Welcome back to What I Thought Of It, tackling Australia!
PERTH
When we left Indonesia, we flew from Bali straight to Perth. For those of you who don't know, Perth is like, the fourth largest city in Australia or something? It's on the West Coast, down at the very bottom. It's where we lived six years ago, for six years. It was nostalgic to go back, visiting my old kindergarten and pre-primary schools, our house and all our friend's places. I was also really happy to see Grandma Steph and Grandpa Brian again, since we haven't seen them for a long time. And our second cousins also have a house there.
Perth is a nice city. It can get hot, but it's a seaside city, and there's lots of wind, which is great. Swimming is really fun, although traumatic flashbacks to me and Papa getting demolished by titan waves at City Beach kept us at the calm Fremantle seas. We met up with old friends and had a lot of fun.
We also had quite a few sleepovers with Grandma and Grandpa. Their new house is really nice - it has a full wall window with a great view of the beach and the city. It was really nice to be able to see them again. We played lots of Upwords, a Scrabble-like game with an interesting new mechanic, drew, watched TV and ate fish & chips, one of my personal favorite foods.
I also rediscovered my very favorite food - meat pies, aka mince beef pies, with a mini version that is dubbed party pies. As far as I know, they're unique to Australia, whereas fish & chips exist in America and England.
Bottom Line: Perth is a great city, full of delicious food, incredible beaches and lots of fun friends to reunite with. I am so glad we got to go there again.
KANGAROO ISLAND
Our second stop in Australia was, as the title says, the Isle of Jumping Marsupials That Are Widely Known As One Of Australia's Most Iconic Animals. Or Kangaroo Island.
It didn't actually have a lot of kangaroos. I never saw even one. But that was OK, since we had seen a lot back at the Perth Zoo. Kangaroo Island was a lot more hot than Perth. If you look at Australia's map, it's just to the left of Adelaide. We stayed in a nice house in a small town while we were there. The current party was the Whitkin family, Grandma and Grandpa. I don't remember the whole thing very well, but I do remember one thing.
One of our ancestors, on Grandma Steph's side, was named William Airy, joined the military and died here. There was a whole messy family history that me, Mama and Grandma tried to uncover at the Kangaroo Island library. We didn't discover much.
Kangaroo Island was nice, but I don't think I'd want to live there. Too hot, and not enough swimming.