Heaven and Earth
Today I went to the City. Every Sunday there is a very small market of about 20 booths where they sell everything from paintings to opal jewelry. There's even a booth where you can get a 10 - 30 min massage for $10 - $30 from a registered massage therapist. There's also live music going on in the afternoon for local bands where they sell their latest cd's and promote the band.
After walking around for a bit I hopped on the bus to the Botanical Gardens at the top of Mt. Cootha which is about a 15 -20 min bus ride from the City Centre; from there I had booked myself to go on the Heaven and Earth tour.
The tour started at the front of the gardens and we walked around with a tour guide to see a small portion of the gardens. You can
view more photos from the garden in my Flickr photo album. We walked along the path where our guide, Denis, who happens to be a retired school teacher talked to us about a few of the plants we walked by. Some of which were quite odd, for example the Elephant Apple tree, the green tough skinned fruit weighs at least a pound or two, definitely not one that you'd want to be standing underneath during a wind storm.
We also passed the Cow tree which got it's name for the sap that is contained within the trunk, which can be used to make yogourt, yes that's right, yogourt from tree sap.
I'd like to go back to the gardens again to spend a little more time walking around and see the bonsai trees and the rest of the plants and trees that are in bloom.
This is a flower that I took a photo of right outside the rainforest greenhouse.
After the tour we had afternoon tea at the restaurant where they served light sponge cake with cream, jam and coffee or tea.
Then it was off to the planetarium for the "Are we alone?" show which included a tour of the night sky in Brisbane. We were shown the Southern Cross which always shows you where the South is and the constellations Scorpio and Libra.
Getting down with the blues...
Sometimes having good hearing can be a good thing, and sometimes not. I happen to be one of those odd people who can hear the high pitched hum from flourecent lights or the high pitched beeping noise that comes from walking in between those RIFD scanners at the library so you don't steal books.
But as for tonight, I heard the faintest sound of a guitar through my window, not just any old guitar sound, the distinct sound of a person singing with that guitar and it sounded well... I took an
audio recording (2.6MB) so you can hear it for yourselves. All I have to say is, "Watch out for this guy at the next Australian Idol!"
Burning Car
Yesterday I was waiting for the bus to arrive this afternoon and while I was waiting I saw this billowing smoke rising out from behind the trees and I was like, "I wonder if someone's lit a fire or something." Then when the smoke was brown and black and moving down towards the intersection I thought, "That sure is a dirty transport truck."
But then the smoke got thicker and blacker... I saw people getting out of their cars and decided to go down the road a bit to see what the commotion was about. (I couldn't see because the interesection dips down into a valley and the bus stop is on a bit of a hill.) And there it was, a car completely engulfed in flames. Just incredible. No one was inside the car as far as I know and I don't even know how the car rolled into the intersection in the first place. I even managed to take a
video of the burning car (9MB).
I still have yet to find out exactly what happened, I didn't see anyone get out of the car from where I was standing. I've never seen anything like it in my entire life! But I'm so glad that I take my camera everywhere with me, it's for times like this because you never know what's going to happen.
We suspect that the car was stolen, set on fire and then pushed out into the intersection. No one claimed to be the owner of the car when the police came. Upon talking to a few other people I think the car was a Cobra.
More Photos of the Car...Don't mind the photo of the limes at the end, I took that one earlier in the day.
Traveling to Sunnybank
Yesterday I went to Sunnybank Plaza and visited the shops there, it's like a mini Chinatown there. They have regular shops there but in addition to that there are Chinese bakeries, nicknack shops, a large Chinese restaurant and a Chinese grocery store. They sell all the usual things that you'd see in a typical Chinese grocery store and even some produce that I've never seen before even compared to the stuff I've seen in Toronto.
Other than that, the place pretty much looks like what you'd expect to see in Chinatown. Roast ducks hanging in the windows, fresh fish lying on ice and lots of Chinese people walking around both old and young.
Getting to this place is easy, it's only a 5 - 10 minute bus trip away from where I live so I can go back at anytime. There's even a Sanrio Gift Gate there, but as always, it's horrendously expensive, but always nice to have a look; sometimes they have sales.
