It's been a big week. Let's go back to last weekend. It was the weekend before school started, and I set aside the craziness of back-to-school preparations and paperwork for some serious Aussie fun.
In the US, if you're getting married and you want to have a big last bash with your friends of the same gender, you call it a bachelor or bachelorette party. Here, It's called a Hen's party or a Buck's party. Last saturday Bec and Jeremy celebrated those traditional rights of passage, and Danny and I got to play all day. a long, fun day. I don't know what the boys did exactly.. I guess they hung out on a boat most of the day. They seemed to enjoy it. But I got to go to the races!
About 30 of us women got all dressed up on a rainy Saturday to dine on beautiful food, drink copious amounts of wine, and watch the horses. And I was introduced to the great tradition of betting on horse races. I bet a dollar or 2 at a time, and I think by the end of the day I'd pretty much broke even. But I guess I wasn't really paying all that much attention at that point. I know I didn't lose much, and I know I didn't win big. I just had fun learning how to place a bet and watching the horses run in the mud and some of the ladies get right into it all. Nobody got hurt, I'm happy to report :)
It was a long night too, but I don't need to tell you all about that. ;) Let's just say it began with a really nice ferry ride accross the river into the city, and then Sunday was spent slowly recovering from Saturday. It was a really good Hen's night :)
Then this week was the first week the kids came back to school. I'm not exactly teaching much yet -- still working on enrollements and paperwork and assessments and timetabling. It's always exciting to me to be back in the swing of a new school year and wonder what it holds. I wonder if it might be my last for a while, and I try to make it the best one yet.
So for a first week back, last week was a short one. Thursday was Australia Day. (This link is very funny. It 's an ad that was shown on the telly for a few weeks before the holiday. It's very Aussie humour!) Australia Day is always on the 26th of January, and it's a pretty popular public holiday . A bit like an independance day in any country I suppose; it's recognised in its own patriotic way by Australians. There are fireworks and sales and bar-b-q's. But this year more importantly for Danny and me , there was a wedding.
Danny was Best Man in Jeremy and Bec's wedding. It was a beautiful day and a goregeous outdoor wedding. They got married in a little park in the center of the city, surrounded by frangipani trees. I didn't get any photos of the ceremony, since I was videotaping, but I got a few shots of the reception. And that was fantastic. Bec didn't wear the traditional white dress -- she was surprisingly stunning in hot pink. But I did get to be a part of a tradition of Australian weddings that I'd only heard of before.
At the end of the reception, as the bride and groom are getting ready to take their leave, all the guests surround them in a circle. The sentimental-but-happy music plays as the couple says goodbye to each guest individually. It's like a receiving line I guess, but it's a goodbye circle instead. They start at one point in the circle; the bride goes one way and the groom the other, until they cross over each other and meet again at the point where they started. There's hugging and cheek-kissing and "Thanks for coming" and "Congratulations again." Then everyone takes off. It's beautiful. I'm so glad I got to be there.
It was a long weekend for us. Danny and I both had Friday off as well, and then we had a busy and relaxing weekend -- our favourite kind!
More about that in the next post. Keep watching, I'm sure I'll write it soon.
And be sure to check out the new photo album on my old Yahoo photo page... (it's the link with this post). It's the only way I could manage to get photos of these stories to go with this post. My computer still won't let me post pictures to blogger. grrrr....
Lots of love to all of you we think of all the time. Let us know how your January was, how your week's going
:)
2 comments:
I'm vaguely unsettled by the mismatching of animal names involved here. Why isn't it hens and roosters, or does and bucks? I don't want to think about a hen getting together with a buck after a long day of boating and horse racing to tie the knot. Unless...do Australians call roosters 'bucks'? Maybe?
You know Josh, the mismatch of animal names used to trouble me a bit too...then I just gave up. I decided that Aussie slang words don't need to make too much sense.
Bucks are not roosters-- they're just stags. I think it may have come from that "Stag night" idea? And hens -- well, women are "birds" to Australians. Especially country folk. Who knows why. (Maybe because birds are beautiful and make a lot of noise?) When aussie "birds" get around babies, they get really "clucky".
OH, And this is my favourite one --Do you know what the slang term for Americans is? "Sepo." Why? It's short for ... Septic Tank. Because Septic Tank ryhmes with Yank, and Yank means American!
It's ryhming slang -- there's heaps of those. I think it comes from an old Cockney or Irish thing. I'm just glad that no one has ever called me a septic tank personally! Or if they have, I've happily wiped it from my memory :)
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