from the RSL to Sinterklaas
We first concluded our very nice week-long stay with Peter (one of Martine’s cousins) & Merie, after we had taken a swim in their pool and after Peter had taken us to the Sydney West Head area.
This is a great area with marvellous bays, lakes, harbors, lookouts, beautifull bushfire burnt bush and even a great collection of Aboriginal rock carvings. This was really one of the highlights of our Sydney visit.
Next we then moved on to stay two days with Inge (another cousin) & Steward and visiting the lifely Manly beach area, the very nice Art Gallery and (for a second time – the changed to open up the RSL’s for everyone. A very succesfull change, since going to the RSL is very popular over here.first one was with Erica the week before) the Botanic gardens during which we spotted hundreds and hundreds of (very big) bats hanging in the trees. A really great day.
In the evening we moved on to Keith/Kees (one of Martine’s uncles) & Luz place, which included having a real Ozzie style dinner the next day. This dinner was at a special kind of restaurant which you can only find here, an:
RSL (Retired Servicemen Leage).
You can find RSL’s all over Australia and these basically are pretty big places where you can eat (pretty cheap), drink (somewhat more expensive) and do (lots of) gambling (to compensate for the cheap food). For me, it was the first time to have visited one, but all Australians regularly visit RSL’s to have dinner (and do some gambling afterwards).
All of the RSL’s originate from the First World War to provide a place where soldiers back from war can meet and talk about their experiences. Since the 1970’s the ‘supply’ of soldiers became more limited, so to prevent many RSL’s from closing, the law was After having dinner in the RSL and doing some ‘gambling’ over there to win some chocolate bars, we left Sydney last Friday to go to Canberra for a completely different chocolate experience:
a ‘Dutch’ Sinterklaas party.
After some very exiting hours preparing some ‘ last ditch’ Sinterklaas poems in English, we hopped into Nick’s (he’s Martine’s brother) & Lucienne’s car, to go to Monica (another cousin) & Andrew, to do the ‘Dutch’ Sinterklaas party.
This party was preceeded by a ‘do it you own’ Japanese Sushi dinner, and then proceeded on to eating some real Sinterklaas candies, such as speculaas, pepernoten, schuimpjes, marsepijn and chocolate cigarets. These very unhealthy candies combined very nicely with the very healty Japanese rice, vegetables and fish.Martine and I even got real ‘ Kruidvat’ chocolate letters as one of our Sinterklaas presents, so this Oz Sinterklaas party was not a bad evening at all.
After the Sinterklaas party we spent the weekend with Nick & Lucienne doing some barbequeing in the park (there are free to use electric barbeques in every Australian park) and visiting some pubs.
We are now spending the last days in Canberra doing some shopping and visiting some of the great museums here (the war museum here even has a big collection of fully restored WW2 airplanes, such as a British Lancaster bomber & a Japanese Zero fighter), before we move on to Koos/Karl (one of Martine’s uncles) & Yvonne and fly out of Sydney airport the day after, to Buenos Aires.
Jannis.
Tags: Aboriginals, Aircraft, Argentina, Australia, Azia, Barbeque, Beach, Buenos Aires, Canberra, Cuisine, Europe, Family, Japan, netherlands, Sinterklaas, South-America, Sydney, Travel, Wildlife, Tag Index
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