Thursday, February 3, 2011

Off to Oz

And now for something completely different....we are in Australia, after a 10 hour flight from Hawaii! Whew. I hinope I am not getting too old for these long flights, but they are sort of daunting to think about. We arrived late, but typical of me, I grabbed some brochures at the airport and read about a Chinese market in Sydney that only went for another hour, so we dropped our bags and trekked onto the streets of Sydney in search of it. Good thing Jim is such a good sport! The market was for Chinese New Year, and it was mostly torn down by the time we arrived, but I did see this wonderful lantern for the Year of the Rabbit. It was worth the walk!
I'm sorry we didn't get there sooner, as there would have been more photo ops like this one of a midway clown. This is for all you clown lovers out there. Dayna, this one's for you!
.On the drive north from Sydney, we had our first wildlife encounter with an actual live lizard. He was rooting in the garbage and was quite oblivious to us. We did see some kangaroo, but they were not of the living variety, sad to say. I guess one of the best places to see kangaroo is on golf courses, but still no sightings for us.
We are visiting friends in Queensland, in the lovely area of Noosa, and our first day we went to the large market at Eumundi. I especially liked seeing the produce and fruit, and since I am a passion fruit lover, was happy to sample these passion fruit(bottom) and see dragon fruit again. I bought a bag of passion fruit since that is something we rarely see in Portland.It is lovely mixed into a fruit salad.
We went for breakfast to Bistro C the day cyclone Yasi struck the Queensland coast. It is all anyone could think about for several days. Luckily we were far south of the storm, but many many people had their houses "deroofed" or worse. After we had breakfast, and my 'cyclone" coffee, we walked the boardwalk in Noosa, one of the hippest beach towns along this coast. The waves were a bit higher than normal, but the surfers were happy.
It has been too hot and humid here to do a lot of outdoor sketching, but I was determined to paint at least one of Marg, our host's beautiful garden plants before we leave here. Our stay in Noosa has been wonderful, but too short, so we really must visit again.

4 comments:

  1. Fun to see all your exotics. Yes, that rabbit lantern looks well worth the inconvenience!

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  2. The lanterns look amazing but I must say, my favorite is the passion fruit picture. I recently found dragon fruit at a market in Seattle and snapped it up as it's one of my 'sought after' fruits.
    Happy you were some distance from Yasi.
    love,
    me

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  3. I'm happy you missed the storm. Dragon fruit and lizards it all sounds so wonderful and extoic have fun.

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  4. Ahhh, thanks for including such a colorful, vibrant, zany clown in your post in honor of me!! We do resemble each other a bit . . . .

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