Whaddup, October has come and gone. Halloween is FAR from taking hold down under, making November 1 a regular teaching day (sorry, my Canadian counter parts!). This month felt FULL of activities with my friends, from coming home from our Stuart Highway trip (3600 km in 9 days!) with Sydney, to finishing up term 2 courses and celebrating Canadian Thanksgiving with all the Canucks down under.
New words:
- Nappy is the Aussie version of a diaper
- Orientated… you’d think that given all the other Aussie lingo I’ve observed, that we would minimize the number of syllables, but this is the equivalent of oriented here
- If you are wanting to add emphasis to something, you might say it’s “_____ as”. Examples include: sweet as, tasty as, warm as, hard as
- Vego is the term to call someone a vegetarian, and it’s quite handy, seeing as I work in a foods space.
- It’s not “first come first served” but rather “first in best dressed”
- Jess caught me by surprise with brolly, meaning umbrella!
Adventures of October:
Dinner at Lucas’ to celebrate his abundance of fishing luck – we had Australian salmon and flathead. I think I preferred the flathead because it was lighter, closer to walleye than the salmon. But both were tasty! And as with any potluck, we ended up with way too much food, so each got some leftovers to go home with.
I took a long and lovely evening walk to Altona (and back) – getting caught in the rain, trying a new ultafiltered milk beverage (nerd alert!), then coming home to fresh pizza courtesy of Jess. What a win for a Friday!
I lost my Myki card. Luckily, it was registered to me so I was able to cancel it and get a replacement. And the same day I did so, I found it. Under my pillow. Don’t ask me why it was there, but here we are! (And I have yet to sort that fiasco out… wish me luck!)
I attended my school’s band night at Kindred Studios, spending (apparently) 3 and a half hours enthralled by my students’ (past, present, and future) talent and hard work.
A visit to see baby Pesto! He is an extraordinarily large king penguin, living at Melbourne’s Sea Life. He’s the most precious little thing, and I found out I have a tendency for falling over when posing with the photo ops:
Jess and I went to see the Aussie pop artist Amy Shark at the Sidney Meyer Music Bowl. It was rainy as, and we ended up looking like a couple drowned rats, but it was a great time!
Canadian thanksgiving!! Jess and I hosted, having just shy of a dozen of my Canadian friends (all teachers!) over to gorge ourselves on all the traditional foods. I couldn’t initially find a turkey, so had settled on duck, but then Costco came in clutch. So we ended up with ham, duck, and turkey! Never hurts to try something new, right?
For Halloween, the students at my school were writing exams, but that didn’t stop me from dressing up! I opted to go as one of the many things in Aus that can give you a bad time: a jellyfish! One Bunnings broad-brimmed hat, plastic table cloth, battery-operated string lights, and some clear cello wrap later, there I was.
That was all for October, now I’m making it through what remains of November and then coasting to the end of the year (and summer holidays!). And seeing my baby seeeeester!!! I CANNOT WAIT.
See you soon,
Kate