Lunch was at Doyles - a renowned seafood restaurant on Circular Quay and it was excellent food - between us we had oysters, prawns, salmon, barramundi, and flounder and it was all very tasty. Went into the Contemporary Art Gallery, which also sits on Circular Quay afterwards and was less than impressed. I'm all for modern art but I do sometimes think that people are being paid enormous sums of money to paint/create pieces of art that a five year old would be proud of, and then get some pretentious fool to write a load of b*ll*cks about it and claim it represents the 'superstition of feeling of a tree as it's cut into by a pigmy carpenter' (or something). The rest of Boxing Day was spent on the couch watching vid's with Mr Lever.....
I thankfully had Friday off and we went to the Blue Mountains in Mum and Dad's hire car - Cremone Point where they are staying is very pretty and peaceful suburb although apparently quite pricey to live in - good view back across the harbour to the city as well. Good views in the Blue Mountains - went to a couple of lookout points I went to last time I was there with Stu - including the 3 Sisters at Echo Point. But the best view was probably Evans lookout which is a bit Grand Canyon-esq, hopefully the photos will do it justice. Dave dashed off to see the Two Towers (great by all accounts) and I went over to Balmain to catch up with Finchy, Darren and Sarah in the Town Hall Hotel and ended up quite a few there and the London Hotel also in Balmain.
The parents are off to Melbourne for New Year so they left early Saturday morning. Can't remember much about the weekend even though it's just happened! Went over to Coogee beach on Saturday afternoon to catch up with Nia and Lindsey and had a look for the first time at the beach there which is really nice. Smaller than Bondi and Manly but a really nice feel (cosy) to it.
We had a free party on Sat night thrown by Vince the guy who owns about 25 of the terrace houses around our way that are rented out to backpackers - this meant free booze and food BBQ'd outside number 31! There were about 800 sausages or something anyway Jess, Nia and Lindsey also came along and it was quite rowdy so all the other non-backpacker residents around the area must have got quite pissed off - apparently the police turned up at midnight to quiet things down. Nia managed to slip over and smack her hip on the ground, after which she couldn't walk properly - this turned out to be a potential fracture (awaiting further information) on Sunday when she visited the local medicare centre. Well done Nia !! - our first BBQ injury (oh for that last bit of chicken eh?). Back to work Monday.... Arrrggghhh!!!!
view of the Bridge from the front. It turned into an all-dayer after a trip to the bottle shop and Woolworths to get food although it was very windy so we had to weigh down the rugs/towels/flags with anything that came to hand.
A very good New Year celebration - the fireworks at 9pm were cancelled because it was so windy but luckily the midnight ones went ahead and were fantastic (looked just as impressive on tele later as well) so thankyou Finchy for showing us a good spot to view ! Hello to all who were there (Darren, Sarah, Finchy, Jess, Sian, Lindsey, Nia, Jo, Gary, Helen, Andy, mystery weird bloke none of us knew). Just ask Dave about his 'angry' moment with the 'portaloo knockers' and the fuzz -
I managed to disgrace myself by falling asleep face down in the park at half ten (I'm getting old don't you know) but a great evening.
After the fireworks we slumped home and promptly lost Gary and Helen on the way back somewhere in Balmain (eventually finding Gary after sending a search party out/Helen got a taxi home) and sat up in Finchy's till the early hours.......
pleasure of speaking to all you guys back home !! Nice to hear you all so drunk at New Years hope you didn't trash Daphne's house too much and I want to see those pictures of the bad Eighties clothes !!