My good mate Markus is moving back home to Germany. He’s been in Australia about as long as we have, moving to Australia with his girlfriend Nina mid last year to study. We met them by accident through a friend who found them lost on a mountain trail, and haven’t looked back. Needless to say we’re very sad that they are returning home. We’ve shared so many exploring Australia moments and have grown very close. A plus is that we now have connections when we decide to tour Europe.

Courtesy of my wonderful Mother-In-Law I have an amazing new camera to take all my shots with. I already own a Minolta Maxxum 5 35mm SLR but find I don’t use it very often; there’s something about developing photo’s that turns me off. Plus I don’t have a great lens so I can’t really get into the nitty gritty. I end up taking all our shots with a 3 or 4 mega-pixel generic, but this is going to be fun. My new Nikon D70 Digital SLR is a 6.1 mega-pixel takin, 3008 x 2000 makin machine. The thing is feature rich and comes with a mind boggling instruction manual that’s going to take some time to weed through.

…Julia and Claudia are. Julia maintained her amazing ability to win games and Claudia joined in by helping Julia to win which ensured she also won. At least that’s what I think happened. You see, we were playing the very catchy card game Munchkin. Markus had been telling us for a while now that he knew a card game that was very fun that would be great to play as a group. It even had expansion packs so he took it upon himself to order the game from eBay and get us hooked up. The best way to describe Munchkin is to use the game creators own words.

This was supposed to be a night to remember for all the right reasons. My top four Eels vs the 2nd last placed Dragons, a win securing our place in the Top Four and guaranteeing a first week finals home game. I invited our German friends, we got our tickets and head to their first ever rugby league experience. This was also my first trip to WIN Stadium, a stadium by the ocean with a traditional grass hill section. It was here on the hill that our tickets were purchased.

Previously our fun night was Texas Holdem, this time it was Cranium. We introduced our German friends to this great game and a fun night was had by all. I didn’t know at the time but this was the “Aussie” version which I guess means that the creators decided to throw in an Australian question here and there. It certainly wasn’t Australia-only questions by any means. I personally enjoyed the Australian sports trivia because I know nothing of American sports history and that’s all we ever had with the American version.