The Easter Games

Happy Easter, gang. Hope you're spending a wicked holiday with friends and family, wherever you are and whatever you're doing.

One of the things I've noticed about New Zealand is that no one asks, “Do you play any sports?” The question is always the subtly different, “What's your sport?” For a Kiwi, the idea of going through life, or any portion thereof, without getting moderately good at at least one thing athletic is kind of like when Stephen King decides not to make one of his main characters be a struggling, alcoholic writer living in rural Maine – the thought literally never crosses the mind.

I've actually been pretty amazed and impressed by the emphasis the schools place on physical education, and feel real inadequate as kids a lot younger than me rattle on about the tournaments and excursions they've taken. They do a lot of things in New Zealand, pretty much utilizing all of the space around them to push the body to the limits, but by and large the main sports are rugby and cricket. Every field has wickets and goal posts, everyone follows the scores, and not everyone is good enough to play for the All Blacks, but it seems like most people have this inherent sense of where to stand on the pitch and what to do.

Friday night, after an afternoon of lugging compost and pruning trees, a small crowd of us went to a rugby match at Forsyth Barr Stadium, the 30,000 seater here in Dunedin that was only opened in 2011. There weren't 30,000 people flocking in to see the home team, the Highlanders, take on the Queenland Reds, but it was every bit as big as a rock concert (Aerosmith is here in a few weeks, we'll see who draws the bigger crowd), with a huge student population coming out in Speights one-piece jumpers (the Dunedin-based beer company happens to flaunt the team's colours). Just so we're up to speed, the league we're dealing with is Super Rugby, or Super 15, which is the main professional rugby league for the Southern Hemisphere, made up of 15 teams from New Zealand, Australia, and South Africa (the All Blacks, the official country team and unanimous source of Kiwi pride, plays in a different league altogether – their season hasn't started yet).

That's about all I knew about rugby, herded into the open air stadium that night with the fanatics. I only know the basics of football because we threw in a toonie on Proline one Sunday afternoon last year, and besides, saying, “I don't know rugby, but I know football,” is the kind of thing that would get one of those guys with the facepaint to turn away from the game just long enough to punch you.

Suffice it to say that it's totally different, and there are a hundred other places where you can find an explanation of the rules better than I can explain – to simplify, just know that the b'ys are trying to get the ball to the other end of the field, and it's real physical. People from New Zealand like their teams – fire shoots out from stacks at the endlines when the Highlanders score, and one guy in front of us ended up with his voice gone and kicked out by security for repeatedly yelling (from Row X) that Reds' player Quade Cooper was a homo (“What? I'm trying to throw him off his stride!”), but at the end of halftime we heard him again, from another perch a few rows away.

It would have been cool to see the home guys win, but at the end of the 80-minute match, the Highlanders marginally lost 33-34. Still, they closed the gap considerably near the end, scoring a try in the final minutes and giving them a fighting chance that made for an exciting ending. I didn't know the rules when I came in, but even I could appreciate that.

Yesterday was a busy one in the domestic sphere, tidying up for Easter around the house. I joined the girls in painting eggs – I didn't do any of the cool ones with leaf silhouettes, the result of attaching plant bits to an egg and adding it to boiling vegetable dye, but bonus points if you can spot the one that was my handiwork.

Today, Easter Sunday threatened to be a cool cloudy one, but the family was still up before the crack of dawn – not because the girls were excited (but, incidentally, they were), but because we were driving up to the top of Mt. Cargill, overlooking Dunedin from nearly 700 m, to watch the sunrise. It's a bit of a family tradition, signalling new beginnings at this time of year, and we weren't the only ones who thought so, meeting a steady belt of traffic on the winding dirt road. 

Most didn't stick around for the actual sunrise, with a layer of low-lying cloud obscuring the valleys and the horizon slightly. Still, it was a cool perch to welcome the morning from, and that nice loaf of sugary bread was waiting for us as soon as we made it back home.

And then came the egg hunt. Indoors and outdoors, two baskets going at top speed as their respective owners dashed around corners, under sofas, and in any nook they thought a bunny might have dropped an egg or two. There was no shortage of caramel and chocolate this morning, with some 60 eggs turning up.

Part of the family roster is Kieran, the 18-year-old son who works during the days and is gearing up to go to university in Germany in a few months time – his buddy next door invited him to join his youth group on a beach outing this afternoon, and the invite passed on down the line to me. So, just about lunchtime, we drove out along the Otago Peninsula, a strip of land jutting into the Pacific with plenty of little scattered beaches (and Larnach Castle, a 19th-century vanity project that's the only bonafide castle in New Zealand). Sandfly Bay is about a half an hour's drive away, and a cool sheltered strip of sand, sand, and more sand (and Yellow-eyed penguins, if you come at the right time).

Naturally, you don't just trace shapes in the sand. This is New Zealand here, people – get a sheet of plastic and slide down the steepest parts, and if you end up with the equivalent of a sandcastle in your pants, it only means that you're doing something right.

A bit of sliding and a picnic lunch later, the half dozen of us left the sand dunes for the flat part of the surf, in the wake of the massive Lion's Head Rock, and set up the makeshift beach cricket pitch.

“I don't know cricket, but I know baseball.” Did you see that? That guy from the rugby game just lit your car on fire. Ok, this wasn't proper cricket, with everyone shuffling through the positions, but I still had to get a general sense of what was going on (a bowler pitches to one of two batsmen, and once he whacks the ball, the two scores runs by bolting back and forth between the two wickets, which in our case were imaginary. Meanwhile, the fielders are trying to catch the ball and get it back to the players positioned along the wickets). That was enough to go by – but if I didn't have a clue how to play cricket, there's a good chance I wasn't a born master of the techniques.

It wasn't so much the cricket manoeuvres that were tricky, to be fair. It's more that insignificant stuff, like hand-eye coordination. But I didn't need to play cricket in New Zealand to tell you that I fumble with a tennis ball. Whatever, it was a good laugh, the sun came out, and we spent the last part of the afternoon whizzing down more sand dunes and playing a breathless game of hide-and-seek that made me totally forget that I'm turning 24 in two weeks.

The chicken and wine from dinner are all gone now, and there's a relaxing day of no school, no work, and no plans ahead as March goes out like an Indian summer lamb and I reach my two and half month mark.

Cheers,

rb