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Published: January 27th 2009
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Enjoying Christmas morning
Left to right: Jess, Karen, Roy, Carol, Nitin, Jo I still couldn’t get my head around the fact that it was Christmas Day. I wasn’t sure whether it was because I was so far from home, or whether it was because it was so sunny - either way it felt bizarre!
When we were all up, Nitin fired up the bbq to cook us a fried breakfast! After tucking into bacon and eggs it was time for Jo’s mum, Carol, and her husband Roy to come over for the grand present opening. Carol was once married to my Dad’s brother but I hadn’t seen her since I was a baby. They’d emigrated out here many years ago. It was lovely meeting her at last as I’d heard her name mentioned over the years.
It seemed funny having Christmas in Perth surrounded by northern accents! Roy filmed us all opening our presents - we even had some thanks to Jo, Nitin and Jess - which was really appreciated as we hadn’t expected to get anything. We’d chosen not to get each other anything as travelling together was enough, and we’d told our families not to send anything other than cards as we couldn’t carry much more! We enjoyed reading
the cards our families had posted over and their letters inside and we were touched to find out that our parents had ignored our pleas and had paid some money into our bank accounts for us anyway.
Once the ritual was over, Carol and Roy headed off to see more family, while Nitin, Jess, Matt and I went to the beach. Unfortunately Jo had a bandaged up foot which wouldn’t have been good on the beach so she stayed home.
There were families on the beach having a pre dinner dip in the ocean, but it was still empty by home standards. It was sunny but very breezy, and after dipping my toes into the ocean and feeling it was chilly I wasn’t sure that I wanted to jump in. Matt and Nitin both ran in and promised me it was warm out in the deeper water, so I decided to join them. Luckily they weren’t lying- it really was much warmed further out. I got really slam dunked by some big waves getting out to them.
I kept having to stop and think about it - it was Christmas day and I was swimming in the
Indian Ocean!
On my way out of the water a big wave caught me from behind pushing me down into the water. My prescription sunglasses were washed straight off my face and were gone even before I knew it. There was no getting them back as the ocean whisked them away from me and took them out of sight. I was gutted as they cost £100 but it was my own fault so I accepted it and got out to get dry. Matt wasn’t impressed and had to keep saying ‘told you so’ as he was always telling me not to wear them in the water. He scoured the waters edge for ages looking for them before giving up and joining us for a beer from the cool bag.
We sat enjoying the view and watching people get sploshed by the big waves for a while before heading home to see Jo. She’d done a get job of getting dinner together and it wasn’t long before we were tucking into roast turkey.
Nitin told us that what they eat on Christmas Day depends on the weather. Sometimes they have turkey, but if it’s 42 degrees then a
cold buffet is the better option. We would have been happy with either, but it did feel good to have had some turkey and even better to have had some Yorkshire puddings as we hadn‘t had those since our last roast at mum‘s house before we left!
It was late evening so we used the internet to skype home and catch up with our families. The phones calls seemed to go so quickly and before we knew it we’d been on there for a couple of hours. Carol and Roy came back over and it was lovely to be able to put her on the phone to my parents as it was years and years since they’d last spoken.
The rest of the night was spent working our way through some of the chocolates we’d been given and watching more James Bond on the tv.
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