How am I supposed to find a job when employers are posting their job listings in another dimension?
I wonder if I should be concerned that almost all of my posts are about food. Hmm.
Well we went to a farmers’ market on Saturday that I’d been wanting to go to for a while. It’s called Eveleigh Markets and it’s in the Newtown/Chippendaleish area. It’s only open on Saturdays, and then only from 8am to 1pm (oh Australia, you so crazy!). Anyway they have a pretty sharp-looking website and I thought it would be fun to see the Australian equivalent of the Union Square greenmarkets, where producers from around the local area come into the city with their awesome seasonal produce and organic meat and dairy products (do I sound like a yuppie yet?) and also a few people with jam or baked goods or things like that. I get really alarmingly excited about farmers’ markets because I like to cook and (despite my self-deprecating knock about yuppies) I’m really obsessed with learning about food production and impact etc.
Well, the Eveleigh market was sort of the reverse of the Union Square market. They had a bunch of finished products like jams and whatnot, and a lot of what seemed like just regular cafes with booths doling out coffee and snacks, with a couple of actual farm booths interspersed. It was a place for people to take their dogs and kids on a Saturday morning and sit down and have breakfast, not really a mecca for buying and learning about fresh local ingredients. Well, they did have a lot of meat operations available, so I guess if you wanted eggs or meat, you’d be flying high. And they had a barbeque joint frying up meat which smelled delicious. So I guess I’d say, recommended for a fun brunch, less so for ingredient shopping (except meat). I’m still hoping to locate a knock-out farmers’ market in Sydney (and hopefully one that isn’t mystically open for one hour a month like some kind of Hogwart’s Express). I need to try out the Paddy’s Market one - although from what I’ve heard I’m worried that it’s not so much about local farmers - and possibly the Pyrmont one - although I’ve heard things that make it seem similar to the Eveleigh one. Maybe we’re just spoiled in New York?
We went for a long drive to visit T’s relatives in a town called Griffith, about an eight hour drive into the interior of NSW. I felt like it was weirdly exciting to go for a drive in such a remote place. Being really far away from everything, in a way that’s not possible to do on the East Coast of the US, felt sort of exotic. And just slightly scary, as we drove past scraggly handpainted signs saying things like “Dead Creek Farms” and I was convinced the guy from Wolf Creek was going to jump out from behind a sheep and start eating my organs.
As we were driving through one town, we took a look at the gas meter and decided we still had more than half a tank, which should get us the rest of the way with no problem. It also, stupidly, didn’t occur to us that there would be no more gas stations for the next four hours. Well, as soon as the meter got past half a tank, it started dropping pretty quickly, and we decided to fill up at the next town. When we got there, around 9pm, all the gas stations in town were closed. I am not that big of a driver and I guess I always figured that gas stations are just always open 24hrs, but apparently that is not the case, at least not once you get past a certain point into the countryside of Australia. Gah. We pulled into a Woolworth’s grocery store and found a security guard standing outside, and asked him where we could get gas. He pointed over our heads and said “Wagga’s about 80 kilometers that way.”
So we went back through the town and stopped at one of the “driver reviver” stations where they have a couple of guys sitting in a trailer handing out coffee and snacks, to see if they had any better ideas. I certainly felt like a foolish city slicker, pulling in in our marked Sydney rental car to ask a question that was beginning to seem sort of ridiculous. Thankfully, they pointed us back to one of the gas stations that had an (artfully hidden) 24hr card reader, and the day was saved.
On another note, T had been promising unending boring desert vistas on the drive, which I was sort of excited about because I wanted to see a desert, but it turned out not to be desert so much as unending flat treeless farm vistas. Extremely flat. We also saw lots of these signs:
"DISPOSE OF FRUIT NOW"
Hmm, why do the inhabitants of this area hate fruit so much? Maybe they are taking the Australian love of meat to the nth degree? No, T explained that in fact there are lots of fruit farms around, and they don’t want anyone carrying fruit flies in with their outsider fruit. Which also explains the graphic. Still, I enjoyed reading all the signs:
Why tomatoes and capsicums specifically? And who decided that $10,000 was not quite harsh enough?
This one made me sad.
We caught this friendly reminder as we were leaving.
We fell into their fruit-monopolizing trap and brought home some delicious local oranges. Those wily fruit farmers.
