Tuesday, November 29, 2005

OZ stories

Day 1 – Thursday 24/11

Arrived in Perth. Got to serviced apartments (Aldernay on the Hay, East Perth) at about 3pm. They are very well equipped and cheap. Managed to get down to the city center of Hay St mall to have a look but the ruddy shops close at 5pm.. sigh. Crazy, how do people here go shopping. Ate chips (yumm, yumm, the way potatoes are done here is great) Went back to East Perth for dinner. The café we happened to step into was run by (guess what) a Singaporean who’d migrated there 3 years ago. Talk about coincidence. Supermarketing at a ruddy run down place down the corner yielded some surprises – bamboo shoots and taugay CANNED and sold under the label ‘Asian Vegetables’. Good grief, imagine canned taugay.. hoho.

BTW there are 3 buses in Perth that cater specially for tourists (they go to all the major attractions and hotelling areas) and they’re free. Normal bus services are also free within the city limits, which feels so good. Heh.

Day 2 – Friday 25/11

Day of frustration. Mum wanted to watch “Dirty Dancing”, some supposedly good show tonight. But the price on Friday is like $10 more than Thursday, cos it’s considered a ‘weekend’. Drat, should have gone yesterday.

Walked around Hay St (again) for less than an hour because we had to meet parents’ friends Uncle Lawrence and Aunt Susan, for lunch. They live in an uppity suburb called Winthrop that’s near Kings Park and UWA. Very nice and cold house with a great garden. They had other guests, a couple from Germany and we ended up eating HORRID food at a Chinese restaurant near their place.

I’ve realised that when travelling with parents, cannot expect things to be done on my time (ie. Strict tight schedule), because they are obliged to spend lots of time on pleasantries and small talk. So by the time “lunch” was done, it was 3pm or so. Sigh.

Aunt Susan suggested going to Subiaco (ubercool suburb with a Friday flea mart) or Garden City, which is a suburban mall near Winthrop. We did Garden City first, thinking Subiaco would be open later, and yes you guessed it, by the time we finished GC, Subi would be closed by the time we got there. Sigh.. So, back to the inimitable Hay St for the night. Apparently Subi is a suburb, so their shops would stay open late on Thursday, whereas Hay St is city center, so it stays open late on Friday. Sheesh, should have gone to Subi day before.

Met my Uncle Toney and cousin Julian in the city at about 9pm, they had driven up from Bunbury to meet us. They brought us to dinner at Northbridge, which is renowned for its food, but we ended up eating at (of all places) a FOODCOURT due to my father’s desire to stop walking around choosing restaurants. Subsequent to dinner, went to my mum’s fave café at 44 Kings St for coffee and cake. Cake was lousy, coffee was slow, place was cold and I was sleepy. Not an auspicious combination for a good time, heh.

Day 3 – Saturday 26/11

Did the drive up to the Pinnacles, a rock formation in the desert about 2 ½ hours drive up from Perth. Introduced to the concept of ‘blink towns’ by Jules, ie blink-and-you’ll-miss-them towns. Plenty of them exist scattered throughout WA, with populations of 1000 or so and not even a single traffic light in the whole town. The state classifies its population into ‘city’, ‘rural’, ‘remote’ (whoa, rural not enough hor), and get this – ‘very remote’. Haha.. That’s what you get with 3 million people scattered in a state that could contain a few good-sized EU members with space to spare.

Arrived at Cervantes, a town of about 1000 or so, for lunch. Funniest, we stopped at a tavern first (the word ‘tavern’ should have warned us already) and the carpark was full of trucks; me and Jules walked into the tavern and this whole bunch of rednecks (or bogans as they call them here) turned around to stare at us. Hoho, 2 Asians walking into this remote tavern must have been a rather strange sight. We cleared out straightaway.

Now the classic eg. Of time wasting. Across road from tavern is fish and chip shop. I recommend fish and chips for lunch but get shot down by uncle who wants a sit-down lunch. So off we go looking for a proper sit-down lunch and eventually after lots of wrong turns end up at the Cervantes Motel, where one solitary staff member runs the reception, café and shop area and takes almost 20 min just to take our orders. The order? Oh yeah, you got it, FISH AND CHIPS. *sigh* And yes, once we sit down for lunch, more chatting and pleasantries and by the time we get moving to the Pinnacles, it’s about 3pm. Yay for a 2 hour detour that landed us the same lunch we could have gotten in a quarter of the time and price. Result – we managed the Pinnacles, but not a visit to New Norcia (which would have been on the way), Australia’s only monastery town. Sigh..

Pinnacles themselves are cool, thousands and thousands of limestone pillars in weird shapes sticking out of the sand. Apparently they form by the reverse process as stalagmites, they form due to water dissolving the softer areas of rock between the hard limestone and leaving limestone formations sticking up out of the desert soil. =) The best time to see them would have been at sunset, but that would have meant driving back to Perth along unlit roads (even Australia’s major highway, the M1, is not lit between cities), so I guess that’s why we turned back early. Ate at Woodpecker’s woodfired pizza in Subi. Their pizzas are good, salad is OK and soup is really salty. Down the road from Woodpecker’s is Sicilian’s, another café where we bought very good cakes.

