Summer gold, summer food, summer b-day

A few weeks ago, we bought a 'barbie' for vegetarian grilling (no prawns/shrimp).

December 1st is the official beginning of the Australian summer. We were lucky enough to have a car for a few weeks in November, which let us prepare properly: buying gardening products, said barbeque, and taking some friends out to goldfields country.

Summer has us feeling lazy, so this is going to be kind of a lazy post, with limited wit.

An old gold town and gold mine

Our books tell us that Melbourne really got going when gold was discovered northwest of the city. The gold rush is long over, but there are a few remnants. One is the cute town of Maldon:

 

According to one book, the whole town of Maldon is officially listed as 'notable' by the National Trust. Hard to beat that.

Other remnants are ruins of smelting buildings, some of which we climbed around with friends Jon and Heather.

A bit uphill of the ruins was the entrance to a former goldmine that offers tours:

Our guide told us that the mine had yielded a few hundred dollars worth of gold. It cost quite a bit more to dig it. This literal goldmine was not a metaphorical goldmine.

However (we were told), the reliable cool temperatures inside the mine had saved some feverish children's lives during one especially hot summer some decades ago.

Gardening efforts (aka plants we haven't killed yet)

We have things growing in our backyard now. Some are even things we meant to grow.

Potatoes emerged in a pot we thought only had strawberries in it. We haven't harvested the potatoes yet, but they provided some nice flowers:

The strawberry plants have been less enthusiastic about life than the potatoes, but they have yielded two berries so far. Here's one:

Naomi discovered that some planters are made out of cloth, and wanted to try them out. Here's one with lettuce and capsicum (i.e. pepper) plants.

Colin's first summer birthday BBQ

We had an initial trial run with the barbeque, which was a success (no injuries, no food poisoning, only a small amount of swearing while trying to get the coals going). Inspired by that, we decided to put it at the center of a small birthday gathering for Colin.

A handful of friends came over, and patiently sat around while Colin slowly over- and under-cooked their food.

When it cooled down outside, we moved into our living room for cake.

Cake!

Sydney

We recently took our first trip to Sydney. Colin gave a talk on a Wednesday, and Naomi flew in the next morning for a long weekend. 

Overall impression: What a beautiful city! It has a somewhat different feel from Melbourne. The population is only slightly larger, but it feels much more bustling and seems to have more big buildings. 

It turned out that our friend Heather was passing through Sydney around the same time, and we were able to meet up and walk around. Here's her and Naomi with a certain bridge in the background:

That Opera Place

We resigned ourselves to doing some tourist-y things. Here's a very nice tree in the botanical gardens, with some other stuff in the background:

The Opera House grew on us as we walked around. It's pretty from a distance, and bizarre from up close. The entire white surface involves little tiles like these:

And there's something of a spaceship feel to it:

Around the Opera 

Just east of the opera are the Botanical Gardens. The picture at the top of the post shows one view. Here's another:

Notice the weird white birds in the lower right. We'd only seen them outside the city in Melbourne, but they're everywhere in Sydney.

The park features a carved stone seat that was made for one of the first governor's wife, Mrs. Macquarie. It has since been named "Mrs. Macquarie's Chair."  It has a nice view of the harbor, and people now take turns checking it out. We used it as a destination in our walk around the gardens. Here's Naomi:

To the west of the Opera is the Contemporary Art Museum. Very cool. Here were our favorite pictures, both of which are representative of the city. You may have to click on this to see the top one properly:

Further west is a neighborhood called 'The Rocks,' which is the area where the city began when the convicts first arrived. It still contains some of the early buildings, but has also been made fairly touristy. Here's a cool street view with a mural that shows what it used to look like:

South of the Opera are a number of pretty sandstone buildings. This is the Sydney Hospital (which seems to still be in use). It seemed remarkably well kept and quiet for a major city hospital:

Spit to Manley Walk

Several people had suggested a certain walk to us, starting from a place known as The Spit, and walking along the shore to the suburb of Manly (most famous for its beach). It was a gorgeous walk, hugging the north side of the harbor and going through a surprising amount of national parkland for being in a city. This was a particularly nice view, where you can see sailboats, as well as the commuter ferry on the left (more on that later):

