not really

The large, colorful sails dwarfed all the pleasure craft clustered on the edge of the race starting lane.
We watched from the top of a Wellington hill as the large, even majestic sailboats in the round-the-world Volvo Ocean Race left Wellington Sunday on their way to Brazil.
The course was kept clear until just after the start, when the mass of spectators in personal boats swarmed toward the racing sailboats. From our vantage point, it looked like a bunch of baby ducks desperately trying to keep up to a group of matriarchs (if baby ducks were generally drunk, hard-sided and propelled by motors).

watching cricket

A few weeks back, we finally had a chance to watch a cricket game at Basin Reserve, the old ground a block from my house.
It seems cricket is trying desperately to figure out ways to stay relevant. Most of those ways involve playing different, shorter versions of the game. This game was a 20/20 match (each team bats for just 20 overs). What this means is that the whole game lasts about three hours, but as few as two players on each team ever get to bat.
It's probably a good idea, especially since a full test lasts five days, and even the one-day version of the game is 50 overs each team, which can last eight hours or so. But the real attraction of the day was the old stadium.
Basin Reserve is one of the oldest grounds in New Zealand. I don't remember hearing just how old it is, but about 100 years is probably a good guess. There are a couple sets of stands, but most of the seating is on a grass berm that circles the ground.
On non-game days, the stadium is always open - the walkway around the playing field is used as an extension of the sidewalk. On game days it has a pleasant, picnic-type atmosphere, with a game going on in the middle of it all.

on the beach

Wellington natives are a little defensive about the weather in their city. It's easy to see why, since the town is known around New Zealand as "Windy Welly" and it lives up to the name. Even the city's official tourism brochure has a page devoted to the weather. Essentially, it says "The wind isn't really so bad. Oh, and we get sun here! As many sunny days as Auckland!" or some fact. What it doesn't mention is that it can be windy and sunny. For most of our time here, the sun has been a tease, mostly. After a week of gray, windy days, the sun would come out and the wind would cease. It felt like summer was coming, but the next day the wind and gray would be back.
Now that summer is here, the pattern hasn't entirely ended, but at least now there are two or three sunny days in between a day or two of crap weather. This gives us an opportunity to go to one of Wellington's beaches.
There aren't any huge, sweeping beaches around Wellington; most of the coastline is rocky cliffs. But there are a few natural sand beaches. There's also this one, Oriental Bay. It's the most popular city beach, since it's right off of downtown. It's not natural, though. The sand is shipped in from somewhere - I think Australia.
I'll tell you what, though. On a sunny day in January or February, it hardly matters if the sand is real. I'm just happy being on a beach at all.

falling water v2.0 (South Island remix)

the other big game

The Super Bowl wasn't the most important sporting event locally last weekend.
Not even close.
The most important even here was a sport you've never even heard of.
The Wellington Sevens - a two-day, international, seven-a-side rugby tournament - took top billing. It wasn't on the strength of the competition, although the game is fast enough for even
the most ADD-addled spectator.
Instead, the Sevens are a crazy social event, one of Wellington's biggest parties. People dress up to go to the games, they drink during the nine hours of play each day, then they go out on the town and drink some more. It's kind of a mini-Mardi Gras here, with all of the drunkenness but not nearly as much of the nudity.
When tickets to the Sevens went on sale before Christmas, the 30,000-seat stadium sold out in less than an hour. (This is not to say 30,000 seats were sold that fast - it was reported less than a third of the tickets were up for grabs by the general public, with the rest going to rugby officials, business partners, and the like.)
No one bought tickets to watch the games. I've never been to an sporting event where the game mattered less. The games go so fast, most of the time the majority of the stadium has no idea who's playing. Hell, most of the time the majority of the stadium has no view of the field - most fans are in the concourses waiting to buy beer, showing off their costume, or checking out others' costumes.
One fellow North American here asked if the experience was anything like tailgating.
No.
For one, this was all happening inside the stadium.
But the biggest difference is this: people come to the stadium for tailgate parties because they know a crowd is going to show up to watch football. People come to watch the Sevens because they know a crowd is going to show up to party. Tailgating sprung up around a popular sporting event; somehow, the party seems to have come first for the Sevens.
The sport itself seems tailor-made for the States (and there was a U.S.A. team here, which was the worst team in the tournament) so it's a too bad no one has ever heard if it over there. And they are playing this weekend in L.A., but I can't imagine more than a couple hundred people are watching.
It's played on a normal size rugby field, but with half the people (normal rugby is 15 a side). Games are split into two seven-minute halves, with a short halftime and break between each game. This, more than anything, is why it would be perfect for America, since it's already broken up into neat commercial breaks.
It's fast-paced and intense. And no one was watching.
Admittedly, I was only there on the first day, when the 16 teams were playing round-robin rounds in preparation for the Saturday's knock-out rounds. And admittedly, the late parts of the day are pretty hazy in my memory.
But I'm pretty sure I had fun.

