Australia Day Weekend

  Sydney, New South Wales, Australia
Tuesday, January 27, 2009

I had a pretty eventful Australia Day weekend here in Sydney.  After taking it easy on Friday night, on Saturday I met up with my friends from London Business School, Claire, Kristin, Lori and her husband John at an outdoor concert on The Domain, which is a large park in downtown Sydney.  The show was a classical music performance by the Sydney symphony, which I am not particularly a fan of and which may or may not have played a part in why I did not arrive until midway through the show.  However, it was nice to sit out in the park and have some drinks while enjoying the music.   They did end up playing one song I knew, ending with the 1812 Overture, which as a Notre Dame alum, I recognized from spending four years saluting Bob Davie to that tune. I can't believe that actually happened, by the way. 

John and Lori packed it in for the night after the show, but Kristin, Claire and I headed to King's Cross to go out, and our friends Lenny and Dale met up with us.  It is clear Lenny and Dale have spent a lot of time in the Cross since we arrived, as our waitress knew Dale at the first bar we went to, and at the second place, everyone working there seemed to know them.  We had a great time out Saturday night (considering I didn't get home until 5:30 in the morning), and apparently there was a huge melee at the bar around 4 am (this is according to Lenny) but I don't recall seeing it, so I'm not sure if he's making it up or if I had way too much to drink.  This brings up something of note about Sydney- I have seen way more fights here than I've seen in all of my years living in Chicago.  For whatever reason, I rarely see a fight in Chicago, but I basically see one every time I go out in Sydney, which I find interesting since most of the Aussie's you meet are very friendly. 

Sunday morning I woke up to Ryan, my roommate, coming back from Canberra, where he visited his aunt for the weekend.  This was at 1:00.  We had 25-30 people coming over for a barbeque at 4, so I had to get up and get some stuff done.  We had the place ready to go in time, and by 5:00 or so, all of our guests were here for the most part.  We put together a pretty big spread and grilled some delicious Australia burgers (hamburgers shaped like Australia), and some sausages we bought from the butcher right by our place.  The barbeque was a great time, and since we had most of our friends already here, we just stayed and partied at our place all night.  It was also a great chance to meet a lot of the other people in our program that I hadn't gotten to know yet.    All in all, the barbeque has been deemed by me to be a great success, and a huge mess to be cleaned up the following day.

BBQ

One uniquely Australian thing I saw during out barbeque was the migration of a massive number of bats (likely in the several thousands) that flew directly over my apartment.

Bats!

I've seen bats a lot around here in the trees of the Botanical Gardens, which I frequently run through, but had not seen anything like this.  They were flying very low and we must have been exactly underneath their travel path- really it was pretty crazy to see.  I'm glad I saw it, though, because one of my major disappointments thus far in Australia is that I haven't seen any of their famed animals, such as the koala, kangaroo, dingo, wallaby, tasmanian devil or the platypus.  Hopefully this will change in the coming weeks.  
 
Monday was Australia Day, which I have previously mentioned is something in Australia akin to the 4th of July.  Everyone has the day off, there are lots of festivals and fireworks and national pride on display.  Lots of people are walking around with flags tied around their necks, sticking out of their hats, and since it was raining, carrying Australian flag umbrellas (this would include yours truly).  When I first walked outside on Australia Day, it was sunny, but it quickly turned foggy and rainy and remained that way the remainder of the day. It was definitely the worst weather I've experienced here (although Friday and Saturday were oppressively hot).  I stopped in a festival at Hyde Park for a while and checked out the Crocodile Hunter on the big screen, but with the rain, decided it was just best to go meet friends at Darling Harbour where the fireworks would be.  Several friends had secured a primo seat at a bar right on the Harbour and we remained there the rest of the afternoon and evening, waiting on the fireworks.  The fireworks didn't disappoint, as it was a great show.

Australia Day

 

Australia Day Pride

I've now set up some of my travel plans for the coming weeks.  While I am not going to Tasmania (for now), I am booked to go to Melbourne next week with a group of 5, and we'll travel the Great Ocean Road while we are there as well.  I've also determined that when Courtney and Andy come to visit in a few weeks, we are going to up to Cairns for a few days and visit the Great Barrier Reef as well as the Daintree Rainforest, which I am pretty excited about.  Alright, that's all I've got for now. 

Darling Harbour on Australia Day