But we only heard a few vuvuzuelas

So we live above a bar, right? Above ten or twelve bars, to be accurate. (It’s not as shady as it sounds—these are Viaduct Harbour bars, after all, not biker bars on skid row—and instances of shenanigans out on the street below are few and far between.) They are all sports bars. Regardless of how they brand themselves the rest of the year, right now during the World Cup they bring in TVs if they have to, and they are sports bars.

Because the matches are played in South Africa, they’re on during the dead of night here. No matter, say the fans, of course we’ll go to the bar to watch soccer from 1-4 AM. And there are a lot of fans. We have been awakened nearly every night by the jubilation below. (Last night was especially noisy, as New Zealand tied with first-place Italy.) It turns out that we’re in a perfect position to do some informal census-taking regarding the relative densities of nationalities in Auckland, as estimated by the volume of the intermittent roars that accompany every exciting play. The apparent Brazilian and Mexican populations are larger than I anticipated.