Well we've been back in Perth now for 1 and a half weeks and we have done very little... it's been great!

Cassy treated us to Hot Chocolates at Perth Airport, before departing for Phuket leaving us a car for the following fortnight, and since then we have been slowly investigating the city and its suburbs. The biggest event was the arrival of Dook (Mel's South African uncle), Liana and Coto and we spent some time catching up with them before having a large family dinner at Bibek Chan's Malaysian restaurant - which was nice and Mel got Fluffy Clouds which made her even happier!

The next day Dook etc. departed and we took Amy Rose into the city for Stu's first expore of the city. We went to the Royal Mint and weighed ourselves - Amy was worth 900,000 dollars, Stu 2.1 million! That is, if we had been made out of gold! We watched a smelting demonstration with a very expensive gold bar which unfortunately we failed to remove from the museum, and received a free coin because we had a voucher. We let amy keep the 5 cent piece they gave us!

We visited the Bell Tower which sits on the river, and walked through London Court which was quite amusing, it being a mocked up Tudor Street with lots of quaint "British" shops in it. We also took a walk to take Amy bowling to find the alley had shut down. However it did cause Stu to reminice on the days of Cosmic Bowling! That evening we went to a Chinese in Subiaco with Katie and John as they were leaving for Europe the next day, and got to meet their friends, including the local weather girl!

We hit a few beaches and wandered around sleepy market suburbs (wierdly they're all called city's). On Sunday we arranged to go to Freemantle with Charlie to see the Velux 5 Oceans Race depart on its second leg. This is a race from Bilbao to Freo to Norfolk, Virginia to Bilbao singlehanded, and the boats are quite impressive, even if two of the three British competitors were wiped out on the first leg. The third one was Sir Robin, the first even man to sail singlehandedly around the world, and the boat is owned by SAGA! There was a free BBQ which we gorged ourselves on hot dogs from... And Charlie bought us ice cream!

We went shopping in Perth and spent a day exploring King's Park, which contains a whole 4 species of tree... our guide began to get repetitive after a while! We even managed to go out of town to pick up another Sizzler's lunch!

Last night we returned to King's Park for the moonlight cinema, which was a christmas present! We opted to see United 93, which was quite good although Mel found the camera work quite disorientating!

Today we went to the local 50m pool! And Stu discovered he can no longer swim more than 100m in one go... missing all those training sessions!

Lots of love from the place with absolutely ridiculous freeway junctions,

Stu and Mel

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