Our last vacation at Noosa...

These past few weeks have been full with our move, my tests, and everything else. So, I'll try to back up and write about our last days in Australia, and then once I'm finished with it, I'll explain what has been going on here in Seattle.

A couple weeks before we actually moved, we spent the weekend up at Noosa with the Grzesiaks. It was a nice way to spend some quality time with them before we left. On Saturday morning, they drove to our home so we could carpool up to the Eumundi Markets. This collection of booths and individual sellers only opens on Saturday mornings and early afternoons, and it offers so much more than the Sunday Markets in Brisbane. Meagan bought a bracelet, I found this really cute blue scarf, and as a family, we bought a cool didgeridoo (a didgeridoo is a long cylinder of wood with the middle carved out; the Australian Aborigines use it as an instrument). We all wanted one just because it is so authentically Australian. You can't find any of those in America!

Later that night, Mr. Grzesiak, Ryan, Connor, Sarah, my dad, Meagan, Madeline, and I attended an Oka concert. This small, rather unknown band takes the Australian didgeridoo and uses it to create a kind of jazz or new age music. My dad especially enjoys the music, and in Australia, he would frequently turn it on while we cleaned the kitchen, and then we all danced to it. It was kind of a tradition, and it certainly made cleaning more enjoyable! Some of the songs are pretty nice--if you ever look at Oka on iTunes, the best one is Elements. When I first heard it though, I thought it was a little strange, but once you get used to it, it's lots of fun. Meagan, Madeline, and I (and probably the Grzesiak kids) had never attended a concert (unless you count classical music . . .) before, and we are not positive we enjoyed it much. At the beginning, a young lady entertained us by playing the guitar and singing along, but she didn't display much musical variety at all! She seemed to use a few notes from the scale and she constantly repeated phrases and tunes so that she bored us all. And the hard thing was that she never seemed to stop!!!! She was on stage for about an hour at least until Oka finally took over. I kept on thinking, "Oh, I just know this will be her last song," but she never finished until I had thought that almost a million times! My dad said that some of the more prominent bands allow other less well-known musicians to display their talent before the actual concert. I think that this is just so that they will seem even better than normal, because the audience will hear them after listening to some people who are probably not so musically talented. The concert itself was ok, but we all found it extremely loud. We even had to shout so that others could hear us!!

We spent the next day hiking up Mount Coolum and boogie-boarding in the ocean. On Monday, we drove back home and all agreed that we all greatly enjoyed the little weekend getaway. That would be our last time to visit a beach in Australia, and I'm glad that it was such a fun time.