Adelaide

Adelaide was a very nice place to be. A lot of the reasons why I felt this were to do with food. There were food courts in a huge market which served amazing vegetarian food and in the market itself there were big stalls full of all sorts of fruit and vegetables at really, really cheap prices. After not seeing anything like this for a long time it really was very exciting and many times I'd go back to my hostel with far more fruit and veg than I could sensibly eat. (That's not to say it didn't get eaten.) What was equally exciting was that the hostel I stayed in served free apple pie and ice cream every night! Near to where I was staying was the Haighs Chocolate factory. Haighs is an Australian company. When it was started by My Haighs they only sold cakes and biscuits. They then started to sell chocolate which they bought in. When Mr Haighs' grandson took over the company he decided that it would be far more profitable to make the chocolate themselves and set about trying to find out the best ways to make it. He wrote to many chocolate companies asking if he could visit them and learn from how they made it. Of all the companies he wrote to only three wrote back and of those only one said that he could come and see them. This company was Lindt chocolate. They said that he could come and stay with them in Switzerland for as long as he wanted and learn all he needed to know as long as he'd teach Mr Lindt's son English. This he did and after I'd been on a tour of the chocolate factory and tried all of their free samples I can confidently say that Haighs chocolate is as good if not better than Lindt.
Apart from lots of very nice food, Adelaide also had a really good museum. I learnt about the Pacific Islands and their people's culture. Amazingly on Papua New Guinea and the surrounding islands they speak over 1000 languages which is a quarter of all the languages spoken worldwide. There was a section about Aborigines where I saw examples of all the different sorts of tools they used for gathering food, hunting and fighting. I learned about their beliefs, how they dressed, their natural medicines and their history. I learnt that it was in 1844 that the aboriginal children started to be taken away from their parents to 'civilise' them, then in 1911 the aborigines were segregated from the rest of society. I hadn't realised that it wasn't until 1967 that they were given equal rights again.
Whilst I was in Adelaide I worked on a farm in the Adelaide hills for a week which was such hard work that by the time I left I had blisters on my hands. There were three other people there working with me which I was glad of. Our main jobs all had to do with digging or carrying heavy objects. We had to dig dry, hard ground to level it off, dig up grass and then dig holes somewhere else to replant it. We had to carry around buckets full of gravel and place it on the ground we'd leveled to make a path. We had to shift large rocks into a trailer (which was quite fun to ride on the back of) and then heave them out again when they were where they were needed. Some of the nicer jobs we did were cleaning out the chickens and collecting their eggs, cleaning out the fields of some very friendly ponies and painting a stable. Despite all the hard work it was fun at times too and they lady we were staying with was a very good cook so we were fed well.
The last thing I did in Adelaide was see a punk band called NOFX who I had seen once before at a festival in England. It was the first proper gig I'd been to since I left home and it didn't fail to impress. The crowd were really lively and there were a couple of good mosh pits although a guy spraying a fire extinguisher at everyone made the floor wet, so it was quite a mission to stay standing up. Despite a short nose bleed caused by a passing crowd surfer, some bruises and rather painful feet I survived to mosh again.