New Year's Eve & New Year's Day

On New Year's Eve I had work. I finished at around 7 and rushed home to get dressed for the NYE celebration. We were determined to see the fireworks over the harbour bridge, as none of us had ever seen it before. Sacha and Lisa went ahead and scored a spot at Mrs. Macquarie's Chair, a prime viewing spot full of people - mostly backpackers & families - which on ordinary days gives a great view of the bridge and the opera house and is a primary tourist destination.

I arrived just as the first set of fireworks went off, at around 8. I scored a giant hotdog while waiting and spent most of the three hours before the actual fireworks sprawled on the picnic blanket taking a nap - there was nothing to do anyway.

At midnight the firework extravaganza commenced and it was spectacular - I have 15MB video, if anyone is interested, which I will someday figure out how to upload and link to this, in the meantime i will send the 500KB 3 second version around via email. The bridge was all lit up and the surrounding harbor had fireworks going off in different locations. It was awesome.

New Year's Day, Sacha and I set off to see Kat and her family in their house in Leumeah, which is outside Campbelltown in the westieland. Okay, the southwest, where everything is 5 degrees hotter. Which is why it was 44 degrees that day. We took an hour long non-airconditioned train and we were practically the only ones on it, sweltering and sweating all over the place.

We met a nice South African (white) guy, who was on vacation having just finished law school. Law over there is apparently based on Dutch civil law, and the British only added stuff where there were gaps when they took over. He had just finished his culminating exam after 5 years, then he had a two year internship and another exam. He had never been outside the country before - much less on a train - and had spent the entire morning trying to get the right train to liverpool. Because he spoke Afrikaans, he and Sacha had a nice conversation. It was pretty interesting to hear about what South Africa was like.

When we finally got out of the train, about five stops after his, we had left imprints of ourselves on the seat. It was intensely hot.

When we got there I immediately attacked the appetizers, while Sacha played the piano. She and Rob, Kat's husband alternated playing so it was like having live classical music throughout the entire afternoon. In the middle of the afternoon the temperature dropped a bit so we all headed off to the pool. Kat blew up Caleb's salbabida floater, while her brother Kon attempted to blow up this giant man sized floating thing, with varying degrees of success. Kon and his wife Jane took their baby Mac who is about 8 months old into the pool. He had a lot of fun though he kept spitting water out a lot. Once Kon got the giant float thing going all the guys started fighting over the right to lounge on it, which lead to attempts to tip it over. Kit, Kat's younger brother was particularly successful in tipping over Kon with Rob's help. Kon tried to tip me over but slammed his head right on my butt bone and hurt himself instead. Rob tried to do the butterfly but succeeded in making large splashy sloshy motions instead of cutting through the water.

Sacha got out early, and while she was hanging around on the side Kat's dad tried to throw her in the pool, so I had to get out and join the battle to chuck him in. It was hard, because he's pretty tall for a philo and kinda heavy so we weren't able to do it, but we did provide an amusing show for the rest of the grown ups who ran inside to grab the video camera.

Dinner was great philo fare, inihaw na liempo, lumpiang shanghai and malagkit for dessert. There was of course, ham and macaroni which had cheese, much to Sacha's despair. We ate a whole lot. This was accompanied by the videoke machine (go magic mike!) running in the background with various members of the older generation belting out everything from the backstreet boys to frank sinatra. I sang Britney Spears, of course. (ceres are you reading this?)

We left late in the night and we got dropped off in parramatta where we took a late night train home, complete with goodie bags of leftovers, that little did we know would feed us for quite a few more weeks...