Asian markets & Moomba festival

Melbourne is a very large city that is subdivided into little suburbs. Lots of big cities do this, but Melbourne is quite formal about it. When you are talking about a place, you reference the suburb so people know where in the city it is. Your address actually lists your suburb, rather than Melbourne, and I'm pretty sure most suburbs have their own mini-city councils. Melbourne is also an incredibly multicultural city. About 40% of residents were not born in Australia. Our AirBnb is in a predominantly Asian suburb (Springvale), specifically Chinese, Thai, Vietnamese and Cambodian.

We have been so busy running around organizing things, on Saturday morning we finally decided it was time to check out Springvale. There is a large pedestrian mall right around the corner from us that is full of Asian shops, markets and food places. The highlights included something call a Feng shui shop that was filled with gold trinkets, and a number of stores that sold everything from clothes to kitchen wares to tools and building supplies. But the real high point was the open food markets!

The fish and meat markets were impressive, but overwhelming. Neither Justin nor I are big seafood people. While all the food is fresh, there was so much of it that the smell was a bit much for us. Same for me with the butcher markets. I enjoy eating meat, but I dislike handling or thinking too much about raw meat. Even though I know the fresh market is way better than industrialized farming, I find the meat market hard to stomach. Once we were through those parts, we got to the fruit and vegetables. Because its an Asian market, of course it was full of super cool Asian vegetables. All kinds of things we had never heard of: Luffa, lotus root, curly cucumbers, Thai eggplant (looks nothing like a non-Thai eggplant), custard apples. Then there were some things that I had heard of before, but never actually seen: taro, durian, winter melon, bitter melon, turmeric. Then there were things that we could identify, but looked very different from the varieties we are used to: grapes, peaches, mangos, and something called 'drinking coconut', which comes with a little tap in the side of the coconut and a straw. I simultaneously want to try everything, and have no idea how to prepare any of it! We weren't feeling bold enough to buy any food in the fresh market, but we did pick up one of those grocery shopping carts (because we are those people now), and a welcome mat for our new place.

Later into the afternoon we headed into the CBD to check out the Moomba festival. If you are curious about what the Moomba festival celebrating, so are we. Even after visiting, we are unsure of what the festival is about, or where the name came from. Moomba takes place in a part along the banks of the Yarra river, which runs just south of the CBD. Its kind of like a carnival - there is a mid-way, rides, and everything is lit up at night. But then there is also a stage with live music. And interesting crowd events like a silent disco and this weird thing where people dress up like bees and you can sign your kid up to interact with them? Then there are live sporting events running in the Yarra all weekend (hence the water ski jumping video on my instagram), and a skatepark with its own competition happening. On the Sunday of Moomba, there is something called the Birdman Rally, where people build their own flying contraptions and try to 'fly' across the Yarra (Here is a link to a news clip about last years competition if you are interested). Then on Monday (which is an holiday for some, but not all, of Victoria), there is a Moomba parade. Oh, and there is a fireworks show every night for all five nights of the festival.

The crowd at Moomba did not give us any context clues for what the festival was about. It is a very family friendly event - there were tons of kids there, and lots of events specifically for children, including a giant projector screen on one of the Yarra banks that exclusively showed kids programming. But there were also a significant number of young adult attendees in what I can only describe as 'festival ware lite' (crop tops, metallics, fringe, psychadelic colours, etc - all paired with neutral bottoms). And then another cohort of skater-teens (which is apparently a universal construct. Skateboarding teenagers look the same in Australia as they do in Canada). Moomba truly does have something for everyone.

It took us a while to look around and take in all the different sights, sounds and smells. I think I forgot to mention - there was a whole row of food trucks where you can get everything from dumplings to stone fired pizza to these fried swirly potatoes on a stick. And in true Melbourne fashion, I'm pretty sure at least half of the trucks were outfitted with espresso machines to make fancy Melbourne coffee. We decided to get some dumplings and donuts. Justin kept on seeing places advertising 'hot jam donuts'. We are guessing this is Melbourne's fried dough of choice right now. For those of you who aren't aware, when we travelled Europe, one of the worldly insights we had was that every country has their own version of a fried dough. Turns out there is even a wiki for it. The hot jam donuts ended up being better than they sound. The jam is way sweeter and smoother than regular jam. I'm not a huge donut person, but they were surprisingly good.

We enjoyed the donuts while watching water ski jumping. A sport we had never heard of before, but is pretty entertaining. Also, turns out the current world champ is a Canadian. The successful jumps were very impressive (they go fast!), and there was one really good wipeout which was cool. But the whole experience was really made by the water ski jump commentators, who continually used phrases that made zero sense to us. Some we were able to decode with google ('absolutely chockas' = its chock full = there's a big crowd; 'absolute rippa' = big jump), but others we still have no idea about ("Nearly went through the front door on that one" - we heard this multiple times about jumpers. No clue what it means).

After getting our fill of Moomba, we hit up the Kaiju brewery on our way home. It was at Kaiju we discovered that Australian beer sizes are different from Canadian ones. This isn't the first time we have had a drink in Australia, but it was the first time we really looked over a beer menu. Justin ended up chatting with the bartender so we could try and figure out sizes. Because of course, Australians use the metric system for everything, not the strange Canadian hybrid of half metric half imperial. So they only know their beer sizes in mLs, not ounces like we are used to. They had 3 sizes listed on the menu: a taste (114 mL aka 4 oz), a pot (285 mL aka 10 oz), and a schooner (425 mL aka 15 oz). By far, schooner is the default size in most places. You can get pints (570 mL or 20 oz) at some places, but not others. I get the impression the liquor laws here are very complex. By this point we were curious, so we looked it up. Australia does have pitchers, but they are only 1,140 mL (40 oz), rather than the 60 oz ones you get at home.

That is all probably more than you wanted to know about Australian beer sizing. But navigating and learning about these kinds of small differences is a significant part of our lives right now. It takes up a lot of our time and energy. Everything is just slightly different from what we know and are used to. We can't just zone out and go into autopilot. Active attention is required to get through a lot of the basic actions of our day. If you are ever wondering why we aren't doing more or seeing more, its because we are tired from re-learning basic facts we used to take for granted, like what size beer we are ordering in a restaurant.