One exhibit to rule them all...

Carmen and I went to Sydney for a couple of days to check out the Lord Of The Rings exhibit at the Powerhouse Museum and it was brilliant. We got there at about 945 and we didn't leave before 1130. While the displays themselves might have benefitted from a more structured arrangement (possibly a limitation of the space, rather than the exhibit), there was ample room to wander around. Of course, this ample room didn't stop some fucktard old man with a red backpack from somehow always being right in front of me whenever I wanted to look intently at a display. But I was the better man, and followed him so that I was able to beat him to death with his stupid red backpack in the privacy of an underground carpark and not in front of a whole bunch of children. At least, I would've liked to, but Carmen told me this wouldn't be polite.

What did they have? Well, character themed displays of costumes and props, including a whole bunch of weapons and, if I can deactivete everyone's innuendo centres for a second; I want Haldir's sword. I was even able to tap Carmen on the back, point a thumb over my shoulder at the frickin' huge Moria diorama and in my best Sean Bean voice say; "They have a cave troll." They also had a maquette of the cave troll (which is a model used for scale comparison and computer scanning, for those not in the know with film-speak) that was about three feet tall and completely anatomically correct, and can I just say that for their size, cave trolls don't appear to be up to much.

They also had a whole bunch on the weapons, and the effects and the sets and man it was just so cool! Carmen and I also got a couple of forced-perspective photos taken (a link to which will appear in the not-too-distant future) in which we took turns being the hobbit to each other's human. The one of me cowering from her is extremely funny. What else? One of each type of racial armour and a whole bunch of swords and bows and stuff. There were a couple of swatches of their rubber-ring-chainmail stuff and wow. A little doco thingy (of which there were many dotted around) tells us that 12.5 million rings were used in the production of the movie, all cut from a 14 kilometre length of alkalene piping and then hand-cut and assembled to make the armour that looks exactly like chainmail, but weighs a fraction of what metal would. And because it's metal-plated, it even sounds right.

Oh, and they had the Boromir body double dummy in the boat and while the hands were a dead giveaway, the face was just creepy. I'll bet Sean Bean borrowed that one to freak his wife out with. :)

As for the rest of the trip, the hotel was excellent (especially the buffet breaky on wednesday morning, they had these little banana-y pancakes that were just...), wandering around the shops was fun and we were even able to meet up with some of the Canberra gang for a drink in a pub on Oxford street that - if not activley a gay bar per se, was at least quite heavily populated with men holding hands (and practicing their ballet, but that's another story).

Dinner on tuesday night was in an Asturian restaurant in the Spanish quarter where we ate hugely of excellent food and I got the waiter all excited by speaking some Spanish. He even asked where I was from, to which I had to reply "Canberra" in a definitely not Spanish accent.

All in all, it was a top couple of days spent with my beautiful woman that we shall have to repeat in the near future. :)