Pinchie Two

This week I have mostly been coming to grips with a new year and dealing with the first full week of the year. The tropical festive season was a quiet one, grounded due to fast approaching new addition to Reidy and Smithy's world, we hung out in Singapoo.
While the locals seemed to have reasonably grasped the Christmas concept, as far as eating and drinking goes it actually panned out to be just another day for most locals. As we headed up Orchard Rd to our lunch venue we were a little stunned to see all of the shops were open as per usual and quite a few locals do what they do best and shop. But thinking about it, it's actually quite a good thing particularly of you get caught in a present stand off with your partner, or if you give a crap gift you can duck down the road for a quick upgrade under the ruse of popping out to get some milk.
Chrissie Lunch was at the Equinox, I think it is the island's highest restaurant, it certainly is a long way up. The view at night is stunning, the view by day we found out is quite drab, so was the food as it turned out. It was an interesting day, particularly as we only really knew one person on the table.
We had been told that one of the table members was a "bit of a character" and it didn't tke long to find out which one. He was the one frequently regailing us with some fuity tales of derring doo of his army days, capped off by regular Sean Connery impersenations. Mostly harmless though, unlike the table full of Molly Malones' regulars who set off a fire extinguisher at their table, but this is apparently not enough to get thrown out of the Equinox on Christmas Day.
New Year was at the Hyatt, where they turned on a pretty amazing buffet that Reidy is still talking about in terms of the amount of desserts and chocolate consumed. Apparently there is a limit to how much free French champagne I can drink, but soldiered on when they told me the price of buying a beer. Entertainment came in the form of the Ultimate Kylie show and Bjorn Again.
Nice Aussie influence there, but not people I would typically go and see, but I was little surprised to see Paul Nelson pretending to be Swedish and playing keyboards. I thought he was walking around coastal Victoria, but actually he was tickling the plastic ivories at the Grand Hyaytt on Scotts Rd. More disturbing than that was the number of spotty expat kids that were there, it made us feel a little bit like we had crashed a school dance there for a while until the numbers dwindled as they disappeared off for a new year's pash.
The new year has got policing off to a cracking start with the aprehension yesterday of a naked man swimming off the East Coast after a 3 hour standoff with police. Having finally convinced him to leave they gave him some shorts for the walk out of the water, whisked him off to the hospital for a check up and then after a clean bill of health promptly arrested him for public nudity.
The New Year has also meant the arrival of a new Pinchie, he has a big set of claws to fill but he has already shed his shell once so is well on the way to doing so.