one in a billion

About five minutes into the broadcast of the Super Bowl Monday afternoon, it dawned on us.
There would be no Commercials.
The game was televised live in New Zealand, no problem. Apparently the game is televised live everywhere, because I heard about the "billion" people who were watching. I was one of them, watching with a small group of displaced Americans and New Zealanders.
On south Pacific ESPN the Super Bowl has a few differences. It's not easy to tell exactly what they are at first, other than the game kicking off around noon Monday (which conveniently happened to be a national holiday here). But after a while, it begins to dawn on you.
Watching on the International feed, the Super Bowl is just a game of American football.
I didn't watch the same Super Bowl you did. I saw the same action, saw the same camera angles, saw the same graphics, saw the same close ups of Bill Cowher.
I didn't, however, hear the same announcers. I don't know who you heard, but I listed to Dick Stockton and Daryl Johnston. As they called the game, they were mindful of viewers who might not know the intricacies of the sport. I was told at least 15 times the yellow, computer-generated first-down line was "not official."
Both men tended to stop and interrupt themselves to explain the game and terms they used in the commentary. I can only imagine there was someone on the crew whose job it was to yell into Stockton and Johnson's ear every time they mentioned any football-exclusive term.
(Actually, this might not be a bad idea for the U.S. broadcast. There's probably just as many non-football fans watching there as anywhere else).
I didn't see the same commercials, the backbone of any Super Bowl viewing experience. I don't think I saw any commercials. Advertising breaks were filled by promos for other events carried by New Zealand's ESPN feed - apparently they think the World Baseball Classic will be a big deal. At other times, ESPN filled space with short commentary on the other football.
While you were watching the newest Budweiser commercials, I was watching an old bald guy with a Scottish accent sit in a studio in Bristol, Conn., answering e-mails from viewers in Australia asking about English soccer.
(I think when ESPN was looking for a soccer commentator, they started with a picture of Dick Vitale, and ended up with an old bald guy. It appears when the guy didn't talk with the energy and enthusiasm of Vitale, they just turned his hearing aid off so at least he'd talk as loud.)
I didn't see five hours of pre-game shows talking about the Super Bowl and showing all the ancillary events from the week in Detroit. I certainly didn't see or hear the weeks worth of pre-game analysis and feature stories leading up to the game.
And without all that, I didn't really see the Super Bowl, not as I would have seen it back home. I noticed the absence of all the hype and glitz, and I'm not sure if I missed it or not.
The Super Bowl as a game may be confusing to the International crowd, but it translates fine. The Super Bowl as An Event doesn't translate at all. That might be for the best.

or one in 93 million

I heard the New Zealand newscasters repeat the old line about "a billion" people watching the Super Bowl, and perhaps for the first time, thought about what that meant. I knew basically no one in New Zealand, including a good portion of the Americans, cared one way or the other and were unlikely to watch. I didn't figure most other countries were any different.
Then I found an article that spelled out the problems with this whole idea much better than I can.

on the weekend

All of a sudden, summer weather is here and the city has decided to
throw a party every weekend.
Two weeks ago, Wellington hosted the X-Air fest, a free outdoor
extreme sports festival. Temporary indoor and outdoor bicycle,
motorcycle and skateboard ramps and courses were set up, along with a
stage for the free bands and tents for the not-so-free merchandise.
I hadn't seen a crowd like that since coming to New Zealand. The
sidewalks and space between venues was packed, the lines for the
indoor venues stretched a few blocks. The events spread out over a
couple blocks and everything was happening at once, but it was
impossible to actually move from one place to another to actually see
what was going on. Still, we managed to take in a little something
from most of it.
By the end of the day, most of the events had wrapped up and the
crowd packed in even more along the waterfront, where a 40-foot ramp
was set up over the water. Bikers, skaters, rollerbladers took turns
getting airborne and making a splash. I missed the final trick of the
day, when one of the crowd members tried to replicate the feat off a
pedestrian bridge, and instead face planted into the sidewalk.
This past weekend I took my sunburn back out into brilliant sunshine
and another crowd. The Wellington Cup horse races are kind of a
1/10-scale model of what I assume the Kentucky Derby experience to be.
About 30,000 people were out at the course, most of the female
species dolled up in formal dress. (The side fashion show got nearly
as much coverage in the local paper as the race).
We had a bit of luck for my first horse race - one of the locals I've
met here works for the New Zealand Thoroughbred Board and got us comp
entrance to the course and the VIP areas. Mostly it felt a little
like the sports festival - there were a lot of different places to go
and things to see, but too much of a crowd to move about easily.
No luck betting, although we did back one horse late in the day that
nearly brought the final tally to even. Another horse that Kirsten
nearly backed ended up winning, paying out $125 per $1 bet - next
time I'll be throwing down a few bucks on some long-shot hunches.

As long as the sun holds, the next month and a half should be fun.
Every weekend until the end of March has some festival or free show
on. And if not, there's always the beach.
Enjoy your winter, all you up there. I'll bask in the summer here in
the Bizarro Hemisphere.