Trees without their leaves at Albury’s Noreuil and Oddies Creek Parks.
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From the category archives:
Australia
Savoury scones from the famous Beechworth Bakery’s Albury store ($2.90… very delicious!). We also had a piece of bright red Jelly slice, straight from childhood birthday parties. It was like the bakery had directly imported it from the 80’s.
I didn’t end up getting the time to go down to the pretty colonial-era goldrush town of Beechworth, about an hour outside of Albury, to have scones or pies at the bakery proper during this stay (or get lollies from the great olde-style sweet store right next to the bakery), but thankfully their Albury store is just as yummy.
What better place to enjoy some scones than down by the Murray River in Albury, the scene for so many of those sugar fueled childhood birthday parties? The Oddies Creek Off-Leash Park is one of Pogo (our fluffy silly dog)’s favourite places in town.
But like most of our family though, when there is food around, Pogo isn’t interested in exercise.
He has very poor table manners. At home, he knows he’s not allowed on the table, but he didn’t feel those rules applied at the park.
This jumping style is how he got his name of Pogo. (The park is partially sealed off in the background because they are building a new playground area)
Once the scones were gone, he finally decided it was time to have a run. He’s a scaredy dog though and will only play with puppies his own size. If there’s a big dog, he won’t stray far from his sisters.
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When I was 16 years old, I went on my first overseas trip. I went to Vietnam on a history study tour with my public high school, Albury High, for 14 days.
My family didn’t have a proper camera then because nobody was into photography. It wouldn’t be for another two or so years until I would have a proper digital camera, so my photos were taken on two cheap disposable cameras with plastic lenses. Each camera had 24 exposures on it, and one had black and white film and the other colour. I had barely taken any photos in my life before this trip. Now it’s unthinkable to me that I travelled for 14 days and only took 48 photos!! I would sometimes take up to 150 photos a day in Indonesia! These basic sorta-blurry photos almost make it look like I was over there 30 years ago instead of only 8.5 years ago!
The Vietnam trip was pretty remarkable for me. My family had never gone on any international travel. My dad had gallivanted around a little when he was in his teens on the scant money he earned from his odd jobs, but since then, nothing. In our small-ish “regional city”, back then we had two Chinese restaurants and newly opened Thai and Indian restaurants were pretty revolutionary. I’d never in my life tried Vietnamese cuisine and the population makeup of our town was far from being racially diverse. I’d also only been in a busy big city a couple of times in my life (but Australian “big” cities are obviously a far cry from Asia’s large cities, population wise).
At that stage of my youth, I thought I wanted to go to university in Albury and become a speech pathologist. I hadn’t really thought seriously about moving away to one of the more prestigious universities in the cities, though it was starting to tick away in the back of my mind.
I was honestly shit scared about going to Vietnam, even with my cool teachers and school friends, and at one point I almost thought about dropping out of the trip.
Sometimes, when I was on the road in Indonesia and even in Eastern Europe, I think about how lucky it was that I went…
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Our family owns a little red Hyundai.
For a while it was mine. I had it up in Sydney, zipping around to interviews and to take photographs, with my straightened newsreader cut hair in a snappy little outfit.
After a couple of years in an office job where I never had to leave the office, my snappy dressing toned down dramatically… but the car is the one that really let itself go while I was in the tropics. It was not entirely Mr Hyundai’s fault though I have to say.
When I went to Indonesia, the red Hyundai became my brother’s vehicle of choice. In fact, “when I moved to Indonesia” was the last time the car had been cleaned until I came back from Indonesia. It was filled with crap, and still jetlagged, I took it and cleaned it out so I could drive it up to Sydney. Hard yakka.
Five weeks later, my bro has filled it with so much rubbish and crap again that I would be ashamed to take any non-relative passengers in it again.
But tonight, when I was driving up to work, a new level of disgusting was reached.
A chip packet STARTED MOVING. Something was thrashing around inside it. THERE WAS A MOUSE IN THE DAMN CAR!!!
I squealed so much, thank god I was only a block or so from work. It was also fortunate I was at traffic lights when it started moving around, otherwise I may have crashed the car out of shock.
Regular readers may remember how much I hate being in enclosed spaces with rodents. I was not impressed.
I have no idea how it got in there. But at least my bro is cleaning the car now.
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I always take lots of photos of my little sister when I’m home, and there’s a good reason. Not only is she a gorgeously beautiful ballerina type, she’s also the type of person who responds enthusiastically to suggestions like “why don’t we go and get that carnivale mask I bought you back from Venice and go to the park in the Albury CBD in the cold at night to take weird artsy pictures while bored bogans drive past and honk their car horns at you?” You’ve got to love that kind of attitude.