I scalded my hand a week ago trying to make a hot water bottle for my husband (seriously, someone needs to bring electric heating pad technology to Australia) so typing was kind of a bitch for a while, which is somewhat of an excuse for not making many posts lately. Oh forget it - I don’t have to apologize to you, blog.
Anyway, we’re going away for the weekend to visit T’s family. In the meantime, I’ll leave you with this impression of the weather right now in Sydney: cold and wet. Actually, not that cold, just cold inside the house. When you go outside, the humidity overpowers you and you get really warm and gross-feeling. The humidity is pretty amazing actually, and I guess I’m not used to having a house with zero insulation. The mirrors are always foggy, either because your breath fogs them up, or because the humidity just sits everywhere and fogs them up itself. Yesterday T said, “Did you realize that all of the paper in our house is damp?” and I said “Thank god I’m not crazy!” My poor Nov. 5 edition of the New York Times (yeah I’m a huge dork). Hmm… we thought we would avoid the basement vibe this time by choosing an apartment that’s on the third floor, but I guess it was just meant to be.
Due to the resounding popularity of my musk stick post, I decided to take a closer look at some of the other unfamiliar candy populating the grocery store shelves. I took the husband to IGA so he could point out what he thinks are the most unusual Australian candies, but I have a sneaking suspicion that he really just pointed out the ones he thinks are the most delicious.
Anyway, here is the loot:
Wine gums: a gummy candy with an illustration on the front of the package showing candies that say “PORT” and “CLARET” on them. This is obviously really weird - aren’t gummy candies usually marketed towards kids? And isn’t wine… not for kids? Is this a gummy candy with sophistication? And most importantly… do they taste like wine, and how gross is that?
Clinkers: “Find your favorite centre.”
Sherbies: an insane orange guy saying “Party in your mouth.”
Chicos: a candy of questionable political correctness. The package depicts a baby bursting with “delicious choc flavour.” Good work, Australia.
Picnic bar: because T wanted one.
There were other interesting candies available, like the chocolate-covered gummy worms, and the bullet candies which I’ve heard are pretty good, but we didn’t really want to spend more than $13 or so on this project.
So let’s get down to business. First we opened the Clinkers, which I think we mainly picked because T did not doubt his ability to finish them off if I didn’t like them. They’re ok, they reminded me of an Easter candy. They’re pieces of hard candy with a foamy/powdery consistency covered with milk chocolate. Despite the “find your favourite centre” tagline, there are only three available flavors, yellow (banana), green (lime), and a pink one. I don’t like banana flavors and lime with chocolate was a bit weird. I didn’t bother eating enough to find a pink one.
Then we opened the wine gums. I was really excited to find out how weird they are and how (and why) they translated the taste of wine into a gummy candy. It turns out that they come in traditional gummy candy colors, only a few of which could be interpreted to be wine-like at all:
They say things like “PORT,” “CLARET,” and “SHERRY” - apparently these are the wine gums of fancy old men. They don’t discriminate when it comes to color - green is just as likely to say “CLARET” as anything else. And the kicker? They taste exactly like every other gummy candy in the world. There is nothing wine-like about them at all, other than the name and the words. Who thought of this marketing idea, and why?? Confusing!
Then we opened the Sherbies. They are pieces of orange taffy supposedly containing a fizzy orange powder, although the powder is sort of hard to detect. The Sherbies helped us sort out an American English/British-Australian English linguistic snafu. He kept telling me that there was sherbet inside, and I kept saying that maybe it was sherbet-flavored but there was no way there was sherbet inside, until we checked out Wikipedia and discovered that British/Australian English uses “sherbet” to refer to a fizzy powder you can use to make a Kool-Aid type drink, while American English of course uses “sherbet” to refer to sorbet. Fascinating.
The Chicos are, in my opinion, totally gross and wrong. They are chocolate-flavored gummy candies shaped like babies or little boys. Aside from the weirdness and inappropriateness factors of this candy, I am just not a big fan of chocolate-flavored things that aren’t chocolate. Why not just eat actual chocolate? You’re already eating candy.
The Picnic bar is pretty good if you’re into candy bars. I’m not too crazy about milk chocolate in general and I don’t like caramel, so I’m at a big disadvantage when it comes to liking that sort of thing. But it’s basically one of those wafer sandwich cookies that are long and thin, covered in peanuts and caramel and coated in milk chocolate. So yeah.
Well, that’s probably all of the Australian candy reviews I’ll be posting for quite some time, since I’ve just eaten enough candy to be sick of it for an entire year. Although I did buy another package of wine gums…
