Sacrifices?! You can be out enjoying a beer (and the opener of the rugby world cup) on a friday night while I'm just walking into work on a friday morning having to put up with the live score updates on the internet, I see no sacrifices there
Look, I tell you it was hard work, being part of that atmosphere, thongs of people. They reckon over 200k people around the party zone in town, probably more and where we watched the fireworks from bottom of a main road near the motorway looking across the harbour, maybe 10k people. Cars parked absolutely everywhere. Quite electric atmosphere with that many people in a happy mood, lots of families and groups. People with coloured wigs, glow sticks for the kids, and the fireworks were really cool. 5 barges in the harbour, and off the Skytower http://www.skycityauckland.co.nz/Attrac ... tower.html, the Museum, ASB Building, plus a few others. So the whole thing was quite spread out. Gun powder haze behind the fireworks giving them more intensity.
My poor little camera really isn't up to taking photos at night time. But one of my mates had his fancy big dslr on the tripod, so I'll post a few of those when he's downloaded them.
Here's a video from our national tv station. The fireworks were must more impressive from 1km across the harbour with the water reflecting all of the fireworks, on glass still water.
http://tvnz.co.nz/national-news/video-s ... 41-4394880