AUSTRALIA VI: YESTERDAY I CELEBRATED MY 92ND BIRTHDAY
- coupkovasvatava
- Aug 27, 2017
- 3 min read
Quite strange, right? I am still pretty young and I have my whole life ahead. And it was not even my birthday yesterday! When I woke up in the morning mum started to sing “Happy birthday…” straight away. She claimed that it was my last birthday starting with 0 and that it is something we should definitely celebrate. After my morning nap she took me to the playground and on the way back home we stopped in the supermarket, bought things that we normally never buy and… made a super healthy banana-apple birthday cake! Because it was my birthday (which it was not) mum even let me spread the cream cheese icing on it. I decided to spread it everywhere including my hair, shoes and Max´s nose. It was good fun.
Now what 92 means? Mum said it was my last zero birthday, so one would expect “0” digit on the cake. Except that they – logically – don´t make zero-shaped candles. Fair enough. So she decided for 11 (like 11 months old), but the shop ran out of “1s”! So she made it “9” plus “2” (good guess: no “pluses” in stock).
Anyway I didn´t mind celebrating my birthday (it was not my first birthday after all: when I was six months old mum decided it was a great success that I made it so far and she organized a small party where dad and I were invited). The cake was pretty tasty actually. Max liked it as well: however giving it to him was forbidden, I couldn´t bear to see how sad he looked (maybe he should get a double shot of his insulin today?). So at the end of the day everybody was happy :-). Now I can´t wait to celebrate my real birthday. This time it will be daddy making a cake for me and I expect a lot of presents.
Apart from the cake I celebrated my birthday with a lot of walking which I got the change to practice a lot in extreme conditions in the past few days: on sand. Whereas in Japan most of the days we were in mountains, in Australia we tend to spend more time on a beach. There is a long Merewether Beach in Newcastle where I was beachcombing, watching surfers and – walking, falling over and standing up again... and again and again. On the way to catch the bus back home mum carried me on her shoulders and I secretly put all the sand I was hiding in my hands and between my fingers to her hair. Great fun.
The walk to the huge dunes in Belmont Wetlands started with us stopping our bus in the middle of a roundabout. They cancelled the bus stop where mum wanted to get on and we were desperately running there and back trying to find another one. I don´t think roundabout was the best place to look for it but the driver stopped and let us in. The dunes were cool: mum said that they reminded her of Stewart Island. There I have never been but I might go to have a look one day, because sand seems to be something I like a lot. We played on the beach and then in the town mum bought us a delicious brownie. On the way back we met an old lady who insisted on telling us where we should change the bus, gave us a list of “to do” places in Newcastle and wanted to show us pictures of her grand-children but her camera was (fortunately) on the bottom of her huge bag and she was (fortunately) not able to find it by the time we were getting off.
Finally three short notes about my third cycle trip: 1. The smallest helmet is less and less way too big for me. 2. The seat behind mum´s back still doesn´t make any sense. 3. No mum, on the shitty rental bike you can´t really cycle around the whole Macquarie Lake (approx. 100 km)!
Today there is no beach and no bike ride, because there is a kids´ program in the library. And there is definitely much more of that birthday cake in the fridge. Yummy yummy.
Your Annie
