sweet caroline....wah wah woah!

This blog is turning into a gallop through the key events in the expatriate social calender. This weekend, I give you, the beer fest that is the Hong Kong 7s.

Ostensibly, this is a leg of the International Rugby Board's 7s Rugby Tournament - there are also rounds of this in Dubai and, er, other places too, and it's all good fun and teams from around the world get together and play in a 3 day tournament in HK.

It's also, in a town that likes to party, one of the biggest piss up weekends that people travel from miles around to come to. Four of my friends came out from the UK, 2 for the weekend only, one from KL and one from Melbourne. This is in no way unusual. The epitome of the spirit of the weekend is the South Stand, where the hard core 7s fans , often in costume and always lagered up to the eyeballs mass and party hard for the full 3 days. Photos available on facebook.

I am now too old and crumbly for this, so do the slightly more gentile version which is ligging shamelessly into the corporate boxes. Last year I inexplicably ended up grappling Ieuan Evans and then being taken out to dinner by a CEO and his visiting Chairman. Half cut, I ended up giving my views on what he should be presenting to the global HR conference in the next month. They are still a client. It couldn't have been all bad.

This year was slightly more restrained, but it's all relative. Saturday and Sunday saw me enjoying the hospitality of various companies, running into ex players (David Campese is both shorter than he looks on the telly and seems to have no mates) and eying up the new batch (like policemen, rugby players do look awfully young these days....)

And then Monday rolled round, HK woke up to one mutha of a hangover and the city ticked back into its more usual routine (much, one would have to think, to the relief of the locals).