Correct. To be fair, TVNZ replied really quickly to tell me that. Nice. Looks like it's time to learn some Czech.

Excuse my terrible grammar. I posted too quickly.

I too, as an expat, I particularly enjoyed the dark humour of the Olympics section of the tvnz.co.nz website.

i.e.:

"We're not going to let you watch the Olympics videos, BUT the advert before the video (that you can't watch) streams just fine. Enjoy!

How 3rd world. Especially, considering that most of us over in Europe would be watching it during the "downtime" of the website, i.e., the middle of the night in NZ. Bandwidth excuses, presumably the reason (?), would thus be irrelevant.

Email tvnz.co.nz with a "friendly" email. I did :)

The newly provided upload and download rates for Orcon are the standard in France, which, when working well, allows us 3-4 computers running decent broadband (wirelessly) from the same line. So that's a good thing.

I guess the shock is the price. Here, for NZD$57, you get unlimited upload/download, 100 TV channels (that you can beam to your computer via wifi, or play a film in the lounge on the TV beamed from a computer in a bedroom, via wifi), no "telecom" line charge and unlimited free phone calls to 70 countries (including NZ).

Possible reasons: highly concentrated population in cities, economies of scale, terrible and expensive customer service! When it works, welcome to heaven. When it doesn't, welcome to hell!

The week before the match, all of my French friends said, jokingly, "we're going to get you this weekend!" and I didn't believe it, and you could see in their eyes that they didn't believe it either.

Sitting in a crammed bar in Montpellier in the south of France, watching the second half horror unfold and seeing the excitement rise in the room was not as fun as winning Lotto.

When we lost, the whole room erupted. I shook a lot of hands, received a lot of apologetic grins, and not a single bad word.

This comes down to three things:

1) The French love the All Blacks (Don't talk about the Haka in France unless you want to do it).

2) The French expect to get demolished by the All Blacks.

3) When they don't, it is seen more as a miracle than anything else.

Once I'd dealt with a tearful call from a relative in NZ, a dozen text messages from French friends ("oops, sorry, who could have known"), it just seemed like the right thing to go out and have a crazy good time, with the lot of them. So I did.

Life goes on...