Lots of rain again today. This is great news for the area. Our trip to the Blue Mountains that we rescheduled for January 19 was again put on hold. We will try one more time on January 26. The rain is having an effect on the fires and this could be good news for that hike.
Tonight we planned to see the Sydney Symphony Under the Stars. This performance at Parramatta Park is not unlike the DSO version at Greenfield Village. Is it still called that? I don’t remember. They end the show with fireworks (cancelled this year) and the 1812 Overture.
It’s amazing that a work depicting Russia’s defense against Napoleon in 1812 composed by Peter Tchaikovsky has become an anthem for other countries, including our own. Arthur Fiedler and the Boston Pops did a 4th of July performance of this work in 1974 with church bells and cannons. Since then, it has come to represent Independence Day in the USA. I doubt if it is performed in France since it represents defeat. I doubt if anyone outside of France recognizes “La Marseillaise” or outside of Russia recognizing “God Save the Tsar”.
We decided not to go to this because of the rain and distance from home base. Not enough preparation packing for what was surely a sloppy event. I’m sure people were camped out all day for this free concert. If we had rented a car, we would have taken this on.
We did some shopping at the Westfield Mall and I took my place on a bench somewhere while Terri went dress shopping. The place was packed on a Saturday afternoon after Christmas. Aren’t shopping malls usually empty in January and the biggest crowds are employees taking inventory?
Free wifi at most locations in Sydney. I guess we have something similar but not actually free. Those of you that use comcast know that your router also broadcasts a signal that can be used by any comcast customer. You knew that. Right?
We finished shopping and stopped at the 3 wise monkeys in an attempt to get a little wiser ourselves.
At this point in our trip we have completed everything that was on our “must do” list save the Blue Mountain hike. We now just take it a day at a time and do spur of the moment things. I’ve been doing lots of reading. When I came across this paragraph I realized that history does repeat itself.
“Often in a German home or office or sometimes in a casual conversation with a stranger in a restaurant, a beer hall, a café, I would meet with the most outlandish assertions from seemingly educated and intelligent persons. It was obvious that they were parroting some piece of nonsense they had heard on the radio or read in the newspapers. Sometimes one was tempted to say as much, but on such occasions one was met with such a stare of incredulity, such a shock of silence, as if one had blasphemed the Almighty, that one realized how useless it was even to try to make contact with a mind which had become warped and for whom the facts of life had become what Hitler and Goebbels, with their cynical disregard for truth, said they were.”
Excerpt From
The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich: A History of Nazi Germany
William L. Shirer
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