The Kiwi's Love their Sports

As soon as I tell people from here that I'm from Australia, they want to know if I watched "the game". I assume they are referring to the latest rugby match, apparently that's on at the moment. I have to confess that I often have trouble convincing people I'm an Australian male after I tell them that I'm really not into sport. It's not that I hate it, it's just that I really can't get that excited about watching it, or keeping track of the fortunes of a team or individual that I have no personal connection to. Kiwi's like Australians, on the whole, love their sport. In Auckland I accidentally wondered into the only bar in the city that doesn't have a big screen television playing the latest rugby match. The bar tender told me that's why it was a quiet bar (he also confided to me in hushed tones that he didn't actually like rugby himself, and preferred ice hockey).

Pretty much every bar and takeaway food outlet I've been too since has had at least 2 big screen TV's playing some game or other. Often rugby, but also netball seems to be very popular as well. For my last meal in Rotorua, I headed to a pub I'd been told about at the hotel called "The Shed". It was supposed to be the happening place, and given the national love of sport, I can see why. They had at least 4 big screen televisions placed strategically around the room so that no matter where you were in the bar there was no possibility of respite… whoops, I mean, missing any of the nail biting action. Not only that but they also had a projector screen set up showing the game against a prominent wall. To cap it all off, I noticed at the bar that there were even small screens mounted on the beer taps so that if you were shouting your bro's a beer, you wouldn't miss the thrill of a home side come-back.