Aussie Bloggers

In just a few weeks, my partner and I will be flying out for our first overseas holiday – in fact, our first holiday of pretty much any description – in around seven years. We’re going to Poland, Slovenia, Italy and finally to Germany for Wacken Open Air, the world’s largest open air heavy metal festival.

We’ll only be gone for three weeks, but they will be jam-packed weeks for sure!

In Poland, we’re going to be visiting some of my partner’s relatives. We’ll also be visiting friends in Slovenia. This means a lot of good things, but it also means one big headache: finding suitable, lightweight, inexpensive gifts from Australia for people we don’t know particularly well.

Setting off to look in tourist shops, we thought… it can’t be that bad. A couple of nice tea-towels, a coaster of two, and we’ll be done. But somehow, everything we saw was either way overpriced, or junk. Worse still, half of the items we saw were made in China. Is this overpriced, tacky, imported rubbish stuff really what we sell to visitors to remind them of Australia?

Fortunately, we found salvation at a local market: delicious local food items with a unique Australian twist. Macadamia nut fudge. Redgum honey nougat. Quandong jam. Wattleseed tea. Bush tomato chutney. Yum!

Throw in a few bottles of Aussie wine, bought duty-free, and we think we’ll be set. Who doesn’t like getting a gift they can eat?