Saturday February 21st, 2009. Posted by Alex:
Thanks to a series of coincidences we got invited to a free lunch on the Arcadia. (I suppose P&O are still trying to improve their image after the sorry Dianne Brimble story). A tour of the ship followed. I was a barnacle in tow with Sarah who was there as the daughter of her father, Les, who had very fond memories of a trip many years ago with some of the other friends at our table.
The name of the ship was historically important to Australia – I think quite a number of the Ten Pound Poms, for instance, came on an earlier bearer of the name. To be sure there are a lot of people with better reasons to have been there, but that was the luck of the draw. Note the cameras and media presence in the slide show!
Facit: food not at all bad, service excellent. What would those Victorian gentlemen who amused themselves dreaming up plurals call a large assembly of waiters? A canteen?
Wednesday February 4th, 2009. Posted by Alex:
A bit after 2:00 am. Bump. Cat or bat on the window bars? Dog gets up to see what’s what. Cat gets up to stalk around in case one should know anything. Back to sleep.
No, it was a bomb and a couple of gunshots! Hell’s Angels clubhouse a bit less than a mile from here.
Picture from the Sydney Morning Herald, photograph by Steven Siewert.
Sunday January 4th, 2009. Posted by Alex:
After all those years when learning to dance seemed like a great idea to do “sometime“, Sarah and I went to an introductory tango session on Saturday, and are fired up to have lessons at Patio de Tango.
The teacher was really reassuring, and started at the very beginning: first, just stand there. Then progress to shifting your weight back and forth from one foot to the other. Later we progressed to walking forward, using first one foot, then the other! And so on.
At this stage I just want to stress that this is Argentine tango, not ballroom tango (or the “dreaded slow-slow-quick-quick-slow” as it seems to be known).
Thursday January 1st, 2009. Posted by Alex:
Let’s face it, if you are going to see in the new year with fireworks, Sydney is the place to do it. This year we were kindly given tickets to a spot in the Botanical Gardens – here was our view as we settled to watch the parakeets, swallows, bats, moon and helicopters as we waited for the show.
For pictures of the fireworks themselves, go to the paper:
SMH picture gallery. They were spectacular!
They also have a video.
Thursday December 25th, 2008. Posted by Alex:
The now traditional trip on the ferry…
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This isn’t the interesting, focussed blog you might have been looking for… "Pica Pica" is, as I'm sure you knew, the name for the common magpie. It's no more than a collection of bits and pieces I wanted to make available for friends and family. I have other blogs for dharma related material (at DangZang), and a small one for translation at my work site. Oh yes, it's by Alex Wilding |
