Greek Festival

This weekend we went to the Paniyiri Greek Festival, the largest Greek festival in Australia.  It was cool and windy when we were walking over, but once we were in the park it was absolutely perfect weather.  For us, this festival is all about the food.  Sure, there were rides for the kids, dancing demonstrations and live music, but our stomachs were in charge!  As soon as we walked into the grounds, the smells of charcoal cooking engulfed us.  We had different types of souvlaki, grilled haloumi and the very famous, and very sweet, loukoumades, or honey puffs.  The honey puffs are the star of the festival and people make plans around devouring plates of them!  Honey puffs are deep fried dough, coated in honey and sprinkled with icing sugar.  Anyone with a sweet tooth would go crazy over these!  We struggled to share a small plate but we saw lots of people packing away the large plate without any hesitation.

Honey Puffs

This is a great time of year in Brisbane, right before the start of winter.  The days are warm and the nights are cool.  It is lovely to get up in the morning and have the humidity less than 90% and be able to walk into work and arrive not looking like a sweaty ball of hot goo.  We seem to be much colder right now than we were this time last year, but we are in a tough position when it comes to complaining about the cold.  On one hand we need to be able to mock the Aussies who think that 18 degrees is nippy by claiming that we walk around in shorts and t-shirts in Canada when it’s -18 degrees, but on the other hand, because there isn’t any proper insulation in the houses, it really does feel cold and we need to be able to wear our jumpers with dignity. 

Festival Goers

Not a cloud in the sky

Mosman Trail

We just spent a beautiful 4 day weekend in Sydney, taking advantage of having Thursday off for Anzac Day.  The highlight of our trip was a 10km hike we took on the north shore, in the suburb of Mosman. 

We started by taking the ferry from Circular Quay to the Taronga Zoo.  We walked NE, past the zoo, and headed along a trail that took us to Bradleys Head and then Chowder Bay.  The walk is really well laid out, with stairs cut into the pathway and nicely cleared with no spider-infested branches hanging across the trail at face height!  The scenery along the pathway is beautiful, with views of the city, lots of little harbours and beaches and trees and flowers everywhere.

The Opera House on Anzac Day (note the planes in the upper left hand corner)

The city

 

On the loop back we cut through some fantastic parts of the suburbs of Clifton Gardens, Mosman and Cremorne, to get to the Cremorne Ferry terminal and back to the city.  These suburbs are quite stately and homes with ocean views are positively estate-line!  The strange part of the walk was that the official pathway actually involves walking more or less right up to a house and then veering off onto a hidden path.  We actually missed a couple of turns at the first pass because we thought we were being too cheeky about walking up to these houses.  Apparently, that is just how it is done.

Bay View along the pathway

Entrance to the Harbour

Chowder Bay

We enjoyed this trip and walk so much that we are already planning to walk from Manly to the Harbour Bridge and back into the city on our next visit, a hike that will take us at least 6 hours, and that is only if we walk on a straight a route as possible, with no wandering off the sea at any point.  This may take more than one visit to complete but luckily we are more than happy to spend as many weekends as possible in Sydney!

Footy galore

Australia is truly a sports-mad country.  It seems like everyone has a sport, or sports, they they play on a regular basis.  Not just kids but adults of all ages, swimming, cycling, running, playing tennis or netball and, the most popular sport, Australian Rules Football.  The part that gets confusing with the sports is that Aussie Rules Football, Rugby League, Rugby Union and soccer all referred to as "footy".

Of the 18 teams in the Australian Rules Football League (AFL), 10 are in Victoria.  Anyone from Victoria will mean AFL if they say "footy".  In Queensland, there are two AFL teams, but there are also both Rugby Union and Rugby League teams.  Rugby League is massive in Queensland and usually, but not always, someone from Queensland saying "footy" will mean Rugby League.  It also depends on the time of year because in June there is the first game of the 3 game State of Origin tournament, played between Queensland born players and New South Wales born players.  During this tournament, everyone calls it footy.

Watching the Lions play the Crows (Brisbane vs Adelaide)

The Lions came close to winning this one!

We really like going to the Brisbane Lions games in the AFL and the Reds games in the Rugby Untion League.  We may not always know what is going on, but it always a nice way to spend some time sitting outdoors and enjoying the weather.

A lovely sunset at the Reds match, played at Suncorp Stadium only 5 minutes from our house

The Warratahs (Sydney) warming up

The other complication with footy is that anyone from Europe or South America, and there is a large European influence here, will call soccer "footy".  Sometimes it is easier just to nod knowingly, rather than keep asking "What do you mean by footy?" 

The one sport that is never, ever called footy or football, is North American football, which here is referred to as "grid iron football' or just "grid iron".  Australians really seem to love watching grid iron, and it is hard to get a seat in a pub when they show NFL games.  They love the size of the players and the hard hits (which is why Aussies also seem to love hockey...referred to as "ice hockey" here, never just hockey) but they just can't get their heads around having offence and defence as different teams.  When we try to explain it, we get the same blank look back as when Aussies start talking about footy.  Sometimes it is easier just to cheer for the ball!

Long weekend

One of the many wonderful things about living in Australia is that we get four days off at Easter!  And since autumn in Brisbane is a lot like summer in Brisbane, it means we get four days to enjoy the sun and be outside.

As we have gone away for the past two years, we decided to spend the Easter weekend at home.  We used to spend most long weekends in the city when we lived in Calgary, as it was usually uncrowded and relaxed.  It was pretty much the same here.  Most people headed for the coast, leaving those of us who stayed with plenty of open spaces and lots of choice seats in restaurants!

