Christmas in July, Brodburger, and Beer

At Gold Creek, which is not far from where we live (and featured prominently in our blog-post about Cockington Greene), they have a really cute, small restaurant called Sweet Copper. One of the things they are known for in Canberra is, they do a ten-course "Last Meal on the Titanic" dinner every year on the day the Titanic sank. Period dress is highly encouraged. Once a month, they do a reservation only, themed multi-course meal. July's theme is always Christmas in July, and since both our birthdays are in July it seemed the perfect joint birthday night out. Spoiler alert, it was.

We think Australians are secretly very sad that they have Christmas in summer and thus miss out on all of the "White Christmas" related fun. Christmas in July is apparently a fairly popular idea. It certainly feels right. It was freezing outside, but with that fireplace you can see behind us it was nice and cozy.

Dinner was amazing, and huge! Scallop and lobster appetizers, pesto and bread, sorbet, turkey roll with mashed potatos and roast vegetables- there was no concern about leaving hungry.

Also, we look good together.

Happy Birthday to us!

This blog-post is a bit of a mix of things we've been up to over the last month or so. This is Brodburger, a Canberra institution. It's a little trailer that sells burgers on the shore of Lake Burley-Griffen. It's on the south-side, near the hotel we were in when we first got here, so we don't get down that way too often anymore, but it's totally worth the trek. Easily the best burgers in Canberra, it scratches the Five Guys itch nicely.

I'm not clear how much of this is true, but legend has it that the owners just parked the trailer there one day and never took it away. It has to violate some kind of zoning ordanace since it's right in the middle of a public park, but when the city tried to make them move, there was a near riot. I can totally understand why, it's that good. Everything is made to order so it's not exactly quick, but on a beautiful Spring day that's not really a problem.

As we waited for our burgers and chips (fries) we wandered over to the lake to say hi to the swans.

How freaking huge is that goose's neck!? We're pretty sure that goose society is organized around the length of one's neck. The longer the neck, the higher in society you are. Along this reasoning, this goose is clearly His Excellency the Grand Emperor Ganderious the First. The two geese on either side of Ganderious are his honor guard, charged with defending the Emperor from both threats winged (magpies) and non-winged (small toddlers, mostly).

Mmmm-mmmm, that is a tasty burger.

The magpies clearly agree and started to gather in hopes of food-scraps.

Greg foolishly fed one a chip, which drew and even larger crowd. When no more chips were thrown to the ground, the mob became increasingly hostile. Fortunately, Laurel was around to save the day. She promptly organized a reward system for the magpies, with strict rules they must follow if they wanted to be fed. The magpies had to organize themselves into an orderly line, and one at a time, jump on the carpark rail, at which point they would be rewarded with a small chip, and then fly away to make room for the next bird. They caught on surprisingly fast. This is a picture of the first members of the angry crowd before Laurel estbalished order.  There were easily 20+ magpies by the end.

For Greg's birthday, Laurel got him a DIY (do it yourself) beer kit. This is awesome for several reasons-

1. Brewing your own beer may be the awesomest (non-viking) thing ever.
2. It's Coopers, which is Greg's favorite Australian beer, by far.
3. It's a complete kit, coming with everything you need, wort (aka pre-beer mix), sugar, bottles, caps, vat, everything.
4. This is the only way to get beer in Australia that is not ridiculously expensive. Six-packs here start at $18. Yeah, you read that right. And that's for your most basic of beers. At most bars, a glass of wine is often cheaper than a pint of beer.

Naturally, all of this had to be put to work very fast. It's remarkably simple. Mix beer, wort, sugar, and approximately 22 liters of water, then add yeast and let sit for about a week. The only tricky part is maintaining a farily warm, constant temperature. We wrapped a blanket around the vat, which did the trick.

After a week, it's time for bottling!

A short time later we had 30 750-ml bottles of beer! It needs to sit for about two weeks, and then it's ready for drinking. Since we are always running behind on our blog-posts, I can tell you the beer is a smashing success! Bob, we're getting ready for you to come visit in December. We just bought all the ingredients to make a Canadian Blonde-style beer. I think you and I can drink it all in two to three weeks time. I believe in us.

