Ovenless in China: Inspiration please...

I've tried writing this post a few times, but the inspiration just wouldn't come. Maybe it's because I'm going thru a second round of culture shock after a lovely month in Australia. Even after a month of living out of a suitcase I wasn't ready to say farewell to the land of friendly people, clean air and beautiful grocery stores with their sanitary meat displays. But at the same time it was nice to realize that coming back to Jiangyin did feel like we were coming "home." A home, that is, where flight attendants have to constantly remind passengers that smoking is prohibited during the flight, and yes, sir, that means even in the bathroom; a home where it's normal for a mom to pull down her sons pants in the middle of the sidewalk and tell him to go the bathroom; a home where children are taught there's absolutely nothing rude about stopping at a stranger's table in a restaurant, pointing and announcing "look ma, foreigners" in your loudest voice. Oh China, you couldn't ease us gently back into things, could you?

On the brighter side, we're being treated here to the biggest and best blueberries I've ever had. And man are they cheap! I've successfully cleaned out two grocery stores, just pulled a blueberry coffee cake out of the "oven" (it turned out much better than this one!) and still have a lifetime supply in the freezer. It's the small victories that matter here. Hopefully they don't turn out to be like the local watermelons. Now traditionally, I hate watermelon. But the watermelons here are so sweet I couldn't resist them. Then they started exploding. Not a typo. Exploding. When even the Chinese government is telling you not to the eat the watermelons because of growth accelerators, you know it can't be good for you. So here's hoping these mutant blueberries are truly organic as advertised.

But back to Australia...Week 1 saw us spend 6 days in Perth and 2 in Fremantle (awesome suggestion Claudia!). Here's the bullet points...

Perth was an absolute ghost town. We wandered a bit each day, but mostly had a lazy week on the couch and got hooked on Australian home improvement tv shows. There were a few failed attempts in our effort to find a delicious, juicy hamburger. And how on earth did beets come to be standard burger toppings anyway? If you missed the photos of Perth I posted while we were there, click here.

We drove north to Nambung National Park to see the Pinnacles limestone formations. It was interesting, but not nearly as breathtaking as all the professional photographs built it up to be.

The next day it was off to the Margaret River Valley wine county. We didn't realize how long it would take to get there so we only had time for one tasting. Oops! But what a beautiful area! It's amazing how green everything is in winter.

Unfortunately the best thing about lunch at the Bootleg Brewery was the scenery

Gralyn Vineyard--wines, eh. Ports--yummy!

Our first kangaroo sighting--the guys in the back were easily 6 ft tall!

Last stop in the Southwest was Fremantle, an absolutely adorable old port town. Filled with tons of art galleries, yummy restaurants, maritime museums, antique shops, and a Notre Dame campus, we had a great time just wandering. I found a yarn shop that had absolutely zero Australian yarns! Boo. Saw a bizarre free exhibit at town hall called "Psychiatry: An Industry of Death." I mean come on, with a name like that we had to check it out! Turns out it was sponsored by the Church of Scientology and basically blamed psychiatry for the rise of Hitler and the majority of 20th century world atrocities. Plausible, no?

The absolute highlight of Fremantle was dinner at the Iron Pot. We had the best calamari ever. EVER. With a tamarind sauce that was delish. Then came dinner--we both had steaks, but Bri was the winner with duck fat roasted potatoes. DUCK FAT. They were fantastic. FANTASTIC. As in, on our layover in Perth the following week we debated hopping in a cab to eat more duck fat (with or without the potatoes) but the cab ride would have probably tripled the cost of dinner and Brian had this fantastic idea anyway.