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…
I saw this package in our grocery store and it caught my eye:
Musk sticks? It’s claiming to be a candy, but a candy flavored with something a deer excretes from its butt. I was curious, but not curious enough to try some, so I mailed a package to my parents as a joke.
My mom just told me that she’s been carrying them around all weekend, offering them to everyone at her Memorial Day shindigs, trying to get someone to like them. The collective verdict is that they “smell and taste like potpourri.”
I guess I can’t knock them, not having tried them or anything, but I’m going to go out on a limb and say that I can’t recommend them either.
Someone relatively near our apartment (we think it’s the greyhound racing track) sets off fireworks several times a week. Sometimes we can see them from our bedroom window in front of the city skyline, which is pretty cool. But I think it’s weird that someone has so much money to blow on fireworks… they do it all the time, like on Monday nights and stuff. I thought of this because they’re doing a fireworks display right now, and it’s pouring rain. (Well, they’re making a lot of fireworks noises anyway, not so much on the visuals.) Fireworks sounds combined with rain sounds is sort of surreal.
Another surreal sound that happens a lot is the birds singing at night - they do it all the time and it’s really weird. One time we passed an entire tree full of parrots yelling at each other at like 11pm. Often I hear this one particular kind of bird (I think it’s a magpie maybe?) singing in the middle of the night, around midnight or 1am. It’s like you give these guys a continent with almost no native predators and they think they can do whatever they want. Jeez.
I just came across this picture so I thought it would be appropriate to put it up. This is T and me on the day we left New York, posing with our 14 pieces of luggage. (Have you seen what it costs to ship things to Australia? Yeah… we don’t have any heirloom armoires or anything so we thought we’d just do it this way.)
Traveling in comfort and style.
We got so used to herding those things around. The best part was all the stares we got in the airports and hotels… after a certain point when people asked about it we’d just say “long weekend.”
Although if you’re considering doing this yourself, one good thing to know before you get to the end of your flight, to prepare yourself, is that they don’t have skycaps in the Sydney airport.
Ice cream makers in Australia need to get a grip. I say this because somehow, no one here has figured out yet that ice cream can have stuff in it. I’m not even that big on ice cream, but I find myself paying more attention to it now that I know I couldn’t even theoretically, if I wanted to, go out and get a pint of something that’s half-ice-cream-half-brownie.
You see, I am literally only interested in ice cream when it has tons of brownies and/or cookies and/or cookie dough and/or moose fudge prints involved. And it is not possible to buy ice cream here that takes this concept beyond “chocolate chip.” Oh, no, wait, they also have slightly larger chocolate chips.
Ok, to be completely honest, they also have cookies ‘n cream. But that is it. Nothing more adventurous than that, just six different brands of plain vanilla and plain chocolate. It’s sort of weird. I mean, does nobody here actually like things in their ice cream, or is this just a glaringly obvious business opportunity?
Get with the program, Australia.
This isn’t recent news apparently, but I happened to mention something last night like “Isn’t it funny to watch the British Parliament on TV because they’re all shouting and being silly,” and my husband was like “Wait, watch this.”
Apparently the Australian Parliament is also very silly. According to my husband, this is a clip from back in February when the Parliament had just started working on Fridays, and Kevin Rudd (the Prime Minister) wasn’t there that Friday because he was off doing other Prime Ministery things. So the other guys got all mad that they had to work on Friday and he didn’t show up. They are also apparently upset because even though they have to show up on Fridays, they don’t get to have Question Time on Fridays. I don’t know what that is, but apparently they actually call it Question Time, which I think is pretty funny. It must have been named by whoever thought up the name for Sorry Day.
There’s probably more to it than this, like maybe they were all working on Fridays before, just in other capacities or something. I don’t actually know anything about this other than what my husband told me. But it seems stereotypically Australian and hilarious that they are getting all in an uproar about having to work on Fridays. And I like how they’re all sprawled out around the chamber just picking their noses and stuff and going “Oh no you didn’t!”
Also, the speaker lady keeps telling people to sit down, and no one will sit down and they’re all just laughing at her, but when she stands up everyone immediately sits down. Why don’t they just get a talking stick or something if it’s that easy?
So it’s fall now in Australia, and you can definitely tell that it is–before I came here I was worried that the seasons would be practically non-existant. (By the way, I never realized that fall is a particularly American term until I came here and everyone started saying things like “So it’s so-called ‘fall,’ now, huh?”) I have a sneaking suspicion that fall is just going to be really long and eventually turn into spring, since it’s already towards the end of May and it’s still not that chilly. During the day, when the sun is out, it is actually hot. But, there are about three trees in Sydney that have actually changed color and dropped their leaves, so that makes me happy.
Tree on our street
But it is definitely weird to be going into fall as I know that everyone back home is getting ready for Memorial Day. Fall/winter seems sort of boring and anticlimactic here, since there are no real holidays that take place during those months. I kind of suspect that the real reason I like those seasons so much is because of Halloween, Thanksgiving, and Christmas. (Although I guess the real bummer of having those holidays actually come around when it’s spring/summer and, in some cases, no one else is celebrating them is yet to come.) Anyway, it’s a good thing we’re doing this season first, because I like fall better than I like spring and yet I still find myself feeling sad or weird when I realize what season it is in the Northern Hemisphere. So I’m glad I get to deal with the concept before it’s the other way around.
So basically, I still manage to keep forgetting what month it is and keep trying really hard not to miss any important birthdays or Mothers’/Fathers’ Days. Actually, not having a job yet, so no set schedule, I usually barely know what day of the week it is. Where are we again? Oh, right, Australia.
