I’ve missed doing these! Some of these are older because I’ve started writing this post about three weeks ago and I kept forgetting to post it.

19 Horrifying Vegan Problems: Laughed out loud. Definitely one of the best Buzzfeeds

“Because it Works” by Adam Lazzara. Solo work by the lead singer of my fav band, Taking Back Sunday? Sign me up. Obviously!

This interview with Jennifer Lawrence and Josh Hutcherson where the play the Newlywed Game. I saw Hunger Games at midnight and loved it. Aaaand then I may have gone to see it again a week later. it’s sad, it’s funny, it’s so good. If there is anyone who hasn’t seen it, I highly recommend it. I maybe also just finished reading the series again. Can’t get enough!

Mrs. Mays all natural Cranberry Blueberry Crunch snacks. I can’t stop eating these! I first discovered them in the airport in LA on my way to Australia when I was desperate for a vegan snack for the long flight. When I discovered them in Australia I was pumped. The only problem- trying not to eat the whole bag!

Haim- The Wire. I know I already gave you Adam Lazzara’s s song and this isn’t really new but this song is on the radio all the time here and it’s totally grown on me. Plus, the video’s kinda great.

Food-wise, things are still dull on this end and I apologize! It’s hot here but all I want is winter comfort food. Blueberry pie over night oats for breakfast, grapefruit for lunch and Thanksgiving leftover for dinner make for incredibly uninteresting posts. I’m experimenting with some popsicles and a new granola and hoping I can work those out next week. The kids are officially on summer break though so my days will noq be filled with parks, and bowling, and skating and oi! Lots of entertaining. Fingers crossed my food funk is broken for next week.

Until then, have a great weekend!

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ok, because I rambled so much in my first Brisbane Post, I had to break it up. Sorry about that! I’ll have recipes later in the week, I promise.

So on day 2, I checked out of the hostel SUPER early. I had made plans to go to the pancake brunch with the two girls in my room. The were both German and 18. You want to feel old? Bunk down with two girls that are a decade younger than you. Who ask you for help on their first job cover letter. Yeap, I was feeling ancient! Anyway, we were going to do brunch but the place was noisy and I wasn’t sleeping well on the top bunk. So I was up and out by 7. I had a gross breakfast at this restaurant around the corner and then set out to find a church that was supposed to have some cool art.

Street Art

Along the way, I turned the corner and found the best. thing. ever *drum roll* a starbucks!!! OMG! So, excited! 1 whole month without an iced soy latte. 1 whole month of trying to find a place that makes good iced mocha lattes (um hi, yes. They put ice cream in their iced beverages sometimes.) I barreled across the street, jaywalking and dodging cars, like Ryan Gosling himself was waiting on the other side. I know Starbucks isn’t necessarily the best but it’s familiar. And familiar is good when you haven’t had American food in a month.

By this point, I was totally satisfied with life and didn’t even care about the church. This proved a good thing because the church definitely did not live up to the hype. Or maybe I’m a total church snob now that I’ve experienced all the epicness that is Italian Churches (I’m looking at you Sistine Chapel and the church in Sienna). Either way, I walked around for about 2 minutes, snapped a few pics, got some nasty looks from old people praying (cool it! It’s not like I went in the middle of mass!) then continued my wondering. All the stores were closed because it was early Sunday so I made my way back across the river to the South Bank and hit up another outdoor market, this one significantly better for christmas shopping!

I was back at the hostel by noon and on the road to the next attraction- The Lone Pine Koala Sanctuary! Nothing says, ‘Look I’m in Australia!’ like a picture of you cuddling a koala. Unfortunately, those photos aren’t digital and they came out so bad that I reserved them for only those nearest and dearest. I still have loads of Koala pictures!

AWW!

The park also had an open kangaroo exhibit where you can buy kangaroo food for $2 and walk right up to a kangaroo and hang with it. I didn’t do this. Mostly because 1. seriously? $2 for a teensy bit of food so a kangaroo can slobber on your hand? and 2. up close they are kind of scary. I didn’t want kangaroo slobber AND to be kicked in the chest. Just sayin’!

See?! Those be human kicking legs! Also, check out the one in the background, just chillin’

Now, just incase you were thinking “woohoo, koalas. Who cares?”, look what I have here. Not only did I cuddle a koala but I followed in the foot steps of the coolest, most awesomest, most bestest band ever- Taking Back Sunday!

