Day 6: The Melbourne Cup & Hat Day in Australia!

Tuesday, November 4th, 2o15. Blind open at 6:42 am. Penthouse room on Anzac Parade. Planning, preparing and writing daily updates. A working morning if there ever was one so far on the 'Journey to Australia & New Zealand.'  There is a construction crew working on the street by 7 am doing a little jack hammering. It doesn't faze me one bit or impact my writing. Not sure why other than to say I am completely living in the moment on these odysseys. Everything is so new and everyone is new to me. It is a lot of work making contacts, working out the logistics and schedule. Somethings, most things, somehow miraculously fall into place. I never know what to expect. There is a knock on my door. I open it to see this young fellow who says hello like he knows me. The lady I rented the room from told me that one of the flat mates was a golfer and this was he—Marek Mohyla, who grew up near Prague in Pardubice in the Czech Republic. I like him immediately and invite him into my humble abode. What a great kid and I immediately think of my maternal grandfather Josef Vlasak, a Czech, who immigrated to America from Uhersky Brod, which is 300 km, from Prague near the Slovakia border, which is where my other three grandparents came from. Here's a young man, self admittedly, living his dream, with a good understanding of the connection between golf and life, and in the process of immigrating to Australia. God bless this young man! As you see in the interview, his English is good after coming here a year ago speaking none. I wonder how similar and how different are the immigration odysseys taken by Marek and my grandfather? As a junior golfer he played golf with Jessica Korda who I saw qualify for the LPGA in Daytona Beach in December 2010. Her first professional win came at the 2012 Women's Australian Open at Royal Melbourne. I like the part in the video that Marek admits Jessica would beat him as a junior player. The Czech Republic's greatest male player, Alex Cejka, who has won eleven professional tournaments, shot a Sunday 79, playing with Tiger Woods in the final group, to lose the 2009 PLAYERS Championship. That day, a couple of groups ahead, I saw Henrik Stenson shot a bogey-free 66 to win it. That's golf. That's life. I am so happy to have met Marek. Anybody in the golf business in Sydney looking for a good man, here he is! What I learned (by luck from my flat mate Aren) on Monday I applied again on Tuesday as I hopped a bus into the Sidney CBD to see just how big this  Melbourne Cup horse race is. Marketed as "the race that stops a nation," it is true though the buses were still moving. I made it downtown and fell short of making it to Ryan's but I went into 'Establishment' only minutes before the 3 pm race started. I will call it 'Hat Day' as there was a sea of hats, quite original, stylish,  and pretty I might add, atop the heads of the women. Having no knowledge of the horses entered, other than knowing there were 24 horses in the field, I placed no bet and enjoyed watching the crowd and their reaction to Protectionist, the first German horse to do so, win the Cup! The roar of the horses coming around the turn on the backstretch took me back to Churchill Downs where I visited before the PGA Championship at Valhalla. So Day 6 was all about hats and horses and meeting my new Czech mate (that's a pun on his chess comment in the video) Marek! Another fun day in Sydney! Still no golf yet but playing New South Wales Golf Club, The Lakes Golf Club, Riverside Oaks and The Australian Golf Club in the next week before I head south to Melbourne for The Masters. Know anybody that would like to host me in Melbourne? (-:   (Facebook Link, Andy Reistetter, 11/5/14)