October 19th, 2005 - Rain, Rain go away…

It was a rainy work week in Sydney which can only mean one thing…more movies, among others Jumanji and Something about Mary. The International MotoShow was in town all week and although we didn’t bother going into the showrooms, there was some neat ambiance all through Darling Harbor. The highlight of which was the 4WD demonstration track. They hauled in a bunch of dirt and set up what looked like a dirt bike track but designed for 4x4 demonstrations. Complete with a massive ‘teeter totter’ and ramp I watched a couple of companies run their cars through the track with interested passengers. Last week was Chris and Karens last week in Sydney and so we showed them off with another house barbeque and a trip to the Star City casino. The casino was a fraction of the size of Montreal’s but had a lot of character. Combined with the hotel, the front entrance is full of waterfalls, staircases, fountains, etc. There must be over fifty different ways to get to the second floor of the building using any different combination of stairs or escalators from street level. Based on the number of people inside, I’m not quite sure why the need for so many staircases? Inside they had the two massive cylindrical fish tanks. They were more impressive than the ones we saw at Ocean World in Manly, with a huge leopard eel and tons of clown fish and angel fish. It really made me want to set up a salt water fish tank back home when I settle down. One of my new roommates, Ben, is an avid soccer fan and he dragged me out to an Arsenal game in a small hotel pub. Ben had been drinking most of the afternoon and two pitchers later we staggered home for 2:00am. I found out the next morning that Ben crawled into bed with his girlfriend and her friend who was spending the night rather than sleeping on the couch as originally planned and that he couldn’t even remember the score!