Darwin, Northern Territory
A relaxing day around town: go to the mall, see a movie, do some internet. Then a walk on the beach looking for shells.
It's in shopping malls where I have the hardest time remembering I'm not in America. Today in the Mexican food section of Coles supermarket, as I was checking out the Old El Paso Gordita Kit to see if it was fully self-contained (it wasn't), I heard two blokes chatting to each other, and thought "hey, what are two Aussies doing here??!?". Duh, Dan, this is Australia.
It was a boring day... and a public holiday. It's Picnic Day! We didn't have a picnic, but we did go shopping at Kmart (more. socks!), and Coles for groceries. We also went on a book buying binge at Dymock's and the ABC shop... now that we know it's easy to ship printed matter home, we're buying a fair number of books and shipping them back. For the record, it's A$60 to ship 16 kilos of books home... or in US terms, that's 90 cents per pound for books. Then we drove to the cinema and watched the utterly boring Windtalkers... the first movie we've walked out of in a very long time. It's utter garbage. Should've gone straight to video.
And then... some Internetting, and a drive back to the cabin to do more laundry. I walked down to the beach and checked out the shells, there were some good ones! I took a few back; sadly one of them had a hermit crab in it. I let it go in the planter outside the room.
In the evening, I repacked some stuff for a 'go back' package. I'm finding that I'm just not wearing many different clothes... I'm cycling through the same three pairs of shorts and half dozen shirts. I'll keep a pair of jeans, but other than that I'll just ship all the old stuff home. Chris spent all night reading Richard Branson's autobiography, and highly recommends it. I'll make that my next book.
Weird Wildlife Sighting
That hermit crab I found in the shell on the beach. Sniff!