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.