Adelaide Botanic Gardens – Where to, Gumshoe?

May 16, 2016

We woke up this morning to the smell of pancakes and pouring rain. Jess and Robin were both up early because Jess worked this morning and Robin was being a good husband and making breakfast. It’s also their first wedding anniversary today! When Tim and I went downstairs Robin told us the pancakes didn’t turn out well because the batter from yesterday had separated and it was inedible. Instead, Robin prepared a granola and fruit bowl for our breakfast. We had bought passion fruit yogurt yesterday so I added it in to make a fruit and granola parfait.

Jessica and Robin got us a 3GB SIM card for data from Telstra (one of Australia’s major cell phone providers). We got the SIM card activated at around 5pm the day before, but Tim and I had used all the data by 10am (whoops). I guess when we have 5 devices on WiFi, it’s easy to blow through that data. We added more money on to the SIM but we added it on to the wrong SIM card by mistake and had to call Telstra to get it sorted out. We waited the whole day for the credit to be added but no luck. So when Jess got home, she called Telstra again to help get things fixed. So many calls to Telstra!

Since it was raining this morning we decided to hold on off on going to Cleland Wildlife Park and just hang out downtown. Robin wasn’t working until 4pm today so we spent the afternoon with him. We went downtown for lunch at a vegetarian Taiwanese restaurant that Jess and Robin go to once in a while. The restaurant was called THEA and it was quite busy with what looked like office workers from nearby buildings. We ordered some dishes to share and a bubble tea – our first bubble tea since leaving Taipei. This bubble tea was not $1.40 CAD… it ended up being $5.70 AUD. The food was okay. Tim’s cold noodles were the best dish by far. The pearl milk tea was also surprisingly good – good textured pearls and solid tea. I wasn’t a huge fan of my dish or the special snack dishes for the day.

After lunch, Robin took us through other parts of the Botanic Gardens and to the Torrens River for a nice walk. The weather had totally changed from the gloomy rainy morning to beautiful blue skies and sun. Australian weather changes really quickly apparently. It was really nice to go for a long walk around some pretty peaceful areas of the city. Our end point of our walk before we turned around back to the city was to go to a suspension bridge that crossed the Torrens River. The bridge is scheduled to be updated, which made me a bit nervous while crossing since it is really old and it looked that way too.

We headed back into the city and Robin headed off to the hospital for his shift. Tim and I walked along North Terrace Road and went to the Adelaide Museum of Art for a quick look. All the museums are free in Adelaide, which is great. I like some museums, but I’m not a big fan of art museums so it’s good this was free or else I probably wouldn’t pay to go in. We did a quick walk through the museum and they had quite the mix of old English looking art to modern art that I don’t understand. They had a huge taxidermy horse hanging from the ceiling, which was really strange and a bit disturbing. We didn’t spend much time in the museum, just a quick walkthrough to get the gist of what it was like.

After walking down North Terrace Road, we headed back to Rundle Mall for the free and fast WiFi. We basically sat on the many benches and surfed the net, downloaded shows, and posted yesterday’s blog post for about 1.5 hours. Adelaide is great for having accessible free and fast WiFi throughout the downtown core. It’s too bad it doesn’t extend out to where Jess and Robin are in Woodville Park (5km outside downtown).

We finished with the WiFi and headed back to the townhouse to meet Jess for dinner after she was done her shift. We planned on going to a Vietnamese restaurant close to their place called, NNQ (Nghi Ngan Quan). The restaurant was in an old and charming building and looked like a very modern and somewhat trendy Vietnamese restaurant. Woodville and Australia in general has a very large Vietnamese community so you see a lot of Vietnamese restaurants around. The restaurant was full inside when we got there, so we got seated outside (with heat lamps that were really hot). The food was really good! I can’t wait to go to Vietnam where our meals will be a fraction of the price they are here. I enjoyed our dinner a lot more than our vegetarian Taiwanese lunch.

We came back home just in time for the last half of Masterchef Australia (the show started here). It’s on every day at 7:30pm except for Fridays and Saturdays (no wonder it’s such a popular show here), we’ve only watched a couple of episodes and we know some participants pretty well. Our favourite is Con, a guy from Melbourne who looks like a sad Joey Fatone from NSYNC.

Jess boiled some hot water and made some tea and we played a card game called SushiGo. She got the card game from a friend in Vancouver and we had actually gotten the same game from Hon before we left. But since the packaging is a bit more cumbersome we left it at home. The three of us played a couple of games – Jess won two out of the three games. Tim gets sad when he’s playing badly, it’s quite funny.

Steps today: 20,000

May 15, 2016

When we woke up this morning, Robin was downstairs making the batter for pancakes. This was really nice of him, but unfortunately we didn’t have time to eat the pancakes because we had to return our rental car to Hertz downtown at 9:30am. We did get to eat some of his cooked apple and banana compote which was a yummy breakfast in itself.

We dropped the car off and Jess picked us up from Hertz. She found parking downtown and we walked around the city. Since it was relatively early on a Sunday morning the streets were pretty dead. Adelaide has a much more small town feel than Melbourne. The sun was shining and the weather was very pleasant (low 20s C). We walked through the Adelaide Botanic Gardens (each city in Australia seems to have their own botanic garden) and walked down Rundle Mall, which is one of the main shopping and restaurant areas downtown.

For lunch Jess took us to a place called “Two Bit Villains”, it’s a vegetarian burger (Jess is vegetarian) restaurant that also specializes in cool flavoured sodas. We ordered our burgers and shared (soy) chili cheese fries. Everything was very tasty. It was very well seasoned so you didn’t realize you weren’t eating meat.

After lunch we drove to Henley Beach, west of downtown. When we pulled up to the boardwalk, it reminded me of Southern California. We walked along the boardwalk and out to the jetty, watching people fish and took in the fresh sea air. It was such a lovely fall day. The sun was beating down but there was still a cool ocean breeze which was perfect.

We walked to the Henley Library to take some travel books out for New Zealand and for the rest of our Australian trips. We’re going to New Zealand with Jess and Robin at the end of May so we’ll have to read up on what we want to do in Auckland and Wellington.

After the library, we walked back to the beach and walked down to the sand, took off our shoes, and walked back to the car. When I stepped on the sand, it felt super soft and almost powder like. I would compare it to the consistency of powdered icing sugar. Each time I stepped down I would hear sort of a crunching sound. Since the sand was a bit damp, and the consistency was like a powder, it was very hard and compact in some areas.

We came back into the city and stopped back home to clean our feet up and headed out to the grocery store. Grocery stores close at 5pm here (so early!). We went to Coles and picked up some fruit, vegetables, and breakfast for the next few days here, and Jess bought ingredients for vegetable lasagna for tonight’s dinner.

While we trip planned for the remaining days in Australia, Jess was making dinner for everyone. She made a really tasty vegetable lasagna and roasted vegetables for dinner. It may have been our healthiest dinner on this whole trip. After dinner we played a card game we brought from home (Thanks, Hon!) called, Hanabi. By the time we finished our first game it was already 11pm and Jess had to work early tomorrow so we called it a night.

We picked up a lot of brochures from the tourist information centre downtown, so we’ll probably be browsing them to see what else we want to do while we’re here. The number one thing on my list is to go to the Cleland Wildlife Park and see koalas and kangaroos. So far the only kangaroos I’ve see in Australia were ones that were hit by cars on our way to Adelaide.

Steps today: 16,000

Tag: Adelaide Botanic Gardens

Adelaide (Day 77): An Autumn Downtown Day

Adelaide (Day 76): Sunny South Australia