Wellington 7s

We made it safe and sound to the North Island on Thursday, February 6 and we were super excited for the weekend we had in store.

We are lucky enough to know a few people in Wellington so we had a chance to sleep in a real bed, inside a house for a couple of nights (sorry Wanda). Our friend from undergrad, Gina, lives and works as a physio in Wellington and she was nice enough to invite us to stay with her for the weekend and tag along to all the festivities with her. It was so nice to see a familiar face in New Zealand when we got to her place!

Thursday night was a lot of chatting, catching up and meeting Gina's boyfriend, Danny. Gina made us dinner, then took us on a tour of the city. Since it was a nice night we went up Mount Victoria to get a view of Wellington. It was so neat. We made it just in time for sunset and we got to see all of Wellington from a perfect perspective - a 360 degree view of the city. After sunset we got some gelato and walked around the water front. We capped off the night with a beer at a crazy bar that has over 101 different beers to choose from. My chocolate stout was awesome!

Friday was such a crazy day. It started out with playing barbershop. We spent over an hour helping Dave cut off his beard and all of his hair! It was so weird to see him all clean shaven and cut short again. And it was even crazier to see how much hair actually came off his head!

 

After Dave was all prettied up we made our way over to one of Gina's friends houses to get all dressed up and ready for the rugby 7's tournament. Apparently it is tradition that everyone going to the tournament dresses up in costume for the whole weekend. People go all out on these costumes and there are even prizes for the best ones. Gina's friend Nick planned a costume for about 12 of us - we were all wearing berets, stripped shirts and a handkerchief, but with Kiss makeup...can you figure it out...we were French Kiss. So clever! I was a little lame and bailed on the face full of make-up because I wanted to represent Canada a little bit. My mom sent me with these hilarious Canada flag sunglasses so I wore those and instead of being French Kiss, I was French Canadian.

After a BBQ, some drinks and, of course, the costume prep, we started to make our way to the stadium. EVERYONE was dressed up! It was wild. Everywhere you looked there were the Super Mario Brothers, or a SWAT team or Batman, Robin, etc. It was hilarious! Everyone slowly makes their way to the stadium via all the bars and restaurants along the water front - apparently, the actual rugby games aren't the main entertainment for the weekend. We did eventually make our way to the stadium and we got to see some pretty amazing rugby. Canada killed it on day 1 and won their pool 3-0. The games went until almost 11pm so we pretty much just made our way home after that because we had another day full of drinking ahead of us tomorrow.

Saturday is definitely the more popular day to go to the 7's so we were up early and getting dressed back in our costumes, having another BBQ and more drinks again. Unfortunately, Canada had a terrible draw for the quarter finals and had to play New Zealand...boo, we lost :( But, New Zealand did go on to win the whole tournament and Canada definitely made them work for it, so as far as we're concerned, Canada came second :)

I have never seen something as crazy as the stadium on Saturday night. It was packed full of people, all dressed in costumes, all wasted singing and dancing and cheering for New Zealand. It was a pretty awesome experience! And we got to see a Haka, which was cool too!

 

After the tourney was over we made our way to the bars. We hit up a few and did our own little bar crawl before finishing at a bar called Chicago, which had this huge outdoor dance floor set up. Seriously, there were thousands of people there (still all in costume) busting a move. It was awesome. I think this place was Dave's highlight of the night because he met a Cook Islander named Dwayne, who was maybe one of the largest men I have ever seen. He was jacked and strong and he had rhythm!!!

Sadly, we are getting old so we had to go home after Chicago. We walked home via this massive street party on Courtenay Place. They shut down the whole street and everyone just goes to different bars. It was so busy and so hilarious to see.

Needless to say we were a little slow moving on Sunday. It took us about 5 hours to do anything productive. But we did manage to do some laundry and go to the gym. We spent the rest of the night just being lazy, eating dinner and watching the Olympics - GO CANADA GO!

From here, we were not too sure what our plans would be. We did want to see some family friends in Wellington, but because of poor timing we could not meet up this go around and ended up leaving and driving north to check out some sights. We knew we would be back around a week or so, so for now it was time to explore again. Life on the open road :)

Thanks for reading

xoxoxo