Sir, I think you are in my seat.

This past weekend, we attended our first All Blacks rugby game. This is a must do when living in New Zealand. Rugby is a big part of life here and fortunately for me, I really enjoy watching the games! No offence to my heritage, but it's a nice change from hockey.

If you don't know anything about rugby, join the club. It's a very confusing game with a ton of little rules that I do not understand. But here is my very average explanation of the game - it's like football in the sense that you are basically trying to run the ball across the goal line at the end of the field and there is some kicking through goal posts, but the play doesn't always stop when the ball and/or player hits the ground. Also, no forward passes allowed. And no equipment either, but even more intense tackling. You should probably just google it.

The game was in Auckland at Eden Park. We attended with Brandon, Kristen, Mel and Brenno. Upon arriving, there was a fellow sitting in our assigned row of seats. I approached him, showed him my ticket and nicely mentioned that I thought he was in our seats. He was busy looking in all his pockets for his ticket, but he couldn't find it and he refused to move until he did. To make matters worse, he was quite intoxicated. After a few more words with Mark (not as polite as mine) he eventually moved. Turns out he was in the wrong section entirely. Anyways, he wanted to fight but we just wanted to watch the game.

The game begins with the haka, which is amazing. It's a cultural war ritual which you should also just google because I'll probably explain it as well as I did rugby.

The All Blacks scored the first try right in front of us and went on to defeat the South Africa Spingboks by 32-12.

Oh, I forgot to mention. The other funny thing that happened was when the guy who was in the seat next to me went to sit down, his seat broke. And he was not a heavy fellow! This is particularly funny/humorous because the seats were brand new and they just finished installing them in half the stadium. I felt bad for the guy but he assured me he was fine to sit on the step. About 3/4 way through the game, security came and told him he couldn't sit there anymore, so we all squished over and shared our seats with him.

It was a great, exciting, interesting, awesome experience! But let me tell you this, I myself will never play rugby. Just watching for me, thanks.