Come What May And Love It...in NEW ZEALAND :): RUGBY!!

My new favorite thing? Rugby! Yes, hands underground, rugby is my new favorite thing. We went to the Auckland Blues vs. Canterbury Crusaders rugby game tonight and it was a-mazing. In-credible. I love going to football games, but I now love going to rugby games even more. Here are a few reasons, along with some interesting facts about rugby:

The clock is always running. You know a game will always be 90 minutes: two 40-minute halves with a 10 minute “halftime”
A tackle does not mean the end of a play. The ball just gets thrown again.
The ball can bounce, but the play still continues.
They “scram” a lot. And I think it looks cool.

This is a scram. It's almost like a team huddle. Almost.

A goal is called a “try.”
The ball must always be thrown backwards, never to a player in front of you.
Running a try is worth 5 points. Kicking a try is worth 3 points.
They don’t wear any padding—they are so tough! They play rough, kicking and punching and pushing all the time. One guy had to get his head bandaged up, but he still played the rest of the game. Another guy had blood all over one side of his head, but he also still played the rest of the game.
Whenever the Auckland Blues scored, they celebrated with these huge torches.

There’s one guy on the team that they lift up to get the ball when it’s thrown in.

This is a blurry picture of it, but it's kind of cool because you can see the white ball going right into his hands.

It was such a fun game! There is another one March 16 and we are all planning on going again :) Oh, one more cool thing about the game was that we got to see the world's best rugby player: #10 on the Crusaders team. Woot woot!

Earlier today, we celebrated Kodie’s birthday. He turned 2 yesterday and they had a big birthday party for him at Lollipop’s, a giant playplace for kids. He was so cute, and loved his “digger” cake.

Part of the kid food included “fairy bread”—slices of bread with butter and covered in sprinkles. It looked fun and party-y, but wasn’t really all that tasty haha

You can kind of see the fairy bread behind the chips on the right. Sheryl said it would have been better if they used Nutella instead of butter. I think I would have liked that much more!

Before the rugby game, we rode the bus into town and went to the Chinese Lantern Festival. (by the way, we had very positive bus experiences today—what a relief! We even got to take a train part of the way home from the game!) The lantern festival was in a beautiful park near the middle of downtown Auckland. They had unique lanterns set up all over the park. Some were pretty cool, especially the dragons and pretty lanterns that hung from the trees, but some were quite strange.

They had a bunch of vendors with food and Chinese trinkets. Anna and I tried a fun new treat: rock melon and ice cream. It was half of a cantaloupe with ice cream filling the hole where they scooped out the seeds. So YUM!