Adventures in Sydney with The Lady Llama. Perfect day 1: Clothes. Zumbo. Photos.

My weekend was so fantastic I don't even know where to begin! I do know that being back to routine and reality is going to be hard this week, but I know I'll get through with thoughts that I'm truly loved and admired.

I flew to Sydney early Friday morning. I was exhausted from the event at work on Thursday, but I was so excited about my trip, it was like the day before Christmas! My flight was delayed and so I was placed on an earlier flight which was also delayed. Delayed flights mean free Foxtel, so I watched bogan rock on the music channel! Nothing like November Rain at 700 feet.

My flight got in at 9.10 am and I set off on the airport shuttle train to the city to meet my lovely blogger friend The Lady Llama for the first time. She greeted me with a handmade felt rose and a hug, and we didn't stop talking for five hours!

 

The taxi driver who took us to my hotel looked at me and told me I'm beautiful, twice. Wow. And at that moment, I knew it was going to be a great day - and I felt beautiful all weekend.

We were tourists, training, bussing and walking it. Ouch my feet. Us on the bus!

The Lady Llama is so so wonderful. She is stylish, super beautiful, and takes great photos. I had a wonderful day with her.

We went looking at clothes - I am going to dedicate a whole blog entry to this, but for now here are a few pictures for you.

 

 

She tried to convince me to buy this hat, but wearing the hat for this photo satisfied me.

I wondered whether ducky hat would go with this skirt?

We stopped in at the delicious Simon Johnson store in Pyrmont. I got excited at the fromagerie room, and vowed to make Fromagerie my middle name by deedpoll.

SO MUCH CHEESE! Cheese for the tasting.

 Cheese for the lusting.

And cheese for simultaneous photographing.

 Simon Johnson is a foodie heaven.

 So many bottles and jars of gourmet goodness.

Our mission, however, was to find another foodie heaven. Not the pharmacy, they only sell jellybeans and meal replacement bars.

It didn't matter if we only had dessert for a meal at dessert king Adriano Zumbo. In theory. Only, after walking about three kilometres, we discovered the cafe version of Zumbo had gone from Balmain, and we had to make do with the hole in the wall patisserie version.

So we did have a meal before Zumbo. I had the brunch that transcends cities - or my limited brunching palate when approaching new and not very notable cafes - salmon, avocado and scrambled eggs. It was good.

Back to Zumbo after a proper meal. We saw this dog with a rugby top on. I patted him. His name is Junior. He was bogan, like his owner. I mean that in a nice way - I have a thing for bogan males.

Zumbo was like Wonka. So many delightful desserts...

 With whimsical names...

 And suggestive names...

And intricate designs.

The myriad of choice was marred by knowing that we had to eat our dessert in gazebo type arrangement.

I love that photo The Lady Llama took. We sat next to the man in the foreground. He showed us some pictures of penguins in the newspaper he read.

So bearing in mind our dining arrangements, I got something simple to eat then, and take away.

I got the milo milkshake cake thingy, and four macarons - blueberry mudcake, rice pudding and mango. I ate a rice pudding one on Friday. It tasted exactly like rice pudding. I could eat a million. I am saving the rest for after work treats.

The milo thingy on the other hand, made me feel like I had food regret. It was delicious, but I wish I had have gotten the corn on the cob dessert.

Still, I ate my dessert and enjoyed it. There are layers of thick dark chocolate discs, cake, mousse, chocolate slivers, milo powder, and milky milo. Yum!

Thank you so much to The Lady Llama for taking the pictures, some that you see here, and blogging about our day out. It was so much fun! I've definitely made a friend for life.

 ♥♥♥

Enough about me, let's talk about YOU for a minute: Luscious Llama

Welcome to the Enough about me, let's talk about YOU for a minute series on my blog. It's to celebrate my birthday and blogiversary week. Each day until and including 15 December I will feature a guest blogger who I admire. I hope you enjoy the series as much as I did collating it.

If you haven't seen Lanelle Elizabeth's blog, Luscious Llama yet, you should visit it pronto. She shares snapshots of her life, in word and photo form. She is a very talented photographer. You will see that in her entry below.

I also like the way she dresses. And her lips are seriously enviable. Luscious in fact.

She has a cool boyfriend called Mr Maus. He made her this funny card.

Luscious Llama's a teacher in training. Her enthusiasm and passion for teaching, as well as her intellect makes me confident that future generations of students are going to be in safe hands. I liked her 'I love teaching' entry.

And she loves stationery (me too!). This blog entry about packing for teaching prac excited me no end.

