Thursday August 26th: I woke up at a surprisingly sensible hour given how late I had been out the night before. Liz and I decided to go to Charlestown Square, a shopping centre/mall near my parent's house. We had a look around but couldn't find our way around due to construction. Part of the reason we initially looked into going to Australia was for a wedding, so we had a look at Myer, the department store where the registry was. We got the gift list, and started looking around. Without exaggeration, we looked at about 8 things on the list that we thought we would get and the store had none of them. Getting tired we gave up, hoping we wouldn't offend anyone by giving them money.
We left Charlestown Square and went home for some lunch. Mil called and said he was coming around. He swung by and took us for a drive over to his new house. It's a cool house - the pizza oven that he and Terri (his wife) have built out the back rocks. We then went for a drive into Newcastle, checking out what has and has not changed. Later we went back to Warners Bay, which is a suburb near Valentine and hung out at a cafe. The service there was terrible, but Jonathan and Terri warned us that it would be. It was bad enough that if it had been in the US I would have considered not tipping, or tipped very little. They invited us to a Teppanyaki bar for dinner, but we were really tired by that stage. It was lucky we didn't say yes for 2 reasons: 1) We passed out early, and 2) The Teppanyaki bar was closed because they couldn't light their grills.
Friday August 27th: This was Liz' birthday. Even though our airfare was our brithday and Christmas presents from my parents, they got Liz something that warrants a special intermission:
You've seen Crocodile Dundee - "That's not a knife. This is a knife.", but more appropriate in this context is The Simpsons: "That's not a knife, that's a spoon." Well, the people who make this product must have been sick of being caught out playing knifey spoony, and wanted to cover all their bases. These, are Splayds.
Splayds are the best of 3 worlds. Forget a spork - they're not multipurpose enough. The splayd combines a fork, spoon (ie a spork) AND a knife. They are useful for eating all kinds of things with just one utensil; our typical use for them so far has been eggs. I hear people asking "Could a splayd's knife really be of any real use?" and the answer to that is "Well, the morning Liz got them I cut myself on it." Sure, it's me, and if anyone was going to find a way to cut themselves on a splayd it would be me, but it should be a lesson to everyone - don't run your fingers over a splayd. Sure, it was only a small cut, but it scabbed.
Because of their versatility, you only need to use one utensil with your meal, which means less dishes! These pictures demonstrate the optimal usage of the Splayd:
While this photo demonstrates a waste in efficiency:
And that's the end of our Splayd intermission.
We spent a lot of the day baking cake, and also baking gluten free bread in my parents' bread machine. It came out really well - so well that we made it another 2 times while we were there and well enough for us to be looking into our own bread machine now that we are back in the US.
The plan was to grill some burgers for dinner with some people coming around, but Dad let me know that there were problems with the grill; only 2 burners of the 5 were working properly, so he wanted to clean up the burners that weren't working to see if they would light. He succeeded in getting them to light, which was great, because we ended up using all of the grill space on offer. The grill was a bit greasy, so he cleaned that up as well. With engine degreaser. It wasn't on any of the cooking surfaces, but I'm not sure if that had anything to do with the little flare up under the grill later that night. A whole host of people came over and we ate burgers, salad and stuff like that and later cake.
Some sticker meltiness thanks to the flare-up
Saturday August 28th: Today was the day that the wedding was on. We went out and ran some errands in the morning before I suited up and Liz dressed up (because she wore a dress instead of a suit). Humid and Rach gave us a ride, so that was cool because we could talk to them on the way to the wedding and home. The wedding was good - the ceremony was in a chuch (not a typo, it said so on the invitation) in Cooks Hill, and between ceremony and reception we went and sat at Custom's House with Humid, Rach, Jeef, Jim and Tara. The reception was in a cool old building downtown, and there was plenty of vuvuzela blowing going on. I was surprised by how dead downtown Newcastle was at night, but I've been told that they have changed a lot of the rules as far as drinking and pubs and clubs are concerned in the city at night.
Me suited up and Liz dressed up
I had been talking to Matt earlier in the day about "photobombing". So, while Liz took a shot of Jeef and Matt, Humid and I ran into the background. After the shot was taken Matt turned and asked "Did you just photobomb your own photo?" Yes, yes I did. But I noticed today, when looking at the full photo, that Rach also photobombed behind the tree on the left.
Monday August 30th: Finding ourselves running out of clothes, Liz and I did some laundry in the morning. Getting towards lunch time Liz and I started heating up some food for lunch, which meant that Dad and Kel also had to work something out for lunch...
One of the foods that is popular in Australia and found almost everywhere but that is not at all common in the US is the meat pie. The meat pie is a prime example of deliciousness: a savory pie bottom and top encase meat, gravy and some times other miscellaneous ingredients, like onions, mushrooms, cheese, bacon or just about anything. Sometimes it is capped with potato instead of a crust top. There's nothing quite like heating up or buying a pie from somewhere and chomping down on it's guaranteed ~20% minimum meat content. It truly is delicious.
On this day Dad and Kel had pies for lunch. Dad must have felt that a pie wouldn't fill him adequately enough, so he made an awesome lunch. He made a pie sandwich.
Recipe for Pie Sandwich:
Ingredients:
- 1x Pie
- 2 x slices of bread
- Optional: tomato sauce, aka ketchup
Instructions:
- Put a slice of bread on a plate.
- Place pie on top of piece of bread. Add ketchup if desired.
- Top with piece of bread. Squish if desired.
PIE SANDWICH!!!
PIE SANDWICH - WITH SAUCE!!!
I was envious of that lunch...
Once everyone had eaten, Liz and I headed to Croudace Bay Park for a walk. Croudace Bay Park is about 2 - 3 minutes drive from my parent's house and is on Lake Macquarie, so you get nice views and it is generally pretty quiet. We took the camera and binoculars with us, because it is also a decent place to see birds. While we were there we saw a Purple Swamphen, Sulphur-Crested Cockatoos, Galahs, Eastern Rosellas, Magpies, Cormorants, and, my favorite of them all, Rainbow Lorikeets. The Lorikeets when we first found them were looking like they were making a nest in a hollow in a tree. They were just hanging out, so we took some photos. After a while we figured we would leave them alone, and went and sat under our favorite tree in the park. Liz gave the tree a hug and we climbed up and sat in it before settling under it. We walked back to the car, stopping at the Lorikeet tree on the way back. We were unhappy to see that some larger galahs were trying to hustle the lorikeets out of their nest. Letting nature take it's course we went home for the evening, cursing those damned galahs.
Sulphur-Crested Cockatoo (Liz took this photo)
Eastern Rosella
Magpie
My favorite: Rainbow Lorikeet. We got lots of photos of them, some perhaps better than this, but this one shows what they look like
The tree Liz and I sit under, and...
... the view from beneath the tree
I'm going to call it a day there. We've got a long walk tomorrow and a long drive the next day. In Australian days, anyway.
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