Australia Day

About ten years ago David and I came back to Australia for what we liked to call a "sabbatical".  In reality David was desperate to come back for a while and I begrudgingly tagged along.  We were living in Sydney for six months and both working (eventually).  On the Australia Day long weekend David went climbing with a friend in the Blue Mountains, whilst I was lucky enough to be invited on a boat on the harbour, with two old university friends Samantha and Juliet and Juliet's new partner.

It was a glorious day filled with swimming in harbourside lagoons, great food and cold champagne  - all taken from the boat.  It was such an adventure and so much fun.  As the sun was setting we were toasting our glasses in front of the Sydney Harbour Bridge and the Opera House - two very Australian cultural icons - and Juliet was jubiliant in her enthusiasm in celebrating the lovely day we had enjoyed.  She said "To great friends and a great day, and this bloody beautiful country of ours!".  The funny thing was, there was no tongue in cheek or jest as she spoke these words, and they were perfectly true and fitted perfectly with the day we had experienced together.

So as I was watching the tennis the other night, my first experience of Australia Day 2013 was a TV commercial featuring rock music, esky's (cool boxes), men running around playing cricket, men laughing and joking in the sun and all of them drinking VB (beer).  The tagline at the end was "Celebrate this Australia Day with Liqourland!"

On another note it has not been funny to see the media bitching about Victoria Azarenka.  Anyone who is not an absolute idiot could see from the courtside interview that she did not understand the question and launched into a completely different topic.  The media then seized on this and have since been reporting very unsporting comments.  This eventually led to the crowd booing Azarenka when she entered the court for the Women's Final.  Thank god she quieted them by thrashing her opponent.

Ever since Lleyton Hewitt and Bernard Tomic went down the Australian press have been less interested in the Open, all information going from front page to back page overnight.  However, it was very exciting to see Murray and Djokovic going at it last night, even when the poor old Scot went down like a lead balloon in the 4th set (but with a sore toe).  I will need a whole other blog post to even try and explain the outfits worn by the umpire and lines people.  Orange fleece jackets by none other than Lacoste.  Looks like someone may have visited Liqourland before designing them.