Go give Luscious Llama some love. She deserves it!

Guest blog by Lanelle Elizabeth:

Carly as most of you readers know is a wonderfully interesting and exuberant person. She found me through my now defunct University Literacy course blog, on our mutual devotion on antiquities such as May Gibb’s Gumnut babies. Henceforth I recently reignited my interest in blogging – something I’ve done on and off since my high school years.

My name is Lanelle. I am fairly young, have nearly finished a double degree at University and I plan to become an art teacher. Currently I freelance as a fine art photojournalist. I’ve exhibited work in numerous regional and city galleries in NSW. Other than that I live a pretty standard life somewhere between Newcastle and Sydney.

Blogging, alongside the internet has been the growth chart against which I’ve lived my life. I’m twenty-two now and my family first obtained a computer in 1990. I suppose I never really considered diary making and so forth because I never had anything to write home about till I started commuting into Newcastle for high school everyday. For that I started with the Livejournal platform, which allowed me a glimpse into the lives of other persons in my year cohort at school which I would not normally get to know. I enjoyed reading about their thoughts and kept mine and I think this is how I became interested in writing, moreso than posting pictures and what not. Livejournal for me was the centre of my life from late 2003 onwards and I kept it till I was entered into a HSC blogging competition in 2006, my final year of school. It wasn’t an official competition by departmental standards or anything of the sort but a competition that sort of ran on an unofficial HSC advice forum website – kind of like vogueforums for high school kids who are more interested in pop culture and insulting one another’s intelligence, than style notes or the latest designer for Target collaboration.

To get selected, I had to compose a short piece on why I would be a suitable candidate. I don’t remember the particulars but I did include that I was Asian, a band photographer and lived in a very ‘white’ regional part of NSW, had a ridiculous amount of interests that I loved the arts, wasn’t bothered with mathematics and wasn’t in it for prizes or anything. I simply wanted to meet new people that were interesting an around about age from other places.

There were 9 of us to start off with, 4 schoolgirls and 5 schoolboys from the eastern seaboard areas. I was lucky enough to make the first culling round, where the 3 other girls were voted out. This I thought was unfortunate because I was basically the only girl amongst 5 boys. So I got a lot of the female votes I believe simply because I was the only school girl left. Some other bloggers made their entire Year 12 cohorts vote for them but I only told a few friends because I didn’t want to make a scene within my already bizarre high school (I attended a performing arts school).

I would write about things that happened in my day, subject content I found pointless, silly things my pet cat would do, my anxieties, my joys, mindless trivial things like what to put on your Year 12 jersey, food I liked to gorge myself on, troubles in my life, my less-than traditional Asian family, pictures of my HSC art project, and just life basically. For some reason my blogging style seem to appeal to a wide variety of people which have gained me some of the loveliest of friends post-HSC. Best of all it also gained me my current boyfriend, Mr Maus who’s good mate had entered in the competition and gotten his entire year to vote for him and write awful comments (of the trolling variety) on people’s blogs. Nevertheless Mr Maus could never find it in his heart to write something nasty about me and we ended up keeping in touch, meeting up and falling in love once the competition was all over. So that is my nice little story about why blogging has been a very important part of my young life so far.

I think my manner of writing is fairly predicable – I don’t have an original writing style, given that my creative abilities lie within photography but I do enjoy expressing myself. I also love reflection and in writing this particular post I can remember the kind of person I was back then – and how all these experiences have shaped the person I am now. I think that blogging, particularly as it is a typed form, offers a very interesting introspective methodology on which we can see ourselves live to this modern age. It seems to me, a new kind of historical footprint. It's one that requires us to carefully choose our words and opinions but one that finds us open to the possibilities of a global community.

And that folks, is the end, and here I leave you with some pictures from my life 09-10.

Me and Mr Maus on Skype

My Sydney loves at some fancy place.

An Andy Warhol 21st.

Morpeth Times with Newcastle Loves

Cats are excellent. My favourite domestic creature.

This is me on Bastille Day in Bordeaux.

St Emilion, the loveliest vineyard in Gironde

I had two 21sts, this is one of them.

Our first picture together after 6 months of being in different countries

Bastille Day with Excellent Europeans.

My Newcastle lovelies.

Me in my teacher mode - photography is fun with Year 12 kids.

I went to Japan with these people, we have reunions biannually.

I'm a photographer to The People, particularly young and not very wealthy people. But I love it!

My high school friends. We graduated nearly 5 years ago.

http://luscious-llama.blogspot.com