Ok, so we were feeling a little sorry for Sydney and their crappy long weekend weather, but we felt we could understand. Its the Dragon Boat festival tomorrow, for that we get a long weekend, but our weather hasn't been too kind these last weeks either. So when we woke to the gods playing cricket with lightning bolts between the buildings this morning, we felt a certain level of empathy.... Being the very well planned people we are, we didn't have food or even a drop of milk left in the house, so we decided to venture out to grab some breakie from the coffee place across the road. Now, being Aussies who left Oz before the drought broke, it is taken some lessons to work out that when we can't see out our windows, that actually means its raining rather than the "fog" is really bad today. So we couldn't see, but knew that we should take umbrellas.

Got down stairs to have the building management in gumboots armed with brooms, squeegee mops, and mini sand bags to stop the water getting into the entrance. The entire front of the building and road were in full flood.... but not to be deterred, we figured we'd head the other way around the building (its always got to better there, right?!) to find that the taxis, trucks, buses, and some poor fellow's Porsche were all sitting in a lot of relatively fast flowing water heading straight out into the harbour!!

Again, remember this before breakfast or the morning coffee, so figuring that if the building dudes could wander through all this water and get no more than their ankles and calves wet we'd be fine to just pop over the coffee shop anyway.... it was a bit of fun wading across the street, and watching the shenanigans of the locals - black garbage bags gaffer taped to your mid thighs; take the cover plate off the large water drain next to your shop so that you can use your 35 year old broom to encourage water into it; go and "help" move a motorbike, only to tip it over into the water; drive your scooter through the water, then into the garden area and rev the heck out of it to get the water back out of your engine..... it was just fun! So breakfast in hand (minus the coffee....) we went home, but figured that we had to come back quickly to capture the carnage so we could share with you!

We were actually pretty surprised to see how much water and damage this had done - again, we're not very good at tuning into sources of info that might have given us a heads up - a "black rain warning" was in force, we did see the notice in the foyer, but it really doesn't have any context for us - as Aussies, "its going to rain really hard, big thunderstorms, maybe hail, and probably going to flood" means something. "Black rain warning" says the colour of the sky should change to black, and look very ominous - not the heavens are going open so much you can actually hear the rain on the roof (34 floors above you). As I said we're still learning. It was still fun but then I don't have to clean up either!

So here are the pics of what we saw from our balcony and down on the street after the worst had passed. The good news is we're now only on an Amber rain warning now - a mere 30mm per hour to be expected! ;-)

So, after venturing out, having our fun and our breakfast, I decided to check out what Sydney coped, still feeling solidarity with our first home..... until - 19 degrees, fine. So soft, Sydney, so soft.

We had 350mm in 4 hours... we now throw down the challenge Sydney, how crap can your long weekend weather really get???