Day 6 in Melbourne! (Last Day in Melbourne)

Today was A&A's last day in Melbourne! Both were feeling rather wistful to be leaving such great company, but were quite abashed at having Uncle Keith and Aunt Ruth driving them all over Melbourne. They were quite intent on getting something nice for their Uncle and Aunt to show their appreciation, but since they weren't very familiar with Melbourne, they didn't exactly know what to look for or where to look for it.

This morning, Aunt Ruth dropped Jemima off at school, and came back around 9 or 1oam to bring A&A down to the Carribean Market nearby.

The Carribean Market is situated along FernTree Gully and Studs Road, and was open Wednesdays and Sundays only. When A&A were there, they were introducing an additional opening day: Friday!

It has just about everything: Restaurants, shopping, parking lots, and even a Carribean Lake and an area for kids!

Prior to entering the market, Adal spotted a Mr Wonderwhip van right outside! You can have Ice-Cream Anywhere in Australia as long as there's a Mr Wonderwhip van! It's quite like the ice-cream vendors you find in orchard road (the ones on bicycles), except you can actually ask the vans to be present for events, and of course, it does feel a lot more hygienic.

These jelly beans were HUGE. They were about the size of one phalanx of my finger, which is about 2 cm long and a cm wide. They looked more like pebbles.

The Carribean market sells not just food (which it does, though mostly snacks with an abundance of nuts - Adal recommends Macadamia Nuts cos they're cheaper there), but also clothes, accessories, toys, souveneirs, and even holds auctions for laptops and computers!

Fake flowers too!

And surprisingly, what seems to be a portable barber's shop!

The woodwork and plants in Australia are really a lot cheaper than they are in Singapore. The rational, of course, is that OZ is an agricultural country and craft their own wood and grow their own plants, unlike Singapore, which has to import just about everything (therefore hiking the prices up). The charming wheel-barrow with plant you see above only costed $45! In SG, the wood wheel-barrow alone would have easily cost $50 - 60.

For Lunch, Aunt Ruth brought them to a dim sum place nearby which was patronized by many Cantonese (i.e. migrants from Hong Kong or China) and the food was very good. The wait staff asked Adal a series of questions in Cantonese, and he replied swiftly in fluid, but extremely broken Cantonese. Since his accent was probably Singaporean, he would have sounded like a Kangaroo choking on a hairball. But he takes refuge in the fact that it's allowed of tourists to act stupid and talk like foreigners.

After lunch, they went back and Adel slept like a baby. Adal tried valiantly to help Aunt Ruth with weeding her garden, but when he went back into the house to wash a cut from a weed, he saw Adel snoring away blissfully, and decided to join her.

They guiltily woke up around evening, and Uncle Keith had bought home the highly recommended Charcoal Chicken!

Since the shop selling the chips he had recommended was slightly far off, he had bought some from Glen Waverly, and Bryce (centre, picture below) remarked that it wasn't as nice. A&A, though, thought it was quite alright.

Sumptuous feast of Charcoal grilled Chicken, Gravy, corn on a cob, fresh salad, fresh peas, chips (fries), sausages, fresh bread and Aunt Ruth's home-made Zucchini and Mushroom soup (Which tasted fantastic!).

Happy couple

Halfway through the meal, Uncle Keith ran off to his office to get the oysters he had bought for Adal, and Adal was very touched but also very apologetic that they would go to such extremes for him. The only thing he got on his 18th birthday, as he recalled, was a cake from a neighbourhood shop which tasted slightly stale. And on his 21st birthday, his mother forgot all about his birthday, and he bought himself a big bottle of alcohol to forget all about it. He wasn't at ease with the pampering Uncle and Aunt were giving them, but A&A were very touched.

Unfortunately, A&A were also very bad at expressing themselves.

Besides fresh oysters, Uncle Keith also made Adal his specialty - Oysters in XO sauce! It tasted quite good, and despite his initial suspicion of whether steamed oysters would be palatable (his experience with oysters were either fried in an omelette, freshly shucked, or complete stale which led to record-breaking 12 visits to the loo in half a day), Adal actually misses the oysters now.

And that ended our final vacationing day in Melbourne!