Waitangi Day, the countryside, and sports

So this is really three small blogs in one! Ooooh....

Saturday was Waitangi Day (or however it's spelled), which is New Zealand's national holiday. The London sub-set of Kiwis celebrate this revered national holiday by embarking on a Circle Line pub crawl. So if you were lucky enough to be on a circle line train between 10am (they start early) and 4pm last Saturday you were joined by way too many really loud drunken kiwis. The tour apparently ended at Westminster for some haka. Whatever the heck that is. Now on Saturday I was on a District Line train going to Victoria around 2pm, and 4 of the stops along the route are shared with the circle line, and we got delayed for some time at South Kensington with the doors open. Luckily as it was a district line train it was against the rules for the kiwis to board, but there were masses of them hanging out at that station, chewing the fat and putting back a few, some dressed up a bit, and quite a few talking loudly in their funny accents. So prevalent was this bunch that a) these stations were lined with cops and b) you could hear an audible boo when pulling into the station upon the masses realization that we were not a circle line train. Again, I just can't envision these sorts of things going down on the 4th of July.

I went to Emsworth over the weekend as well. This involved both driving through quite a few winding country roads past small villages, and a bit of walking as well. In the US for some reason I find the countryside inherently creepy (despite never having seen Deliverance) and feel like there are weird people with guns lurking in the dark, but I don't get this creepiness vibe in the countryside in these parts at all. Now I'm not completely sure why, but for some reason I find little brick English country houses less creepy than the wooden US counterpart perhaps set a slightly uncomfortable distance back from the road. And then I'm also pretty sure that it is very, very expensive to live in a quaint little countryside locale in those parts given the premium given to the countryside lifestyle. Anyways, that could be a whole thing on it's own, explored and explained thoroughly but let's leave it at that.

And finally, I had an epiphany watching the rugby yesterday about why these sports (aka, rugby and soccer) are destined never to fully catch on in the US: the clocks count up instead of counting down. I think the counting down of the clock, as seen in football, basketball, and hockey, adds a sense of drama to the game. Counting up, on the other hand, just gives me the feeling that they've been playing for an awful long time and it might as well go on forever. And as both rugby and soccer are done only in halves, not quarters or threes, they count up quite a bit, so you're like '32? Really, I've been sitting here watching people run up and down a field for 32 minutes??'. This is as opposed to 'There are only 8 minutes left! We're coming down to the wire!!'. Now maybe this is just me, but I feel like the Americans are really drawn to the whole counting down thing. Which I think makes sense. Like on New Years, people aren't going '364 days, 23 hours, 59 minutes and 54 seconds...' and so on. This argument doesn't apply to the whole cricket/baseball situation, but I think we all know cricket will never be popular in America because you just can't come up with as catchy a sayings to go along with wickets as home runs. Plus there's no seven inning stretch.