Xmas Hols 2003 -Preparations
12/24/2003
Madly shopping for food for Christmas, we waited till the last minute. It’s so hot that food must be very fresh or it spoils. We went to Rusty’s, an open-air market in the middle of town. Very colorful and noisy, it is a destination point for many backpackers. The shiny purple Passion fruit are my favorite!
Lychee are so fresh here that they are an attractive orange peach, I barely recognized them brown and wizened as both fruits are- even in California where stuff is so fresh.
The weakened dollar and high taxes on everything makes prices so expensive I can hardly believe it. My mom wanted us to make pumpkin pie, but we couldn’t find any pumpkin- even though we searched all over. We decided to make an almond tart instead.
I just read Daughter of Fortune by Isabel Allande this afternoon. It feels so luxurious just to read as much as I want. That’s something I don’t do often. Great book I enjoyed it tremendously.
Dinner at the Reef House restaurant was great. An old plantation style house was converted into a grand hotel. The restaurant sits next to the ocean, where cool breezes skim off the gently lapping waves. The food was excellent, and since Peter the chef (is the husband of one of Dad’s nurses- Nancy ) , we got special treatment. Dad loves their lunchtime soufflé, which the stuffy French waiter assured us, was NOT available. So Dad went back to say hi to Peter and sure enough he got his soufflé. We had mostly seafood dishes- all fresh from the ocean. We had 2 different types of Australian wine both excellent. It’s hard to pick wrong I think.
Nancy and Peter (both really nice), are from East Timor and Cairns/Darwin, and speak Portuguese at home.
