2nd Trip to Adelaide

Johanna is attending a 2-week workshop in Adelaide. As I was still trying my luck with jobs in the past few weeks, she was suppose to go to Adelaide on her own.

She flew off on 13 January. On 15 January, I've decided to accept the job offer from AIG Life in Melbourne and will start work on the 29th. Hence I flew to Adelaide on Friday the 18th to join Johanna in Adelaide.

It's probably the last holiday before I get back to work. Life has been great since I stepped out of work since 16 September 2006. We spent the whole weekend watching Australian Open, playing table tennis and pool at our YHA accomodation, strolling along the Rundle Mall (shopping area) and catching Miss Saigon which was showing at the Festival Centre.

The match between Fedex and Tipsarevic was really tense - no one would expect the 49th ranked player to win more than a handful of games. Instead he stretched Federer to the limit and nearly caused the biggest upset. It's probably good for the sport as Federer has been disposing his opponents too easily all this while, too predictable.

Miss Saigon

Miss Saigon is the first musical I've watched in my life - Theatre Royal in London 1999, right before the London performance closed down. I've always wanted to bring Johanna to watch this musical but it was not in London during our stay there last year. We watched Puccini's Madam Butterfly instead, which Miss Saigon was based on. Alain Boublil and Claude Michel Schönberg was inspired by this photo of a woman giving up her child at Saigon airport in the hope of a new life in America, meeting her dad that she has never seen (ex-GI during Vietnam war).



The version we watched is slightly different from the one I've watched in London. According to Wikipedia, this is a scaled down version to suit smaller theatres so that the musical can be shown worldwide. The most notable prop missing is the helicopter, which was replaced by projected 3D video. I thought the "Engineer" - played by Leo Tavarro Valdez, a Philipino, was great.

To me, the best part of Miss Saigon is its potrayal of the undending miseries caused by wars - the poor children conceived in brothels or rape cases, who may never know their fathers.

War isn't over when it ends
Some pictures never leave your mind
They are the faces of the children
The ones we left behind

Adelaide via Great Ocean Road

This post is one month late...

I followed Johanna to visit her University in Adelaide for the first time on 15th December (last month). We've decided to drive all the way from Melbourne, via the famous Great Ocean Road. And what a drive that was - greeted by great sceneries of the ocean, beaches and magnificent cliffs. The outbound journey was more than 1,000km. We stopped over at Port Fairy to break the journey into two. We took a shorter way back to Melbourne (around 700km). We were very lucky to be given a brand new Subaru Spectra Impreza by Europcar.

Great Ocean Road

12 Apostles



Adelaide is a great city, a lot better than my expectations. Not only there is the great Glenelg beach for those who love the sea, there are also hills and valleys. We visited Barossa Valley, the home to many South Australian wineries. The city itself is very well planned, with a grid-like CBD (Central Business District) like any other Australian capital cities. For the whole week, we stayed in YHA Adelaide, which is very new, neat and clean.

YHA Adelaide

We were quite surprised to see the common room filled with IKEA furniture, complete with brand new wooden flooring.



Glenelg Beach

Along the beach are luxurious villas, restaurants and apartments.













Barossa Valley

Gawler, Tanunda, Nuriootpa, Angaston, etc. are homes to many early European settlers, mainly Lutherians. Wine making has been the main activity since the early days of Barossa Valley. Barossa was supposed to be spelt as Barrosa. The mistake was not rectified since.


Borossa Villa, house to 30,000 roses


Penfolds winery


A popular cafe in Angaston


Working in the vineyards

Adelaide City

The city has a nice botanical garden, a great shopping street, an average-sized zoo and a few museums. The summer is hot, very dry and very glaring - very high UV index.


A view of the Nothern Terrace


3 little pigs along Rundle Mall, the shopping street of Adelaide

Adelaide Zoo

I took a 2-hour tour of the zoo while Johanna was visiting her PhD Supervisor. Disappointingly, most animals were sleeping or hiding in the shades due to the hot weather.


Penguins swimming in the heat

UniSA


Johanna's university's Mawson Lake campus. The main campus is at the Northern Terrace of the CBD.

Happy New Year 2008

Due to limited bandwidth, I've avoided blogging recently.

2007 had been an interesting year for me and Johanna. Our stay in London had been really great. Despite not gaining as many exams as expected for my actuarial profession, it still feels great to have cleared 3 more papers in one year.

2008 is a year of new challenges as I'm still looking for a new job and settling down in Australia - either Sydney or Melbourne depending on the job offer I'll be getting. The weather in Melbourne had been extremly hot and dry for the past few weeks. On New Year's eve, it touched 42C, the hottest weather I've ever experienced in my whole life. On New Year's Day it touched 41C. The hot weather is worsen by the irritating bush flies which feed on sweat. Makes me miss British weather a lot, even though it is cloudy and rainy most of the time. At least the temperature and humidity is bearable and British summers are great (not the 2007 one though).

Happy New Year to everyone. I hope there will be more tolerence and less violence worldwide.