The Royal Adelaide Show 2008

The past 7 years I heard several people speak to me about "The Show".

- "It's a nice day out"
- "There are lots of cute animals"
- "They have poffertjes"
- "There are tons of interesting things to see"

But also:
- "It's too commercialised"
- "It's too busy"
- "It's boring"
- "There are too many kids"

Today it happened. I went to the Royal Adelaide Show. Karin dropped us off around noon and we returned home around 19:00.
I had a great day and saw lots of cool things. The weather was perfect. It was sunny, 20C and a clear, blue sky. Here are pictures and videos I took/made today. Sorry if this page took long to load.

Enjoy.

The entrance.

First things first, right? People have been telling me about this poffertjes stand for seven years, I just HAD to go there first.

Perfect conditions for a nice day out. Good weather, lots of happy people and fun things to see and do.

There were flowers...

and Bonsai trees...

and fresh produce...

and things in jars...

and cakes. This one is actually a first prize winner and I think we can all see why.

And there was a guy with a big hat...

checking out other hats.

Just as a side note. On this show, there are about a gazillion contests that people can enter. Prettiest flower, prettiest bonsai, best fruit, best cake and prettiest hat are just a few.

There are a few stages with fun performances. These guys call themselves the "Zimbabwe Brothers". They were fun to watch.

These beauties are called "Dagwood dogs". It's medicine for people with low cholesterol. I had never seen these before. If you're wondering what it is: It's deep fried battered sausage on a lollypop-like stick. It's nice and crispy and they dip it in tomato sauce.

Anyway, there are also cow-girls shaving cows...

and nice old buildings...

and jumping horses...

and old cars (Holdens in this case).

"Piggie love". Oink oink.

And then there was the grand parade of the show animals.

This Kozak from the Ukraine came to do a few tricks as well.

He was pretty good.

No Australian show without Australia's favourite entertainment: Noisy hotted up cars.

The last act was a motorcycle stunt-team. They were pretty good.

No accidents or anything, good stuff.

Not everybody was impressed all the time.

Munch munch munch.

There were also a lot of rides, some of them looking beautiful like this one.

Adelaide driving school.

I thought I had seen most rides by now but this one was totally new to me. It looks awesome. I reckon one can get pretty sick in it.

The sun was setting slowly by the time we left.

But before we left we had to have more poffertjes.

Gotcha! We actually were told where to find this poffertjes stand on Sundays. I think we're gonna see a lot more poffertjes from now on. Simply because they are so DAMN GOOD!

While making my blog I got a phone call from my mate Mic which was really cool. Especially since most of the time I could actually hear what he was saying ;-) Thanks for the call mic! Oh, and thanks to some magical force unknown to mankind the missing half of my blog returned after our chat!

The presents

Lunch!

It was busy outside so I thought I'd illustrate that with this photograph... of an empty bench. It's not easy aiming with a phone.

In the afternoon I went to the coffee place to buy more beans. $18.50 for half a kilo of coffee beans.

After work we went out for beers because Hoang, my colleague is leaving to England again next week. In the picture, from left to right we see Luke, Melvin, Hoang, Craig, Buddy, yours truly and Ben. We stayed till the end with Hoang and his girl friend who joined us later and Luke. We left around 20:30 when it was already dark.

We walked past this graffiti that we saw being made a few weeks ago. It's a pretty cool one.

When we came home we found a parcel from Alkmaar! My moms and dads birthday pressies had arrived! THANK YOU mum and dad! :-)

Then I did my blog while listening to Boot liquor. I'm tired from this weeks work. My back aches and so does my neck. I'm looking forward to some decent, undisturbed sleep.

The Sausage roll

For lunch I bought a pie and a sausage roll. This is the sausage roll from the side.

This is the sausage roll from the top, looks pretty nice.

This is the sausage roll from the inside. It was YUCK. There was no sausage. Instead there was a gooey , lukewarm substance that seemed made of wet bread with traces of meat and some herb in it that had a very strong flavour masquerading the rest. Like it was bread, dunked in vegetable soup and then blended to little pieces barely having texture and then dried to be just sticky enough to stay in the roll... Not having that again.
I fed it to the bin.

At least the weather was great. I was not alone eating outside.

After work we went to Woolies.

We were completely out of milk this morning so fresh supplies were badly needed.

They did not have our olive butter anymore though! I knew it was too good to be true. BASTARDS!

I do these, but then on databases.

The birthday

My work street during lunch. In the distance you can see the Adelaide hills.

I bought tulips for Nicole. They are actually pretty decent ones.

The Coke truck was parked right outside. I snapped away when people were walking past and I like this image the best.

I went to the Blue lemon baguette bar to get a small baguette with camembert.

It was still warm. I ate it outside in the sun again. The weather is getting better pretty quick now. You can feel the warmth coming, it's fantastic. Bring me warmth now!

Nicole was very happy with the flowers, the bbq we got from the in-laws, the pressies from her colleagues and the cards that came by mail.

Welcome home!

We were out of bread this morning so I went to the bakery. We have two bakeries here, one right on Main North road and one left on Main North road. I went to the right one first. It was 7:30 in the morning. When I entered I noticed there wasn't any fresh bread. Just some bread rolls from the day before. So I asked the baker if he had any fresh bread. After all, bakers bake all night long so that we, the people, can have fresh bread in the morning. He looks at me all grumpy and barks "Nah, one hour!". As fucking if. See you later! Or probably not.

So it was off to the bakery on the left. Same bloody scene except that these people didn't even speak English. But I saw he had fresh loafs of white bread in the back, just not cut. I tried to ask if they had or could cut a loaf. After trying so get the general picture of a sliced loaf of bread across to the the baker's wife I gave up and told the baker himself that I'd just have the whole un-fucking-sliced loaf of bread and that's it. At least it was fresh. The guy puts it in an open bag saying "it is hot!" and hands it to me. It was hardly luke-warm but alright, it was crispy so that was nice. I paid and left.

I don't think I will ever try to get bread there again unless I happen to walk past anyway. This kind of thing just shits me to tears in the morning you know... And the thing is that sometimes when you go to the toilet at night (for which we have to walk through the garden) you can actually smell bread baking. So where is this magical bread that I can smell but not see?!?!

While cutting my bread the in-laws returned from their holiday in Croatia. It was good to see them again. We just had a little 15 minutes chat and then we went to work. Life goes on ;-)

It was beautiful and sunny during lunch so I had a Vili's pie outside in the sun. I needed the break because work was a bit frustrating today.

When I came home there was this birthday card for me. It's from Joyce and Raymond. Thanks guys! It's really nice of you to think of me and Nicole :-)