Carolling

Sydney has been holding an annual concert-like carolling session for the past 23 years. It goes by the name of "Carols in the Domain", Domain being the name of the place it is held. I suppose the concert is the Sydney equivalent of our Chingay, except it is for a different festival and it is not a parade. Again, this is one of those annual events in Sydney I didn't know about until Stef had informed me.

This year's took place on the Saturday just past. We decided to go take a look instead of just catching it on the gogglebox. The plan was to reach there by early evening as we thought that was good enough to "chope" a decent site for viewing. We were wrong. By the time we reached there, we reckoned there was already 15,000 people there.
We finally found a site but it was light-years away from the stage. One of the first things I noticed was the alcohol. Every, and I mean every, other mat had at least some beer or wine on it. Except ours. We had juice. :P
By 8p.m. or so, the crowds were really moving in. Our final estimate of the crowd size was 30,000.
The night's festivities kicked off with the obligatory pyrotechnics. It was almost over by the time Stef whipped out the camera so only one picture was snapped.
Then down to the carolling. Too far to see anything, so we relied mostly on the screens they had put up to see what's going. Now, I'm not a Christmasy person, so the carols didn't leave much of an impression on me.

Instead it was the ambience that got to me. The Sydney crowd was pretty sponetaneous, singing and dancing on the slightest urging by the host. Not only that, there was a Christmas pack on sale and amongst the items in the pack, was a candle set. Nearly everyone lit their candle sets and that made for a very Christmasy sight indeed.
We did our fair share of candle-lighting and waving as well.

98 days to go.