Primarily it’s the fact that I’m pretty tired of cold, wet weather but my thoughts are turning to magic portals and instant travel back to Adelaide in the next couple of weeks. While I love Spring in Adelaide and would happily return for visits in October, future returns home will probably happen in February and March as that’s the time when Adelaide really comes alive!

Visitors to Adelaide during festival season (Adelaide Festival of Arts, Fringe Festival and Womadelaide) are given a strange impression of the town, there are people energised and out partying on the streets every night! There’s culture down every alley and even if you don’t like ‘culture’, there’s also a very loud car race which happens around the same time. The rest of the year, while it can be difficult to remember the party face the city puts on, it is still a lovely place that I miss.

Foolishly I’ve managed to miss out Adelaide Fringe and most frustratingly, Womadelaide for the last few years as I always seemed to book my flights back to Europe in winter just in time for slushy side walks and freezing winds.

If you’ve never experienced Womadelaide festival you really should. For three days the most beautiful park in Adelaide is full of world music, hippies and happy, relaxed, white-middle class families wearing ethnic clothing bought at the previous year’s festival. It is a time of picnics, temporary camps under amazing old trees, children wandering around and playing diablo, amazing art installations and all my favourite people.

This year I feel even more sad that I don’t get to be in Adelaide at this most wonderful of times as during Fringe there’ll also be the first Format Festival, run by some very dear friends of mine. Only last week did I realise that maybe I should have tried to organise a simultaneous Academy of DIY here in Berlin as part of my DIYMasters project. So while there won’t be a Berlin Academy of DIY this March, I’m hoping that in the next couple of months I’ll organise a similar event celebrating self-organised learning and informal teaching and community.

I won’t be around in Adelaide for the festivals this year, but if you’re in Australia make your way over to my home town and have fun on my behalf. During February / March 2010 though, is when I’m planning on making a short return to a festival filled Adelaide, my friends and family and the smells of dry earth and eucalyptus leaves. Until then, I’m looking forward to watching Berlin move from grey skies to blue and experiencing this city as it wakes from its winter hibernation.

On the windowsill of my room in Merihaka I have a temporary garden of lettuce, parsley and thyme in jars, mugs and reused plastic containers struggling to survive out of their traditional hydroponic environments.

At times I miss Adelaide horribly. I miss the way the park by my bus stop smells on a warm evening and the sounds the rainbow lorikeets make. I miss the Farmers and Central markets and the fact that I don’t need to buy airfreighted fruit and overpackaged food from a chain store. I miss my friends, Queen St and my old job, my bike and Womadelaide. I miss it but it all feels a bit unreal. I miss my garden and my ridiculously large house which is both a blessing and a burden.

But I’m back in Helsinki and that means that I’m surrounded by a tremendous amount of good stuff. I’m love that Ninnu and Sid are an hour away and that I have friends in Helsinki too. I love that there is snow even though it’s the warmest winter in a century. I love the drying cupboards in the kitchens and fact I can shower as long as I like and not have to carry the used water on to the garden. I love the smell a wood-fired sauna makes and that I don’t need to talk or think when the löyly hits my skin and my head. I love the amazing design surrounding me and the scale and density of the city and the public transport. I love the range of salmiaki in the pick and mix section of the video store and the rye bread. I love that even though I never studied the language I can actually understand some of what I read and hear.

I’m flattered that here I’m greeted like a minor celebrity by some old customers “Hei! You! Australian Girl!” and that my English is international enough to confuse some people into not knowing where I’m from at all.

For all the good stuff here I’m frustrated too. I’m kind of bored because I don’t have a job to fill up some of my days and let me meet new people. I regret not studying Finnish because I understand enough to know that it will be years before I was ever fluent in a language only 6 million people speak. I’m frustrated that I feel heartbound to Adelaide but intrigued by Finland and that so many people are leaving while I’m away (not that my presence would have kept them there).

Every couple of days it seems like I switch moods between “I shall stay here and work at the bar so I can stay for the summer…” to “I need to go home and make radelai.de happen right now!” and then to “Ooooh, maybe I should apply for a Masters program here… It’s free!”. I half make plans for a summer in Europe and for May in Australia.

I am confused by choices and I don’t want to give either one up just yet.

after almost a month of waiting and waiting and angry emails and cranky phonecalls…. the radelai.de domain is now actually working!

there’s nothing much up there yet – but soon there will be!

