No better way to celebrate our national 'unity' day with a pub crawl on the other side of the world. Struggling for motivation, a handful of university mates talked us into going to the 'event'. Kicking off from Paddington tube station, the concept was to have a drink at each of the Circle Line stops. We arrived to a sea of black, impressed we grabbed a drink and headed down to the underground for a circle line tube to move to the next station. The platform was packed, a good ten people deep, as a district line pulled up, everyone started booing and yelling at the locals. You felt sorry for them in the tube, they pull up to the station not knowing whats going on, then get boo'ed and yelled at by a couple thousand people on the platform. When the Circle line did turn up, the chant went up of 'OFF OFF OFF' to get those on the tube off as quickly, so we could get going. So the only rules on the crawl were, no sitting on the tube, no holding on while on the tube and Circle line only.

After one or two stops, there were that many kiwis (I am estimating about 5-10 thousand). That you would come up from the underground, and would not physically be able to get into the nearest pub, let alone the next closest, nor the next. So you would resort to going into the closest supermarket to buy a few drinkings. Good in theory, but by the time you got to the supermarket at each stop, the booze shelf was empty, completly gutted by the hordes before you.

Before long we had a mildy large police escort. Then, they started closing the underground station because there were to many of us and they decided that it was dangerous with so many people on the under ground. I think that is a pretty cool acvievment, a pub crawl so large that is shuts down portions of Londons public transport.

The crawl took a breath at Parlaiment, where those that were that way inclined took part in doing a haka, again impressive when there are about a thousand people doing it a once.

Serious Fun
A bit late, but Matt just sent this photo through to us. At Christmas six of us (Nicole, Carmen, Radford, Matt, Karina and Aaron) went river surfing. Simply you grab a body board, a wet suit, jump into a white rapid river and try and survive through until the other end. It was a hell of a lot of fun, even the name of the company was fun, in fact it was 'serious fun'.