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| Adelaide, with the oval in foreground |
It's Australia Day in the wide brown land. On this day we celebrate the first arrival of European settlers. It is traditionally a time for barbeques, a few tinnies (of beer), a bit of cricket, and a lot of sunburn.
As Indians celebrate Republic Day on the same date, we sometimes get together to hold a Test Match. This time round, the game is being played at Adelaide Oval.
For the benefit of our international audience, this is not the 4th of July. The wider population never got much excited about the patriotic, nationalistic side of things, so the government recently took a hand in geeing us up with a bunch of "culturally appropriate" activities. They even have a website for it. Stone the flamin' crows!
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| Adelaide Oval scoreboard, cathedral in b.g. |
The following video shows a series of views from selected parts of Australia, set to music. In a display of antipodean cunning, we left out the less salubrious locations, and avoided all reference to Adelaide (population 1.3 million) so as not to attract too much attention. We know a good thing when we see it, and we don't want the neighborhood spoiled.
So sit back, turn up the volume, and while you people in the Northern Hemisphere think about getting a suntan, I'll be thinking about snakes, sharks, and skin cancer. Enjoy.
2 comments:
Now, Henry, it's the potential tourists who think about snakes, sharks and crocodiles. Apparently publicity of our more interesting wildlife is keeping a lot of people away. It's hard for visitors to understand that we see very little of our native fauna.
My daughter called me at 10:30 the other night and said, "Mum! I ran over a koala." I said, "In the city?" She said, "Yes, and it's still alive." I said, "Oh, the poor thing, how can you tell it's alive? Did it make a noise?" She said, "Yes, a big thump!" Anyway the thing was fine, it dazedly crawled over to the nearest tree and by the time the Parks and Wildlife volunteers had come to rescue it, it was 8 metres up and it didn't want to be rescued. They rescued it anyway. The car needed rescuing more than the koala, the radiator ruptured and sent all its green coolant down the road. To add insult to injury, the RAA wouldn't tow it because it was disabled as the result of an impact. So the moral of this story is, if you hit a koala, drive 200 metres down the road before you call the RAA. No, the real moral of this story is, don't make Australia seem alien and scary to tourists. The Parks and Wildlife volunteers are a lot more dangerous than the resident cuddlies.
I don't know. The regular koalas aren't too bad, but those giant vampire koalas scare me silly...
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