Since I’ve returned to Adelaide I’ve had opportunity to host a few guests as part of CouchSurfing, the program that introduced me to Sid, Ninnu, Ronja and a whole bunch of other lovely people. Regularly, conversation with my international visitors comes down to eating: favourite foods, traditional foods from their homelands and the difficulty of finding good bread while on the road. Just as it was when I was travelling overseas, I’m faced with the difficulty of defining what typical Australian food is.

There are the usual “Aussie Tucker” suspects of Vegemite, meat pies, pavlova, lamingtons, spag bog and Anzac biscuits. But in comparison to people who’ve come from most other countries (Canada and USA are probably the other exceptions) we can’t really identify distinct food cultures and rely instead on a few recipes and a salty, yeasty brand name. Our national identity is defined by events taking place during a little over two centuries of (primarily European) migration, and doesn’t really reflect a cohesive culture.

So I’ve thought and I’ve thought about this concept of food and national identity. Historically the French, the Italians, the Finns, the Spanish, the Germans, the Chinese, the Indians were not nations of people, they were many smaller regional and cultural groups who just happened to live within more recent borders. Migration, globalisation, the media, supermarkets, freezers and microwaves didn’t exist for thousands of years and so regional food cultures evolved out of eating seasonal, local foods.

Where people seem to have gone wrong in identifying Australian food culture is by looking for one food culture to rule them all rather than letting many smaller, localised food cultures emerge. Even the true food cultures of the Indigenous Australians seem to have been reduced down to a “bush tucker” of witchetty grubs and wattle seed, quandong, honey ants, lemon myrtle and kangaroo, ignoring the full spectrum of groups living on foods specific to the coast, rainforest, arid grasslands and bush.

Other people have probably come around to this idea before, but I’ve only just articulated this thought: As Australians we should be looking to our immediate bioregions as a way of identifying the seasonal foods which will then shape a plurality of culinary cultures. We should be taking pride in our local brands, environment and farmers, recognising the layers of food cultures, both indigenous and immigrated and working out what grows best where and when. Once we know what plants and animals are best suited to our local regions we can learn how to cook and eat the foods that make up our food culture.

Currently I can identify only one type of edible wild mushroom and teeny tiny native cherries, but part of my longer term garden plan is to plant a couple of areas with indigenous plants including those suitable for food. In the meantime I’ll be feeding my summer guests Vietnamese cold rolls with seasonal vegetables (some coming from my garden), suggesting they drink Coopers’ beers, Bickford cordials and local wines to be be followed by Haighs’ chocolates and local fruits.

Maybe in two hundred years my descendants will be able to say with more certainty what dishes make up the contemporary Tandanya bioregional food culture, but right now I’ll just have to play it by taste.

Back in the sunless days when I lived in Finland, I started thinking an awful lot about how great Adelaide is. Then I realised that I only know a tiny bit about my hometown. I have my favourite parks, streets, beaches and cafes, but unless someone else tells me about something new, I rarely explore outside my comfort zone.

Being a geek I had an idea for a website about why Adelaide is so rad, so I bought a rather fun and cheap german domain about 6 months ago*. But I needed more content for this website than I could just write myself. So ultimately the plan kind of stalled…

Until this morning when I decided to finally design a very simple logo, and to actually get the radelai.de domain to work properly… [still waiting on this - my apologies, but i'd appreciate positive problem solving vibes to be sent this way...] … And now I’m all inspired again and hungry for content to put onto the web.

radelai.de : got balls? by Fighting Tiger.

Which is why I’m emailing you. I want you to help me with content for radelai.de.

What are your favourite things about Adelaide? Why do you choose to stay here or come back even though you’ve moved? When you’re entertaining visitors to Adelaide, what do you show them? Which deli makes the best bacon sandwich? Is there really a secret vat which makes the best tasting Farmers Union Iced Coffee? What are your favourite places in the hills and further afield?

So, are you interested? Have you and your friends got [metaphorical] balls?^

Let me know your ideas!

Articles should be between 100-500 words in length. If you can supply images to accompany written content that would be lovely. Over the longer term, video / podcasting content would also be sweet…

At this point of the project, payment is unlikely but notoriety and my everlasting gratitude is assured.

Yours,

Pippa xo