The Aluminium

Aluminium in deodorants increases the risk of breast cancer. As a fine set of boobs is not a requirement I advise blokes to also pay some attention. You can google for this topic and find out yourself. Anyways, in Europe they're still trying to keep the public unaware of this for obvious financial benefits which (like in a lot of cases in Europe) is found more important than your health.

Not in Australia, where deodorants make it clear that they do not contain any Aluminium.

And for the Americans reading this. While we are on the subject of Aluminium I'd like to take this opportunity to educate ALL Americans about a serious mistake in their society. The metal often addressed as "Aluminum" is actually called AlumiNIUM. That's right, it ends on -NIUM. "Aluminum" is WRONG and makes everybody using that word sound INCREDIBLY DUMB or UNEDUCATED!!! So, if you're American - and I know many fine American people, don't get me wrong - and you still say, write or even think "AlumiNUM", consider yourself rather stupid in the eyes of educated people that actually know how to spell the name if this soft metal correctly. Amen!

So yeah, it's almost christmas. The only way for me to notice unfortunately is coz the shops are starting to decorate for it.

Christmas trees and other christmas stuff is on display everywhere. It's a bit confusing coming from Europe, walking in 37C outside in shorts and then having to think of christmas. Even weirder is it to see people who were born here and have never seen snow in their entire lives putting up snowy christmas decorations. Why can't they make a santa wearing summerstuff here?

They also have something here called "Witlof". What would that be?

Here's Mason, Karin and Gav's dog. He's in his beanbag being a very good boy.

The above picture shows Gavin in his natural habitat. It must be his natural habitat I figured because he works the Weber like a true master. I swear, the roast he did for christmas 3 years ago was the best!

The Central Market and the beach

Today we hit the road around noon I believe to go to the Central Market. This is a market with permanent little stalls that sell everything you need. More pictures will follow in a bit.

The elections are coming up in Australia. I hope that John Howard will be kicked right out of parlement because that man is just as evil as George Bush. Kate Ellis is obviously running for some function, I haven't made a study of the political structure here yet. I do know that they at least have a system where there are several parties who can be voted on instead of the 2-3 party systems in the USA or the UK.

Anyway, I made this photo out of the car again coz I keep seeing her face 300 times a day. Must say, she does look kinda cute ;-)
I now wonder if that lightpole has a funny shape because:
A) It was so damn hot today, or
B) It's because Kate Ellis is damn hot, or
C) Because my phone is not exactly hot.
D) Your eyes are frozen (only applicable to people in the northern hemisphere)

What do you think is the correct answer?

Driving into the city. Overhere "city" means the centre of Adelaide.

When we arrived at the Central Market we first needed a drink. You have to drink a lot with these temperatures you know. As I am writing this, Nicole's father is in bed with a sunstroke, 38C fever. Staying hydrated is serious business in this country these days.

There was a delicatessen stall with German, Croatian and Dutch things for sale. I bought "Chocolade vlokken" (Choco flakes, you put this on a slice of bread). They also sell liqorice (drop), breakfast cake (ontbijtkoek), Droste chocolates, speculaascookies and lots of other goodies.

A random vegetable shop at the Central Market. It has more contents of way better quality than any dutch supermarket will give you!

More vegetables, hmmmmmmmmm.

The other side of the German/Croatian/Dutch delicatessen stall.

Gavin dropped by straight after he finished work. He starts early (I think ;-) and finishes about 15:00. Here he's posing in his working uniform.

In Australia you can (with restrictions of course) have your own custom license plate as long as it's decent and not taken. I have seen some cool ones and I'll try to take a picture if I remember. This one says "MYPOP50". POP is grandpa or father.

Mason the dog, Karin, Nicole and Gavin walking towards the beach after we ate fish and chips (pretty good one too! No grates!).

They went up the jetty but I just had to go into the water with my feet. I walked with my new Crocs shoes into the sea and I loved it.

There was an old-style sailingship lying about 1 kilometre away of the jetty.

Karin, Gaving+Mason and Nicole standing on the jetty.

The view from the beach onto the dunes. We call them dunes but compared to the Dutch dunes they're nothing...

Quite a few people fish from the end of the jetty, some even for their daily meal. Adelaide has a fair number of jetty's so that's a lot of people catching fish and crabs. To not clean out the whole sea in one season there are restrictions on the ammount that can be caught.

We watched the sunset and it got dark soon while we were leaving.

We went to get some money out at the mall close by. The sign for the main shops is kinda big.

The new iMac

We did quite a lot today but unfortunately I forgot or wasn't able to make any pictures of those events myself. I pulled the phoneline into the flat together with Tony, Nic's dad, very happy to get that done. And in the evening we had a very nice and relaxed evening at the Daniel O'Connel Irish pub down town with Gianna, her mom Anna and Stephen, Caroline and Lachlan (pronounced "Lochlan" ;-)

Check out Nicole's blog here for pictures of the mentioned events!