We had a pretty epic photo sesh tonight (I can’t find my damn tripod, making night photography tricky!), taking heaps and heaps of kooky snaps. There’s some more…
… if you clickity-click-click this linkety-link-link.
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My nanna has dementia. It’s getting worse. Some days she is OK, some days she is terrible, driving my poor uncle, who is selflessly caring for her full time, understandably crazy.
It’s a sad disease, especially when it impacts younger people. But it can also be oddly hysterically funny. It feels wrong to laugh at, but until there is some sort of cure, those caring for someone with the disease deserve to be able to see the lighter side of it, I feel, if only to keep their own sanity. Answering the same questions over again every five minutes is frustrating even for just a few hours, let alone every day.
My grandmother’s sister suffered from Alzheimer’s, and I remember as a child thinking it quite hilarious when she would take dirty dishes, “dry” them with a tea towel and then put them away in the cupboard as if they had been washed, forgetting the crucial step of actually washing them. That being said, I wasn’t the one that had to go through the cupboards to find the dirty plates, often with chunks of food still on them, and clean up the mess. I also wasn’t tasked with having to try and tactfully dissuade her from helping out with the dishes anymore.
But my grandmother takes the hilarity to a whole new level. Nanna’s latest annoyance is the failure of my mother to return her bicycle, which my mother borrowed when she grew out of her child bike and needed a new ride up to the high school when she was aged 12, circa 1972. The bike got many years of use. When we were young kids, mum and dad took us out on rides on the bike, which by then had a child seat fastened on the back. But it is now 2010, some 38 years after the original loan, and Nanna wants the bike back. So she can go riding. Even though she is very elderly and has troubles hobbling around the house.
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Photo taken somewhere on the Hume Highway between Melbourne and Albury… still south of Glenrowan, maybe just past Stanley?
Yes that’s me, in one of Melbourne’s funky graffiti and milk crate packed laneways. I specifically requested my friend take me to one so I could take graffiti photos. 
I’m clearly having travel/mad photographing withdrawals being back here in Oz, so I managed to take some 90 photos during my 24 hour stay in Melbourne. Crazy lady with a camera. It’s a great city and I enjoyed catching up with some of my friends down there and just hanging out. Note to Sydney… umm why don’t you have awesome laneways and wicked good bicycle paths like Melbourne? Hmm?
Here’s a handful of pics taken during my brief Melbourne wanders.
Click this link for more Melbourne photos…
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I made a whirlwind trip to Melbourne earlier this week to go to the US Consulate to get my visa to study in Washington D.C. I’m APPROVED! Yay!
But that wasn’t the only yay. The food in Melbourne is fantastic and I was lucky enough to have a delish breakfast with my lovely friend Tilda at the wonderful new cafe in Abbotsford called Three Bags Full. With very chic yet relaxed decor, including repurposed traffic signs as seats and tables, the cafe apparently attracts queues on the weekends. Melbournians are so crazy about their cafes they are willing to queue for breakfast if the spot is top notch.
We didn’t have to queue. Three Bags Full has a well-edited breakfast menu, each dish focusing on a handful of clear flavours well executed.
I had these delicious grilled mushrooms on thick wholegrain toast, sprinkled with dukkah and served with chunks of gooey goats cheese. Just delish. I am crazy about tomato relish, and when I saw that the relish at this caf is homemade, I ordered some on the side, which was also fantastic. My brekkie buddy had the homemade baked beans on toast with rocket and said it was “nomtastic”.
So is it queue-worthy? I’d say yes. There’s some shots of the interior over here, I was too busy chatting to take any.
Three Bags Full. 56 Nicholson St, Abbotsford, Melbourne. Ph: (03) 9421 2732
We also had some fabulous food at:
Peko-Peko Japanese and Kent St Bar, both on Smith St in Collingwood. Fantastic Japanese! I can highly recommend the sweet potato dumplings and the Curry Don! Mmm. Kent St has some great cider and mulled wine, the hipster Melbournians winter drink of choice. Mmm. Full bar review over here.
RiceBar. 121 Grattan St, Carlton. A cheap student restaurant selling a range of rice-based Asian dishes, I came here to get a hit of something Indonesian or Malaysian before driving back to Albury. No Indonesian on the menu, but some Malaysian dishes, including a nasi lemak, which was decent (but I’m a harsh critic… I’ve been very spoiled with food in the last few years). Cheap by Melbourne standards ($10 for a nasi lemak, which after being in SE Asia for so long is shockingly expensive lol). Here’s a pic of my nasi lemak.
It looks tasty, right? It’s a shame that here in Australia, banana leaves are expensive, so shops have to resort to banana leaf patterned plates…. none of that lovely aroma from the leaf.
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