Okay, right now, stop reading this and open this link.
Follow the directions (i.e. click "yes" when you get the security pop-up window) and, if you are likely to be offended or if you're in a sensitive area, know that you are about to watch a beer commercial. Not just any beer commercial-- possibly the best beer commercial ever made.1 We're talking Super Bowl good,2 watch it over and over again without getting tired of it good, and that's a saying a lot because watching Australian TV commercials is kind of like watching UPN3 between 2 and 7pm-- they play the same 10 commercials endlessly, repeating them even during the same show.
It was D's father a few weeks ago who recognized the brilliance of this particular commericial, and since then we've learned that it just gets better every time you see it. In our excitement to show Chad's friend Mark, we found that it was, in fact, available on the internet-- and it even has its very own URL.4
Go on, feel free to watch it again if you want.
So, we sent Mark off this morning on his flight back to Boston and we were so tired that we got very little else done after he left at noon. If pressed, we would tell you that we actually did very little with Mark while he was in Sydney, so it's not clear why we're so tired now that he's gone. On Friday, Mark and Chad rented a car and drove up to the Hunter Valley wine region north of Sydney, although D chose to sit it out so they were without a designated driver. Mark assured us that he was an experienced enough wine taster that he could "swish and spit" and so taste without raising his BAC.
Since we've done the standard Blue Mountains tourist things a couple of times recently, the main thing Chad & D were interested in doing out that way was the Jenolan Caves, a popular and remote network of limestone caves. Mark initially was not so keen on that idea, so Saturday we had expected to send Mark off to the Blue Mountains without us. At the last minute, though, he learned that Chad had never actually been in a cave, and so all three of us woke up at 5am and made the three hour drive from Sydney through the Blue Mountains to the Jenolan Caves. As it turned out, we saw two wallabies and a small mob of kangaroos on the roads to and from the caves, which were the first sightings we'd had since Mark had arrived in Australia.
We chose, for some unfathomable reason, to tour the cave that involved the most steps (1298) of all the caves that you can tour at Jenolan. It's a pretty large cave system that Australians have been exploring since the mid-1800s5 with a couple of spectacular 'decorations' like stalactites, stalagmites, columns, flowstone, etc., and an underground river. Mark and D, who had both explored limestone caves in the US, agreed that it was pretty much the same as the ones that we have across the pond, but cool anyway. On the way back from the Jenolan Caves, we stopped at the lookouts in Blackheath and Katoomba, but we didn't stay long, and it was too late in the day to make it back to Featherdale Wildlife Park before closing. So, we drove back into Sydney and had a leisurely evening at home.
In Sydney, Mark went out and saw all kinds of things-- museums, beaches, harbour ferries-- while Chad & D mostly stayed home and did work. As usual, it creeps along, Chad having hit another stumbling block in getting his code to run, and D having trouble writing job applications when she's not feeling so confident about her dissertation. We did, however, find a good procrastinating task-- we printed up "save the date" cards for our wedding next August and wrote all the addresses by hand so that Mark (Chad's best man) can mail them for us when he gets back to the US tomorrow. So, that was fun.
;)
- D
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NOTES
1Our claim about the superiority of the beer commercial does not necessarily extend to the superiority of the beer. Unless you're a die-hard fan of Carlton Draught, in which case, believe whatever you want.
2If you happen to be reading this and you're not an American, you might be unfamiliar with this standard of commercial-quality judging. (See my entry for 8 February 2005, the week the Super Bowl was aired here in Sydney, sans the American commercials.) So many viewers tune in to the grand championship of professional football that the ad agencies save up their wittiest, best, most obscenely expensive advertisements to air for the first time during the game. At one point in the recent history of the Super Bowl, the commercials were so good that non-football watchers would tune in to watch the ads and then change the channel during the game itself.
3Again, not going to be a self-evident illustration for non-Americans. Sorry.
4The company's website is http://www.carltondraught.com.au but the name of this commercial is "the Big Ad" and it's actually at http://www.bigad.com.au (Go on and click it again, you know you want to.)
5It is our understanding that the aborigines did not go deep into these or any other large caves for both practical reasons (no light) and mytho-religious ones (evil spirits lived in the dark).
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