That’s right kids. Matt Rubano and I stood in the same spot and dare I say, possibly (not likely, let’s just pretend) cuddled the same Koala. Almost as cool as say, Cuddling the same Koala as Taylor Swift?

Yeapers. It happened. And if you’re too cool for TBS and Tswift, I have some Wombats for you…which is funny cause you know, I saw wombats at the Koala Sanctuary, too. Get it?

The Wombats (above); wombats (below). Ha!

Anyways, I think that’s quite enough of my Brisbane adventures. I really truly promise I didn’t go to the Lone Pine Koala Sanctuary and take more pictures of the celebrities in the gift shop then the animals. I have about a million koala pics but i’m going to spare you for now. I will leave you with this look at Australia’s huge skyline as I drove back to Toowoomba.

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Two weekends ago, I packed my bag and hit the road to Brisbane, which is about an hour and a half from Toowoomba. I’m trying to travel as much as I can with the money I have so short weekend trips are perfect. I don’t have to take time off and it’s a little cheaper.

I wasn’t sure what to expect in Brisbane. One thing about this trip to Australia is it was, hands down, my least researched trip. I’m winging it, guys. I knew I needed out of Boston for a little while, this opportunity came up and so I peaced out. This means that I only have the vaguest idea of what I want to do now that I’m here.

Brisbane is close so I thought I’d give it a go!

Turns out, it’s a city and surprisingly, I miss the city! They have vegan restaurants and culture and things to do and fro-yo! I didn’t realize I was missing that until I was in Brisbane.

So here’s a little of what I did:

First off, stayed in a hostel for the first time ever! The first time I tried the whole hostel thing was with my friend,  Laura, in Rome and things did not go well. At all. I think we stayed in the hostel long enough to get information on the closest internet cafe and then we went and booked ourselves a hotel. This was after a week of couch surfing, though, including a stint in London which involved us sleeping on lined up chairs. I think the floor would have been more comfy. Needless to say, I was quite proud of myself for staying in the hostel!

floor of the elevator in the hostel. Terrifying!

On Saturday, I just sort of meandered around Brisbane. I went to the Davies Park market where I ate a Swizzle, which is a spiraled potato dunked in Tapioca Flour (Gluten Free and apparently full of healthy things like vitamin B stuff) and fried in  rice bran oil (also, apparently more healthy), then drenched in seasonings. I chose the Aussie BBQ seasoning which was smoked paprika, garlic and onion powder and salt and pepper. Basically it was a huge, pretentious french fry…that was amazing. The market was a bit too hippy for me and it was super produce heavy, which I wasn’t really looking for. I stayed for a bit, ate my pretentious french fries, bought a ginormous hat to keep the sun off (seriously, so strong), then headed to the South Bank Parkland.

Old tree at Davies Park

SWIZZLE!

After basking in the sun, I NEEDED to get in doors. I could feel my pale irish skin turning crispy even though I had on sunscreen, a cardigan, pants, and a ginormous hat. So I hit up the Queensland Art Gallery. I walked in and they had a whole exhibit on California, which I thought was ironic. Let me go to an Aussie Gallery to check out stuff on the US. As soon as I walked in, I was ushered to a free comedy performance by Tim Ross and a musician named, Kit. Most of it went over my head as I didn’t get the Aussie references, except for the whole segment he did about Bruce Springsteen. Yes, Springsteen. Even in Australia, I can’t escape him. The segment was concluded with a little cover of Born to Run, which was my cue to get out! At that time, I took in some paintings, which weren’t bad. They had a section on Australian painters, which was pretty cool. The close ups below are some of the more comical elements of paintings that I found.

Tim Ross

Attributed to Lucas Cranach the Elder- The Three Apostles. Seriously, could that apostle be any uglier?!

Cologne School- Virgin and Child with Saints. This is a close up of, most likely, the person who commissioned the painting. Which begs the question, seriously? They couldn’t at least make him a tad more attractive??

Then I wondered around the South Bank Parkland a bit. At this point, I discovered an outdoor cinema sponsored by Ben and Jerry’s (side note: Ben and Jerry’s is apparently not easy to find here!). So I thought that would be fun and bought a ticket for that. The movie that was playing was Blue Jasmine, which was a really depressing Woody Allen film. I was not a fan! But the experience was fun. While there, I almost bought a Ben and Jerry ice cream but it was $12 for a pint! $12!! So I bought a salad and “healthy” sour gummy worms. Come on! This is a food blog. You know I have to include these pics.

flower covered walk way on the South Bank 

outdoor cinema. There were lawn chairs and bean bag chairs, which was pretty cool

obsessed!

