FESTIVE SEASON IN OZ!

Here's what I got up to over the christmas period.

Christmas Eve

We'd booked a cruise through Work and Travel which seemed like a good idea.
- a 3 hour cruise on a boat around the harbour with all you can eat and drink.
For some reason someone decided that getting tipsy beforehand was a good idea...
basically... alot of different companies were doing this offer and at the jetty, which was at Darling Harbour there were a large number of people all waiting at various points. We saw the luxury of some of the boats and were getting quite excited..... that was until we saw the joke that was the boat that we got! - it looked like a toy boat... in fact it said "FUN BOAT" on it. - implied that it was not a proper boat more than that you would have fun on it.

the free food was a joke too.... chicken bits on the bone (yuk) and lettuce. THAT'S IT!!!

the drink was all very nice... but you can imagine the combination of people not really eating anything substantial and having lots of free booze. yeh, not pretty. everyone of our party threw up at some point. mostly on the boat, but i made myself the day after, as i felt quite ill lol. Another of our group... somehow got left on the boat and fell asleep and woke up being wrestled by police and losing her bag with her phone and wallet etc.

CHRISTMAS DAY
After the craziness of the night before, we werent really sure what we were up for in regard to christmas dinner... but we'd been invited to a friends house where her
land lady wanted to cook for us. So our christmas dinner was a roast pork with potatoes and veggies. - very nice. After that, we thought we'd see what was going on on Bondi Beach (you just have to say you spend christmas day on bondi).
It was very surreal everyone sitting chilling on the beach, in santa hats lol

the police kept the alcohol strictly off the beach.

NEW YEARS EVE
For New Years Eve, we had decided to go across the harbour to North Sydney at a small place called Bradleys Head which is just down the road from Taronga Zoo. We'd scoped out the place beforehand and selected the optimum spot. We woke up at 5.30am (i think) and got to the area at about 7am... what greeted us was a selection of TENTS of people who had stole all the best parts for themselves. NOT IMPRESSED - especially as there's signs forbidding camping or barbeques. (both of which was ignored clearly). Anyway, we managed to find an ok spot and sat down for the big wait of around 16 hours.

The sun was very hot that day and we had to constantly reapply the suncream. At about 9pm a group of Dutch people sat RIGHT infront of us... i.e. on our bags and towels etc. what a rude bunch of people. So we had a bit of a territory fight there... which i'm happy to say the brits won. The Dutch are the rudest race we have encountered here and seem to have no regard for other people or manners of any kind - not just this situation but there was a much worse won later on (read later)
.... i'm actually tempted to keep a log of nationalities and their traits... which could be quite racist i guess... but if it's factual i suppose that's ok.
Anyway once we had our turf back it was all fun. we drank slowly and had our little picnics that we'd made. The fireworks were really quite amazing, by far the best new year celebrations in the world and i got several AMAZING photos.