show day

Man, oh man, oh man... what a day!

Hehehe... I say that a lot don't I...

I can honestly say that I have not been to the Royal Adelaide Show since I was about fifteen... which means that it's been at least eighteen years or so.

And no matter how much things change, some things just NEVER change... at least not in principal.

Sure, there's some new stuff around, but the rest of it is the same as it ever was.

Ma and I got all organised and co-ordinated, which is a feat all on it's own actually... I picked up tickets on Tuesday after getting my haircut... plus, yesterday and today were the "cheap" days... and Ma and I are nothing if not frugal. Okay, so we're cheap... there's nothing wrong with that! *grin*

Pretty much everything this morning went off without a hitch... Ma came down, we caught the bus into town, went and had breakfast, then went looking for the stop for the Show Bus... and the nice man driving the free BeeLine bus drove us around the square and dropped us off there after we asked him where the hell it was.

The Show Bus didn't take long, and although it kind of filled up at the second stop it wasn't too bad and dropped us right outside the entrance to the Show... not hassles with parking, no nothing (although it probably would have been cheaper just to park in the parklands than it was to buy bus tickets... but then you have all the drama of getting in and out of said carpark).

Now either I don't remember there being quite so much random "commerical" rubbish at the Show, or else there always has been, but we never really bothered with it. A lot of that stuff that you look at and think "who the hell buys this stuff?"... then you remember that the world is full of people with no taste...

Although we sort of had a vague kind of plan, we pretty much just wandered about aimlessly here, there and everywhere... partially caused by the Yellow Brick Road showbag.

I love the Yellow Brick Road showbag...

It was always a mainstay of our Show visits when I was a kid... partially because I think it was a good way of getting me and my cousin to actually not pay so much attention to the other crap on offer (those years that we all went together anyway)... and, to be honest, you do get to see all over the Show when you have one.

In the last couple of years they've even switched over to a reusable calico bag... although to be honest, the printing on said bag leaves a little to be desired... also, I think some of the yellow rubbed off onto my new blue shirt... RUDE! I'm hoping it just comes out in the wash though.

For the record, in this year's Yellow Brick Road Bag (sort of all spread out in the top right corner) was: An apple & a pear, a Yogo Snake & a cheese portion, a Sam the Ram Calendar (which doubles as a colouring in book... what a piece of crap that is!), two oranges, a bag of carrots, a Bellis Fruit Bar & a Braille alphabet card, a Soy milk drink, a small avocado plus recipe leaflet, a bag of pasta, a loaf of Wonder White bread, a small bag of dried apricots, a kiwi fruit, a bag of Robern ‘FruBears’, a jar of Beerenberg jam and a tub of Yoghurt Shop flavoured yoghurt.

Okay, some of it is crap, but at least it's all healthy.

Other than that I bought an Ikea showbag (c'mon, it was only $5) which had a Blund Bear (who's a bit cute, and who I keep playing with... I'm sure I'll get over it by tomorrow morning... and Ma snapped some shots of me being stupid with said bear... and if one of them works out as well as I think it has, well... you never know), 2 DAIM Twin Bars, a coffee & muffin voucher, a Plastis Ice Cube Tray (mine is pink with a jigsaw puzzle piece design... which I'm sure will make it impossible to get the ice cubes out), a Skamt tealight holder with tealight, a Letten squeegee and the Blue Bag it all came in which is a mini version of the bags they have in store. I'm sure the ice cube tray will come in handy...

And finally I bought six Bertie Beetle showbags. Originally I was going to buy their "Triple" pack which had all of the three different colours of Bertie showbags in it... but the girl at the stand said that if I was just after the chocolate (which I pretty much was) that I was better off getting six of the "red" bags... since it was before midday and they were only $1 each. So I did. Plus it meant that I could give one to Ma to give to one of the girls she works with (who'd jokingly said to Ma yesterday "Bring me a Bertie Beetle showbag"... but because Ma is both evil and just that nice, she planned on actually doing it).... which means I ended up with fifteen Bertie Beetles choccies and five lollypops.

The seahorse in the shot with the showbags is one that we just spotted as we were walking out of one of the halls... I couldn't even tell you where the hell it was now... but it was only $5... and it's a sizeable piece of stuffed randomness... at least about the length of my forearm I would say. Well we couldn't go past them at that price, so I bought Ma one... and then as we were walking away she actually made me go back so she could buy one for the aforementioned work girly, who also has a seahorse fetish (and who I made the other seahorse calendar for last Christmas). And Ma just called me after she'd dropped the seahorse and showbag in at work and said work girly was thrilled to bits. Awww... bless.

Anyway, in between following around the Yellow Brick Road trail and whatnot we took in just about everything the Show had to offer... okay, scratch that... discounting the rides and the whole Sideshow Alley area, we took in everything...

