Cultural tradition?

Had an email from Liz today saying that Nick had made the NZ newspapers - not sure that delighted was quite how she felt. The headline was about how drunken Kiwis had been misbehaving in the Waitangi Day pub crawl that appears to be Kiwi expat tradition.

Anyway as you can see from this photo our Nick is centre shot.

http://www.nzherald.co.nz/nz/news/article.cfm?c_id=1&objectid=10783842

The rest of the news article is about the man who has made a formal complaint about the behaviour to the NZ High Commission. Over the course of today there has been a bit of to-ing and fro-ing about whether the behaviour was really, really bad, or just bad.

Stuff have one of their polls on the article and there appears to be a pretty split reaction (even from the fairly right wing poll responders)

38% consider this a real Kiwi celebration

31% consider the behaviour to be silly but harmless

27% consider it an embarrassment to NZ

Mark I think I recall you saying you did it once but it made you feel old - or am I imagining this?

And then there are the multitude of comments that note that the behaviour at the Sevens in Wellington over the weekend was pretty similar. In terms of arrests and hospitalisations it could be said to be worse.

Do you think the mothers of these young women would have been thrilled to see their daughters?

I guess one the things that continues to surprise/depress/amaze (and the verb probably depends on how black I am feeling at the time) is that we can't as a country seem to move far from the good time and heaps of booze being interchangeable