Oz on a Friday

Despite the fact that it's already quite warm here, the mornings and evenings are surprisingly cool due to the winds that blow down from the hills in the A.M. and then come off the coast in the P.M. But even then you can still feel the humidity and, on a run especially, you can work up quite a sweat while feeling that chill on your skin.

Jonnene and I went into downtown Perth on Friday to look around, eat lunch, and we also picked up her medical results for the immigration process. She passed all her exams with flying colors and will need to bring the paperwork and x-rays with her to her interview at the US Consulate in Sydney (whenever that will be). We ate lunch at one of the underground food courts in an arcade (shopping) in the Hay Street Mall. My mom would recognize many of these spots like London Court and such from when she was here during the wedding. We spent lots of time in women's shoe stores since Jonnene was trying to find some slip-ons to replace the ones she was now wearing and had borrowed from her sister. They were rubbing her outside little toes raw and she was quite uncomfortable the more we walked around.

We stopped by the grocery store (Cole's in the Karrinyup Mall) to get the ingredients for a lasagna Jonnene was going to make for dinner. They have these weird shopping carts here: all four wheels swivel about...the carts in the States only have swivel wheels in the front, the rear wheels stay straight. It's unusual and takes a lot of work to push them around if you've never done it before. The cart starts to turn sideways as you push it forward and making a turn into an aisle is a work in physics and momentum. I'm sure that the more you use these things the more you get the hang of it and it becomes easier. One immediate advantage I found with the "four-wheel drive" of these carts is that you can move them sideways into areas that you'd have to "parallel park" our traditional carts.

It looks like a full weekend coming up. We're having a bar-b-que at David's house Sauturday night, the family Christmas Tea on Sunday afternoon at Sue and Peter's (where the wedding took place), and then another bar-b-que at the house of a friend of Jonnene's on Monday evening. It should be a lot of fun and a lot of food. Cooking on the barby is definitely a part of Aussie life and I've had some excellent meals come off those cooktops. I relay the details as they happen.