We went to the markets on Sunday then learned that it was closed because it was Easter Sunday. So we went to a carpark in the city centre instead. After pottering around for a few minutes we decided that the carpark was a little dull so we headed to the city centre... which wasn't much better.
Pauline: "now kids, if you rub Stephen's head, you get good luck". Obviously not enough luck to clear a 2.1m max headroom bar at the entrance to a carpark with a 2.8m high van...
To pass the time, we went to the Antarctic centre. The weather obviously wasn't cold enough outside so we came in to experience a storm.
The highlight of the antarctic centre was a ride in this thing over a very steep, wet and wild obsacle course of sorts. These were originally designed and built for the Swedish army but they were so much fun, they started giving people rides in them. Before long someone realised that they would also be useful for driving around Antarctica. They are terribly useful, if you accidentally drop it in the bathtub, they float.
As you can see, Pauline enjoyed the ride.
After dinner on the first night, we went to McDonalds to eat some ice cream
We had a team meeting where we lay down some ground rules and discussed how we were going to slaughter the New Zealanders.
Afterwards, we went to the Riccardon markets to do some shopping. They were apparently the biggest markets in all of New Zealand... hmmm. Some of the junior boys picked up some bling - Mark Gainsmith would be proud. What better way is there to get some rethpect from the Kiwis.
Later that night, we took a Gondola to the top of some mountain to learn about the history of Christchurch and watch the sunset.
When we got down, it was a little dark so we got a little lost. Luckily there were some useful signs telling us which directions things were in.
We had some dinner in a place which took over two hours to get our food to us. That sucked. We still managed to keep ourselves occupied... and when we got bored with that, we turned to each other for company... then things really got ugly.
Approaching the track for the first day of competition.
The Australian team gets ready to go.
The junior boys had their work cut out for them. They put up a gallant fight and managed to snag themselves a fair few medals in the process.
The senior men weren't so lucky. Short on numbers, the Kiwis bent us over and spanked us pretty good. Here's Daniel Thomson getting his ears licked by the New Zealand seniors.
15k elimination means 93 laps of the banked track. 61 laps into it, the sight of skaters with their hands on their knees was pretty common.
We really showed up the New Zealanders in this department - singing of the national anthem.
We belted it out at the top of our lungs... all of our lungs. The Kiwis were so quiet, I was unsure about whether they even knew the words to their own national anthem
The junior boys doing very well in the relay. This was in the heat, all of our teams advanced to the final and two of our teams managed to snag 1st and 2nd in front of the first New Zealand team.
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