Christmas in Australia

Christmas in Australia was very nice. I went back there for two week with my wife and daughter. Christmas for us is a very hot time, summer starts in December. Many people think that is strange, but for us it is normal to have Christmas in summer. A lot of people say "What about Santa? What does he wear?" I hate to be the person to have to tell them "SANTA DOES NOT EXIST" He is just a character. It does not matter if it is hot or cold, He lives in people's minds and imaginations. It does not matter what he wears. Does Mickey Mouse wear a kimono in Tokyo Disneyland? Does Anpan man put on a jacket in winter? Maybe he does, I don't know.


Anyway, Christmas in Australia is different depending on your age - if you are a young child, it is a time for getting presents, if you are an adult, it is a time for eating and drinking A LOT! I am an adult, but I am a child at heart, so I enjoyed both sides. Every day we drank alcohol - not a lot, but a steady stream of alcohol poured down my throat. On a hot day, a beer in the afternoon is very refreshing. Later on, during dinner, we would have wine because both my parents and my wife love wine. Before going to bed, we would drink some whiskey or brandy.


In Australia you can get a lot of fruit very cheap, so I ate a lot of fruit while I was there - dark cherries, mangoes, nectarines, apricots. I love apricots. We used to have an apricot tree in my backyard when I was younger. The birds used to eat most of the apricots, but you can pick an apricot when it is hard, and it gets soft later so we picked a lot before the birds could get them. The tree is gone now, but there are still plenty of fruit trees in the garden. When I was a child, we had so many fruit trees - three kinds of plums (yellow, red and purple), figs, apples, pears, grapefruits, and of course apricots. The pears were always too hard to eat, and the birds got most of the apples but we used to eat a lot of the plums. Jam was made from the plums and the figs. The grapefruits were eaten for breakfast, which seems to be the only time we eat grapefruits.


In Australia we have many people who come from the middle east, mostly Turkey and Lebanon. These people have some very nice food. I love sweet food, and the Turks and Lebanese make some good sweets. One is a Lebanese sweet called Halva. It is made of sesame oil and sugar, sometimes vanilla or some kinds of nuts. They mix it all up into a paste and then let the paste turn into a hard block. When you eat it, you slice a piece off the block with a knife. I brought some back to my office as omiyage. Every Japanese person who tried it had the same two expressions on their face - first they made a polite expression when I offered the Halva to them. It is a delicious food, but it does not look very nice - a kind of grey block - so I think people did not really want to eat it so much when they saw it. BUT when they ate it, everyone had the same expression of surprise on their face. "OH!....Oishi!......Nanda!" It was very funny.

▼▽▼▼【講師】Eddie先生のバックナンバー━━━━━━━━
・【The World of Sweets. Part 4】2009.11.27 (Fri)

ブログランキングに参加しています。
下記の3つをクリックして、応援していただけると嬉しいです。
▼Please help us increase our blog ranking by clicking below!▼

We thank you for your continued support!

Posted By: Eddie Palmer on January 22, 2010