Weekend Two

We had a good nights sleep so we were down at the Otago Farmers Market at the Dunedin Railway Station before eight on Saturday morning and Fi made an immediate beeline for the Lebanese lady who sells homemade goodies from her car boot including spanokopita parcels, fatayer, moggrabieh, tabbouleh and hummus for a song and it's all authentic yummy stuff.  Mike made a beeline for the coffee stall and then we both made our weekly pilgrimage around the roughly forty stalls.

They sell everything from Rua potatoes to Blue Bay cheddar to Green Man Stout to Havoc Farm gammon. Fi bought a kilo of frozen farm raspberries and a bunch of jonquils for a whiff of spring. We had crepes and coffee for breakfast and stocked up on veggie and fruit for the week, having discovered that the fresh food offering at Countdown (Woolies), NW (Coles) and PaknSave is OK for bananas and lemons but iffy for most other things. The swedes here are the size of softballs and are lethal weapons. Jayden the six year old Maori boy was belting out fifties songs with a winning, cheeky smile. This market is a magic place.



 Home, unpacked and after some spanokpita for lunch, it was time for a relax, a read and "some feet up in front of telly" time:

Mike not watching the telly

 
 The weekend rugby menu was six matches, three on Saturday and three on Sunday, one of which would be us watching England vs Georgia live at the Otago Stadium.  With a heavy schedule ahead, Fi opted out of the first match of Saturday, Argentina v Romania and Mike went off at three to watch it at Pirates, where he met up with Dave. He picked up Fi for a dinner booking at Starfish at six to watch the Fiji vs South Africa match, but Starfish had no Sky Sport so we went next door to Salt to watch it. By the end of that match, Mike well and truly had Fi's bronchio-flu bug, so we abandoned formerly enthusiastic plans to go back to Pirates to watch the Wallabies v Ireland match and headed back up the hill home to watch it on Maori TV instead. Bloody awful performance by Wallabies.  Maybe some truth in what was said by the Irish coach about the southern hemisphere teams playing each other too much. We retired to bed, shivering, feverish and despondent.


Sunday dawned startlingly beautiful with pristine blue skies, birdsong and the roar of surf from St Kilda beach

The view from the hill at 6:20 am

We lounged about in the morning, barking with coughs, feeling ragged and trying to work up energy and enthusiasm for the days match schedule. Our Lebanese lunch improved our mood and Mike set to to paint Fi's face:

Georgian Flag Mk II

but Mike declined decoration for the Georgia match, opting instead to put on his red Georgian rugby shirt sent to him by our good Georgian friend Tornike. Loaded up with flag, face paint, tissues and match tickets, we headed down the hill in Enzo The Apache, parked it behind the railway station and hoofed it up to The Octagon where Mike bought the largest packet of cold&flu tablets in town.

The Fan Zone at the Dunedin Town Hall

RWC had set up an offical fanzone inside the Dunedin Town Hall where they were showing the Wales v Samoa match on a big screen (with a bar on the ground floor), so we sat up in the balcony with loads of Samoan fans and had a great time shouting at the screen and groaning at the result (Wales 17 - Samoa 10).


Then we had a fast march to the Otago Stadium, arriving just in time for the team entrance and the anthems.

Anthems At the Match - Georgia on the left

There were about 16000 English fans and 500 Georgian fans. And the English fans were very quiet in the first half, because apart from an early try by their NZ import, the English were completely locked down by the gutsy Georgian forward pack. Despite their 41-10 loss, it was a great performance by Georgia, winning them much respect and many new fans.  There definitely needs to be a review of the scheduling of the World Cup to give a more even time gap between games and more tests between Tier 1 and Tier 2 countries.

Referee Jonathan Kaplan and half the Georgian team

The drugs worked well for Mike so we went back to Pirates for the France vs Canada game, a plate of pie gravy and chips and Fi had a pint of Buccaneer. The match once again reinforced the scheduling and test issues raised above, as the Canadians held out the French for the first half before running out of puff (France 46 - Canada 19).  Banner of the match went to "Save a beaver, eat a frog".

Then it was home for more drugs and sleep.