lost. Our guys weren't even as good looking as the other teams...oh well. Rugby is an amazing game!

The rest of the weekend basically consisted of going out on the town, going to a music festival, visiting an art and crafts market, and recuperating. I definitely filled my quota of partying for the next few weeks but schoolwork did somehow got accomplished along the way.