Our first Christmas down under...

Hi Everyone....Happy Christmas from all of us down under!

We have had a really lovely past couple of days experiencing our first Aussie Christmas. We were hoping for boiling hot weather....which we only got a bit of...but we still managed to have a great time.

On Christmas Eve our friends and neighbours the Pribils (Natalie, Jason, Sascha, Chiara and Sunny the dog) came round for a BBQ. I felt under pressure as this was our 1st BBQ we had provided for some real life locals...but all came good...phew! We had a great time just chatting and drinking some good wine...and evening opening a few presents:

On Christmas day we went round to our English (well, also Aussies too) friends the Gates. They live a couple of miles away so we took the train - which was free on Christmas Day! They had gone to a huge amount of effort and prepared a wonderful fish lunch - prawns, lobster and gorgeous salads etc. After this we were completely stuffed....but at 7pm we then had full roast turkey and all the trimming!!! We won't need to eat for weeks now. Thanks to Jackie, Dave, Jodie, Cara and Josh for a lovely day....Aussie Style.

On Boxing Day we went to watch the cricket at the MCG - an amazing stadium where 85,000 other people joined us. That's an amazing amount of people to watch a cricket match. The atmosphere was brilliant and England performed outstandingly to get Australia out for 98 - incredible! To cap it all we managed 157 for no loss of wickets. Our seats were right next to the Aussie players' entrance so Jack enjoyed providing their players with some helpful comments once they were out and returning to the dressing room. Ricky Ponting below particularly appreciated it I think....

Here is another view but as usual there are more pictures on our Flickr site...

Tomorrow we are off to Sydney for the week so look for more updates soon!!!

Lots of love to all...