We have had a quietish weekend this weekend as we are going away next weekend. Had another aussie barbie on Friday night with our housemates out on the verandah - i ended up drinking at least a bottle of wine which went straight to my head!! Had a really good laugh with everyone.

Yesterday we went to the Ekka which is the Royal Queensland Show, it runs for 10 days and we get a public holiday for it on Wed 15th but instead we went with Damian who lives in the downstairs part of the house. It's spread out over a huge area and has an International Village with loads of food things, we had Sushi for lunch - Iain was eating tuna, salmon and crab - getting very adventerous! I had this big Labenese flat bread - kind of loooked like a pizza but had cinamon over it - very nice and naughty!

We saw Latin/Salsa and jazz dance shows, an interesting Aboriginal Dance show, all the farm animals and giant bales of sheep wool for sale (quite expensive too!!). In the big arena we watched the showjumping, horse drawn carriage show and tentpegging (we though it was to do with putting up tents but it's a competative horse sport where each competitor has a big pole a scewers a block as he's riding - very strange!

We got our Showbags, chocci ones, and a fudge/nuts one and pigged out! They also had amazing ice cream where the whole cone was filled with fresh strawberries and then homemade strawberry ice-cream with a strawberry on top-mmmm!!

We also watched a "Woodchopping" competition were men (except 1 event which was for very menish women!!) literally chop blocks of wood and the fastest person to get through the block moves to the next round, it is quite big over here and they even have handicaps - deadly serious competition! Quite entertaining to watch

In the evening we watched 2 live bands, a Brisbane 1 called "Small mercies" and a Sydney 1 called "Beautiful Girls" - 1 st were really good and i got 2 free albums and a dvd of them!

We also saw freestyle yamaha motocycle which was fantastic - they did the most amazing show - very daredevilish!

The show ended with the best fireworks display i've seen - lasted a full 15mins and then we headed home on the train - greatday out!

My alarm went off this morning at 5:20am (!) to do a 10km race but we were just too tired so we went back to sleep and got up later and went for a very slow 12km run ourselves.

The results of the Bridge to Brisbane race last Sunday were published in the local newspaper this morning and Iain came 945 and i came 2120 out of about 27,000 - majority of people were walkers/fundraisers but Iain did pretty damn well!! We are going to keep the newspaper cut out for our scrap book as evidence!

Hopefully, on our day off this Wednesday, we are going to go on an afternoon sail. Damian is a keen sailor and sails with a guy who owns his own boat so he is going to ask the skipper if we can come along - it would be a great day out if we could!

Anyway, off home for a homemade curry, really gotinto making our own currie's from scratch over here - a proper little wife.... (!!)

Oh i nearly forget that today ( mum i hopwe u are sitting down as you will be in shock...) we joined the library (which is free and so are book hires up to 20 in 1 go!) and borrowed a road map for our trip next weekend and each of us got a book to read.... (me reading a book - this is a 1st!!) Iain got Mohammad Ali biography and i got the biography of an Afghan women living through the war ( i impressed myself - lets see if i finish it this time!)

Speak soon

C xx