Animals out of the yin yang, as I'm want to say... Goats, alpacas, pigs, cows, sheep, pigeons, chickens, ducks, turkeys, geese, fish, bunnies, birds, cats, dogs... if it was a member of the animal kingdom and it happened to be being judged at the Show... we saw it. Well, except for horses, thanks to equine influenza...

Actually I have a small confession to make... Alfred Hitchcock wasn't far off the mark with The Birds... walking along rows with BIGASS roosters on either side of you in cages, all crowing and doing whatever else it is that chickens do in small confined cages... I was more than a little bit freaked out. Not enough to make me run away... but it did give me a good old case of the wiggins. Roosters are just plain EVIL man! Although really... when you've seen one chicken of a particular type, there really isn't much point in seeing twenty other chickens that pretty much all look EXACTLY the same.

On the flip-side of that... when we saw this guy and girl who were carrying around an eagle ( I think it might have been a wedgetailed eagle) and a peregrine falcon respectively I had no problem about going over and stroking said birds of prey. But then I've had a thing about peregrines for the longest time... plus they still had their hoods on.

I was kind of amused when we were in the sheep judging area though... for whatever reason we ended up standing there for ages, watching them judge these groups of rams and ewes... and it got to the point where I was over it (they just kept going back and forwards and back and forwards and back and forwards... make a decision already!)... but then I kind of went past that and just wanted to know who the hell they were going to announce as the winner. And in the end, I pretty much called it... the group with the "cranky" sheep won... and the group down the other end got third (okay, so there were only three groups... so everybody got a ribbon). Not that I know a damn thing about sheep... I was just watching the way the judges were behaving.

We also took a look in the Handicrafts Hall... man that place is weird yet groovy... I don't have a problem with the crafty stuff... but the cookery stuff... there's just SO much of it... I actually took a photo of the finger bun category, because there were like a TON of finger buns... and because there were like four from each competitor there just seemed to be finger buns coming out of the woodwork.

I think that the next time Ma and I are down at Glenelg though that we need to visit the Orange Spot bakery... I know they took out first place for their pasty and their meat pie... possibly either second or third place for their sausage roll... and I think they won something for their vanilla slice too... and they won the first prize for finger buns too. Oh, and supposedly the Baker's Delight at the Central Market is the place to go for your rolls, since they took out first place in that category.

The Junior Cookery section was a little scary though... although probably not helped by the fact that it's all been sitting there for around a week now, and those display cases aren't refrigerated.

We also took in the Photography and Art contests... and I blew a raspberry (literally) every time I saw a name I recognised from my Camera Club days... although, to be honest, I think there were only a couple of familiar names.

There were a few nice pieces (and one photographer who I'm SURE was gay... he had a couple of entries in that look like they were taken at a gay pride type picnic day... and one shot I'm almost certain was taken the morning after Mardi Gras featuring a drag queen drinking a VB out of a straw), but I was paying more attention to the names of the photographers than I was to the actual photographs. I'm blaming it on having had to sit through all those Camera Club judging nights... not only am I fairly over random landscape stuff (unless, you know, it's mine), but I can work out whether it's even worth a first look within about twelve seconds... then I move on. Some of the art was better I thought... still some slightly dodgy stuff going on, but a few nice pieces.

Although we ended up stopping for lunch, we didn't have very much since we'd pretty much been grazing on free stuff all morning (bread product here, chocolate sample there, ginger punch somewhere else)... what we did have was a Turkish gozleme, which is a little bit like Indian naan bread... the filled kind anyway... but it was very nice. When Ma was ordering she wasn't game to actually say the name of the bread, and the woman behind the counter said "come on, you can say it"... and obviously I was just channeling the linguistic part of my brain because without thinking I just said "Goz-lemm-eh"... but, you know... all as one word... and the woman was highly impressed, she said I pronounced it perfectly... hehe, go me!

By the time we'd collected the last of our Yellow Brick Road goodies we were pretty much done for the day... we'd seen just about everything... got everything we wanted or needed or whatever... so figured it was time to go.

As we were leaving I snapped a few last shots of the ferris wheel, see, beautiful clear blue sky as far as the eye could see... by the time we'd caught the two buses back to my place (although getting the Show Bus back into town was somewhat of an ordeal in itself... but I want to not think about that... so we'll move on) the entire sky was grey... and just after Ma set off home the clouds just opened up and it rained like crazy. We could not have timed it better.

So, yeah... it was a much better day than I'd expected... whether it was because we went really early or what, I dunno, but it wasn't anywhere near as busy as I remember it from all those years ago (that was a big part of the reason I stopped wanting to go though, there were just too many people and crowds make me crazy at the best of times). It did start to get a little bit that way by the time we were ready to leave, but that was somewhere around 2:30... so not a bad run, all things considered.

Will we do it again next year? I dunno... maybe, maybe not... it was a good day though.

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