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Port Douglas is marvelous and perfect and of course, expensive. We walked down town from the beach and while mom rested in the nice new apartment. We fed the boys pizza at a down town restaurant bar. The pizza was “different” and we ordered a Caesar salad that sported a very creamy dressing and poached egg on top and big heavy bits of bacon. The pizza had a walnuts and pumpkins topping.
The pizzas we order are small and thin crust. And the people here are thinner crust so to speak; there may be a correlation. Then again, we aren’t traveling in the K-mart section of the cities or the country. Port Douglas is clearly for the wealthy; there are many families here on the off-season, so this must be the time when they can afford to come here.
There are no fat people in Australia.
There are nothing but bars and restaurants downtown. My kind of place!
I found a great shop with Aboriginal art. In fact, tomorrow I will take mom to this shop and it will be raining so hard it pulls you to the doorways to see the pouring sheets of water. And it will pound on the tin roofs in this town, just like the pouring rain on the tin roof of Toad Hollow in Costa Rica. And the shop is filled with interesting things, and the rain is interesting. Andrew buys cookies at the local grocery store and shares them with us under the overhang.
Anyway we found the shop we liked and Andrew liked this small vase but I said, my it’s $145 and Andrew said, well I just spent $90 on lunch, so really. . .” And we purchased it and I’m not sorry now that it’s on the mantel at home.
The owner of the Aboriginal gift shop, Bilby said that she was delighted to see American’s in Pt. Douglas again. Ever since 9/11 the tourists had fallen off severely I didn’t mention that our economy tanked as well, if she wants to attribute our absence to that single event, then that’s fine. But the point was – no Americans for the last 3 years equals terrible business for their own town. She said she loved Americans, we spend of course, we are a high consumer society and we bring that sensibility wherever we go, but she also said that she loved our enthusiasm and curiosity. The US customers ask questions and are interested in what’s going on. So she was happy to see us, happy to see our Visa.
All her artists received money from their work, either commission or royalties. Hers is one of the few stores (there are a handful in the country) that carries an accreditation from a program bent on rewarding the artists directly for their efforts. Like the store in San Jose we found. It’s good to shop at such places, and frankly, it had the nicest things I ever saw. I ended up not shopping much in Adelaide and that was the end of that. So it was good to do shopping here.
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