Beautiful River View

Quiet Day on the Brisbane River

We spent part of Good Friday in the Southbank suburb, not in the pools but at a restaurant nearby with a nice view of the river.  It was pretty hot so we really needed a sit-down after the long walk.  We have been taking the train so much lately that we have forgotten how hot it can really feel in the sun at 30+C with humidity in the 85% range.  In other words, it was melting!  We had good walks on Saturday and Monday too, but, this being the subtropics, it was bucketing on Sunday and there were weather warnings going on all day.  We didn't get hit too badly, but the warnings made us pretty wary about going out on Sunday evening.

We watched this guy try to waterski for about 5 minutes and he never did stand up...still not a bad way to spend the day

A lovely bridge in West End

We probably wouldn't stick around every long weekend, but it was really nice not to worry about fighting traffic or rushing home late Monday to get to work on Tuesday.  The nicest part is that we are having a four day weekend in Sydney in just a couple of weeks, so we are getting away on our own terms!

Balmain

Balmain is a suburb on the west side of the Sydney CBD.  We explored the area when we were in Sydney for Christmas, but the suburb has been on our list of places to visit for a long time.  It is snuggled in a nice, quiet harbour.  To get there we took a ferry from Circular Quay but, perhaps because of the shape of the harbour, JB was convinced that we were on the north shore, not just west of the CBD.  There are so many inlets and small bays in the Sydney Harbour that it is very easy for people who aren't used to it to get VERY turned around!  Maybe we are just spoiled by having the mountains to the west for so many years that we just forgot how to gauge the direction!

Houses overlooking the harbour

Australia Post Office

High Street

One of many posh parts

We had a really lovely walk through the high street in Balmain, which was full of smart shops, cafes and tempting bakeries.  Just off the high street there are lots of cottages dating back to the founding of Balmain, which have been kept up in a very "English" fashion, giving the area a very genteel feel.  This area used to have a rough reputation, but it is now a very well looked after neighbourhood and is really quite charming. 

This area really showed us how little we know about Sydney and the surrounding suburbs.  We will definitely make more of an effort to explore the city.  Our next trip there is only 4 weeks away!

Noosa

We have been quite busy with work for the last few weeks, so this past weekend we took a couple of extra days and headed north to Noosa.  This was our third trip to Noosa, but our first time staying right on the beach in Noosa Heads.  It was absolutely fantastic!  We have been to the beach many times but we have never stayed in a hotel that is right on the beach.  All that separated us from the water was a swimming pool (gloriously heated), a boardwalk and the sand.  It was wonderfully relaxing to sit on our deck and stare out at the ocean.  Autumn started on 1 March, but it still felt pretty summery to us.

The weather in Queensland (and much of Australia) has been really rough for the last six weeks.  We had beautiful weather until Australia Day (26 January) and then all hell broke loose!  We had at least three days with more than 80mm of rain, there were floods in northern Queensland, storms on the Sunshine and Gold coasts, and now there is the threat of a Cyclone making landfall on the northeast coast.  We really need to make hay when the sun shines, because you really don’t know how long that sun will last!  (There is a 50% chance, of course, that the sun will shine nonstop, dry everything out and then start the whole country on fire, too.)

The beaches in Noosa have really been decimated by the bad weather.  The point where the sea has pulled away the sand is almost a metre in some places and they are piping sand more than a kilometre from the mouth of the Noosa River to the Noosa Beach.  There is a brown muck that is being sprayed out over the beach and it might not look nice now, but it should save the area from really getting torn apart.

Sunny day on the beach (beautiful!)

Cloudy day on the beach (still pretty good!)

Rainbow Lorikeets relaxing in a pub

Noosa is a beautiful spot and we were really lucky to be able to go at this time of year.  It is extremely popular at Christmas and is the kind of place where people will get up early to drive close to the beach and find a parking spot before 6 am.  Even at this time of year the parking lots were full by 8am on weekends and even on a weekday the main lots looked pretty full.   We have yet to experience Christmas on the beach but if it involves fighting crowds and battling for parking, we will stick with Christmas in the city and off-season at the beach.  The water was about 25C, the air was about 30C and that was pretty easy to take.

Late Summer

This was our first "typical" Brisbane summer (the first two years were nothing but rain) and we can really feel the difference in the temperatures as we near the last part of summer, which ends on February 28 in Australia.  We have been through weeks of temperatures in the high 30s, with high humidity, and have been through downpours, thunderstorms and wind like we have never seen before.  Now that autumn is approaching, the days seem a bit cooler and there are more people out enjoying the end of the summer.  Today we walked all along the river and the crowds seemed much bigger than usual.  We even saw the mounted patrol, something that we haven't seen since we left Calgary!

Crowds at the market in Southbank

Mounted Patrol

The other thing that we have noticed is that there are a lot more critters coming into the house.  We don't mind the little daddy-longlegs, the geckos or the ants, but a couple of nights ago we walked into the garage (the attached garage) and were horrified to see a gigantic Huntsman spider scurrying across the floor.  It was so big that JB actually thought it was a mouse!  This is something that Aussies clearly don't get too bothered by.  All the Canadians that JB works with freaked out when she showed them the photo of the spider and made all the appropriate and sympathetic comments ("I would die!", "Poor you" and "You should have called in sick for all the stress") but the Aussie she showed it to said, "We were thinking of getting that finish on the floor in our Rumpus Room.  Do you like it?"  Clearly this person has lost touch with reality!

The beastly spider!  (and yes, we do like the floor)

Horrifying!

We sprayed the spider with our Napalm-type spider killer spray and it seemed to do the trick but minutes later when we went back in the garage in hopes of picking up it's corpse, the spider wasn't there!  We can only hope that he has crawled off somewhere, away from our house, and has died.  At least this one wasn't in our bedroom!