I am now in not so sunny Adelaide - it was 16 degrees today so it was lucky that I had left some warm clothes here - you can imagine how delighted I was when my daughter-in-law Prue handed over my sweatshirt this morning. I know it's not so cold compared with the UK but I've gone soft in the past two months.
Connie, Phil and I flew down to Sydney for the weekend, staying with their daughter (my niece) Rachelle in her flat (or as the Aussies say - unit). It is in Maroubra which is the last beach town going south before you get to Botany Bay. Phil and I went for an early morning walk and ... the waves were up, so the sea was full of surfers.
Just beyond the main beach area is quite rocky so a swimming pool has been made on the edge of the sea. I've stayed in this pleasant township before and the big story last time was about a man who had gone to this pool for a very early morning swim and found, as the sun came up, that a shark had been swept into it on the tide and was swimming around alongside him. Perfectly likely as you can see from this photo.
We had a great time - went to a very up-market (and expensive) craft fair near Sydney centre, met up with some old friends and had a very pleasant Christmas lunch cum birthday party with C&P family of four children with partners and a selection of grand kids. What do you eat in Oz for such a celebration? BBQ turkey sausages + veggies followed by fruit salad, Christmas pud and birthday cake. Most excellent.
Yesterday, I flew into Adelaide from Sydney (2 hours) landing ten minutes before Adam's plane. He was returning from a meeting in Canberra so I was able to meet HIM at the airport in a reversal of what usually happens. They are now living about 30 min outside the city in a very pleasant area in the Adelaide Hills on a plot amongst the trees. A koala was making an unattractive noise up in the eucalyptus at the back of the granny flat last night but there was no sign of him this morning when I went to remonstrate.
I have been in school today - Stirling East Primary School where both my grandchildren go is about five minutes from the family home. In the morning we went to Ollie's End of Term concert which was very good fun - each of the classes did songs from 50s (like How Much is that Doggie in the Window?) through the decades (Staying Alive) until the 2010s. They were all dressed up in costume and the concert was stage managed by the older children.
In the afternoon Prue and I went into Antonia's class to help with the art lesson. There were three parents there so the teacher briefed the class on what they could do and then sent them into our area to work on their designs for Christmas crafts. I was shown how to stamp and emboss cards, which was something I'd not done before, so I could then help the children. All went well apart from a bit of over-enthusiastic use of the heat gun and some very sparkley jumpers where the embossing powder had landed rather than the paper. And that was just me!
It was a total contrast to my Cambodian school crafts where the most exciting thing I could do was cut out shapes out of printer paper for the children to crayon.
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