Lions vs Roughriders

On Friday 7th August, we went to a BC Lions football game, which Ben had been given tickets to by his boss. Canadian football is very similar to NFL (American football), known as gridiron in Australia. The BC Lions are British Columbia's team and they were playing the Saskatchewan Roughriders. Being a home game for the Lions, the audience was very heavily orange-biased (the Lions' colour), with only a smattering of green (the Roughriders' colour).

The evening was an awesome opportunity for Ben to try out our new (secondhand :P) Nikon D60, and this is the first blog entry since getting our new camera that probably would not have been worth posting if we'd been using our old 3x zoom camera (due to the lighting and our distance from the action)!







Neither of us had been to any kind of football game before, so this was a brand new experience. We didn't really know what to expect but it was actually quite fun to experience the atmosphere! We had no clue what was going on most of the time, and the main thing that stood out was how often they stopped! They would run a few metres and then the game clock would stop and the teams would be replaced with new players from the sidelines. Unlike in Australia, many of the players were obviously pudgy - guess their main job is to look big and scary, rather than to actually have fitness and stamina!























It was also the first time we have seen cheerleaders (who were definitely not pudgy). They were the "felions", and throughout the game they worked a LOT harder than the football players!









We also saw the BC Lion mascot (who seemed to like the blond cheerleaders), an advertising blimp dropping prizes, and a few elderly ex-Lions brought onto the field during the interval (one in a wheelchair) to be cheered again for their service to BC. Some of the fans were also quite entertaining to watch!













BC Place, where the game was held, is the stadium where the opening ceremony of the Vancouver 2010 Winter Olympics will be held next February.

So it was another truly Canadian experience for us. And yes, the BC Lions won the game!