Melbourne Patron

The first thing any Adelaidean will tell you about the Fringe Festival is that "The Garden" is an absoulte MUST. A sectioned-off part of Rundle Park at the north-eastern corner of the CBD, The Garden of Unearthly Delights  (cnr East Terrace & Rundle Road) is essentially the hub for All Things 'Fringe'. Here, for the duration of the Festival, you can buy or collect tickets, attend shows in any one of the on-site 'venues' (mainly tents like you'd find at a circus), buy merchandise, get a food or drink fix, shop at market stalls, attend events, lounge around on the grass or chairs and watch people or the free entertainment, take the kids on rides... and the list goes on. The Garden is set up like an old-fashioned fair: elaborately decorated caravans housing food stalls, games and tickets; various stages and 'big top' style, colourful tents; wooden painted signs, flags, mirrors and coloured lights. It is loosely divided int...

Adelaide (or "Radelaide" as I more often hear it referred to) holds special meaning for me, because it's where my parents grew up before they relocated to Sydney in the late 1970s. As a result, I've been there a lot - particularly as a kid with the family, mainly to see the grandfolks, when they were still around. We'd stay at their place in North Plympton, on an avenue of one-storey, sand-brick houses, each and every one with a tidy lawn, neatly-pruned rose bushes, and a low fence, over which you'd chat to the neighbours. We'd hang out in the back room (because that's where the air con was), with its tiled flooring, vertical blinds, green knobbly couches, photo frames galore, and my grandfather's bar (yep, near-alcoholism goes way back in my family). Nanna would put out little bowls of Dixie Drumsticks, beer nuts and YoYo biscuits, and Grandpa would pour me a lemonade  from one of those mini blue Schweppes cans. While the grown-ups talked and Whee...

Yum cha! Who doesn't love it? I'm always surprised by the amount of people I come across who have never tried yum cha. Usually once they have, they're converted. It doesn't even have to be great yum cha. There's just something innately cool about being brought food on trolleys to choose from, then stuffing yourself silly, all for not-very-much-money. AND, you can drink if you want to! Bonus. I've mentioned before that I was brought up on 'going out for Chinese' as a restaurant treat in Sydney. So, you could say I've been enjoying yum cha my whole life. In Sydney, we used to go to the Marigold in Chinatown (where the hostess would, without fail, pinch my chubby cheeks with pure delight), Mathew's Peacock Gardens in Crows Nest (reliable and traditional), or the Sea Treasure, also in Crows Nest (great for seafood, but came under fire at one point for inhumane treatment of its live seafood). All were great, and when I moved to Melbourne in 2009...