Friday, June 6, 2008

Thursday, May 29, 2008

Our Marriott Hotel roomFinally got a good night’s sleep last night. I realize I will get absolutely no sympathy if I complain about trying to sleep in first class, so I won’t even try. But today I feel so much better after a sleep in a real bed.
Ian brought us their Rav to drive to Narrabeen to see Nick & Jan. Randy did a great job of driving on the left (I am trying not to say “on the wrong side of the road”!), only signaling with the windshield wipers a couple of times. For me sitting in the passenger seat—he left side—it is a bit disconcerting to be on the left side and HAVE NO CONTROL! But I’m getting over it.
Nice visit with Nick & Jan and they gave us a bit of a tour around the countryside near their house. Nick still won’t come to the US with Jan when she goes in a couple of days. He wants to stay home and watch the European soccer games. Too bad! We were hoping he would go up to our cabin and so a little work up there. He is going to have bilateral knee replacements in August—the 20th, I think—so Jan will have to be back by then.
In the evening we had decided we would like to go to some performance at the Opera House. Any performance. Just to go to a performance at the Opera House. How could we go wrong at a world class venue? Let me count the ways! We bought tickets to Edward Scissorhands; great reviews, an avant garde performance that has opened to rave reviews in Paris and London. That alone should have told us to be wary.
The tickets said the performance was at 7:30pm so we arrived at 7:10, expecting to be able to be seated (in row X, the very back of the bottom floor) soon if not immediately. Wrong. At 7:50pm the doors opened and the performance, such as it was, started at about 8:05. Meanwhile the entire sell-out crowd was jammed into the halls, the stairs, the lobby, anywhere there was room for a warm body. Heaven help us if there were to be a fire! Luckily, there wasn’t. It also didn’t help that we paid $A90 per seat (!) and the woman next to us paid $A45!
The performance starts and the music is kind of nice but there is no dialog. None. And lots of weird sets and dances. Not my idea of how I wanted to spend my evening and my $A180! Each of us fell asleep a couple of times and thus decided that we would bag the rest of the “performance” and go have something to eat. We did get our pre-ordered intermission glass of wine and thoroughly enjoyed sipping wine of the patio/deck of the Sydney Opera House. That was great.

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