Yesterday morning was a well deserved sleep in, before Brook and Jerry came around to the hostel. Sizi used to work with Brook in the UK from quite some years ago, and he now lives back in Auckland, so thought he'd show us around a bit. We took a walk down the road from the hostel to a small French Market which they have set up every Saturday morning, and got ourselves some well needed fresh fruit juice, some food and some really good coffee. A few cups of coffee actually. We chilled out there for a while, and then in the gardens of the hostel, with the weather being perfect for lazying about until our game that evening.

Later in the afternoon, we took a bus into town and met up with Craig, where we all got kitted out in our Japanese attire - ready for the France vs Japan game we were off to last night. We caught the bus from Britomart out to North Harbour, which was about 40 minutes drive north of Auckland, and with some good banter on the bus between the French fans and everyone else dressed up as Japanese supporters, including ourselves.

Since we had two sets of tickets - Brook, Si and Suzie headed off to their seats, and Craig, Duncs and myself headed to ours. We were quite lucky with our seats yet again, forth row from the front and once again behind the goal posts. So not bad at all. There was a good mix of supporters in the stadium, quite evenly matched for both teams.

The game was good up until the very end, with Japan managing to hold off the French and actually put up a good fight, but then the Frogs managed to open up and run away with it at the end, winning by 47 to 21. It was a noticeably smaller stadium than Eden Park, as expected, but was more open and had a good vibe to it. The journey back took a while, with massive queues to get onto the buses, but was still brilliantly managed and controlled, especially for that many people all trying to get back to Auckland at the same time. I think they had managed to commission every bus in the city to help out.

Back in Auckland, we headed to the Fan Zone and into the Cloud, which had massive screens and were showing all the games live. The others had left a bit before us, Suzie wanted to catch the start of the England vs Argentina game. We arrived about 10 minutes into the game, so hardly missed anything, and turned out to be quite the match, with England almost throwing it away, but managed a try right towards the end, giving them a 13 - 9 win over the Argies. Such a good atmosphere in the Cloud Bar, glad we decided on that rather than a pub over on the North Shore.

There was talk about going out afterwards or staying around the waterfront, but considering we had a nice early start at 04:30 this morning, we decided to call it a night and head back to the hostel. Rather save our energies for the SA game tonight down in Wellington. At the moment we're all just at Auckland airport, waiting to head down to Wellington in the next little, ready for the first Bokke game tonight.