Oh, so funny! When we lived in Japan and caught the train, we lost count of the times that the person sitting next to us would fall asleep, their head nodding closer and closer to our shoulder until they almost fell, woke with a start and an apology. They'd then go back to sleep. And repeat the cycle.
Now excuse me while I spend the next 10 minutes right-clicking and saving.
Found via Tokyo Expat Life.
Kathleen and I, along with our friend Darise, were down in Port Sorell, near Devonport, for the Australia Day long weekend to see our friends Frithy and Kel married.
We drove a hire car from Launceston airport out to Devonport, through the farming countryside of northern Tasmania.
We arrived on Friday afternoon, just in time to help with a little bit of the setup and preparation - both Frithy and Kel were hard at work preparing for the wedding - and that night, went out with them and their families and those friends that had arrived to a counter tea at the pub, followed by a few quiet beers back at Camp Banksia, the wedding venue.
The day of the wedding, Frithy was still running around organising, but took time out to take a few happy snaps:
It was a very warm Tasmanian summer day, and after Kel arrived, she wasted no time in sorting Frithy out. She adjusted his suit much to everyone's amusement:
But apart from Frithy's sartorial mishaps, the rest of the wedding went beautifully.
While the bride and groom departed for photos along the beach, the guests retired for a few beers at the marquee before the reception lunch. Afterwards, everyone came back (well, most people were staying at cabins at the camp) prepared for the evening BBQ. Frithy and Kel (particularly Frithy) take their BBQs pretty seriously. There's a reason why we call an invitation around to his place to put meat on a hot grill a "Frithyque" - it really is above and beyond a mere BBQ.
The BBQ went on long into the night.
As the groom relaxed the morning after, with his fry-up breakfast and brand new, discomforting, wedding ring...
... his new wife found out the hard way how married life tends to pan out, behind the business end of the cooking.
Congrats, Frithy and Kel!
There's no reason for this photo, apart from the fact that I love how all the cows are looking at me taking a photo. Moo!
Andrew, Kathleen and Darise stayed at Shearwater Cottages. They hired a car from Budget. They are not being paid for any endorsements but note that the service was so good that it is worth mentioning if you, the reader, are ever in Tasmania.
Just 3 out of 5 stars.
I wanted to like this more, really I did, but the self-consciously hipster dialog was just a little too much. Awkward references to 80s pop/punk culture coming out the mouth of a wise-cracking 16 year old character is just too much of a bridge to cross. The references to The Stooges and Patti Smith just sounded like the writer wanted to throw in her musical tastes in front of the audience, rather than a real attempt at characterisation. In fact, a vast majority of Juno's lines sounded like they'd been rehearsed for cool, rather than something that a 16 year old would actually say.
Two scenes in particular though - where Juno and her mother have the ultrasound appointment, and the later birth scene - were fantastic, and it was in those scenes that the dialog was believable and authentic. Most of the rest of the time... well, perhaps it had been a bit too hyped.
We were at the Chinese restaurant in Lemon Grove in Chatswood on Monday. Kathleen had ordered the wonton noodle soup.
Five minutes later, the waitress came back out.
"We cooked the soup, but not the noodles. Did you want to change your order to the soup?" she asked without a hint of embarrassment.
"No," said Kathleen firmly. "I want the noodles as well."
"You sure?" the waitress asked one more time.
So, the difference between a Chinese restaurant and a western one is that, in the Chinese restaurant, if they mess up your order, they hope that you want their version of your order, rather than the one you initially wanted.
Panic is getting an SMS at 7.30am from your wife stating that she's sick with a cold, and is coming home earlier from her interstate trip, and then realising that that means she'll be home at lunch, rather than at 9pm as expected, and that all the dirty dishes, empty beer bottles, pizza boxes and other garbage, recycling and ironing that have accumulated over the last 3 days (because, right, they can be fixed after you get home from work on Wednesday and she'd be none the wiser) will have to be done NOW, in the next 30 minutes.
OK, I exaggerate a little at how messy this place was... but the ironing had not been done, and clothes that had been taken down from the line 4 days earlier had still not been put away. She hates that.
Poor Leila McKinnon. She came with her best attempt at condescension, but even that was no match for an interviewee who treats you with disdain rather than shame.
The impotence of her position, sitting in a studio trying to impose a public shaming on a 16 year old was best expressed in the exchange:
ACA: "Take off your glasses and apologise to us!"
CD: "I'll say sorry, but I'm not taking off my glasses."
