It’s so good to go home

Posted by angie on Aug 28, 2009 in review | 6 comments

I’m always travelIing, I love being free,
and so I keep leaving the sun and the sea,
but my heart lies waiting over the foam,
I still call Australia home.

You never know how much you miss a place until you realise that you have to leave. “Going home” brings up so many feelings in people – sad, happy, or even pure drudgery with the enslaught of relatives and past memories relived. Fortunately for me, going home is a really good thing after being away from beautiful, clean Perth whilst traveling and working in bustling Asia – a continent that never sleeps.

Recently, I went back home to Perth to surprise my mum for her birthday. When I rang the doorbell at around 6am, my mum looked out her window that looks over the driveway in complete shock. She had just gotten up, and had tried to alert my step-dad but he just thought mum was dreaming that I had come home. Little did he know that my cousin and I had been secretly planning this surprise for a month.

For mum’s birthday dinner, we went to Hong Kong BBQ – a famous Chinese restaurant in Northbridge. The food was absolutely delicious as usual. The only scary part was that I was going to order Patagonian fish but was recommended by the Waitress to have the Perch. I thought I had ordered another fish, but scarily enough the fish we were given looked like the dead fish that was in the aquarium. Yikes! Fortunately I double checked and the dead fish was still there sinking at the bottom of the tank. Phew! In hindsight, I should have probably sticked to my guns after reading 1,001 Things They Won’t Tell You which I mentioned in a previous blog post about why not to order the specials of the day.

The good news for fans of Hong Kong BBQ but hate the fact that it’s always either really busy or that there are 2 designated eating time slots you have to stick to otherwise you lose your reservation, is that Hong Kong BBQ is expanding! Yes, you heard that right folks – it’s finally expanding. It’s expanding upwards, I believe, to where Riverside Chinese Restaurant used to be. The new area will be ready within the next few months and is designated for parties or large groups.

The next night, the Wandering Gourmet and I went to Campari Italian Restaurant in Leeming. Esther and I shared a kids lasagna which was funnily enough filling for the both of us. Can’t imagine what the adult-sized lasagna would be like! The rest had the usual pasta or parmagiana – except for Bec who seemed to happily dig into her Chilli Mussels.

To be honest, the food was pretty average and I’ve had better lasagna elsewhere. For me, this is just an ordinary local Italian restaurant – the kind of place you can go around the corner to if you don’t feel like cooking and want a hearty meal close to home.

Afterwards, Esther, Shebz, and I tried to go cafe hopping but we had forgotten that Perth has bad trading hours. I wanted to go to one of my favourite late night cafes, C15 Espresso, but it seemed like they do not open until late any more. We ended up going to McCafe of all places and ordered hot chocolates. I opened the lid of my take away hot chocolate cup in order to cool my drink down and discovered that the McCafe Barista had put 2 marshmallows in my cup. Funnily enough, the 2 marshmallows looked like 2 boobs!

We weren’t the only ones who thought the hot chocolate with the marshmallows looked a bit too much like breasts. Check out Shebz’s expression as people laughed while passing by our table: