Spent this morning wandering around town having a look to see how things were different in the shops in Australia to stuff in Canada. Not much difference except lots more light weight summer clothes. Paula and Di went to the very famous Hopetoun Tea Rooms in the Block Arcade.
The tea rooms were established in 1892 and are a Melbourne icon. Every time we have walked past them whilst we have been in Melbourne, there has been a very long queue to get in.
Fras and Barbara (his mum) went to THE CLUB to have some lunch so Di joined them for a cuppa. By the sounds of this blog posting it appears that all Di did yesterday was to eat.
We all rendezvoused back at the apartment and walked over to the Marvel Stadium (alias Ethiad, alias Docklands) to watch a game of Twenty/20 cricket.
It is a multi-purpose sports and entertainment stadium in the Docklands precinct of Melbourne. Construction started in October 1997, under the working name “Victoria Stadium”, and was completed in 2000 at a cost of A$460 million. The capacity of the stadium is 53,000, whereas the capacity of the MCG is 100,000. Amazing atmosphere in the stadium when it is full.
The stadium is primarily used for Australian rules football and is the headquarters of the Australian Football League (AFL) which, since 7 October 2016, has had exclusive ownership of the venue.
Twenty20 cricket, sometimes written Twenty-20, and often abbreviated to T20, is a short form of cricket. In a Twenty20 game the two teams have a single innings each, which is restricted to a maximum of 20 overs. A typical Twenty20 game is completed in about three hours, with each innings lasting around 90 minutes and an official 10 minute break between the innings. This is much shorter than previously-existing forms of the game, and is closer to the timespan of other popular team sports. It was introduced to create a fast-paced form of the game which would be attractive to spectators at the ground and viewers on television.
Paula and Dex had never been to a T20 game so we decided to surprise them with tickets.nat first they were rather apprehensive but once the game started and got past the preliminaries they got into it.
We also decided that they could not attend a cricket game without being introduced to a quintessential Aussie favourite – the meat pie!
No amount of arm twisting could get them to try one.
The crowd have some strange antics that they get up to. One particular favourite was standing up and imitating a lawn sprinkler – don’t ask, we don’t know why. The other was to put an empty bucket on your head – that’s not as bad as people who support the Saskatchewan Roughriders (football team) who put a shelled out watermelon on their heads.
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