Carols at the Domain

Penultimate weekend and in need of a Christmas Fix we took the advice to go to Carols in the Domain (sort of Sydney's Hyde Park). For all you botanists out there you may be interested to hear that flowers also have their seasons back to front. Our house in England has these two in close proximity to each other and they always bloom just before the big summer holiday. The same would seem to apply here but in December rather than July. A nice reminder that I only had 4 days of teaching to do in Australia.

The picture above is part of our precursor Multicultural lunch experience. After the Cronulla riots some questions have been asked about the embracing nature of the Australians but when you are sitting opposite the Opera House watching England start to lose the Ashes, eating sushi whilst in the background A Caribbean steel drum busker is belting out blue Spanish Eyes trying to compete with the resident Aboriginal didgeridoo players
then you must be part of a multicultural society.

As far as getting to the Domain was concerned the main advice was get your picnic mat down early so we arrived at 3:30pm. You have to be friendly because this is how far we were from all our neighbours. After the first 30 minutes you stop apologising for stepping on their territory.

We had to get cosy too. Notice the raincoat! December has not really brought the Summer we were promised. It poured down just before we arrived but apart from a 5 minute drizzle at about 6pm (to which the Australians completely over reacted, brollies and tarpaulin everywhere) that was all.




Getting there 5 hours early got us this close. The news was full of the usual"mad people camped out for three days to get good picnic mat space" stories. Meanwhile Mad children got into the Christmas spirit with their one dollar antlers and flashing noses. These will not be coming home with us as we have a good supply of comedy antlers back home and the noses lasted about 15 minutes.



As for the performance itself? No photos I'm afraid. Lots of video but not had time to download it and our camera is crap in the dark. Suffice to say that it was brilliant. They broadcast it live on the telly and it shows how much the media culture is getting to us in that we were excited by the fact that Human Nature, The Young Divas, Guy Sebastian and Damien Leith would be performing. Meanwhile we too were touched by the tribute to Belinda Emmett and also joined the biggest ovation of the night when the Wiggles came on. Guessing that any Northern Hemisphere reader would go "who the **** are they?"........................... Apart from the Wiggles; to which they would say "not those *******"



The concert and the big firework finale were over by 11pm but thanks to some clever hotel booking at The North Sydney Harbourview hotel we had the kids crashed out by midnight. We have now found out from the room given to us at any hotel with a "Family Room" that your room is usually one floor above any asylum seekers who might be staying. Now it is true that every room in this hotel had a harbourview. By ignoring our immediate outlook to North Sydney Railway station, smacking our cheeks to the window and craning our necks to the right we got our view. Frustrated we went down to the Harbour for breakfast.







The "LonelyPlanet" guide recommended Ripples and we were not disappointed. OK, it was our most expensive breakfast of the year ($75....... 30 pounds) and the waitress made a good attempt at ruining our tans by giving us third degree burns by tossing Tina's Hot chocolate over me and Alex but the heavy shade in the above photo comes from the fact that we were seated directly under the harbour bridge and just when we thought we'd bored each other senseless with the "Can you believe we are here?" line.......we found ourselves saying it again.