Today I picked up my new computer. It's a brandnew iMac. The photo isn't showing because of my shit camera but it's a beautifull machine! For the geeks: 24" / 2.8GHz Dual Core Extreme / 2GB / 500GB. However, when we fired it up at home it wouldn't start. Aparently the 1GB extra RAM that was put in was faulty, after we took it out it worked fine. The shop will replace my faulty RAM tomorrow. It was a bit scary though...

OS X, the operating system that apple machines use is kinda new to me. I'm getting familiar with it rather quick though. It has some really cool features like the backup tool "Time machine" and also "Spaces" which enables a max. of 25 or even 36 different desktops. A feature that Linux/Unix has had for ages but I don't know if MS Windows now has this in Vista.

I'll probably write more about my iMac during the next days. I still have to get Parallels. This is virtualization software so I can run several versions of MS Windows on the iMac.

When we went to our car I noticed a little flying friend had used it as a landingspot.

The weird photo's

I slept very bad last night, Actually I think I haven't really slept. Could this be delayed jetlag? Who knows. Anyway, I was up early and these two love birds were already wide awake walking around the house. They actually are true lovebirds because they're trying to make a nest. Trying, because they were cramming all their little branches into a too small space and while getting in our car we saw half the nest fall down. I guess that's how the term "bird brain" developped.

As some know and some don't, I'm a bit of a modelrailroader. I have plans to make a 160x80cm coffeetable with quite a big modelrailroad track inside. Shown here is the basic line. It looks messy but there will be 4 floors actually, very complicated ;-) I'm sure overtime I'll post updates.

I bought 2 Australian electricity plugs today to convert some of our European appliances. They are see through, I thought it was kind of funky.

Nicole drove a car again for the first time in three years, always a bit exciting. Especially with trucks like this on your tail...

I wanted to make a nice photo of the beach from the car but because of the car still driving and my phone being sucky it now looks like a photo of a nucleair explosion. I like it though. You don't get this effect -standard- with your big fat professional camera! ;-P

And another picture greatly fucketh up. Still driving and see what happens with those poles? They are actually standing straight up for real. It's the way my phonecam reads the image of the light sensitive chip I believe. It scans the image in horixontal lines. Objects close by will then be displayed like this.

We went to Semaphore beach. A lovely and quiet little piece of beach in Adelaide. I want to live there. If we ever have the possibility to buy land or a whole house there I think I will. Oh yeah, there's a very good icecream place too!

The sun was going down. Always good for a few nice piccies.

OK, especially for the family and friends in Holland where the first snow has actually fallen, here's another go at the sunset.

The Rundle Street pigs

My new mobile office. Today I inquired for a new 24" iMac. The shop has 1 in stock so I might get one soon. Haven't decided 100% yet as it's a very big expense.

Temperatures were rather pleasant again. This was around 1PM. There is a very big downside to this I have to tell you btw: mosquito's. During the past 3 days I have already been stung 7 times. What can I say, I guess they want to be my best friends...

Mozzies or no mozzies, with sites like this they're easily forgotten. The city was once again bathing in sun.

Nicole and I went to get lunch while in town. We went into a food court. That's something you don't really see in The Netherlands.

Food courts are often in the basement of a big shopping mall and they dedicated that floor to lots of little snackbars/take-away's with each their own sitting area. Some places sell rather decent food actually.

Outside again walking through Rundle Street. We had to see the little piggies of course. They are 4 bronze sculptures of pigs, only 2 are shown.

The view through Rundle Street.

We had a drink while waiting for Nic's parents to come pick us up as they were in town as well. Needless to say someone was very happy with her diet coke today.

The Amsterdam beer

You look outside on your first morning waking up and what do you see? That's right, a garden bathing in the morning sun.

After breakfast we drove down to Karin's house before shopping. Pictured is the main road that our street comes out on to.

On the way still... By the way, don't let this picture give you the impression Adelaide is very empty. This photo just looks that way.

Parked infront of Karin and Gav's house. We met the nice neighbour called Ron who seemed impressed by my height.

Karin has a fish tank with a few yabbies, this one recently shed it's shell and is still light blue because of this.

This is the other big yabbie, still in a darker blue.

Close to our house there's a street where all the trees are blooming in beautifull purple. This photo hardly does any justice to it unfortunately.

And then when we came back home after seeing Karin's place and some shopping it was still sunny. Can't stop photographing sunny sites...

And then when I started digging into the fridge, looking for something cold and bubbly to drink, guess what I found?! I didn't even know it existed! Aparently Gavin Nic's father got this somehow and it's a beer brewed in the Dutch city of Enschede and it's called "Amsterdam"! It's taste reminds me of Heineken though.