Then Henri and Eneken texted us to let us know they had finished work early for the day and they were free to meet up with me. As I had planned to go to the beach anyway, I met with them and we spent the afternoon on the beach together. Having learned from my mistake on Monday, I chose a place in the shade to set our things down. So, instead of sunbathing and swimming we were shade-bathing and swimming.
Henri and Eneken came round to watch a film and eat some snacks (read: drink good, Australian wine) later on in the evening while Priit had to go back to work on some kind of an emergency test thingie.
On Thursday, Henri and Eneken had a day off from work, so we went to the beach early on. This was my first time on the bus. Although the beach is a walking-distance away, as Henri had his surf board, it was too heavy to carry the whole way. Public transport is extremely expensive here. One way tickets are $3.40 and return tickets (which are day tickets in effect) are $6.80. That is the reason Henri and Eneken bought bikes and cycle to work. Although, they said that around Christmas, the bus had been free of charge for two weeks and they had used it quite a bit then.
After the beach we had some time to shower and then we put our plan for the afternoon into action. Henri and Eneken made some potato salad, I had already made a cheesecake in the morning and we packed our picnic stuff in the car. We went to the local supermarket and bought some kangaroo meat and some vegetables and went to the park to try out one of those public grills.
Henri is checking out how it works, but it was no rocket science. There was just one button to press to activate the electric hot-plate.
We unpacked our food at one of the tables. At 5 pm they were all available. It was later that people from the houses across the road came with full wine glasses in one hand and picnic baskets in other. We speculated whether they actually had stoves at home, or whether they were saving costs by coming to the park every day.
Kangaroo meat was around the same price as most other meats. So we figured, people must eat it quite a bit here.
This is what the meat looked like. It was a bit darker than beef. Other than that, no weird smells or anything else strange.
It took three of us to start cooking. Eneken with a olive oil spray, Henri with the meat, and me with the camera.
Priit was feeding the local ibis population bits of his potato salad. We nicknamed them the "Three Musketeers".
The Grill Master takes his job seriously. It was difficult as the pieces of meat were too thick, so we had to cut them in half.
Our kangaroo meat. :)
I tried some local lager as well. It was rather enjoyable. Priit said that he had actually seen one of these blue-tongued lizards somewhere before.
Another photo of our picnic table.
This tree next to Henri and Eneken's house is full of green parrots. They were making a lot of noise.
The first flat on the left is where Henri and Eneken live. Priit's place is just around the corner.
When we got home, it was only 7pm and we thought that there was time to do something else that evening. Priit knew of a car movie theatre that he had wanted to try for ages. It was an hour and a half's drive away, but in Australian terms this is almost next door. We checked that we could catch the evening showing of "Sherlock Holmes". It was a unique experience. I really enjoyed it.
On our way there we had been late enough to miss the traffic jams, but on our way back, we hit the road works, which are conducted mainly at night here. It is interesting, that they limit the speed of passing traffic to 40 kph, but only where there are people actually working on the road. They also have a police car with flashing lights there and a person with a sign telling people to slow down. This has reduced accidents involving road workers.
Today, I went to the beach in the morning, had lunch (sushi again at my insistence) with Priit, and spent some time shopping. Then I took some photos in our neighbourhood.
This is the local Catholic church. The parking lot is empty at the moment, but on Sunday mornings it is packed. Catholicism has had a lot of good press here lately as the latest Australian Idol (in Estonia we would call him Superstaar) was a young Catholic man called Guy Sebastian. Check out Guy Sebastian with Jordin Sparks on youtube: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n75lnqmcQrM
There is a shortcut through the woods where I have seen some weird turkey-like birds. I am still not sure what they are. They look really slow and big on the ground:
... but then you see them up in the trees... go figure...
OK, I better finish as we are spending the night driving up to Great Barrier Reef. I will try to take lots of photos there. The only problem I have is, that I don't have a waterproof camera.
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