Australia Day

One of the blog readers with more knowledge of history than I, or at the very least a superior ability to google, said this about Australia Day,

"Australia Day celebrates the landing of the "First Fleet" in 1788--the first 1,000 or so convicts to arrive from England. "

Aha! The birth of a nation! Its like the 4th of July! 

Australians seem to celebrate it much like we celebrate the 4th of July. BBQs, parades and fire works. All of which were canceled yesterday because of the rain......that actually

never came. The second dry day since we got here. It was wonderful! We got dressed up in green and gold and hit the town!

Here is a notable difference between Australia and the US. While their flag is red, white and blue, just like ours, those are not their national colors. They are green and gold, the colors of their sports teams. I am pretty sure they didn't have a sports program when the First Fleet landed, but I suppose if you know what colors to paint your face you can rally with your countrymen around anything. 

And rally they did. Let me just say one more time how much fun Australians are.

The Davis family rallied across the street from our apartment to the City Cat ferry dock, Regatta, for a ride over to Brisbane's South Bank. Brisbane, being a river city, has a great ferry system (and no less than 16 major bridges), called City Cats.  Our particular ferry, or City Cat, the Beenung - Urrung , I'm not making that up, whisked  us to South Bank at 25 knots with Nola shouting "WHOOHOO!" the whole way. It was a short ride. We stopped only once once but passed under five bridges!  City Cats are twin hulled catamarans and they are named after the Aboriginal place name for parts of the Brisbane river. Some of my favorite City Cat names, besides Beenung - Urrung, are Ya-Wa-Gar, and Binkinba. 

Now, had we actually gotten a copy of our new lease before everyone with a job in Australia knocked off for Australia Day, we could have gotten our drivers license, which then in turn would have allowed us to buy a City Cat pass for 1/2 of the $30!!! our five minute ferry ride cost us.

Ah well, it was sunny, it was a holiday and we were dressed in green and gold. We were off to get ice cream, sun burns and sandy bottoms.