A Visit From Friends

As we hugged goodbye, Jennifer and I said the usual things, like "it was so good to see you" and "have a safe trip", but Tom simply said, "have a nice life."  It made me laugh and I said to him, "I'm pretty sure you said the exact same thing when we said goodbye in Sydney about 6 weeks ago."  He grinned back and simply stated, "probably."  He's absolutely right though - each time we say goodbye we never really know if we'll ever see each other again.  We're still heading in separate directions and it's a big country.  Either way, I'm very glad we were able to spend the afternoon together yesterday.

Tom isn't really into that many things, Jennifer said he likes to golf and that's about it.  There isn't a ton to do in Adelaide if you're not interested in many things, and the things that might be interesting cost money, and since they also haven't worked since they arrived they'd rather not spend too much money.  It was decided that even Tom would enjoy a tour of a chocolate factory, and we were lucky enough to be able to get booked into a tour at Haigh's Chocolate factory.  We had lunch and then started our walk across town looking forward to some chocolate tasting. Just walking into the store front was like a little piece of paradise, it smelled absolutely amazing.  It was a short, but very interesting tour, they explained the whole process of making their chocolate, start to finish.  They do a ton of it by hand - rolling the truffles, decorating the chocolates, they even hand wrap them all (even the egg from this post).  It's a fourth generation, family owned company and they've won lots of awards for their chocolates.  And get this, if you work there you can eat as much chocolate as you want.  Seriously.  And, because they do so much of the stuff by hand, a chocolate from every single batch has to be tested to make sure they're good, and that something wasn't left out.  Our guide told us her day to test is the chocolates is every other Monday.  So apparently I was searching for the wrong kind of job while here in Adelaide...

So after starting and ending our tour with chocolate (they really know how to give a tour, sandwiching the information with chocolates), we had a free coffee and headed back into town.  We were going to bike to the beach, but Tom doesn't really like the beach and it was already 3pm and it's about 12 km away we decided to go visit the Botanic Gardens instead.  On the edge of the gardens is the National Wine Centre of Australia, so we stopped in there, but the exhibits and tours were closed due to renovations.  Jennifer and I had a chat with one of the employees though and she was so helpful.  She gave us lots of tips on finding work in Australia and websites that would help us.  So, although we didn't get a tour, it was definitely worth stopping.  They even gave us some recommendations for where to have dinner.

We wandered along Rundle Street checking the menu's of all the little cafes and restaurants and ended up stopping at The Austral.  We had dinner (fantastic burgers) and they had a trivia night at 7pm so we stuck around for that.  As the other tables started showing up we realized we didn't really have a shot.  All the other teams had a minimum of 6 people and Adelaide is full of college kids...  We didn't do too bad on the first half, but the second half had way too many Australian questions and we didn't have an Australian on our team.  We don't know Australian actors or Prime Ministers or soccer players...  Oh well, we still had lots of fun.  We were told when we started that the average score is 30 and we managed to get 32 in the end....and come in at last place. Due to our poor finish we won a jug of beer anyway.  I'm sure the person Tom gave it away too was appreciative.  So it was a nice day and hopefully we can meet up again somewhere, sometime, in the next year.