ANZAC Day celebrations

Tuesday was ANZAC Day and we used the day off to have an interdepartmental lunch at our apartment. We had about 35 people over from our interdepartmental household - Treasury, Attorney-General's department, and Finance.

Mel and Sarah at AG had come up with the idea of having roti - a type of Indian flat bread. Now we were too lazy (and cautious) to make the mixture from scratch, but we did drive all the way to the 'town' of Tuggeranong, about 25 minutes from where we live (VERY far by Canberra standards) to buy pre-made roti dough from an Indian grocery store. It was great - you get this long roll of dough, which we cut into pieces, rolled out, and cooked on the barbeque! I guess most Indians would be horrified that we bought pre-made dough in the first place, let alone dared to cook it on the barbeque, but it was so easy and quick, and when you're trying to cater for so many people, it helps to be able to cook 20 roti at once!
















Barbequeing the roti

Everyone brought great food - we had about 8 curries, salads, other barbeque meats and vegies, pastries, ANZAC biscuits, pavlova, lamingtons (yes a real Australian-food focus in the spirit of ANZAC day), cakes, muffins, chocolate, mooncake, ice cream sandwiches... we were really stuffed by the end of the day.















Mel and Sarah

Easter road trip

We spent 4 days in Sydney over Easter. Yen was really nice and let us stay at her apartment in Randwick which was a great location, and a great apartment - thanks Yen!! Friday night Maria and I went to the James Blunt concert - it was awesome. Unfortunately the pictures don't do justice to how close we were - I could see him blink! He was very different in concert to how we expected from his album - much less mellow, more energetic, charismatic. It was only a small venue (maybe 6,000 people?) but totally packed, there were people literally standing on me at the beginning. He has such a beautiful voice.

Anyway.. unfortunately I have hardly any other photos from Sydney on my camera - most of my paltry 128MB memory card was used taking video clips at the concert.



We spent most of Saturday at DFO (Direct Factory Outlets) in Homebush where a couple of the girls spent crazy amounts of money. Saturday night we went to a few places including The World, a pretty cool bar that is famous for its 'Teapots' - they serve cocktails in Chinese teapots! It was pretty hard to get one because they were so popular but we persevered!

On Sunday we caught the ferry from Circular Quay to Manley beach - it was such a nice day to relax, have lunch in front of the water, and walk around the markets. In the evening we had dinner at Coogee beach... because we know we will be beach deprived back in Canberra!




Mirren and Rithy in a Sydney cafe

Welcome to my world

HeLLO! I've been in Canberra for over 2 months now and people back home have been asking to see pics of the apartment or the place in general ... and I realised how few I have taken! But this is my attempt at updating you all on some of the things I've been doing since moving to the nation's Capital.

I'm staying in a 3 bedroom apartment with two friends from Perth - Tai and Melanie - and we have been getting along famously ;) Well maybe not exactly, but we really are pretty good friends - we cook, eat and shop together, and have such long conversations over dinner that I am often sleeping after midnight on weeknights these days... such a change from the Perth days! And then wandering into work the next day half asleep...




I just took a picture of the living area in our apartment - it's not particularly tidy at the moment but it's OK. We are in the process of getting approval to put hooks in the wall to hang up Tai's paintings :P It's such a huge living area we don't know what else to do with all the empty space!





Maria, me, Heather and Shaz at Skyfire. Lee Harding played which was NOT exciting. But a couple of weeks later there was a free concert with Alex Lloyd that was way better!








We made a trip to Sydney a couple of weeks ago, and I'm going again this Easter weekend with some of the other grads. We're going to the James Blunt concert and to hit the shops!















A couple of pictures from my birthday on March 20 - we had dinner at a place in Civic (the city) with the Treasury grads - you can kind of see Mel, Heather, James and Phillip. And Kylie, Mirren and Chrissy made delicious cake :)