Begonia Festival 2016

My beautiful hometown has once again celebrated their annual Begonia Festival. It’s a spectacular flower and garden festival that has been running since 1953 and features Ballarat’s historic Botanic Gardens. It’s been visited by Queen Elizabeth II and features a whole range of awesome activities including a street parade. It dropped in popularity during the 90s, but its popularity is booming again.

This year it took up the whole Botanic Gardens. There was a giant Lego begonia again, as well as roving musicians, craft and art activities, pop up sand pits, a tea house, a wine garden, and giant chess and checkers games.

I bumped into my friend Lovisa and her beautiful son and we hung out together for a while. He really wanted to play checkers so we did, and then we went and got ice cream and looked at the fish in the pond. Lovisa taught me some Swedish words. I learned how to say ‘fern’ in Swedish, mostly because I thought I was learning ‘triceratops’. Never mind. It was really fun and now I’m inspired to learn Swedish.

We walked through the green house (Swedish people call it a growth house), and we had tea in the tearooms. After checking out an awesome band we went for tea and I said goodbye to Lovisa and wandered around with my family.

This blog post has a further Swedish flavour to it, because this Miss Patina top was a gift from my Instagram best friend, Mona. It was for my birthday last year, and it’s almost my birthday again! It’s almost like an anniversary for getting this top as a present. Mona lives in Sweden (in a town which Lovisa has been teaching me to pronounce and warning me that it is very cold), and she sent me a voucher to buy this top after we started writing letters to one another last year.