Then I headed back to the hostel. Not super exciting but I was pretty beat from being up since 6 and then being in the sun all day.

Turns out, I had a lot more to say then I thought I did so I will continue with Brisbane next Travel Tuesday. Spoiler alert: Koalas are involved!

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So it’s Halloween night in Australia. Halloween is not big at all here in Toowoomba. It is supposedly growing in popularity in the larger cities like Brisbane but in Toowoomba, which has 150,000, it is still pretty under celebrated. When I went to the grocery store, the entire store had approximately six shelves of halloween items and that was pretty common for Halloween displays.

The family I am nannying for actually has never done Halloween. Can you imagine being 12 and never having gone trick or treating?!? Clearly, I saw this as my opportunity to bring the Halloween spirit to Australia. The kids, knowing I was a huge fan of Halloween, actually bought costumes before I even arrived, anticipating that I would want to do something. 1 witch and 2 vampires. The few packaged costumes were all pretty standard like that. As you’ll see from the photo above, there wasn’t much selection.

I wanted to get the kids pumped for Halloween as best I could though. There was rumors that one street was going to have trick or treating so we decided to make our own trick or treating bags. In hindsight, these bags were entirely too big for the goodies we got but I like how they can reuse them if they want for trick or treating or other things. Check out our super fun creations! The kids took 1-2 hours to work on. I took 2 days (all the bags have a front and a back decorated). I’m so pokey!

So, this morning, we had our bags made and our costumes out and the kids were stoked! I broke the dress code of the childrens’ catholic school by sending the 5 year old off with Halloween ribbons in the braids I did for her. Rules be damned! It’s Halloween!!

I was having a hard time getting in the spirit with it being so warm out and no decorations anywhere! So I decided to spruce up the house with whatever decorations I could find.  I think I did a fairly decent job considering what little I had to work with…

I did this while the kids were in school. I was also in charge of dinner tonight (for the first time) because I wanted to do a Halloween theme. This was a bit more difficult than I thought it would be because 1. I could not find canned pumpkin anywhere. So that eliminated most of what I wanted to do (ie: pumpkin shaped pumpkin pancakes (I also couldn’t find a pumpkin cookie cutter), pumpkin burgers, etc), and 2. even if I could find canned pumpkin, the kids don’t like pumpkin or squash flavored things (side note: Aussies call most squashes pumpkins, like Butternut Pumpkin or Japanese Pumpkin, etc. Very weird). So, I got creative! We had Quesadilla Pumpkins (they’d never heard of a quesadilla) and Guacamole with a side of carrots (the only orange, non-squash veggie I could find). I think it came out cute!

That little pumpkin was a HUGE pain to carve cause the inside was stringy like a spaghetti squash. I definitely wasn’t expecting that! The kids loved the food though, especially the “pumpkin vomit”. We had to take the chips away so they would eat their veggies.

After they were fueled up, we went trick or treating. So. Weird! I knew it was going to be different but actually experiencing it was bizarre. The houses were all dark and no one had decorations. I would say 1 in 5 places actually had candy or treats. We only really got a handful of houses I think that were giving things out. One old lady had a bag of loose gummy “snakes” (aka gummy worms) and loose jelly beans and she just had us open our bags and she dumped them in. That SO wouldn’t fly in the states. The Dad I work for ate some jelly beans so I know they aren’t laced with arsenic or something but I’m still having a hard time eating them! 28 years of “NEVER EAT OPEN CANDY” is a hard thing to shake. Then one guy didn’t have any candy so he opened his freezer and gave the kids ice cream popsicles! In the end, my stash looked like this:

I’m pretty sure that’s how much candy I get from the bowl at my house usually! LOL!

We ended the night all munching on our “lollies” (Aussie speak for candy) and watching Hocus Pocus (which they’d never seen!). The kids had a great time and the little 5 year old said that this was the best night she’s had! So I think I succeeded in bringing the Halloween spirit to at least one tiny bit of Australia 🙂

This post was a lot longer than I anticipated so I will post my alternative cheese quesadilla recipe tomorrow.

HAPPY HALLOWEEN EVERYONE!! (yes, I did bring my own cat ears from America in anticipation of Halloween and no, I have no idea what sort of cat expression that is. I apparently don’t hang with cats often)

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