Pause. "Why not?" She didn't expect that.
CD: "'Cause they're famous."
But the kicker was the sign-off. Everybody knows that rule number one on a 'current affairs show', when you're trying to shame somebody into being Bogan Australia's number one villian, is that you never, ever let them have the last word.
ACA: "I suggest you go away and take a good, hard, long look at yourself."
CD: "I have. Everyone has. They love it."
ACA - pwned!Damn, I wanted to start uploading to Flickr most of the Japan photos that I've had to take down from the site due to running out of space allocated for my account. It seriously burns that people can no longer see some of the earlier photos.
Unfortunately, it looks like I'll have to get a Pro account at Flickr to be able to categorise things nicely into sets. Plus get some decent stat data.
Double unfortunately, the obsessive compulsive within me starts looking at some of these old photos and thinks "Wouldn't it be nice to get on board with that geotagging think, so that I can link up the photos with the physical location where they were taken? And that way people could just click on the photo, and see in Google Earth exactly where in the world I took it?"
Yeah, wouldn't it? That might take a little while to do. Maybe a project for next summer...
Anyway, I've just uploaded the photos from our trip to Kyoto, circa December 2002. A trip marked by the closure of a number of significant cultural destinations for the time that we were there.
It's currently the January sumo tournament in Japan. Sapporo restaurant in Crows Nest always televise the tournaments on a projector screen outside, since they get a satellite feed of NHK, Japan's main TV channel*.
So we invited Steph and Eva (since Steph sounded keen) and Ivan and Ange (since I'd told them so many times how cool sumo wrestling was) over on Saturday night to come up and watch. And I'd specifically booked a table with line of sight to the projector.
Unfortunately!
The weather was so lousy on Saturday night that the satellite reception was very patchy. A bout would start and almost instantly, the reception would freeze and blink out for about 5 seconds, before returning. And the sumo bouts are generally short - often no more than 5-10 seconds in length - so a lot of the time, we saw the wrestlers face off, and then the coverage of the winner returning to his position. Even the replays were plagued by the glitches. Most annoying.
Anyway, from what they could see, it was definitely appealing enough to warrant the trip over to the north side of the river. Next time we go, we'll go on a dry night!
Given the poor reception, the owner kept switching across to the cricket - a close finish there too - until Shaun Tait's stumps got skittled. Then he switched to the tennis, for an amazing five set finish between Federer and some Serbian nobody playing the game of his life.
The entire restaurant was watching the TV by this stage.
Talk about a sports night! We'd seen sumo, cricket, tennis - all close and exciting. And at the local Japanese restaurant no less.
* In Japan, there's a tax that's collected from every house with a TV, similar to that of the UK. Every few months or so, NHK send collectors around door-to-door to deliver the bill, payable there and then. They don't take no for an answer, either. We came back from holidays once, and there was a knock at the door not less than 10 minutes after we'd arrived home. I swear they'd been lying in wait for us. And no amount of pretending you don't understand the language helps either. Damn, they were insistent!
I am so glad we went snorkelling at the Great Barrier Reef BEFORE watching Open Water on Sunday night...
Yesterday it was so hot and humid in the apartment that we went into town specifically to go into shopping aircon. By last night, we couldn't bear the heat any longer and turned the aircon on in our apartment.
And we cranked it, too - all the way down to 20C, which was beautiful...
Unfortunately this morning I've woken up with a sore throat and a cold. Probably the result of going from heat and humidity in the apartment to a much colder temperature very very quickly.
Urgh.
After an afternoon at home spent battling pantry moths - little ****ers caused us to throw out most of our plastic-wrapped or open food in the pantry - we caught with Steph/Eva and Denzil/Lu for Jazz in the Domain.
Alleged jazz, that is - it turned out to be salsa! Talk about misleading advertising.
Anyway, we all got there pretty late, got seats right out the side under the fig trees and the audio was pretty ordinary out that way, so we actually just sat around and talked and ate the food that the more prepared of us (i.e. not Kathleen and I) had brought along. As I said, pantry moths, etc etc, but that's not really an excuse because the others had pretty busy days as well... we really owe them a BBQ at our place!
But even there at jazz we were still subject to the attacks of the natural world.
Bats!
Moving between their daytime home at the Botanical Gardens and their nighttime lair of Centennial Park, the bats swooped down into the trees, eating the figs, and dropping a lot of the fruit all over those unfortunate enough to be sitting below. Ouch!
So we moved off, and had a nightcap in at the Sheraton, making sure we enjoyed our $10 beers!