All along the path (both near the water and higher up) we saw at least five Water Dragons, catching some sun. Here's one:

Here's the view from the same spot ("Reef Beach"), looking towards Manly:

Manly itself was fairly tourist-heavy, but still cute. Google will show you pictures of the famous beach (which looks like, well, a beach). One thing we liked, though, was a sea-fed swimming pool. It was slightly elevated, but waves would crash in. It also featured a bit of art:

The recommendation of the walk came with a recommendation of taking the ferry back from Manly to the city. We were not the only people who had been given this advice, it turns out. Here are some of our fellow tourists, firing away:

Reasonably so. Here's a view with the CBD, Opera House and Bridge:

University of Sydney

For our final day, we ignored the harbour and walked around the University of Sydney and surrounding neighborhoods. The main Quad building is quite a bit bigger than Melbourne's Old Quad, and featured a purple tree:

Here's Colin in front of the building. We didn't have any good way to store our bags that day, so Colin was trying to look nonchalant:

Vegetarian Butcher

On Colin's first night in Sydney, he noticed this sign, and made a mental note to come back when they were open.

That gave us a destination for our final day. The place made their own veggie burgers and sausages. 

We're back in Melbourne now, enjoying the spring weather and the slightly slower pace. Much love to everyone up north!

Scenes of Melbourne spring to take your mind off other things

Sometimes nothing feels appropriate to talk about. Any of our boring life concerns here pale in comparison to the chaos and destruction back in US (thankfully, our friends and family seem to be alright). Even while we worry about New York, though, we know that it would be horribly wrong to ignore the destruction Sandy wrought in other countries. And, of course, it would be a mistake to only think about Sandy and ignore the larger, increasingly terrifying issue of global warming.

And then there's the US election. Ugh.

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So, instead of trying to talk about any of the big-picture important stuff, here are a few silly photos of things that have happened around here. Hopefully, this can provide a brief, meaningless break from worrying about real issues.

1. Jon Simon

Our friend Jon came back to Melbourne to give a talk at the Melbourne philosophy department. The talk was mind-expanding: it was probably the first philosophy talk ever to discuss mind-body dualism, Sacred Fire, Hegel, and David Chalmers at the same time.

We went out to dinner afterward in Carlton. Colin's colleague Laura, who has quite different philosophical leanings than Jon, was there. Here's her and Jon, in a state of less than perfect agreement:

2. Taxes and sunshine

Australians celebrate Halloween by making 31 Oct. the due date for taxes. Naomi took on the challenge. She made the best of an unpleasant task:

Next to her are boxes of herbs.

By the way: filing Australian taxes is really not bad, as far as these things go. The government provides some free software, and we had responses about our returns within a couple weeks of filing.

3. New TimTam flavours

No real explanation needed here. The 'Double Choc-Mud' taste like frosting.

And those are Colin's slippers on bottom.

4. A birthday present for Justin

Our friend Justin is a bit evasive about things like his birthday, but we found out and got him a present. Colin wrapped it with pink ribbon. Then Jenn and Justin made us dinner. (Sorry for the bad picture, Jenn.)

Not long after the US election, we'll go to Sydney (finally!). Expect pictures of water...

Autumn in the North, Spring in the South

We just got back from a trip to the US... where 'just' means 'about a month ago.' We'll get back to proper posting soon - we promise.

Autumn in the North

Our main reason for going back was Naomi's brother's wedding. The trip also gave us a chance to catch up (not enough!) with a few friends and family in New York. It was a great week... so great that we kept forgetting to take pictures. But here are a few:

Our first night, we managed to keep ourselves awake long enough to go out for dinner. The jet-lag delirium actually made for a good time. Here's Naomi with her friend Rachel:

We stayed with our friends Jeff and Maryse. Jeff was Colin's office mate for 5 years when he was at NYU. J&M are lovely hosts, and we wish we could have just moved in.

Among Jeff's many virtues is how he sings to himself while eating a bowl of guacamole:

Or maybe he was just making guacamole. We can't remember.

But the singing was infectious. We all got into singing/dancing:

After family and friends, our third priority was food. We ate (real!) bagels, pizza, donuts, and pickles. These were all eaten too quickly to get captured on film.

