Wickets and Wicked

Day 22:
Boxing Day in Melbourne is something akin to absolute madness. Melbourne is the shopping heart of Australia during the best if times, but Boxing Day sales at Gucci, Louis Vitton, Prada, and Swarovski were all 50% off, and made the city manic.

On top of all of this shopping hubbub, there was a major sporting event going on. Jill and I decided to abandon the shopping district and go to the Melbourne Cricket Ground and see a couple of hours of the Boxing Day Test between Australia and South Africa.

At the time the teams were one and two in the world and Australia had lost the first five-day test soundly in Perth the week before. This time the honor of the country was on the line; if the Aussies lost, they’d drop to number two in the world.

Jill and I got our tickets and after getting lost in the stadium for a while, joined 100,000 other fans in various states of drunkenness. Now Cricket is a slow game in the best of times, but Test Cricket sets a very high bar for boredom.

It’s been wall-to-wall Cricket here since the day we arrived. Not a night has gone by that we haven’t finished our evening watching some Twenty20 match, or daily highlights of the Test series. But this match was a battle of the best with a lot on the line. The South African bowling was great and the Australian batting, not so much. There was very little scoring but they kept serving beer so that was good. Jill did manage to fall asleep twice between wickets though.

After we finished with that we hustled back to the hotel for Jill’s part of the day. We were going to see Wicked.

Jill has never seen the musical before and was quite looking forward to it. We fortified ourselves with some pre-drinking and arrived at the theater. Our seats were close, but off on the left edge. It was actually a very similar sightline to when I saw it in Tampa so I still don’t know what happens on the left side of the stage.

Jill did seem to enjoy it though and it capped a fun day.