Dinosaurs! (and oh yeah, Sydney)

Flash back to Andrew & Paige's visit in May for this post.  After, they left for Cairns to visit the Great Barrier Reef they headed to Sydney to finish up their trip with Andrew's sister and dad.  It so happened, the weekend they were in Sydney, we were also there visiting our friends Alex & Matthew.  Alex and Matthew had recently moved to Sydney from Canberra.  They generously offered us room in their beautiful new apartment that overlooks the Sydney Harbour.  Here's a view from their balcony. 

Pretty awesome, huh?

So another reason for our Sydney trip was to see Walking with Dinosaurs, the Arena Spectacular!  We somehow convinced Alex and Matthew to go with us. By somehow, we mean Alex was like, "Meh, I'm only marginally interested," and then Matthew said, "Greatest thing ever. We have to go!"  This was excellent for two reasons.  One, life's always more fun with friends.  And two, we're not sure we would have been able to navigate the Sydney subway on our own.  This is a view of the bustling Sydney subway on our way to Dinosaurs.  Espresso on the go anyone?

The Sydney trains are triple deckers!  That's right, you walk on and can either go up or down to the next level if you think "ground level" just isn't interesting enough for you.  Fancy.

This is Acer Arena, where all the glorious dinosaur action was taking place.  We didn't let the fact they were advertising for an upcoming Miley Cyrus concert diminish our excitement.

So, the show is essentially a two-hour science lesson for kids, narrated by a "paleontologist." Laurel commented that his hair was way too fabulous for a paleontologist. This science lesson, however, features life-size, animatronics dinosaurs, so it's automatically the greatest science lesson ever. Here's a Utahosaurus facing off against a Stegosaurus.  The pictures are a bit blurry because of the extreme dino-action.

Velociraptors! Ever since Jurassic Park they are mandatory for any self-respecting dino-show. Although, to digress for a moment, when Greg grew up and memorized his dinosaurs there was one called Deinonychus. And Greg is 98% certain that the so-called raptors of Jurassic Park, while extra-awesome, are in fact Deinonychus.

They also had a flying Pterodactyl-type dinosaur. It was all right. Greg was hoping for swooping all over for the areana, but they decided for the moving screen behind the dinosaur to give the illusion of movement. Oh well, I guess they are just saving the budget for the T-rex.

Apparently a Triceratops was not cool enough, so they used a Torosaurus instead. This also included the best line of the night, "With its horns and muscular physique, what could challenge a torosaurus . . . except for ANOTHER TOROSAURUS!?" Cue Torosaurus fight.

While we may have been the oldest people there without children, Dinosuars didn't disappoint.  And more importantly, a childhood dream of Greg's was fulfulled.  Dinosuar success!

Later that night, we met up with Andrew and Paige and hit the bars of Sydney. Andrew thought he'd participate in an age-old Australian tradition of challenging Greg to a bar fight.  In the end they decided to just get another drink instead.  Good times!

  Alex and Matthew were fantastic tour guides.  Thanks for a great weekend!

KI: Pelicans and Penguins

Our first night at Kangaroo Island was spent attending both a Pelican Feeding and a nighttime Little Penguin Walk.  The pelican feeding was really funny, because it’s just one guy, a bucket of fish, and a whole flock of hungry pelicans waiting for their evening handout.  The pelicans know when it’s free food time, which we all know is the best kind of food.  When we arrived, there were already a whole bunch of them just kind of loitering on the rocks, but as soon as people started sitting on the benches they immediately started climbing on to the platform.  Smart birds.  A fair number of seagulls started to assemble as well.

Here are a few pelican facts for you, since we know you’re wondering.  Pelicans look big, but only weigh about 6.5 kg. They have a wing span just over 2m. Unlike most water birds they don’t make any natural oil on their feathers to make them waterproof.  This means that when they are in the water, they go to great effort to keep their wings out of the water.  This is for two reasons, one- they’ll get cold, and two- they can’t fly with wet wings.  When they do dive (or try as they’re not very good at it) they have to stay on the ground and walk around with their wings spread until they dry.  We also learned more about their ribbony beak movement I tried to describe in an earlier post.  It is called bill ribboning (I was close!) and is used to attract potential mates during mating season.  The strange mating sound is made by filling their bottom bill with air and then vibrating it against their top bill.  So there you have it, mystery solved!

