Burst of winter!

As I'd already noticed in summer, the weather can change both dramatically and rapidly in Melbourne, so without much warning, we went from 25 degrees and sunny one day to 14 degrees (which is considered an average winter temperature here..) and stormy the next. This happened last weekend, when we were supposed to go and celebrate Dutch Orange Day (organised by the local Dutch consulate, http://www.dutchorangeday.com/) on Southbank... so much to our disappointment we had to miss out on a dose of Dutch culture, like the clogdancing group 'De Tukkers',and a chance to buy some salty 'drop', because of lousy weather.. Luckily, the Melbourne Comedy Festival was still on, so we went to see some stand-up comedians at the Crown Casino; funny stuff, but no replacement for clog dancing and 'poffertjes' though!

The rest of the week it's been rainy and cold as well (all my colleagues tell me this is good news, since we're almost out of water here.. I guess they're right, but I still prefer the sunny days!), which has even led to the ski-slopes in the mountains outside the city opening a month early.. (To be honest, I still can't believe that you can actually ski less than 2 hours drive from the city, maybe it's time to go have a look myself!).

Our tiny Richmond apartment only has a small electrical heater, so we've been freezing as overnight temperatures went as low as 4 degrees! However today I woke up to find it was a beautiful sunny day, and a comfortable 19 degrees (average for this time of year), so hopefully the cold weather is over for a while now, at least until we move into our new house with central heating next month!

Until the next post!