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