The temperature has dropped down to 7C and it's really cold! Now I know all you fellow Canadians out there don't think it's very cold but it is when none of the houses have any form of insulation. I know this becuase there's a hole in the wall of this one house in here (from an accident of some sort) and there is no insulation! And there are no heaters in the house either. :p Thankfully it's supposed to start getting warmer this time of the year so it should get better soon.
Elena, Kelly and I watched two movies last night, Serendipity and Grease both great movies. Though about 10 minutes into the film Kelly came to the revelation that Sandy doesn't have anywhere near an Australian accent, ha!
How to make Chocolate Chip Cookies in Australia
Tonight my flatmate Elena and I decided to make chocolate chip cookies since she's never made them before and apparently they don't have them in Spain. So since our oven was broken Marcus let us use his oven in Unit 4 to do our baking, and since we were in his place baking already we just brought all of our stuff over there and made it in his kitchen.
They turned out ok, our ovens are these weird things, where the microwave is actually the oven, that is to say that it has a heating coil of sorts in the top and can be used as a convection oven. But it seems that the oven works differently than the usual ovens that I'm used to so instead of turning the cookies brown, they stayed yellow but were still baked through.
So, as Elena was taking our second batch of cookies off the tray and putting them onto a plate I saw it... a huge brown spider skitter across the kitchen floor from underneath the fridge and out into the open. I told Elena, who immediately got up on one of the kitchen stools and yelped. She ended up calling to Marcus who we thought was in his room (in both English and German) but after several minutes of calling we switched to calling Junior (I don't know his real name, he's from France). I ended up going there and asking him what we should do about the spider. A few minutes later Junior came down and kicked the spider, it ended up against the front door and appeared to be dead; he then went back to his room.
Then Kelly came to see how the cookies were doing and we told her about the spider, she was like, "What?" and we showed her as she walked up to the door, she thought it was huge too. Then Craig (our landlord's brother) came to see what the fuss was about and started batting at it with a towel to see if it was really dead, it didn't move. He said it was a huntsman spider, there are pics on Google if you do an image search and I'd post one here but I'm just too freaked out at the moment to even look at one of those things for more than a minute. At this point Kelly went to get her camera, and Elena and I went back to making cookies. But when Kelly came back the spider was gone! Oh we searched everywhere for it, but the only places it could have gone were either into the wall or into Marcus' room. We carefully searched a bit of Marcus' room, but since he wasn't there we didn't want to go too far in; instead, I just shook the curtains a bit that were by the door... nothing. So we decided to leave the boys a note.
Kelly wrote it so eloquently don't you think? We stuck it do their door so they could read it when they got home.
By this time Troy was back from playing beach volleyball, and was laughing with the rest of us at where a spider that size could have run to. So there we were, Troy, Marcus, Elena, Junior and Johann standing around the kitchen island talking and laughing about the spider, when I saw it... a MOUSE!! A mouse scurried out into the hallway and... back into Marcus' room! Everyone thought I was joking. So we went into Marcus' room, this time since he was here we could search a little better. We shook the shelves a bit, and then Marcus took his shoes out from under the bed and tossed them to see if the mouse had gone into there, nothing. Then Elena came to watch and we decided to move the bed away from the wall to see if it had gone under there, again nothing. Then Elena shrieked and said she saw something moving from underneath the curtains and that we should shake them a bit. So that's what Marcus did, and the mouse came scurrying out from under the curtains and back out of Marcus' room past Elena who shrieked and then it went into the living room.
I went to Craig and James' house to tell them what happened and Craig was just about dying with laughter at this whole event, along with Kelly and Chantal.
Meanwhile back at Unit 4, the mouse had scurried under one of the couches. Johann had perched himself atop of one of the couches and was totally freaking out. Poor Marcus didn't know what to do and Elena was perched on one of the stools.
By the time I came back the mouse was gone, we think it went out the back door which they had opened for it. Elena and I decided to close the door after that to make sure that more critters didn't come in.
And that... is how you make chocolate chip cookies in Australia
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