Carnivale

This weekend was the 60th Anniversary of the Toowoomba Carnival of Flowers.  We had beautiful weather and the parade was wonderful. I am still not a parade person, standing in the sun with wriggly kids, whinging parents, pushy photographers, oops was I one of them and just a lot of waiting and standing.  The floats were better this year than some other years but the gaps between the floats was sometimes long and frankly boring.  Sorry but it was.  The performers on stilts were great and there were quite a few different ones, the beautiful red lady above was really pretty.  The Koala was walking with the volunteer fire brigade and I am afraid that once again this summer they will be very busy.  We are having extremely hot weather already.  What a great bunch of men and women they are.

Toowoomba has really become extremely multicultural in the last few years and the parade showcased many of the different nationalities that have made their home here.  The Asian walkers were particularly colourful.

 There were so many colourful floats and performers and then we went up to the Food & Wine Festival.  This is about the 8th year I think that the Festival has been run and the first that we have been.  It's a new and different concept for Toowoomba.  We tried some different wines and there were local cheeses and olives to try also.  The Whitlams a well known Australian band played on Saturday night and Bjorn Again an Abba knock off band on Sunday.  All in all a pretty exciting weekend for our little town.Then of course there are the gardens that have entered the Carnival competition.  We visited the Grand Champion Garden, which is only a short walk from our house.  The pot above has been mosiaced (if that's a word) from plates and china hearts.  All throughout the garden there are little nooks that have been prettied up with lovely mosiacs.  We actually know relatives of the owners of this garden and there is a wall where special mosiacs were done for a Grandma who passed away not long ago.  Now the grandchildren can remember Grandma whenever they wander through the garden.

Also this weekend I cooked.  Saturday morning I made the yummiest French Toast with bacon maple syrup and balsamic strawberries, delicious.  This afternoon for lunch I experimented a bit.  I got some store bought puff pastry and cut the pieces in half, blended some cottage cheese, humous and grated fresh parmasen and spread it on the middle of each piece.  I topped this with thinly sliced tomato, red onion and asparagus.  I sprinkled a little more grated parmasen on top before baking in the oven for about 25 mins.  It was so delicious.  We had a couple of glasses of Pino Grigio with it.  So lovely for a spring afternoon.  So Carnival weekend was lovely, I'm glad we decided to venture on down this weekend.