Easter in Adelaide

I went to Adelaide for Easter this year. Flew out Friday lunch time with Virgin Blue. Was able to offset my carbon emissions for about $1.50 for the return trip, which sounded suspiciously low.

The flight was great. Nan came to pick me up at the airport in her new Kia. Her Pulsar had been recently stolen, and she bought a Kia Cerato with the insurance payout.

We went back to her place in Parafield Gardens, had a bit of a chat, caut up with my cousin Jamie and Nan's boyfrend Tony. Rod, an old workmate and frend from Wodonga came around for dinner.

On Saturday, I went to see Linda and her boyfrend Okke for lunch at Sushi Train near the Adelaide Central Markets. After lunch, we went shopping. I bought some Lindt dark chocolates and Coopers Extra Dark Stout.

Linda and Okke

We went back to Linda's place in Gilberton (just to the North of North Adelaide), met Okke properly, then discussed past events, relationships, and the meaning of life. :-)

That night, Linda and Okke took me to a frend's party in the East End of Adelaide. Drank too much, stayed up too late! Had a great time! It was revealed that Okke and his mates were card-carrying Adelaide United members, so we arranged to travel to each other's home matches. Apparently they've got a blow-up doll of Kevin Muscat, but I'm sure it's all in good sport... :-/

Beehive Corner, Rundle Mall

On Sunday, we went to see the Egyptian exhibit from the Louvre at the Art Gallery. It was a little bit interesting, but I always find myself wanting to know more than the signs tell. They also used some weird terminology, possibly due to the translation from French, and called the Sun God "Re" rather than the familiar "Ra".

We went back to Linda's place. I saw the first half of the Western Bulldogs getting convincingly beaten (again!), then we went out for dinner to an Indian restaurant on Melbourne Street.

After dinner, we went to see The Host at Palace Cinema. Kinda fortunately for me, it wasn't on. I had been really wanting to see The Lives of Others, and that was on in about 15 minutes, so we did that instead.

The movie turned out to be really good. A bit of a Schindler's List type of movie in that the circumstances are those of oppression and control of a war-like regime, and that it focussed on a small group of peeple to show its effects. The story was great and was made very emotive by the direction and cinematography. I felt really worried and concerned for the characters. The ending was good, and really helped show that it's the peeple of the regime that make up the regime. It was also rather ironic, considering one of the main undertones of the movie was suicide. It lead to some interesting discussions afterwards.

Got back to Nan's place a bit after midnight, and flew out the next morning.

Felt quite sick by the Monday night. Ended up in bed for most of the week with tonsillitis.

(I didn't kiss anyone Katie, honest!) ;-)

World Cup Tickets!

I just got a fone call telling me I'd won free tickets to the Australia versus Brazil World Cup match!

There was a promotion for Bitburger beer at Dan Murphy's, so I bought a slab last week and entered the competition.

It was such an awesome surprise after not getting any tickets in the draw! I was so excited I started talking like people do when they win something on commercial radio. "Oh my god, thanks so much!" :-)

The flight takes me to Munich on June 15 in time to watch the match on June 18. My return flight is for June 20, but I'll see if I can stay longer.

Time to start practising my German!

World Cup

I had been hoping to go to the soccer world cup in Germany this year.

It was a long term plan of mine to revisit Europe after staying in Austria for 8 months as a 15 year old on a student exchange.

I started trying to get tickets as soon as I watched the qualifier between Australia and Uguguay back in Sydney, and applied for tickets in the ballot, which apparently was already up to round 3 of sales.

I got an e-mail in early Feb telling me that I hadn't been allocated any tickets. I thought that was pretty bad luck, since I'd applied for the maximum possible, all three of Australia's round 1 matches, and figured it was fairly likely I'd get at least one. It wasn't good news, but I still held some hope of getting tickets in the last round of sales.

Round 4 started last night at 10, so I got to the web site about 9.45 to try to get in early. At about 10 o'clock, the site opened for business. I was optimistic, as it told me there were still limited tickets available for two of Australia's three round 1 matches: Australia versus Brazil in Munich, and Australia versus Croatia in Stuttgart. I guess there weren't any for Australia versus Japan, as the match was being played at Kaiserslautern, which can't fit as many people in the stadium.

On my first attempt, after selecting the tickets I wanted, I got as far as "the waiting room", which was supposed to be the last step before getting the tickets, but for some reason I could go no further. On subsequent retries, I just kept getting error messages. They didn't say anything meaningful, but I assume that Yahoo!'s web servers were so busy that they just couldn't handle the load.

I sat there retrying until about 1am, when I decided I needed to get some sleep. I set my alarm and went to sleep.

I woke up again at 2am, and was disappointed to find there was nothing left!

Going to keep going back to the site regularly to see if any more tickets have come on sale, but I guess I'm going to have to rethink my plans. :-(