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Published: April 3rd 2008
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Four days off! It's a nice prospect at Easter which the majority of the population do enjoy. It's something of a conflict of interest though when you're temping; four days off is always nice, but the wage is reduced. I'd say it was worth it though and it felt like a much needed break from the mundane office environment which we both work in.
For Good Friday, we had tickets booked for the Rugby League match between the South Sydney Rabbitohs and the Bulldogs at the ANZ Stadium, one used for the Sydney Olympics. One thing about Australia, and apparantly also North America, is the way that EVERY venue has corporate sponsorship/ownership, thus being named after companies. ANZ are a bank and it had previously been called the Telstra Stadium, which is the Australian BT. What tends to happen is these places have their name changed every few years when the sponsorship lapses. It really takes the personality out of the places, although the sporting crowds here seem to have a bit less passion anyway with more focus on creating a nice, family atmosphere. Never any singing in the crowd and no one ever stands up from their seat when
Lumberjacks
Our first introduction. the game gets tense. That said, the upshot is they can sell alcohol in the stadium without the prospect of bigoted louts ruining things after a drink or two. I do miss going to the Scotland football matches though, alcohol or no alcohol.
We arrived pretty early so we were sitting about for a while, although they had the B teams playing beforehand so at least it was entertaining. Not being a total rugby fiend myself, I was a bit disappointed to realise it was a Rugby League match, being only familiar with the Rugby Union rules. Rugby League is definitely the dominant "footy" sport over here it seems, although Aussie Rules Football does have a a strong following. For details on our experience with that sport, tune into our next blog.
The
game itself was entertaining enough although it never really held our attention too much. Stew was also let down having only played Rugby Union rules back in Canada and it does seem to be a watered down version, although the tackles are a bit more dangerous. Russell Crowe is a co-director of the Rabbitohs so we half-heartedly supported them as it was also their home
ground. "Rusty" himself wasn't present, but attention was called to American rapper LL Cool J who was.
After the game we just headed back into town and then out to Megan & Stew's flat to have a couple of drinks. It was Shannon's birthday and our intentions were to head into town to celebrate this. However, we didn't really have the attire for getting in most places on a Saturday night in Sydney, and by the time we got into town it was VERY busy. We headed to the World Bar at Kings Cross but the queues were massive and the possibility of some of us getting in wasn't great. So Emma and myself ended up heading to our nearby flat to retire, although not before Emma insisted on stopping for me to get a kebab!
The next day, Easter Saturday, we headed to the
Powerhouse Museum which was fairly entertaining, if a bit underwhelming. There were a few interesting things like the power generation section where you could ride a bike in an attempt to power a fire engine's siren. It was too hard due to the speed the pedals rotated when going fast, although Stew managed to
Towards The End
A lot of my pictures from the game turned out blurry unfortunately, due to incorrect settings. get a peep out of it. Some other nifty things were there too, but a lot of the educational "games" were pretty much aimed at the younger market.
Afterwards, we headed back into town and went for an enjoyable food stop at Harry's (we can't get enough of the place!) and went to a couple of bars to claim some free drinks from coupons that our Canadian comrades had picked up from their stay at the Funk House. Scary Canary wasn't open, but we hit Scubar and Side Bar for our free beverages, and it tastes much better when it's free. This resulted in us heading back to their flat again and having some Chicken Fajitas. A guy called Chris was down from the Gold Coast who Shannon had worked with in Canada, and he had his first taste and thoroughly enjoyed them I believe.
On Easter Sunday, we had no Easter eggs, but we headed to Megan & Stew's flat for a day of DVDs and snacks, which was the chill out we needed. They have a decent number of DVDs purchased in Asia, which are all new and good quality. Megan in particular loved Sweeney Todd
Us
Anticipating the game. and has since said she is going to rush out and buy the soundtrack. Or not. I still think it's really good though, even on second watch.
We finished off our chillout weekend with some things we had to do on Monday, such as food shopping and internet hopping. We ended up gettin a cut price Easter Egg too, so it still felt a bit like Easter. Unlike back home though, Easter TV isn't jam packed with films or particularly good TV so we didn't spend much time at our flat. In fact, it was mostly spent at Megan & Stew's...it's almost as if we are living there now! Watch this space.
Despite now being Autumn, the weather hasn't got substantiallly colder. Some pretty hot days too, hotter than the best summer days back home. It's nice, but it means we go through a lot of sunscreen. Only 6 weeks until we leave Sydney for good, the time has gone pretty fast. A lot of the East Coast is in the tropics, so it means we still have some great weather to enjoy. We hit New Zealand in their winter though. The glaciers will be nice but I
ANZ Stadium
This was still early, but it never really filled up to capacity. think we're going to be cold, cold, cold in our campervan, which we hope to hire for our time there.
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