Happenings over the week

I have really fully settled down in my Aussie apartment. Bought all the necessary things needed to make this place home. Settling in is really a new experience. Before this, I can never imagine the amount of things that I’ll need to buy when I get here. Things like soy sauce, salt & pepper (cooking things), toilet brush, detergents right up to containers for holding the plate washing sponge and powder detergents used to be taken for granted back home cos all these things were always available but now we really had to shop and buy all these absolutely necessary things to make our place fit to be called home. It doesn’t really help that I’m on a tight budget, therefore have to go to several places to look for the best price for all these things before deciding to buy them. As a result, the few days of settling in were really busy n tiring days of walking, more walking and carrying of all the stuff back and more carrying. I really thank my stars that our place is fully furnished with sofa, washing machine, pots and pans etc. Cannot imagine having to buy and move all these back home. But on the positive side, I really believe that my calf muscle and arm muscles will be very much tougher by the time I get back to Spore.



Went to Hunter Valley from Thur to Sat. (Hunter Valley is a place that produces lots & lots of wine) It’s quite pretty there. Very different from Sydney city. Lots of open spaces, fields and vast vineyards there. We stayed in the YHA Wine Country Lodge. Quite comfy & nice. (I highly recommend anyone who wants to go on a budget tour to stay in YHAs. I stayed in 3 YHAs in Aust before already and all of them are very nice and clean. Really value for money.) The tour I joined included a half day tour to wineries and wine tasting. Tasted quite a few wines for the 1st time in my life. Hmmm… Think I dun really fancy wines. Red wine is esp awful. Spicy & piercing to the tongue, palate and throat. Those that I like are the sweet/desert wine. Haha.. But that really defeats the purpose of drinking wine rite? I might as well drink soft drinks. But it was a worthwhile experience. At least I tasted a lot of variety of wines and I know a bit about how they were made and what kind is suited to go with the different cuisines. Had a self-made wood fire pizza for dinner one of the nite at the lodge. Yum yum...



On my last day at Hunter Valley, Jeannie and I visited the Hunter Valley Gardens. It was beautiful! 16 hectares of land with 13 different kinds of garden (eg Oriental, Indian, Italian styles) all in 1 area. My favorite was Storybook Garden where they were many statues of storybook characters with many nice flowers. The whole place is very colourful and pretty. Too bad, it’s winter now. Many flowers are not in bloom, eg the roses. However, Jeannie and I have already made up our minds. We shall visit the place again in summer to see all the flowers in bloom. Can’t wait till summer. Oh… the thing that I shall remember most about my trip to Hunter Valley is the cold weather. It was really much much colder at Hunter Valley than in Sydney. The temp dropped to 3 degrees Celsius at night. During my 3 days at Hunter Valley, my hands and feet were constantly numb with cold. Wearing gloves and socks didn’t help at all. It was so bad till I couldn’t even feel anything with my fingers. They felt like they didn’t belong to me! But other than that, I should say that I really enjoyed Hunter Valley. It was a nice break before school starts.



This morning, it was back to reality again. Back to being an aunty. Walked 50 min to Auburn to buy groceries and other stuff and lugged tones of things back. (bought an enormous cabbage that must have weighed at least 4kg!) Haizz… Tired tired…

And school starts tomorrow! Why is it that I’m already looking forward to the next holidays? Haha…