Feb 22-24, visitors from America!

On Monday, February 22, my buddy Laura and her friends Beth and Jeremy came to stay with me! Laura and Beth are USCG and Jeremy is USCG from the Naval Academy (good for him). It’s amazing how four people can stuff my tiny apartment, but we managed! I was only actually here for three days and then left for Tasmania; they stayed here another four days. Beth and Jeremy had one air mattress, and Laura slept with me. At first she offered to sleep on the couch, but I was glad she decided to use my bed for a very selfish reason: my partially-inflated air mattress flattens out only when two people sleep on it, balancing on either side. When it’s just me, the mattress gently folds me into the middle, so I am sort of buried in a cocoon of air mattress folds—which would be cosy except that often, my arms end up elevated above the rest of my body, and they lose blood circulation and fall asleep so I am always waking up with pins and needles. But poor Laura may have regretted her decision when she woke up in the middle of the night with me trying to spoon her. I usually sleep with a stuffed animal which I smother in the course of the evening—I guess she made a good replacement, to my sleeping mind. Anyway she woke me up and pushed me off. Sorry Laura! At least she had the bed to herself for the rest of the week.



So all three arrived on Monday, and we hit the beaches for the day. Summer is fading fast, a definite chill has set in, but there are still some scorching hot days scattered here at the end of February. We had a good dinner down at the Clovelly Hotel.



On Tuesday morning we climbed the Sydney Harbour Bridge! Though we weren’t allowed to take cameras up, but we did buy a cd with our photos on it. The views over the city were stunning, although I was feeling pretty vertiginous. The wind was so strong up there, it felt as though if you didn’t grip the rails, it might pick you up and toss you out over the water and the cars rushing far below...Well, that’s how it felt to me, anyway. Our guide told us that the wind here could get up to 100 km/hr and yes, it had been known to toss people off, in the old days...



Back on solid ground, we went for lunch at the Hero of Waterloo pub in the Rocks, enjoyed a gelato at Copenhagen's, went home, showered and got all dressed up and made it to the Opera House with about thirty seconds to spare, slipping into our seats as they were closing the doors and lowering the lights.
The show was the opera version of “A Midsummer Night’s Dream,” directed by (Aussie) Baz Luhrmann. Some of you may remember me complaining that the tickets were over $200 apiece?...well, I take it all back. We were in the THIRD ROW, and essentially counting Titania’s nostril hairs. The show was fantastic, although I couldn’t get used to Oberon, who sang in a falsetto and trilled all his R’s. Try to picture a grown man wearing a bunch of leaves and heavy eye makeup, warbling "I know a ba-ank wherrrre the wild thyme blows, where oxlips and the nodding, nodding, NODDING woodbine grrrrrows..." Ugh, sorry, my artistic tolerance does not extend that far. Otherwise the show was brilliant, especially the actors who played the silly town workers doing their performance for the Duke--they hammed it up madly and stole the show entirely away from Helena, Demetrius, Lysander and Hermia. Oh, and there was a LOT of sexual innuendo.




On Wednesday, we had pastries at Brot, the German bakery just up my street, and we said our goodbye’s as the adventurers set out for the Taronga Zoo and I got ready for my trip to Tasmania...