Week ending 26-Oct: The Beach and Rugby

Had a slightly more stable week at work this past week, although we've still been working hard to get this trade over the line with, as of yet, nothing to show for it. Still working on it. The weekend was pretty relaxed…Saturday we spent most of the day at the beach at Manly just a short ferry ride on the other side of the harbour. It’s a beautiful beach and we were planning on venturing out and trying surfing, but the water is still freezing cold so would have required a wetsuit. We decided we'll wait on the surfing until the water warms up a bit. But it was very relaxing just lounging around and the people watching there was second to none.

On the ferry back from Manly

Sunday we did a bunch of little chores that we'd been putting off for a while so actually got quite a bit of stuff done, most notably we booked our trip to New Zealand at xmas/new years time…very exciting! Haven't completely figured out all the details, but we have plane tix and a rental car and a decent idea of where we want to go and what we want to see. More on that to come of course. We also managed to take advantage of technology and had a nice long skype with my sister and brother-in-law and my little nephew Kai who is adorable. He demonstrated his incredible intelligence by being able to point to his nose, eyes and ears (and when he was asked to point to Uncle Jesse's nose he pointed to my nose on the computer screen…not bad!) We also watched a great classic (?) australian movie: Priscilla Queen of the Desert. It’s a movie about drag queens travelling from Sydney into the middle of the outback to perform a show…pretty random, but kind of hilarious and fun to see some of the places in the "bush" that we're planning to get to eventually.

We capped the weekend off by going to a rugby match at the Sydney Football Stadium (which conveniently is walking distance from our apartment) on Sunday night. The Rugby League World Cup is I believe an annual event that is played between the big rugby playing countries who take turns hosting the event. This year Australia is the host and we caught Australia's opening match played against New Zealand (who is of course Australia's big rival). The rivalry is pretty intense and by the end of the match the rowdiness was pretty elevated. Everyone will be glad to know that fans at Australian sporting events do "the wave" almost exactly as fans in the U.S. do. Except this version involved throwing things in the air in addition to standing up and throwing your arms in the air and it seemed to gain a crazy sort of intensity as it went around a few times. I guess that's the Aussie version. Anyways, Australia won and it was a fun game to go to.

Week ending 19-Oct: Horse Racing at Randwick

This past week was a pretty brutal one at work for me so I was feeling pretty exhausted this weekend. We still managed to make it out to the horse races during the day on Saturday at Randwick. Horse racing here is a big deal so this race is something lots of Sydneysiders attend and it was quite a scene. Everyone gets dressed up to the nines but in a very colorful way. Whereas I get mocked at work for wearing a turquoise shirt, the races were the perfect time for it. And women do wear either big gaudy hats or some big flower thing in the hair. The people watching was really quite spectacular, really makes me wish we had events like that in the U.S. where people get all dressed up and look silly. One of the more amusing things about the whole scene is there are really two distinct groups of people enjoying the event: youngerish people like us who go, have some drinks, maybe place some bets, but its essentially a big social scene and then older, wealthier people who go probably to watch the races and make big bets. These two groups are somewhat separated at the venue but since I got tickets from my boss, we were allowed into the “members” area to witness what its like for the latter group. Pretty interesting contrast…but I think we all had much more fun out with the riffraff. Michelle and I are going to “Derby Days” which is a big horse racing event in Melbourne in a couple weeks and I think the scene there is supposed to be even more over the top than at Randwick…Should be fun.

Other than that, I had a decent bit of work over the weekend but we also squeezed in a quick game of tennis Sunday morning which was nice. I caught up on as much sleep as I could so as to not start next week with a sleep deficit. Not sure I succeeded though.

A link to some more pictures from the race day:

http://www.kodakgallery.com/I.jsp?c=bqmhkbd.6h4n4pbp&x=0&y=-w927a5&localeid=en_US

Week ending 12-Oct

This week was a short work week since we had Monday off and we had our IBD offsite starting Thursday night and all day Friday. Part of the offsite on Friday was “team building” which meant we went to the Paddington Bowling Club and did some lawn bowling. Lawn bowling is awesome…its just a bunch of people out on this well manicured grassy area bowling balls down trying to get as close to the target as possible. Very simple, but when you’re out on a beautiful day, with a little competition between co-workers and a beer in hand, it makes for an excellent afternoon. My team got to the finals actually, out of about 30 or so teams where we were defeated by the Kiwi team (which to everyone else on the team made losing that much worse evidently). I’m planning on bringing lawn bowling with me back to the US; quite a good time. The conference ended with the big party Friday night at this club in the CBD which was fun…we stayed out later than I usually do these days. Otherwise the weekend was pretty low key at home, lovely weather as always these days, went down to the pool for a bit and BBQed burgers for dinner. It was sad however, that this weekend was our 5 year Stanford reunion so all of our friends were out at Stanford which was quite a bummer to miss. But that’s the price of living in Australia I guess!

