Sunday, July 24, 2011

The Botanical Gardens and Grocery Shopping

Yesterday we made the journey down to the Cairns Botanic Gardens, and it was well worth it.  It's one of the numerous free spots in Cairns that you have to put some effort into finding but once you do it's great.  It was awesome to see all these jungle plants that were native and marvel at their bizarre flowers and crazy colored leaves.  We decided it's definitely a place we have to come back about once a month to see all the different plants in bloom.  After spending about 3 and a half hours just wandering around the garden and the park across the street we began what we thought would be a simply bus ride to town.  Some how we managed to "miss" two buses, although we were on time for them as the bus station and the bus that picked us up was 10 minutes late, allowing us to relax at a bus station for about 45 minutes.  We made our way downtown to Rusty's market yet again and Chue made friends with a woman that ran a farmer's market stand and got about 20$ worth of groceries for 10$ and now we have to go back next week so she can give us her special super hot peppers.  After this trip we were all rather exhausted, especially because our long day at Fitzroy was catching up with us so we came home made dinner/lunch watched a movie and fell into bed.
Today was Grocery day.  We made the 20 minute trek to Smithfield shopping center with the grocery cart we had "borrowed" last time in tow.  We picked up school supplies, loads of groceries, and ventured into Dan Murphy's (The discount liquor store) in search of something our mentor called "Clear Skins".  They are bottles of wine that have something wrong with the labeling or the wine itself and they slap a white label on it and sell it for cheap.  It was fun to see all the Australian beer and to find out that our orientation was apparently sponsored by a beer company (Toohey's).  We came home with another cart in tow, somehow fit everything into our tiny fridge and spent the rest of the afternoon laying around, taking our first dip in the pool and finding the buildings where our classes were on campus.  I made a big pasta dish for dinner and Jennifer made us vanilla ice cream and Oreos
for dessert. We spent the night reading in our living room until we were all to exhausted and decided that we should probably get to bed because class starts TOMORROW!



 A crazy spider we saw a lot of at the botanical gardens.
Beautiful flowers that smelled like honeysuckle!

No comments:

Post a Comment