Day 4 – Sunday 27/11

Drive down to Bunbury begins. We stopped in Fremantle, Perth’s port – it has a good market on weekends, and this weekend was no exception. It was also during the period of the Freo festival, so even more buskers, shops and performers were in the street. It was really a carnival atmosphere. There are really interesting shops – something called ‘Salty Dog Surf Shop’, ‘The Pickled Fairy and other Myths’. Krazy Tees sells very interesting T-shirts, with captions like: “Fat kids always win at seesaw”, “Fat kids are harder to kidnap” – with a graphic of said fat kid being unable to fit in through car window, etc etc.

Bought myself a purple button necklace (way cool) and a brooch with glass beads. Had lots more Freo-ing to do but time was up at we had 2 hours to go to get to Bunbury and we had to reach by 6pm to attend church where my other cousin Danielle was playing piano. The church, St Mary’s had actually been destroyed by a cyclone previously, so services were held in a makeshift hall that belongs to some school or community club. The priest is from Sri Lanka, interestingly enough.

Dinner that night at my uncle Toney and aunt Geraldine’s house, was pasta. My uncle and aunt, especially aunt, express their love through gift-giving. So, the pasta dinner was WAY in excess of what normal people eat. Heh. Although my aunt is an excellent cook, everything is done to excess – she has a fridge, a freezer the same size of most peoples’ normal fridge, a larder the size of a HDB storeroom and all are packed chockfull AND more food scattered around the tables and kitchen. Can you see the fats accumulating on me already.. sigh..

Day 5 – Monday 28/11

Went with Jules and Dani to the beach to tan in the morning. After 2 hours of lying in the sun, Jules is darker all over, so is Dani and I am NOT. Sigh. Except for the sunburnt bits around the edges of the back of my swimming costume where Dani forgot to apply sunblock on me.. Thanks Dani, for giving me the weirdest tanlines possible.

Lunch at some fish and chip shop in town, was very good indeed, with fish and chips, squid, mussels and a killer clam chowder. They even managed decent desserts (tiramisu and some fruit and nut slice). Cannot remember the place name but it’s near a bar/restaurant called Barbados and a sweet shop called Taffy’s. Taffy’s, for the record, does very good white chocolate pretzels and Tigereye (which is dark choc, white choc and peanut butter all mixed) and oddly enough, not-good saltwater taffys. I bought their sampler to try and will probably be going back to get the Tigereye to bring home. The whole eating area overlooked a recreational activities bay, so people were constantly zipping past on their powerboats.

After lunch, at about 3pm again, we went to Bunbury’s city center. Bunbury is the 3rd or 4th largest city in WA, and apparently one of the fastest growing, but it still feels so small town. People park on the streetsides for free and there is so little traffic on the road you can just walk across practically without looking. Jules and Dani brought me to Hillzeez, a surf shop that had specials on their bikinis, but I can’t fit any of them, boohoo. Their sizes are 8, 10, 12 etc and I am in between them. Sigh. The bargains were really good though, 50-70% off for brands like Billabing, Quiksilver and Seafolly, so you would pay something like $30-40 in total for what would have cost $100 in Singapore. Oh well. Other shops that were pretty good included Brazen, Flirtatious and Garbage (I thought their names were really strange) and I got myself a nice blue and gold top. Also got some temp hair dye to do on Dani and Jules in vivid violet. The range of cosmetics, haircare and body care products here is really amazing and cheap. Mum bought self-highlighting kits and red-hair-care shampoo (ie it restores the colour of hair that has been dyed red. Cool.)

Dinner at home was beef rendang, steamed fish and egg with asparagus and mushroom. Yumm.

Day 6 – Tuesday 29/11

Woke up early in the morning (OK, not that early, 7am or so) to go to Koombana Bay to watch dolphins. Erps, no dolphins came even though we sat at the chilly beachside from 8am till almost 10am. There is a group of about a dozen wild dolphins who live in the bay and they will come in almost everyday to interact with the people, but apparently not today. The amazing thing is that the dolphin interaction center is staffed by volunteers, and they come from all over the world – lots of Asian faces, from Korea, HK, Japan included. The hut where the volunteers wait for the dolphins is called the Koombana Bay Hilton. Heh.

Returned home after for lunch, which was the leftover pasta. Still just as good. Went down to Bunbury city center again for more walking around. Tuesday is the day waffles are half priced at Gelare, so we had waffles – ooh, heavenly. Bought myself a pair of earrings in red and blue.

Dinner again at home; steak, sausages, potato salad and greens, typical gwailo food. Heh. But very good gwailo food indeed. Tomorrow we are going to Albany down south, so will pack clothes tonight. Enroute, supposed to go to the Tree Top Walk and Margaret River – am keeping fingers crossed that we’ll make it in time. =)

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