Darcy's Quest

So we woke up at our own time since it was the second day of the strike. Even though the strike has been quite the inconvenience at times, it’s actually working out in our favour since it’s extending our spring break for a whole extra week! We decided that we would finally go check out the markets that we have been dying to see, so we headed out the door and were ready to see what this market had to offer. It was only a short walk down George Street before we arrived at the big sign that literally just said ‘Market’. I’ve been used to seeing some kind of name such as ‘Pike Place Market’, but our guess is that this is just the generic market! As we walked in we expected to see plenty of food and vegetables, but instead we stepped into cell phone world. The first couple of stands had to be nothing but cell phone accessories, which would be good for someone who had a fancy phone (definitely not us). As we pushed passed the commotion over cell phone covers, we made it to women’s apparel. Lauren went and looked around while I sat on the sideline fiddling with some random stuff. We have noticed that all of the girl clothes are always ’10 Dollars and Under” or “Clothes must go”, but if you look at the men’s clothes you will get jeans and shirts over 60 dollars. For this, I have come to an epiphany: Australia imports the men’s and women’s clothes equally. Yet, the population of men are higher than the population of women, so when the piles upon piles of women’s clothes come to Australia, who buys them? Exactly. No one. So they always have to be marked down, which is not fair if I may add. Lauren’s logic is that they view women as cheap and therefore have to sell their clothes cheap. Not a good image. Anyways, this market had everything! Fake watches, Fake clothing brands, if you want something fake, you should come to the Market on George Street! We finally reached the produce, which was the main reason we came to the market. I must say, we were impressed with how low the prices were! Usually a green pepper at Coles cost $6.98/kg but a green pepper at the Market only cost $2.50/kg! They also had apples, oranges, bananas and strawberries at an extremely low price! Needless to say we were both more than excited! We decided not to buy anything today since we had to get back and meet our friend Molly at Redfern Station before we set off to the Easter show. We left the market and noticed a Men’s Cuts place that did haircuts for $10. I really wanted to get my hair cut since it was getting a bit shaggy, but I was a little scared since its Australia (I know, someone’s going to say something about me being scared to get my haircut here). Maybe another day I’ll have the nerve. As we arrived at Redfern Station, we received a text from her saying she would be a couple minutes late, so we took the opportunity to see how much train tickets to Wollongong and New Castle would be. Surprisingly, to go to both places it only cost 8 dollars each! We definitely knew that we were going to go to these places now that it is so cheap! Molly arrived a few minutes late just as she said she would and then we were off to Olympic Park/Easter Show. We weren’t quite sure what the Olympic Park was until we arrived and found out it was where they held the 2000 Olympics! We weren’t sure where to go so we headed to the visitor center that was just right up the road. When we walked into the visitor’s center it felt as if we walked into the freezer, but we weren’t complaining since it was a scorcher that day! We took a map and decided to go check out the Olympic pool where Michael Phelps and all the other Olympic swimmers swam! It was a pretty cool place to see!

Us being fishies

Medals outside the Olympic Pool.

After the pool, we decided to head to the warm up center. The place wasn’t as special since we were standing behind a gated fence, so we finally decided to make our way to the Easter Show! Since we decided to get half price tickets we had to wait until five o’clock to get in but that only left us time to wander down to another Olympic sight.

A random water fall that we were amazed by!

Lauren and Molly walking through the memorial park where all the
Olympic athletes names are listed on these poles.

It was surrounded by a pond full of birds and what we found were ducks. The water didn’t look very appealing though so we felt bad for the poor duckies. Finally, at exactly five o’clock they opened the gates to let everybody else in! We knew where we wanted to go first; Woolworth’s taste testing. We were all very hungry and had been promised food samples so of course we were there. The food was definitely worth it since we tried bread, smoked salmon, vegetable chips, yogurt with chocolate candies called Smarties, as well as me trying some hot sauce.

I was literally sweating after this for about ten minutes!

This is the picture of me sweating after I took the challenge to try the hottest hot sauce. This company had a ranking of their hot sauce from 1 to 10 and this particular sauce was an 10++. Let me put it in simple terms, it was hot! I tried to be a man and couldn’t do it. But, I did get a good ‘I survived’ lanyard, so that made it all worth it to me! All Lauren heard for the next ten minutes was ‘that was so hot, that was so hot!” Once he had our fill we venture to another arena to check out the some events and lucky for us it was rodeo time! Molly is actually very into the rodeo since she used to own a horse, and well we were interested too! It was the city verses the country and through several competitions like bull riding, calf roping and barrel racing the country was victorious! The south will rise again is what we say about that! Joking.

Lauren loved this rodeo sign.

Proof of how high a bull can get off the ground.

No fair/Easter Show is complete without some fried food so we began our search for anything – funnel cakes, candied apples, fried oreos (that’s what we really wanted). However, all we found was fried corned dogs, really that’s the best they could do? And turkey legs, but really we should say half a turkey leg. Either the chicken’s here have guinea pig legs or someone was chopping on those turkey legs behind the scenes. Regardless we refused to spend 10 bucks on a bit of meat each. We finally settled with sharing a bucket of ribbon fries as we headed back to the arena to check out a show called Darcy’s Quest. It looked very promising whenever the show started out with motor cross bikes, four wheelers, and huge monster trucks!

This was apparently a monster truck? We were all confused too!

 This soon changed whenever a 40 foot giant made out of metal walked out. This was Darcy.

 And it just got weirder and weirder from there! At one point Darcy had to walk all the way around the arena and for someone who is that tall you would think that she’d be able to walk fast, but that is where you are wrong. Took nearly 45 minutes and by then we were completely confused by the show and couldn’t stand another minute of Darcy’s voice anyways. But, if you’ve never seen a 40 foot giant shake her groove thang while she’s teaching the audience her dance then you are truly missing out. We got out while we could to see what else the Easter Show had to offer. We had previously walked around the whole area while in search of the fried food. We had hopes that we could ride some rides at a reasonable price.

In Australia, they don't care.

However, that hope was crushed whenever we looked up and saw the Vortex tumbling around and then looked down to see that it was 15 coupons and at $1.10 a coupon, that’s over $15 bucks! We quickly decided we were going to be riding any rides, sadly. But on the positive side there was a band playing right outside the arena. It consisted of two guys, one from New Zealand and one from Australia! They played all the greatest songs from every generation and genre so we had a great time!