St. Patrick's Day!
The people of Australia have a strong tradition of celebrating St. Patrick's Day through lots of drinking, much like the United States. This year, St. Paddy's day coincided with finishing a 10 page research paper that I had due for Australian History. What better reason to celebrate than an Irish Holiday and a job well done? Well, taking the advice to heart Megan and I headed out on the town looking for a good time. Everyone else was at a bar, but we decided it would be a better (and cheaper) option to simply buy a bottle of wine from the liquor store and go to a restaurant, order food and drink it there. Tragedy struck when neither the liquor store or the bottle shop were open. Not discouraged, we walked around town for a bit before deciding to make our way back to the Orient Bar. After a pitcher each, singing along the people doing karaoke sounded like a great idea! Next thing we knew, Ian (Our Resident Director's Friend) bought us more beer, and we were having even more fun! It all happened so fast! We spent the rest of the night dancing and singing with the crowd that had gathered at the Orient. Soon other Notre Dame students were there, and we were all having a great time! It was a night worthy of celebration, and I had an amazing time =)
Wine, Cheese and Chocolate Tour
This morning we left Fremantle around 9:30am for a tour of two wineries, a chocolate store, a brewery, and a coffee house in the Swan River Valley. The tour started out about 10am when they gave us about 45 minutes to sample about nine different wines. It was a free for all to fill up the tiny tasting glasses, but eventually I got to try all of the different wines. I'm not a huge fan of wine, but some of them were pretty tasty, including a sweet white wine and a strong "smoky" chilled red wine. From there we moved on to the second winery. They had wine, of course, but also cheese! And lots of it! From garlic and chive to guoda to some other awesome flavors, the cheese was definitely the highlight of the day! I probably ate too much, but I didn't really feel bad about it because it was soooo good!
We then moved from cheese to an awesome chocolate store. Right when you walked in they have a large bucket of chocolates to sample, and you could try almost anything that they were selling. I tried some caramel and a coffee chocolate, both of which were pretty good, and bought a cookies and cream chocolate (not that different from the US candy bar) and and Irish toffee chocolate, which was amazing! Having a stomach packed full of specialty cheese and quality chocolate is one of the best feelings ever. So it was an amazing day, and an even more wonderful weekend =)
