"Winterval" and New Year's Greetings!

Folks, I don't wish to be northern hemisphere centric and hence the festival of "Winterval" is within quotes (it is summer here in the Southern Hemisphere).

For origins of the festival "Winterval, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Winterval

Also for the reason below, which is an anecdote.

This reminds of the incident in Chicago when Carlos Rios asked Tayfun (who's Turkish)
What he was doing to celebrate Christmas? Tayfun was a little slow in responding and I happened to be nearby and (since we Turks stick together!) I replied , "He does nothing for Christmas, he's Muslim!"

We went to the South Coast of NSW for the Christmas break, specifically Bateman's Bay.

Here in Oz, most people don't work from Dec 22nd - Jan 2nd (as you get 24th, 25th, 26th Boxing Day off). So all you have to do is take 3 days off and you get almost a week (7 days) off.

Yesterday we went to see the fire-works at the Harbour Bridge (also celebrations of the 75th anniversary of the bridge.) It was absolutely spectacular. There was a "mini" fireworks at 9pm at Darling Harbour which we saw from North Sydney.

It reminded when we were in Buenos Aires for Y2k NYE celebrations and they proved to be a damp squib at Avenida Neuvo Julio (the main Ave in Buenos Aires) and we (Tom, Eric, my brother Dave) returned to our hotel room and watched the celebrations on CNN from the world over which included fire-works from Sydney.

I couldn't believe here I was in Sydney with my family, experiencing the real thing. Octavio was a trooper and stayed awake until 1:30 am!

Lest I be accused of child abuse, he did manage to sleep on the way from 9-10pm while we drove back home and then took the train to Milson's Point.

The lady wife insisted on driving downtown even though the city of Sydney web-site explicitly forbade people from driving (most major roads were closed from 4pm) and finding parking would have been a bitch (it was).

These Venezuelans are toc, toc, toc!!!

Hope you had a "reasonable" day as my twin said!! The key to happines in life is LOW EXPECTATIONS!

You can check photos of our trip and also of the NYE celebrations at

http://picasaweb.google.com/russramaswamy/ChristmasNewYear07