Christmas Festivities.

I've been a bit slow updating my blog recently. No excuses just having too much fun over here to find the time.

We've had the Earth Tech, Wallingford and Sydney Water Christmas parties in mid December.

The Earth Tech one consisted of a meal and dance in a hotel in north Sydney. It was good fun but most other people were much more drunk than me. Earth Tech is the company which Sydney Water hired which in turn hired Wallingford Software to provide the water modelling software.

The photo on the left is of the Wallingford Christmas party which took place on one of the old paddle steamer boats which for two and a half hours circles around the harbour while we get to eat average food and get entertained by a small cabaret act.

There were plenty of other people on the boat, they were mainly tourists though as there appeared to be only one other company there. We all had a good time on the boat but it was a bit brief. You only really had time to eat and watch the cabaret show as it was only a two and a half hour cruise around the harbour. It would have been much better to get some time to walk around the boat and admire the view as well. Still we had plenty of beers once we docked again at a local bar.

As you can see the Australian bus company in Sydney has a good laugh with some of their busses over Christmas. Here are a couple of photos that Allen took of their 442 bus home to Balmain.

It still doesn't really feel like Christmas over here. It's been much too warm though not too hot. The run up to Christmas has been very subdued, if you ignore the shops that is. There isn't that over the top decorating that you get in England.

One thing that we noticed was that there isn't any Christmas decorations put up by the Sydney council. So the only Christmas decorations that you see are either subtle ones on people's houses or in the shop windows. I didn't see any instances of fake snow in the shop windows though, only some tinsel, lights or balls. A much better way to have Christmas if you ask me.

I spent Christmas day at Deirdre and Allen's place for Christmas lunch. We also had Roger, Ian and Ian's mum along as well. Ian is the technical support for Wallingford Software in Australia. He's a proper Sydneysider. We all had a full Christmas lunch cooked up by Allen and played Trivial Pursuit on their front Porch as it was clear and Sunny outside. The Trivial Pursuit here does have an Australian slant though. Unless you happen to know a little bit about Australian sport, politics and entertainment you wouldn't know about ten percent of the questions.