Nutmeg & Naps in North Adelaide

Aug 2017

I’m not going to lie, writing this post is really hard for me. Adelaide is a place that means a lot to me because of all the wonderful things that we experienced while we were there, and the amazing people we met. But there’s a real darkness to our time in Adelaide as well that is unavoidable when thinking about our time here.

Let’s start at the beginning.

So 2013 ended and Simon and I moved away from Sawtell, we stayed with my parents in Mittagong, NSW for about a month before packing up our bomby car, ‘Chips’ for our very long drive over to Adelaide, South Australia.

It was summer. And it was so fucking hot. I don’t know if many of you have driven this route, see image for reference, but damn, it’s long and flat and on a hot day in the middle of summer, it’s not good. I mean, you know we saw some cool stuff along the way like some emus chilling out on the desolate and dry, Hay Plains. We ate corn chips and salsa at Wagga ‘beach’. My card details were stolen at our hotel in Balranald, oh wait, that sucked. Haha. No, really, it was an adventure at least. I don’t think I’d drive that way again but it was an experience.

So we get to Adelaide and spend the next two weeks finding an apartment, work and enrolling into school. Simon had spent 2013 studying and working with furniture but he was ready to change it up, so he landed a job in graphic design (part of his major at uni) pretty much the day we arrived. I enrolled in a fulltime patisserie course in the outskirts of Adelaide, which upon completion would allow me to work at a pastry cook (not chef, there’s a difference).

See, in Sawtell I had been working in a cake shop/ patisserie in what I was told was an apprenticeship. It turns out it was all fake and just an excuse to pay me an apprentice wage. Despite this shitty experience, I still wanted more than anything to be a pastry chef. That had been a dream of mine that I’d been working towards for 3 years prior to this move to Adelaide. So after my fake apprenticeship experience, I was so excited to finally getting a pastry qualification and to begin my life as a successful pastry cook, eventually chef.

Our first apartment here was in North Adelaide, which as the name suggests, is just north of the main city. It’s a beautiful area with old cottages, big town houses and tree-lined streets. We lived in one of its few shabby apartment blocks in a real 1970s-style apartment. Not in a cool way, if that’s what you’re thinking. Despite lots of mid-century style furniture, courtesy of Simon, and some funky Ikea rugs, the place was still really daggy.

Now for the spanner.

About two weeks into our move, I had a call from my mum and she told me that my dad had bowel cancer. I was devastated. My dad is my hero. He’ll probably read this and cry, haha, but it’s true. He’s a legend. So hearing that he was sick and he was going to have emergency surgery to have the cancer removed was terrifying. I’ve never felt so nauseous. We immediately jumped on a plane to get back to see him.

Do you know what’s even more sad about this tale? My mum had been planning a surprise holiday for him to Uluru in the Northern Territory for his 50^thbirthday. Instead, he spent his birthday with a pathetic party hat lopsidedly sat on his head, in Liverpool hospital, hooked up to a morphine drip, in pain and zonked out. If it sounds like a really sad scene from a movie, that’s how it felt.

But plus side, the cancer was removed and over the following months he had a round of chemo resulting in no more cancer for him at this present time. And he looks and feels a lot healthier than before he was sick. So it’s a happy ending, really.

Okay, so 6 months into the move, life was getting good in Adelaide. My dad’s health was getting back on track, my course was going well and I had made some great friends and connections. I had a job lined up for when I finished my course and I was so excited that I was getting to make cakes, pastries and breads pretty much every day. That was until my course was coming to an end. I started feeling run down. Really run down. I’ve always been pretty active over the years with dance classes, yoga and walking keeping me fit so I knew something was wrong. Sure enough, my doctor diagnosed glandular fever.

Now to some this may seem like a breezy, two-week stint at home, eating lots of ice cream with everyone waiting on you. For me, it was literally not being able to climb into the shower to wash myself without the help of Simon. It was needing to rest afterwards because showering was too tiring. I would get stuck on the toilet because my legs were too weak to pull myself up. I would have to use my hands to pull myself up the stairs to our apartment if I went out. I have never felt so fatigued.

The glandular fever plagued me for 8 months and when it left, it left behind something. Fatigue. I then got diagnosed with Chronic Fatigue Syndrome (CFS) or Myalgic Encephalomyelitis (ME). I still have it in case you’re wondering, but I don’t like to dwell on it. I just keep on living as best I can.

North Adelaide's Deco Cinema, yes it is super nice inside

Since completing my patisserie training, I have not been able to work as a pastry cook because of my illness. It’s a bit sad but I have discovered passions for other things because of this loss. I enrolled myself in an online writing course at Open Universities during my time in North Adelaide, which led me to gain perspective on what kind of career I wanted for myself seeing as pastry cooking was off the table. Getting sick also led me to some wonderful friendships, and I’m still just as awesome as I was before I got sick, so who’s the real loser anyway?

But Adelaide itself? It’s a fantastic city. Everyone in Australia bags it out for some weird reason when South Australia has the best produce I’ve eaten in my life. And I grew up atop mountains!

All the buildings are so nice in North Adelaide!

Seriously, the fruit and veg are so fresh, local and there is so much organic stuff to choose from. The cheese is incredibly creamy and again, local! The wine is gorgeous. The ice cream. The milk. The bread. The chocolate. Gah! It was all amazing. I’ll write a post dedicated to Adelaide food. Probably many posts.

Me, prior to getting sick, strolling the tree-lined streets.

The takeaway from this is that Adelaide is an amazing city. It’s small in size and population so it doesn’t feel too busy or overcrowded. You can get to the beach or the Adelaide Hills in under 30 minutes from the city. You can get to the wineries of the Barossa and McLaren Vale in about an hour or less (McLaren Vale is less than). And you can see some of the most beautiful scenery in Australia driving through these towns and areas.

You can see why this post was hard to write. This time in North Adelaide should have been full of excitement for new opportunities, but instead, it was full of a lot of illness and worry and sadness. Despite the bad stuff, there were many, many good times and I loved living in North Adelaide.

I don’t regret any of it.