Like I need a new hobby…

Beading class on Thursday was lots of fun. A little odd, but lots of fun. When we arrived we were asked what we wanted to make and told to select some beads. We were then taken upstairs where we sat and watched the teacher make stuff and didn’t get to touch our beads at all. I learnt heaps though.

I ended up putting all of my beads back and buying equipment instead: jump ring tool, round nosed pliers and an assortment of findings for projects that I already have beads for at home. I also learnt how to restring pearls – I have some fresh water seed pearls that need restringing.

Here we are in the class. I’m sure the teacher thought we were quite mad when I insisted she take our photo.

After the class we had pudding – pudding was a word I never used in Australia, but it is quite common here, to refer to dessert in general.

Check out the pink table number holder.

Cheesecake, very yummy.

We are making progress with the cat. We had him shipped from Australia on his first day he had a massive fight with the cat next door (next door has 3 cats and 2 dogs) while the dogs barked themselves hoarse and he hasn’t been willing to go outside since. This has changed a little in the past week or so and he’s venturing out more and more.

This is taken through our front door. The advantage of the bars over a screen door is that he can come in and out as he pleases when the front door is open.

We had people over for lunch on Saturday and fatboy even hung around to be petted by the children. Normal behaviour is to hide in the bedroom.

There are different social conventions to do with food here. For example we’ve noticed that here, when you invite people for lunch or dinner they always bring food. When we first arrived I was really offended because we were invited to someone’s place for lunch (we’d never met them, they were a work colleague’s friend) and we were told to bring juice. In Australia we’d never tell strangers to bring food or drink to your house. I’d ask a close friend or family to bring a plate of food, or some juice, but not someone I was meeting for the first time. So that took some getting my head around.

Back to the always bringing food. I had a South African friend explain it for me. She says it has to do with the women feeling guilty that you are feeding their whole family and they haven’t contributed anything. We keep forgetting to take food to people’s places when we’re invited – so we’ve probably been offending huge numbers of people without realising. That being said, I’m going to a baby shower this afternoon and I have food to take. I’m taking scones with jam and cream.

Should be fun.

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