Sunday in the country

Moshi and his wife Miriam treated us to a “typical Australian day in the country”. They are originally from Iraq, so all of the Aussie culture is being translated through their eyes.

We started by going to a plant nursery. It had a café attached. We looked at the plants for awhile, watched the children trying to feed the ducks, (These ducks obviously get too much food! They weren’t even interested!) and then went into the dining room where we had a reservation for lunch.

First we had pot bread; you can see that they are following the nursery theme:




Miriam and I had chicken pot pie. It had zucchini, carrots and chicken:



Moshie had the middle eastern dips:



Chuck had open faced steak sandwich with fries (again in a flower pot.)



After lunch we drove to the Yarra valley to a vineyard. Miriam had checked at her work for the “best one.” As we were driving, looking at the country side, I spied a herd of kangaroos. We stopped to take pictures, with much honking behind us. A little further down the road – another herd of kangaroos, much closer to the road. We stopped again for more pictures! We’re foreigners – wild kangaroos are exciting. When we got out of the car, they all looked up, much the way that deer do in the US.




Here’s me with the roos in the background:



On to the vineyard. This area is much like Napa, with one right after another. The one that we went to also had a cheese tasting with 6 cheeses, so we could wander back & forth pairing wines with the cheese. Lots of fun.

On the way home we took the “scenic route.” Neither Moshi nor Miriam can find there way out of a paper bag. I thought that we were going wrong at the first turn, but didn’t say anything because I thought that they really did want to go a different way back to the city. After about 10 minutes, Miriam looked at me and said, “This doesn’t look familiar.” Then Chuck said, “This is new.” Moshi was still driving along, not noticing that we were not going the same way that we had come.

I finally had to help read the map to get us home. Moshi recently went to Seoul, Korea and said that he really didn’t go far from the hotel, because he didn’t want to get lost.

We dropped Miriam off and went back into Melbourne. Stopped into a pizza place on Melbourne’s Italian street, for a nosh before going to the hotel.

Each night we stay up a little later – I think that it was 10 when we collapsed into bed.