Laurel displayed her expert sneaking skills to get close for a photo-op.

Here is the aforementioned pelican-guy, complete with seagull on his head.

Alright, back to the pelican feeding.  We can’t remember his name so we will refer to the man that was feeding the pelicans as Food Man from here on out.  I’m pretty sure that’s how the pelicans thought of him too.  First Food Man raised some individual pieces of fish in the air to inspire, as he called it, “aerial combat.”  One seagull would swoop over and grab the fish, then try to fly off before the other seagulls (and maybe a pelican or two) swarmed him and made him drop it.  It was pretty funny.  The pelicans, however, were not pleased at this waste of perfectly good fish.

Finally, came the main event.  It was pretty unceremonious.  Food Man just took giant handfuls of fish and tossed them into the swarming mass of pelicans.  Chaos ensued.  Each pelican was out to get as much fish as possible, regardless of whether he could actually eat that much or not.  That bill holds A LOT of fish.  Several pelicans were lucky enough to get the lion’s share of a fish toss, and would have this giant bulge of fish in their neck.  They had no chance of swallowing it, so they would go into the water and drink to try to help them swallow.  This is what the other pelicans were waiting for.  Pelicans are very social birds, except when it’s food-time.  Then, all bets are off.  Several other pelicans would follow the first one into the water and try to force his head underwater, so he would have to cough up and lose the fish.  It’s a tough world out there.

 

Little penguins! I love them!

Before the penguin walk, they took us through a small aquarium, the highlight of which was the cuddlefish. I never knew this before, but cuddlefish are amazing! They communicate though color flashes on the skin- they can change their pigmentation and appearance at will. The blue stripes you can see on his side, were actually pulsing on and off.

This cuddlefish showed an intelligence we have never seen in a fish. When pelicans see a bunch of people gather at the harbor and know its food time, I'm not all that surprised. Birds are pretty smart. When a fish sees a bunch of people outside his tank, and knows he's about to be fed, I'm kind of impressed. This guy was hiding in the back of the tank, but as soon as the tour group came over he came right out to the front.

When they threw the fish in (poor fish) it immediately dived underneath a log to hide. The assistant tour guide behind me muttured, "That was a bad idea," and she ws not kidding. Mr. Cuddlefish just sauntered over, and then lightning fast shot some tentacles out and reeled the fish right in his mouth. It all happened in about three seconds. Fish in tank, puff of dirt and mud, no more fish.

Now, we couldn't actually show this, but this is crazy. Mr. Cuddlefish doesn't like scales, so he actually somehow scales the fish while its in his mouth and then casually spits the scales out like the seeds of a watermelon. Greg kind of wants a cuddlefish now.

The Little Penguin, previously known as the Fairy Penguin, is the smallest penguin in the world and the only one native to Australia.  It’s only about 8 inches high and weighs about 1.5 kg.  Its call sounds a lot like one is being strangled.  Those cries serve a good purpose though.  The penguin that is staying with its young will call out to let the other penguin out hunting for fish know where their burrow is.  Penguins have a very poor sense of navigation, and without the call to guide them they would have to spend several hours a night trying to smell their way home.

Now since its dark out, and these little guys are kind of shy, we didn't really get many good pictures, but here's the best of the lot.

Kangaroo Island Shops

So, after Adelaide we drove south to Kangaroo Island. KI is about a forty five minute ferry ride from Cape Jervis which is about a two hour drive south from Adelaide. We were quite surprised when we actually got to the island though. While we had research things to on KI, we had never actually researched the size of the island. Apparently, it's the third biggest island in Australia, and is about 200 kilometers across. This was a shock. Most of the things we wanted to visit were on the opposite end of the island where our hotel was. Yay, more driving! On the upside, KI was just as beautiful as we had been led to believe.

It only took us four tries to pull this picture off with the boat behind us. Totally worth it.

