Australian Beer is terrible...

This morning, David and I walked along a pathway that would bring us to Shelley Beach, which is visible from Manly Beach. Along the pathway we encountered several interesting things. There was a pool that was filled with the ocean water, but along the side of the path.Here's the wall of the pool with some sculptures.


Here's another angle of the pool that gives you an idea of what it was facing. Across the pool is Manly Beach.

We saw this lizard on land side of the pathway.


As we approached Shelley Beach, the side of the path had all these little sculptures/statues as part of the wall. Here was my favorite one.


On our way back, you could see along the northern coast line and how there are beaches at every inlet. We ended up stopping at a restaurant that was halfway between Shelley and Manly for some brunch. We got some blueberry pikelets and corn fritters. Neither of them were what we expected. The pikelets were similar to pancakes in the fact that they were round shaped, but they were extremely dense and almost biscuit like. The corn fritters were similar to an omelet, but exploding with ingredients and falling apart.


Later, we met up with some friends for Australian Beer Festival in the Rocks. Unlike any of the beer festivals in Boston, it was held outside. Being outside was nice, but it was crammed down a small side street as shown below, so it was hard to move around.


Instead of delicious waffles, they sold "gourmet pizzas" and meat pies! The gourmet pizzas were pizzas topped with more toppings than I have ever seen. Australia is very big into meat pies. The options at the beer festival were chicken and leek, lamb and rosemary or beef. We saw one girl eating her meat pie with just her fingers and not eating any of the pie crust (she must be on an Atkins diet). We also saw other people smother the top of the meat pie with ketchup and picking it up like a pizza slice. We sampled one of the beef pies and it tasted much better with the ketchup. Here we are sampling our beers.

I'm in the queue trying to get some beer. Sometimes it was hard to tell who was actually in the queue and standing around.


Almost all of the beers we tasted were pretty awful. I think we'll be sticking to wine from now on! After watching some Rugby, we decided to get some of that delicious Macker's (aka McDonalds) soft serve that I've been telling you about. We learned that besides the Big Mac, there is also a "Son of Mac", which is the same toppings, but with only 1 burger patty. Here's proof that soft serve is only 30 cents!


And look, it's not even that small!


Australia's strange fact of the day: The money! The denominations in coins are 5, 10, 20, 50 cents, but they also have 1 dollar and 2 dollar coins. The dollar bills come in 5, 10, 20 and 50. The great thing about the coins is that David will empty his pocket every night into his drawer, but after 2 or 3 days, that money is actually worth a lot! I'll be able to collect around 10-20 dollars to do my own shopping. =) The strange part is that in the supermarkets, prices are still end in .99 and if you pay in cash, they automatically round for you to make the amount in denominations of 5. If you pay with credit card, they just charge you the actual amount.