We also made it to a real American diner, where we ate ketchup (not called 'tomato sauce'!), a shiny piece of pie made mostly from corn, and curly fries with American cheese on top.

The fries were a once-in-a-lifetime experience, because we'll never, ever do it again.

The wedding itself was wonderful. Impossible to capture properly, but here are two scenes that capture parts of the mood:

Colin had to come straight back to Australia to teach, but Naomi was able to make a stop in California and visit some friends. And to bike across a certain bridge:

Spring in the South

Life back here has been good. We found ourselves easily slipping back into our routine. But we've been enjoying spring's arrival. After arriving, spring retreated for a few days, then came, retreated, came back, and has now retreated again. This is the nature of Melbourne weather: it's never quite one season or another.

But the good days have been glorious. Here's a flower in our backyard:

Also:

We voted! Here's hoping...

Love to everyone up north!

The Marshalls take Melbourne, Part 2

The adventures continues...

Our last post about Colin's mom's and brother's visit focused on things we did outside of Melbourne proper. Braving winter, most of our time in the city was spent inside, focusing on the most distinctively Melbourne things we could.

Warm drinks

Once again, Melbourne has been rated as the world's most livable city by some people who think one can be objective about such things. They claim that the rating is based on transportation, crime rate, etc.

But the real reason is Melbourne's finely-crafted elitism about coffee. There is lots of excellent coffee, and coffee pride, but people are pretty low-key about it. Melbournians know their coffee's great, so they don't need to rub it in.

So we made sure to take M&P out to one of the fancier coffee places, called Seven Seeds. Here they are, armed with their coffees:

On the other side of the table was Naomi, along with her cousin Paul and his girlfriend Erica. P&E came to Melbourne for the weekend, as part of a larger Australian trip.

Notice the cartridge container holding the menus.

Jumping ahead a bit, here's what one drinks when it's too late in the day for coffee:

Victoria Parliament Building

As it happened, M&P&P&E's overlapping weekend also overlapped with Open House Melbourne, when a number of buildings were open to the public. We stopped at a few, the most exciting of which was the state parliament building. We waited in line for about an hour, entertained by queuing Aussies (two of whom explained cricket and footie to M&P), and a wandering state official, in the suit below:

The wait was worth it, though. We got to sit in both chambers of the parliament, both of which were very nice. Here's Peter in one:

And here's our guide (and his friendly co-guide, who kept us moving from room to room) in the other chamber:

Red and green - nice color-coding.

We all took pictures:

Footy!

Since before our arrival in 2011, people told us that we had to go to an Australian Rules Football match. We would tell people that neither of us were especially into sports, but nobody seemed to think that was relevant. M&P's visit was the perfect excuse to go.

We braved the (slightly) rainy and (a bit more than slightly) cool night, walking to the Melbourne Cricket Grounds along the river:

Equipped with ponchos, we lucked into being just out of the rain. Here are two happy Marshalls:

Colin's most common reaction throughout the game was, "wait, that's legal?" Apparently, most things are legal (according to one source: if the ref. isn't looking, everything is legal). 

It was a lot of fun. We saw the Carlton Blues defeat the Richmond Tigers. Colin was a bit disappointed, since he has some default inclination towards any cat-themed team. Getting home, mom found the Blues' song on Youtube. 

If you're wondering what the game looks like, here's a video of the two teams. It's from this year, though not the match we saw. But Carlton wins.

Desserts

Melbourne is not especially known for its desserts, but it does them pretty well (as we've documented ad nauseum in earlier posts). M&P tried several places on their own, and got to experience a Lamington.

We took them to our favorite cake shop on Acland St, Monarch. Monarch features lots of 1980's style magazines, and a viciously good Kugelhopf:

Our final night was again dessert themed. We were all sad that the visit was ending. So we ate desserts from Chocolateria San Churro (a chain dessert place that we've found pretty reliable), and watched some Olympics.

Hard saying goodbye... why couldn't the Pacific be 1/2 the size? 

Still, there's a lot to be said for getting perspective about how lucky one is. We're lucky to have such fantastic families, and to be living in a fantastic city. Not getting to have both all the time makes us appreciate them all the more...