We bought a new camera as part of a belated Christmas/anniversary present to ourselves - a Canon EOS 400D.
On the plus side, it lets even amateur hacks like us take good photos:
Most of these, the notable exceptions being the night photos, were taken in auto mode. The night photos were also taken in a 'preset' mode - landscape, to make sure the flash didn't fire.
On the negative side, I wish we'd had a camera like this last year on our US and China trips, as well as when we were living in Japan!
New Years Resolution: learn how to use the manual settings and take photos like the better photographers I know: Cam, Denzil and Rob.
We went into town with our friends for the Sydney Festival. Spoilt for choice - we would have loved to have gone to all the different concerts that were on in Martin Place, Hyde Park and the laneways around Angel Place, but ended up at the Domain to watch Paul Kelly and Brian Wilson.
Former was good (To Her Door, Dumb Things, How To Make Gravy, but no From St Kilda To Kings Cross and thank goodness not Bradman), latter was... in keeping with his reputation as a little bit eccentric. Brian Wilson was very reserved on stage with a repetoire of interesting hand movements, but he did play a number of Beach Boys classics which the crowd loved when they recognised them. The songs were 1950s-style short, too.
Troy would have loved it.
Afterwards, we wandered into the crush of people that was Martin Place (the police had previously blocked off the George, Pitt and Elizabeth St entrances to prevent more people from going there!), and then down to the Intercon for a drink at 1am.
(And was it only me, or did everyone notice just how much rubbish was on the trains, both on the ride in and the ride home?)
We arrived back after almost a week in Port Douglas, Far North Queensland*. It was a warm, humid week, with pouring rain in the evening due to the start of the rainy season.
Our first impression of FNQ was the naked female mud wrestling on TV in the hotel - and to be honest we expected nothing less from Queensland, well renowned as being a bastion of Australian sophistication and class. It turned out to be the film clip from Duran Duran's Girls on Film - a slight reprieve for Queensland there. So we went and had dinner at the Iron Bar, which featured nightly cane toad races.
We went out to see the Great Barrier Reef, catching a catamaran 30k offshore. We were given red lycra jumpsuits to wear in the water, allegedly to protect from jellyfish stings, more likely for staff amusement. We looked like we were in a Daft Punk music video.
We spent the day snorkelling and scuba diving (yes, I even strapped an oxygen tank to my back).
Kathleen even got to pose with a tame humphead wrasse:
I was going to pose holding a sea cucumber as though it was sticking out of my ear, but I was too busy concentrating on trying to adjust to the pressure 10m underwater. It was beautiful under the water, though.
The reef was amazing, despite the overcast day - apparently on a clear day, you can see the reef so much more clearly even from the pontoon. Swimming about 50m away from the boat, we found the edge of one section of the reef, with a dramatic drop off 10m to the sea floor. The diversity of the coral structures, and the swarms of fish floating by as close as close can be, were just the most incredible and breathtaking sights.
The persistent sea swell played havoc with the stomachs of a number of the people on board, with obvious results.
Cairns, Port Douglas, and North Queensland are synonymous with the reef, and the reef touches the lives of the people in many ways up here, such as through gaming lounges and pokies on dry land:
We swam at Four Mile Beach, safely protected from the jellyfish by the sea nets installed at the beach.
We took a day trip to Kuranda via the Skyrail, which was fantastic. We coasted in a little car over the tops of the trees for kilometres.
I have no idea how they managed to construct the cable car without damaging the rainforest.
Kuranda itself was a bit meh - way too many tacky souvenir shops selling crappy t-shirts.
For me, the best part of Kuranda was this shop:
Yep, an Aboriginal souvenir shop, in the shape of a pirate boat, complete with Aboriginal colours. Yargh me hearties!
We came home via the scenic railway, but got the dud seats on the side facing the cliff face, rather than the view, which sucked a lot.
We finished off the holiday by taking a 4WD tour of the Daintree, which was awesome, particularly the rainforest walk in the mist-covered mountains.
I uploaded a whole bunch of photos to Flickr, so you should probably go there to check them out.
* We arrived back prior to the New Year, but I adapted to Port Douglas time, which is usually much slower than the rest of Australia... hence the late post.
andrewandkathleen was meant to be a place to chuck our photos and diaries of our time in Japan. Since then it's transformed into a way of letting our friends and family know what we've been up to!
We've been together since high school, married since 2005. We've travelled and lived in different cities and different countries and are now trying to work out whether we're settling down or having a rest!
