What we've been up to this week

This is an informative post to tell you what we've been up to and what we did over the Christmas hols.

23rd Dec: MH finished work early. Basically, almost everyone in the office went home right after a long leisure lunch which ended at 2.00PM. So he was home by 3.00PM. We decided to go down to Darling Harbour in the city for a walk and to enjoy the Christmas decorations and carol singing. It was lovely. The sound of the Christmas carols sounded so magical together with the beautiful scenery and ambience. We also walked around a shopping centre to hunt for the missing piece of MH's Transformers boxed set collection. We saw a myriad of last minute shoppers racing around everywhere.
{I wonder why despite how early the Christmas sales season begins, there will ALWAYS be last minute shopping to do, and there will always be the last minute mad Christmas rush. Puzzling isn't it?}
After dinner, we went out for supper with some of MH's ex-classmates to meet up with one ex-classmate who was in Sydney on holiday. It was an evening spent reminiscing over the good old days for MH and his classmates and catching up on the latest gossip on who was doing what, who was getting married, who died, who's dating who now etc. Although I could not reminisce with them at the same level, I always enjoy being part of this type of conversation. There's a sweet nostalgia and a kind of serenity when old comrades get together like this.

24th Dec: Christmas Eve. We spent it in the most unusual way. MH and I, together with our other connect group members had agreed to help one member shift into her new apartment. We started at 9.30AM and meant to finish all the packing and moving and unloading by 11.00AM or 12.00NOON. But Murphy's Law must dictate that whatever can go wrong will inevitably go wrong. The main problem was that the lifts in the new apartment block were not functioning and there was absolutely no other way we could find our way up to her apartment. And so the whole morning and most of the afternoon was spent waiting around for this issue to be resolved... we called the security guard's office, the sales office, and the lift maintenance people. There was a lot of drama in between which I shall not go into now. But in the end, we finally managed to move everything in time for the member to spend Christmas Eve at her new place.

25th Dec: Christmas Day. The morning was spent at Christmas Day service in church. Then we had an unusual Christmas Day lunch with our couple friends, D&G, eating dim sum in Chinatown. I believe dim sum is aways best enjoyed enjoyed with friends. I thoroughly enjoyed the talking and eating and sharing of food. After that we went for a nice drive up to the Harbour Bridge to enjoy a quick glimpse of the beautiful city skyline.

26th Dec: Boxing Day. MH and I went down to the Sydney Olympic Park to check out the so called major Boxing Day sales by a major retailer. Unfortunately it was quite dissapointing. The range of clothes were not as nice and varied as I expected. Although they claimed to slash 60-90% of the original price, somehow the items were so expensive to start of with the discounted price was not as attractive as I'd hope. We did eventually end up buying some jackets for next winter.

27th Dec: The REAL boxing day sales commence. MH and I realise that the real post Christmas sales in Sydney begin the day AFTER the actual Boxing Day. We went down to the Westfield Shopping Centre near our place to Myer's major stocktake sale. Wow, it was crazy!!! I confess that I myself went a little bonkers too. I hadn't shopped like this in ages. I tried on plenty of clothes but ended up only buying one item. Somehow it's difficult to find items in XS size in Australia. We also bought some Christmas decorations and Christmas cards for next year... they were so cheap!!!
{Apparently, it's a well know fact that Australians always decorate their house every Christmas with items acquired from the previous year's boxing day sales. I found this quite amusing... the whole pre-Christmas sales is in fact a charade because people just wait for boxing day to buy everything anyway. A friend mentioned to me that it was estimated that the entire country's retail industry will fork in AU$4 billion from boxing day sales alone}
Okay, back to shopping... my favourite buy was a little bag with a funky design which had an adorable little matching set of an apron, oven mitt and pot holder. So cute!!! I especially liked the bag and the apron very much and will certainly use them regularly.
In the evening, we had our couple friends, D&G, over for a simple dinner (I made fried rice and tossed a quick salad of red onions and red wine vinegar for a kind of pickled side-dish). After that we went to watch a movie together: The Chronicles of Narnia, The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe. It was good but a bit of an anti-climax at the same time (more on this later).

28th Dec: MH had taken the day off today so we could run some errands together... we had some banking affairs to close and needed to do them together as we were joint signatories for the accounts. We ended up in the city after finishing our banking to have lunch at the famous Malay-Chinese food restaurant and take-away. It's not bad, really. The owner is supposedly some big business tycoon from Malaysia, but I can't remember his name now. Since we were in the city, I couldn't resist checking out the retail scene there to see what the sales were like. The mad rush of post-Christmas shoppers was still ongoing. But we didn't buy anything.

For me, the Christmas season is officially over and it's time to start thinking and planning for the new year. Time to move forward.