Dunedin

A great city that we enjoyed for several reasons... The sun shone all weekend. It's organised around a central octagon that streets radiate from - very easy to navigate and meet up with people. It's name is Celtic for Edinburgh. It's architecture pre dates 1960's bungalows (unusual for NZ). The gallery was a nice place to while away a couple of hours. The people are vibrant - it's a university town and a mix of all sorts of folks. The rugby stadium is covered. (It feels like sitting in a giant greenhouse but at least we stayed warm and dry for one out of the six matches we went to - the irony being that was the only match we attended on a dry day...) The cafe Nova did a very nice brunch, thank you very much (though they forgot Neil's tea three times). All the locals were
very friendly. In the bar we settled in after the win against Italy, they put on Irish music for us and didn't mind when we danced around the place knocking over chairs and engaging the staff and other punters in swinging-around-by-the-arm type dancing and loud singing of Irish tunes, less than tunefully. Did we mention that Ireland beat Italy in Dunedin? It was the city of dreams...dreams of semi-finals and finals and this time we might go all the way...

Reasons we didn't like Dunedin...the campsite was rammed. The Irish fans parked in the bushes, in the fields, on the roads and in front of the toilet entrances...and the campsite owners merrily charged them all 35 bucks a piece and laughed all the way to the bank as we queued for 45 minutes for a shower or to use the washing machine... Sleep escaped us as the site stayed alive and throbbing with music and honking horns and yelling and singing into the small hours, on both the night before and the night of the match. And finally, Dunedin was a sad place as it's where Paul left our merry crew, to fly home, as we drove on to the quarter final in Wellington.

Joss