Happy Easter!

Happy Easter everyone! We’re proud to report that we all managed to get our butts up and to the Sacred Heart Cathedral for 8:30 a.m. Mass. We’re also proud to report that Jen’s plan to wake up at 6 a.m. for a run didn’t quite work out…makes the rest of us non-worky-outy people feel so much better!! Matt, of course, managed to wake up early for a long walk (every time we get together at a pool, Matt is the only one who swims while the rest of us “wade” and work on our tans.) After a somber Easter service, we went home to our host families for Easter lunch.

We met up again at 1 p.m. to go to the Bendigo Winemakers Festival in Castelmaine. You’re not new, so you know how this team “sampled” the local wines. We also got a cheese fix with more blue vein cheese, soft white cheese, quince paste and bikkies. We love Australia!!

So, here we are again, sitting around a table as a team, reviewing the schedule for the next couple of days…again. What are we going to do once we return to Nebraska? How are we going to manage to get through our day-to-day lives withour our team leader, Judy, to review our schedules with us? We refuse to think about life after Australia…we’ve got less than a week left and we’re planning to make the most of it! We’ll start tonight with a gathering at the local pub…nothing says Happy Easter like pub food and drinks!

Are you going to eat that?

We started our first day of the Easter Weekend by meeting up at Sacred Heart Cathedral (except Matt, who ditched us for breakfast with his host family). It was transfer day AGAIN, so we thought we’d start the day with a little religious observation – not really. We wanted to visit Sacred Heart Cathedral, because it’s an amazingly beautiful building and we were scoping out a location for Easter Sunday service (by the way, it’s the last Gothic Church built in the world).

After our cultural moment, we went to the Bendigo Art Gallery Café (not for the art…for the food and drink, of course) and had the best Lemon Tart in OUR LIVES!!!! FYI – we’ve tried lemon desserts at every single eating opportunity, so WE KNOW our lemon tart.

We then transferred from RC Bendigo to RC Kangaroo Flat over lunch at the Hole In One Park – and according to Trevor (who’s driving our car right now as we write this blog), they’re the best hosts we’ve ever had (he’s Matt’s current host dad).

It can’t always be fun and games, so the five of us had to get together for some real work. After all, we have a presentation on Tuesday in front of 200 of our newest friends at our farewell dinner, so we rallied to decide how to summarize our amazing trip in a whopping 15 minutes. Stay tuned – we’re going to rock the place!

Once again, Matt had to steal the show with how much better he is than the rest of us at the Bendigo Easter Weekend Carnival. He jumped on one of those crazy whirly rides (after a monster dinner, no less), with Jen’s host mom, Deb. Why do we continue to be surprised by The Amazing Matt!?

Dinner at The Match café was uber-yum, but the one thing that’s happened on this trip is that Matt and Aaron have lost all privileges on ordering their own food. It’s not so much that they’re making bad choices, but Jen and I can never decide what we want, so we choose for everyone…then we don’t have to make a decision (we’re so clever!!). In our defense, we haven’t heard the guys complain (but who would really care if they did).

Afterwards, we gathered at Jen’s host family’s house and, lo and behold, they had a hot tub and pool that needed to be broken in. So us, being the kind and polite Americans that we are, couldn’t refuse the offer to chill out in the pool. It was another late night and the 8:30 a.m. Easter Sunday Mass will be here sooner than we’d like…..

Stinky Friday

Bendigo on Friday was a day filled with local experiences, delicious food (of course) and stinky cheese. We started the day at Bendigo Pottery where it took every ounce of willpower to NOT purchase all of the great pottery that was available. I’m proud to report that I managed to talk both Aaron and Jen off of the ledge…Aaron was eying a gigantic red vase made by a local artist (beautiful, but really, how is he going to get that home) and Jen was considering the purchase of a large white tray (she eats cake mix…need I say more?!).

Most of us walked away with a few small purchases…after all, pottery can be heavy and two of us have already paid the overweight charge on luggage on the way out here. Shopping always brings on an appetite, so our next obvious stop was at Big Hill Winery where we sampled (drank) our fair share of Shiraz (the regional recommendation) and had one of the best lunches to date. With some time to spare, we visited the Central Deborah Mine for a bit of culture and history. After such an exhausting morning, we all returned to our host families for a little nap prior to the evening gathering in Sutton Grange.

Jen’s host family lives on a working sheep farm in the valley of Mt Alexander. Imagine a small cluster of granite buildings (built in the 1870s) in the middle of the open range with the mountain as your backyard. Picturesque is an understatement. After we all had a chance to tour the property and learn about the history of the buildings and the farmstead, we settled in for a relaxing evening of great food, amazing local wine (provided by a fellow Rotarian who owns a vineyard) and the stinkiest cheese we’ve ever had in our lives!

It was the night when Matt again surprised all of us by eating this cheese not just once, but TWICE. The cheese was a source of delight for the cheese conisseures among us, but also served as entertainment for those of us who couldn’t appreciate such a pungent treat. So the biggest question is, “why did Matt eat it twice if it was so bad?

According to Matt, he doubted his taste buds and seriously doubted something could taste so bad. We have some photos if you want to see the real reaction. No offense, Heather and Andrew – your party was PHENOMENAL, but the cheese was not a hit with the Americans. We can appreciate fine wine, but our palette has yet to learn cheese.

P.S. – to our American Friends – all of us have now managed to see kangaroos in the wild…. So quit asking - it’s like seeing a wild deer in Nebraska.