Keep those cards and letters coming

First off, we wanted to let everyone know how much your comments and greetings meant to us as we tried to get through the holiday social season without our friends and family. We kind of knew it would be hard. It was.

Back to the bloggy bit. We wrapped up Australia with a week in Sydney, mostly because we had to hit the Thai embassy, but also because we wanted to see the New Year's Eve fireworks at the Harbour Bridge. That was fun, if a bit weird. Sort of like one of those big all-day rock concerts - without the music. For us it was 12 hours of waiting around, drinking expensive beer and chatting with lots of other foreigners. I think most locals decided been-there-done-that and the crowd was tourists, just like us. All that waiting and spending $120 on beer seemed like a lot for 15 minutes of fireworks, but it was quite a spectacle. Our favourite bit was the hundreds of little rectangles of blue light underlining the splashy lightshow on the bridge as nearly everybody filmed it with a cellphone or camera. Us too. We'll post a photo if we hit a better internet cafe. Other than that big night out, a twisted ankle has forced us to take it a little easy in Sydney. However, we did manage a bit of sightseeing and ended up at the oldest pub in the city, Lord Nelson's Brewery Pub, where we tried many of their made-on-premises pints and got a little looped. We shared a table with a really nice bunch of Aussies - hi Steve, Steve, Steve*, Stephanie*, Sequel and their friends whose names we drank from our memory. (Actually, Karen might remember a few more names, but, unusually, Bob is writing this post alone while Karen rests her sore ankle.) When some of the Aussie gang first sat down half of them were named Steve so we just called them all Steve. Double-clinks to Steve and Steve. All in all, we're a bit down on big-city Australia (except for our drinking pals) because it's so much like big-city Canada. Bangkok will certainly be a change. Wish us luck.