Merry Christmas!!!

It's Christmas Eve in Sydney, and I think I've finally caught the Christmas spirit. This past Sunday night, we brought a picnic supper to Coogee beach to watch the Christmas carols, which may be what finally did it. It was great, we sang our hearts out to all the carols sung by local Sydney celebrities, a few of which I even recognized! (like Amanda Keller from Talkin 'Bout my Generation and hunky Chris Brown from Bondi Vet...although I still have a hard time forgiving him for the one time I watched a full episode, and the little joey he tried to rescue died during the night).

Christmas in Sydney is definitely not the same as a Canadian Christmas. That was made especially clear from attending boozed up auzzie carols at the beach: when we got there at 4pm-ish I wondered if I should have brought some sunblock, and during his brief appearance, Santa let everyone know that some of the kids in the crowd were "damn bad" and they should leave some beer out for him on Christmas eve. However, we're making our own Christmas here, adapted to our new southern-hemisphere life, and we're having fun doing it.

Merry Christmas everyone!!! For those of you back in Canada, throw a snowball, make a snow angel and drink some eggnog for us.

Waiting for the carols to start..

Still waiting....
Santa! ...and do you know what he's saying? well, he's asking the kids to leave beer out for him.

One of the many carolers and the choir

Christmas in the Southern Hemisphere

It's pretty hard to get into the Christmas spirit when it's hot and sunny outside and weekends are spent cooling off at the beach. As a result, we've done absolutely no Christmas shopping, and have made only a weak attempt at a Christmas tree (wrapped the branches of our balcony-sized frangipani with tin foil, then strung it with lights).

Tomorrow evening, we're planning to pack a picnic supper and enjoy some Christmas carols at Coogee beach. We're hoping that might help infuse us with the Christmas spirit. I'll keep you posted. In the meantime, take a look at some pics of our recent trip to Clovelly beach for some snorkelling, where we saw lots of colourful fish, including some big groupers. I love that this place is just a few minutes drive away....is it any wonder Christmas is the farthest thing from our minds?

Walking into the water.

Vic and Gus in the water, if you look closely you can see that Vic is pointing something out to Gus.

Recovering from a big swim/snorkel.

Happenings

Two weeks ago, I finally got away from my desk and started the meat of my thesis; a survey of people who inject drugs. So far I have a sample size of 15, with the goal of eventually getting 260 participants. After a year and a half into my PhD, which involved successfully defending my thesis proposal a few months ahead of schedule, only to go through a very messy divorce with my thesis advisor shortly after, followed by a change in thesis advisors and a change in thesis topics, it feels great to finally be at the point of data collection.

It's been a challenging start to the survey for many reasons, one of which is that I'm so used to having a flexible schedule, able to drop Gus off and pick him up from school on most days. So it's been difficult for the both us to get used to me starting this more rigid and more demanding schedule. Luckily, Vic's parents will be here on Monday and will be a huge help with picking Gus up and being at home with Gus while I'm out surveying people for my thesis.

Completely unrelated, but slightly related to my elevated stress levels, is that we now know for certain that flying foxes (the big bats that live here in the Sydney area) are nocturnal. A group of them recently settled into a macademia nut tree behind our apartment building and man are they loud. They sound sort of like a bunch of angry squirrels, and we've had a few nights of crazy bat sounds going on all night. aaargh! The tree grows right above our clothesline, and we quickly realized that you cannot leave your clothes out overnight or they will end up covered in bat poo by morning. Last night we came home shortly after dusk, and ran to the back to get our clothes off the line before the pooping started, and as they swooped around the tree, disturbed by my presence, Vic decided to stand back and watch, while letting me know that there was a bat right above my head that had a funny, scrunched up look on his face. But he must have misinterpreted the bat's look, because I (and our clothes) came out unscathed by bat poo.

For those of you who live in the area, we made a great little day trip last weekend to Bundeena that I highly recommend. It was one of those hot, hot days. So we packed up our swim stuff, drove to Cronulla (which we had never been to before, but always had negative connotations for me because of the whole race riot thing that happened there about 5 yrs ago - however, it looks lovely and hopefully we'll explore it a little more on another trip), and then took a little wooden ferry to Bundeena. Bundeena has some nice cafes, a great kids' playground and a few beaches within walking distance of the ferry. We went to one of the more deserted beaches, and it was beautiful. Lots of shells for collecting, and a short hike nearby where there were some aboriginal rock carvings to check out.

Here are some pics from the day:

Waiting for the ferry, eating cornettos.

On the ferry on the way to Bundeena.

Making pictures in the sand.

Beachcombing for shells and other assorted things, and on the way to the bushwalk, where we saw the aboriginal rock carvings. Very, very cool and definitely the highlight of our trip to Bundeena.