Week ending 05-Oct: Tasmania

Michelle left for Tasmania Monday afternoon with two of her uni friends so I had to survive the week solo before joining up with them. They went into Launceston in the north and did a loop on the east coast of the state before getting to Hobart (the largest city in Tassie) Friday morning to get me from the airport. Tasmania, in general, is about as opposite of a large, crowded city as you can get. There was actually a little traffic getting out of Hobart, but once we got into the countryside, other people and other cars were few and far between. We went up to the top of Mt. Wellington, which overlooks the Hobart area to get a view…its up pretty high and a few flakes of snow were actually coming down…it was freezing cold! (which was even more shocking when compared to how warm Sydney was that morning when I left). From there we went out to Mt. Field National Park and did a little hike up into the forest to a couple of waterfalls. We wanted to go deeper into the park to explore a bit more but it was already pretty late in the day and the animals were out in large quantity all over the place so driving on the road became quite challenging to not hit wallabies and other things popping out in front of the car so we decided to turn back so as to not contribute to the roadkill tally. We did have a close call with a wallaby as we were getting close to our destination…the thing was out in the road and completely froze as we were coming towards it before hopping into our path as I was slamming on the brakes (thankfully everyone survived the incident completely unscathed).

After spending the night in Tarraleah in this somewhat random "resort" that kind of had a Dharma Initiative feel about it (a la Lost), we continued north towards Lake St. Clair in the southern end of Cradle Mountain/Lake St. Clair National Park. We had hopes of climbing up a couple of mountains in the park but it was way too early in the season and snows still made the trails impassable towards the top. So instead we did a long hike up to a small lake and then looped back along Lake St. Clair on the way back. The weather was completely schizophrenic, going from dumping rain, to sunny and back repeatedly. (On a sidenote, the one thing that we had shipped over that is still being held by Australian quartantine are my hiking boots…evidently they were caked with dirt so they're either going to be steam cleaned or "destroyed" to make sure some weird bacteria or germ isn't introduced into Australia. So I was unfortunately reduced to hiking in sneakers which held up very poorly to the rainy, wet, marshy conditions). Anyways, the hike was nice and the highlight was at the end when we made a little detour down to what is called "Platypus Bay" where we ended up seeing a platypus swimming through the water right in front of us! There was also the most amazing rainbow that went down into the lake with the strongest colors. Pretty awesome. From that area we drove north towards the Cradle Mountain part of the park, making a few stops for short walks along the way. Michelle also spotted an echidna on the side of the road which is her new favorite animal.

The next morning we got up early and set out on a hike around Dove Lake which is one of the lakes at the base of Cradle Mountain. The weather was again somewhat questionable so the top of the mountain wasn't quite out, but the views were still pretty great. Towards the end of the circuit we went up on a side trail that climbs up pretty high to a viewpoint looking down on a few lakes with the mountain in the distance. It was a straight uphill kind of thing but the views at the top were worth it. As we were about to head back down it started sleeting on us and the wind picked up so it was pretty cold and my sneakers were failing pretty significantly against the elements so it was a cold hike back to the visitor center. From there we went to this reserve for Tasmanian Devils. Tassie Devils have had a huge reduction in population over the recent few years largely due to a disease that is spreading rapidly through the population. There are a few private and government run institutes that are trying to preserve them but the way things are going they're running the risk of going extinct in the near future. It was fascinating to see the devils right there in front of you…we saw a few of them get a bit of wallaby meat and the ensuing fight went on for probably an hour, just a 4 way tug of war over this carcass. They were actually pretty cute little things though and I think are often misrepresented as ferocious nasty things that will attack humans even though its not true. As we were leaving, we could see off in the distance that Cradle Mountain had come completely out of the clouds so we drove back to Dove Lake so we could get the view of the whole mountain below the clouds. From there we drove north to the coast for a complete change of scenery and spent the night in Stanley on the coast in the northwest of the state.

The morning was clear with blue sky (it didn't last long) and we took advantage by hiking up "the Nut" which is a volcanic rock formation that juts out into the water from the coast. After making it back to the car just before a torrential downpour started, we headed back east along the coast. We stopped in rocky cape national park and did a few small walks along the coastline (which was stunning…the color of the water combined with the rocks jutting out was really beautiful). We stopped for lunch in the town of Penguin (no penguins that we could see on the beach though) and then eventually ended up back in Launceston that evening for our flight back to the mainland. It was a great trip…Tassie is quite a beautiful place and I'm glad we made it down there. I like being places where you can drive along the road and not pass another car for literally hours at a time…its quite a change from living in NYC or Sydney!

Link to a bunch of pictures below:

http://www.kodakgallery.com/I.jsp?c=bqmhkbd.7kp9s5bp&x=0&y=kve2l6&localeid=en_US