Glorious Darwin!

I haven't had a chance to tell you about my trip to Darwin last week. I went up with M and F, a linguist formerly employed at the Katherine Lang Centre and now working on her doctorate. It was a car swap thing where F had a car and needed to get a different one in Darwin, so M offered to drive one back. I went along for the ride.

Darwin was fantastic! The highlights were the two outdoor markets we went to. The Saturday market at Parap was huge (maybe any size market would look huge to me at this point, but it was a lot bigger than Chico's market and Darwin is not bigger than Chico). There was lots of fresh tropical produce--fruits and veggies--and lots of great hot cooked Asian food and smoothie and lassi makers and a couple of plant stalls. Then there were textiles, sarongs, dresses, etc. and arts and crafts like homemade soaps and hammocks and shoes and great witch hats that looked like they were made out of bark. I mostly just stuffed myself on yummy food at that market, bought some nice cards and a small gift for my sis (sorry, sis, haven't sent it yet!).

M bought a bunch of great clothes: a wrap-around dress, wrap-around pants, Thai fisher pants, a couple of sarongs for brightening up her room.

Sunday morning on our way out of town we went to another market at Rapid Creek. Again, very multi-ethnic, with most sellers speaking English with some sort of foreign accent: mostly Asian, like Thai, Indonesian, Malaysian, Chinese, but also Italian, Dutch, Scottish. There was way more produce at this market and not so much of the other stuff, but still with some prepared foods. I had myself my third fresh-tropical-fruit smoothie of the weekend and bought a sticky-rice-banana-coconut-milk yummy wrapped in banana leaf to take back to Justin. I bought a lot of fruit and veg there, including a green coconut (for Justin) and the cooking greens pictured below. Anybody know what it is?

I also bought plants for the house and garden. I'll post pictures at another time.

Oh, and there was a cyclone warning while we were in Darwin. M and I returned to the hostel Saturday night to find a notice in our room that we should put together an emergency kit and directions on where to go if there should be an evacuation. So at ten p.m. we were down at the supermarket buying tinned tuna and candles. Overheard while waiting to check out:
local teenage boy 1: look at all the cyclone stuff at twice the price! (pointing to big displays of candles, flashlights, etc.)
local teenage boy 2: my mom has a video store and when there's a cyclone, she always gets super busy cuz people just sit at home watching movies. But then the power goes out and they can't watch 'em anyway! (he seemed to derive quite a bit of pleasure from this irony)
local boy 1: No way. We have a generator. I can still use my x-box when there's no power.

Just in case you were wondering what it'd be like to grow up in Darwin.