We were going to be on the island for about 48 hours. We had divided our two days so the first day was spent visiting the various island shops, and the second day seeing more critters. We got onto the island right around lunch time, and a little winery was right off the main road. We figured it would be a good place to get some nibblies (and we can't say no to a winery), so we pulled off. For the first of several times, we walked up to a shop and saw the "closed" sign. We were just turning away, when an employee saw us outside and waved us in. Apparently, most places are open only when customers are around. Here's the locally sourced cheese and salami plate we had for lunch with wines, and our absolutely to die-for view.

After the winery we visited Clifford's Honey Farm, which runs a thriving honey export business as well as a small museum dedicated to the honey-making process. We don't have pictures, because nothing was all that photogenic, but it was still pretty neat. They have some super-rare strain of Italian bees (the last of this type in the world), which explains why bees were on the list of things you could not bring on the island. They don't want new colonies intermixing. Although, really, who travels with bees?

Next on the drive was the Island Pure dairy farm. Nothing but sheep products! Mmmm, cheese...

Before going in, we wandered the grounds for a little bit and found the barn where they keep all the lambs. Aren't they the cutest? Baby lambies!

We took a tour and sampled the various kinds of cheeses, and got lucky on the timing. It happened to be during the sheep's afternoon milking so we able to watch how that was done. It's mostly automated. They just round the sheep up, and let them through the gates ten by ten. They feed them while they are milking them, so they really don't mind.

We took piles of pictures during this part of the trip, so we've decided to split the day into 2 posts.  Stay tuned for more cute critters!

Our first visitors

About a month ago, Andrew and Paige came to visit. Our first visitors!

Good thing we just bought a brand new bed for our second bedroom, designed specifically for visitors. Oooo, pretty...

Providing solid proof that it is actually a small world after all, it turns out Andrew is friends with the other guy from NGA who came down to Canberra about a month after we did. This is Brevin. He's a good guy. We both told Andrew we got positions here, so he introduced us before we left.

Now, as some of you may be aware, we had an Iron Chef party, based on one of the greatest Japanese language cooking shows of all time. Each week a contestant challenges one of the Iron Chefs (who specialize in a certain ethnic cuisine- Japanese, Chinese, or French) to a cook-off featuring a certain theme ingredient. To adapt this for us, we gave everyone the ingredient ahead of time, with the only guidance that at least a majority of the cooking had to be done at our place. Thus began the Lemon Battle, and after the sticky, sticky dust had cleared, Andrew and Paige were crowned the Iron Chefs, much to Greg's chagrin. So, to honor their coming, we had a second Iron Chef party to allow them to defend their title. Australia Iron Chef: Pumpkin Battle!  Here are three of the contestants- Tika, Josh, and Katrina (of High Tea fame), eager for battle.

The Pumpkin Battle in full swing! Controlled chaos ensued.

This is just a really nice picture of Laurel and Katrina. Over Laurel's left shoulder are Adrian and Chrissy (spoiler alert) the eventual Pumpkin Iron Chefs.

And this is largely why. Chrissy made homemade pasta! Holy crap, their pumpkin and pine nut cream sauce was absolutely fantastic, and the fresh pasta was amazing. Although after watching all of the effort they went through to make it, it definitely convinced us we will NEVER make homemade pasta for ourselves. In fact, they were just one of a number of contestants that made homemade pasta.  People came to play at this party. We were impressed.

Greg and Tim having a very deep, serious conversation.Yeah right. In the background is Brevin's three year old son, Jackson, who made pretty much everyone at the party play the "kick the ball down the hall" game.

Here is Paige looking fabulous.

This is the silly picture we took when they were leaving. Paige is looking for kangaroos. Sadly, they did not see any while they were here. In another case of "its a small world" Andrew's little sister is studying abroad at Wollongong University which is about a two hour drive from us, so that was a "two for the price of one" trip for them. It was so great seeing them again and having them as our first visitors from the States.

And finally, this is the bag of carrots they bought at the grocery store so Andrew can have his daily carrot. They were amazed how inexpensive fresh veggies are here.  Greg has actually taken up this habit since they left. It's genius. It is both delicious, and strangely satisying to bite the end off a whole carrot with a vigorous crunch.