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
