Sydney - Wedding #1 - Linda and Ian

It was a shock to the system to have to get out of bed before 10am, but it was well worth it. The sun was out, it was a beautiful Sydney day, and my childhood friend Linda was getting married.

The ceremony was short and sweet, made all the more entertaining by watching Ian stumble over the same line in his vows three times, followed by both of them giggling the rest of the way through. They made it out to the convertible bridal car, posed for a few photos, and drove off with the doof-doof music blaring.

An hour or so later, the "young" people gathered once again for the reception at The Wharf Restaurant. With the Harbour Bridge as our backdrop, we sipped wine and nibbled on beautiful canapes for the rest of the afternoon. It was such a lovely day, and looking over the harbour even made me slightly homesick!

We had a similar experience in Little India, whilst in search of curry for lunch, we came across some street vendors and cafes that looked just a little too much like food poisoning waiting to happen. If we were going to be around for more than a couple of days we might have tasted some of the more authentic street food, but seeing as we had another nine hour plane trip ahead, we decided to play it safe!

Our final day turned out to be rainy and hot (ie. humid!) so we stuck to the air conditioned shopping malls. A lot of the malls close to our hotel were underground and joined via underground passageways, meaning we could shop for hours without having to brave the humidity! On walking between two of these shopping malls, we discovered several art displays lining the passageways - one of which pointed out the fact that you can drive across Singapore in about 38 minutes. It was only then that we realised just how small the city is - and they have a population of over 4 million - how crazy is that?

Singapore

Blergh! British Airways is terrible, if you ever have the choice between BA and Qantas, try and get Qantas! Anyway flight aside, we landed in Singapore at about 5.30pm and it had just finished raining and it was 33 degrees. Nice. We decided to catch a shuttle bus from the airport (figuring it would be easier if we were dropped at the hotel door) rather than catch the train. I think the train would have been quicker. It took about an hour of sitting in a rather cramped van with 6 other souls, one of them seemed to have a serious lung infection as he would not (or could not) stop hacking up phlegm, lungs, spleen for the entire trip (no sign of a hanky either!!).

Ahh air conditioned bliss! The hotel is situated right next door to the (famous?) Raffles Hotel and as it happens right on a train station. Once sufficiently cooled, we set out to explore the surrounding district, find a bite to eat and plan our remaining days in Singapore.

Being tourists, we decided to stick to the tourist traps: China town, Buffalo Road (Little India), Orchard Rd etc. Tammie and I really have to get out more - being the seasoned travellers that we are you would expect that we would jump at the chance to experience cultures, foods etc. But upon finding a particular food court in Chinatown, we decided that the experience would be just a little too authentic (plus we could not read any of the menus and there were no pictures).

3 Weddings and a ...

(Or We're off to the Parents, our wonderful parents in OZ)
After about 20 months abroad Tammie and I are taking a 6 week trip back to Oz (and NZ) to catch up with family and attend 3 weddings. Of course we couldn't go home without taking the opportunity to stop off at other countries on the way there and back...

Oktoberfesssht

In a word "Crowded". In a few more words "really crowded, huge, lots of beer, lots of food". This is Oktoberfest!! What I was envisaging as a homecoming or pilgramage turned out to be more of a wash out. It was cold and wet and near impossible to get into any of the big beer "tents". (We have to use the word tent loosely as these things are 3 stories high and hold 10000 people). However one cannot put a dampener on the atmosphere. It really is quite a party complete with amusement park!

Tammie and I were up bright and early on Saturday morning to depart from London and Prague respectively to arrive in Munich as early as possible. We had managed to score a hotel just around the corner from the festivities so we only had a short walk once we had checked in. To behold the Weis'n is quite something. So many people, so many tents, so little time. After a small scouting mission we managed to get into one of the smaller beer halls, where we were seated with some natives (germans that is) and after a brief moment of silence, and a few loosening ales the conversation was flowing in some sort of broken German/English hybrid.



Fast forward 3 similar hours and we decided to bid our new friends farewell and venture on to one of the bigger tents - there in lies our first error. We trudged over to the Hoffbrau tent to find a queue about 20 people deep and 4 people wide infront of every door and showing no signs of moving. We waited for about 30 mins in which time the only forward movement was brought about by other people leaving the queue. A short while later we too gave up - and decided that maybe we'd had just the right amount of alcohol, coupled with the lack of sleep the night before and the lack of food during the day, to warrant a short nap back at the hotel - there in lies mistake number 2. We had our kip and woke up to our horror to discover it was actually midnight and that the day was over, so proceeded to sleep again till the early morn.



Day 2 - the reckoning. Well we were a reckoning that we would get into a hall today. But we were wrong. We got there early (11am) but already the no vacancy signs were out and queues forming. We sat outside in the rain at a smaller tent again and had half a chicken each, which was really good, and a couple of beers, before going off to join a queue. After waiting in the rain for 2 hours we gave up again and managed to get a seat in a smaller beer hall again and talk to a few more germans. Around this time we decided that Oktoberfest was not going to be our friend and that we would be better experiencing the original Hoffbrauhaus beer hall in the city. We ate, drank and talked to some locals (who actually turned out to be Czech SAP practitioners, what are the odds!!) before retiring at a reasonable hour (11.30pm) as we had flights to catch the next morning.

Day 3 - Monday 7.20am. Bugger. We were late - very late. Tammie has approx 20 mins to make her flight. No Chance. After the initial shock of somehow sleeping in, Tammie managed to secure herself another flight later in the day as I packed as fast as I could, and jumped a cab to the airport (I still had an hour). I managed to get to the check in counter with seconds to spare only to be told "No need to hurry your flight has been delayed by about 2 hours". Bugger.