More Shopping?

Two sleeps til Christmas. Even though the stores and markets are packed and crazy, it just doesn't seem like Christmas when the temperature is ninety degrees.  (actually 30C)

I think I mentioned before that we are going to a friend's for dinner on Christmas.  She has offered to let us use her car while she's away in New Zealand for ten days.  We have decided to get out of town for a while since we are going to be working and in school in another week.  We're heading down to New South Wales and a town called Byron Bay. It's about two hour's drive from Brissie.  Along the way we're going to climb Mt. Warning, the highest peak around I believe and the first place that the sun shines on Australia every day.

Today I made reservations for us to take a scuba certification class starting Monday at Byron Bay.  Scuba has been high on our list since we decided to come to Oz and we're both pretty stoked.  The class takes two days and gets us certified to dive with a dive master anywhere in the world.  After that we have to make a couple more dives with an instructor and get a dive physical and then we'll get our open water license that allows us to dive on our own.

Other than that is was a pretty uneventful day for us today, we hit the grocery store for a few items for Christmas eve dinner and then went with Melissa, Andrew and the kids over to Rocklea for the twilight markets. We got some local honey and some oranges for 99 cents a kilo.  We also found a nice bag of pine nuts for $8.  Pine nuts in the stores here are outrageous so we were happy to pay that.  We got some wasabi flavored macadamia nuts that are out of this world.

Today I noticed a few items that I'm going to miss.  All the dental floss at the store is waxed.  I can't stand waxed dental floss. (If anyone would like to put together a care package of dental floss and Q-Tips brand cotton swabs I'd be in your debt.) Also they don't sell cocktail sauce at the store.  We even tried to buy horse radish and make some ourselves but they only had the mayonnaise type of horseradish. (I found a bottle of the good stuff at a German butcher at the market this evening, woot!) Also, Leah is planning on making special K bars and we had a hell of a time finding corn syrup.  It's called glucose syrup here and gave us both the creeps.  We're gonna try the bars with honey instead of the corn syrup.

Some observations for today:

-"A Christmas Story" is going to be on here, but only once and at 11:30 am on Christmas day
-Prawns, Lobster, and Oysters are common items on the "Christmas Lunch" menu at most peoples houses