Movies, concerts and dancing

No Moonlight Movie Picnic is complete without

Gummy Teeth, or as they are called here, "Lollies".

-Kitty, Tom and Kiwi Expat Friend, Laura -

So what are we doing this SUMMER (it was 93 degrees Fahrenheit today - still odd to have summer in January!).

Well, every Sunday night, we're going to take dance lessons in a giant downtown park. We'll learn: Swing, Salsa, Funk, Bollywood, and, my favorite, movie dances. That will include moves from Saturday Night Fever, Slumdog Millionaire, Dirty Dancing ("Nobody puts Kitty in a corner!"), Muriel's Wedding (a classic here in Australia), and Michael Jackson's Thriller. I just love the part where you do the "zombie hands with knee lifts". They line everyone up, so no partner needed. It was just this kind of class that made us fall in love with Bollywood last year, and sign up for a whole series.

We're booked up with a bunch of different friends to go to the outdoor cinemas. It's quite something, to trek about a kilometer down the road to the gorgeous Botanical Gardens with our backpacks full of sleeping bags, iced coffee, card games, blue cheese and our new favorite snack, grilled pepperoni (like pizza, sans mess). We like to get there early and stake out our turf while we picnic. "You're so American", our friend Laura says last night when I tell her we need to stretch the blanket out bigger. We're finding that Australians make for a really polite, well behaved mob. We seldom see the kind of confrontational crowd dynamics we're used to. Accidentally step on someone? No worries, Mate!

Around 8:30 pm, flocks of wild cockatoos fly over the crowd. Lovely animals, but horrible screechers. I can't believe my brother and his wife had a cockatoo for their first child. They could have raised a race horse for all the trouble and expense of that nefarious bird. It took them about a year to properly rehome it after they started having human kids....now we're the exotic ones and they're the locals.

By 8:45, the giant bats start doing their thing overhead. I was horrified when I realized what was happening the first time, though assured they are gray headed flying foxes, just going out to gather fruit, not hunt humans. Lies, all lies. Wish I'd known that 5000 of them had set up shop in our (hey, there's that American thing again?) park, and that they are protected. One meter wing spans, people. Meh...cute babies anyway.

We're also going to a number of concerts, though I tend to whinge incessantly both about the music always starts so late plus Tom likes stuff that's so cool they expect everyone to want to dance, or, at minimum, stand. Hard to believe I'm looking around for chairs and wondering where the "40+" section is. Tonight we're going to see a famous DJ who goes on at, get this, 1 am, so I'm going to start my power nap now.

There are so many great people here - we're thrilled to have such nice friends and fun things to do.