Terri-Lee, Denise and I went to see the new 3D Pirates of the Caribbean movie a few weeks ago. Both Terri and Denise had just finished writing their exams and wanted to do something fun, so we went back to Terri-Lee and Michael’s house to figure out what.
When we got there we found Nick and Michael watching rugby, which turned the conversation to how “we” are going to the rugby on Saturday. I had thought that Michael and Terri-Lee were going alone, but I learned that she had bought 10 tickets for Michael’s anniversary present and a bus had been rented to chauffer everyone to and from the game.
I was confused about the “we” as this was the first time I’d heard about any of this. It turns out I wasn’t the only one that was confused- at one point there had been more people coming than there were tickets.
By Friday I was starting to get a cold and I hadn’t heard anything about rugby or bus times, so I figured I definitely wasn’t going. I stayed up until 1:45 a.m. rereading The Hunger Games and didn’t wake up until 10:57 a.m.
Three minutes later I was brushing my teeth when I heard the first honk at the gate. And the second. And the third. I thought, ‘Surely that’s not someone at my gate’ but I checked anyway. Indeed, there was a silver car there. I figured Craig had somehow locked himself out and needed the gate opened for him. I grabbed the remote from the kitchen and opened the gate from my bedroom window. But the car didn’t move. I decided to leave the gate open so whoever it was could figure out what they were doing.
A few minutes later I heard someone walking around my house. Sometimes Craig has meals delivered to the house- I wondered if they had come to deliver but he wasn’t home. I grudgingly opened my front door.
And there was Denise. We stared at each other for a few moments. I’m sure she was shocked into silence by how magnificent I look after rolling out of bed.
“Um, hi, Denise,” I said.
“Hey… we’re here to pick you up,” she replied.
“Pick me up… for what?”
“For the rugby.”
“What?”
“We’re here to pick you up for the rugby. It’s today.”
“Uh, I didn’t know I was going to the rugby.”
“What?”
“No one told me.”
“Crap. Let me phone and see how much time we have.”
“Okay. I’m gonna go put on some clothes.”
Denise called out from the front door that I had 3 minutes to get ready. I grabbed the first blue clothes that I saw. In reality, it was more like 15 minutes. It turned out that Terri-Lee and Michael were also running late so I had some extra time.
We were on the bus by 11:30 a.m. and stopped by BesTec to pick up everyone else.
Michael had booked a few tables for the day at a bar and grill across the street from the stadium in Pretoria. My food was the last to come out and Denise said they probably thought I was joking about ordering the vegetarian platter. The waitress came out a while later and told me that the cooks had forgotten about my order. Denise then predicted that they would just run through the kitchen and throw all the side dishes together and bring it out. Five minutes later, that’s what was in front of me. All the side dishes. Luckily I like South African side dishes.
Loftus Stadium is the Bulls’ home field, so everything was blue. There were quite a few Sharks fans, though, so it looked like there were black specks floating around in all the blue. There was a particularly annoying Sharks fan sitting in front of Terri-Lee and Michael. He made obscene gestures and screamed whenever they scored, showering everyone and everything around him in spittle. Elisna taught me Afrikaans words to yell with her. I yelled so much that I lost my voice the next day.
It was a fairly close game from the beginning, but the Sharks ended up winning by 3 points.
We walked back to our tables at the restaurant for some snacks and drinks. It wasn’t even 8 p.m. and the bus was scheduled to pick us up at 10. Each snack tray had french fries, samoosas, chicken nuggets, chicken wings, and some other meaty things that I didn’t really pay attention to.
I was wondering if the samoosas were vegetarian but we couldn’t find our waitress. Terri-Lee tried one and confirmed that it was, in fact, vegetarian. I took a bite of one and tasted meat. But I ate it anyway because, well, I’d already had one bite. Around that time our waitress showed up and informed us that the samoosas did in fact have meat. Michael promised not to bug me about eating meat anymore if I would eat another, so I did. It was disgusting. I have no regrets about being a vegetarian. Terri-Lee grabbed another samoosa from another tray and found that one to be vegetarian as well. All the meaty ones just came to me.
We were all exhausted by the time the bus came to pick us up, but everyone was in a good mood. The guys were at the front of the bus talking about rugby and listening to the music they brought. Elisna, Terri-Lee, Denise and I were at the back talking and telling bad jokes. Inevitably Terri-Lee wound up on the autocorrect site (www.damnyouautocorrect.com) and read all of the funny ones to us.
I didn’t get home until around 11:30 p.m. I went straight to bed because the next morning Terri was coming to pick me up for Father’s Day lunch with her family. I really enjoyed the rugby game- the entire day was a pleasant although completely unexpected surprise.
