On foot in Corvallis

Apart from various piles of paperwork, we've spent the last couple of days walking around Corvallis, getting to know the town and figuring out where the good places to live are. We're also getting a huge amount of entertainment seeing real things that we thought only existed on TV....

Like the yellow school bus with the stop-sign:





Another awesome stereotype was when a tiny elderly lady was taking multiple shots at parking her gigantic blue Ute, and finally parked it over two disabled spaces.

And we had to wonder how they managed two typos on the same sign (you might need to click on the picture to make it big enough to see):




Manfred rode the creepy squirrel by central park:




And we found Christmas... The home brew shop here is amazing, with a massive range of equipment and ingredients we couldn't hope to find in NZ. The sad thing is there are more varieties of NZ hops for sale here than we could get back home. They also sell a range of beers from all over the world:



Note that we haven't yet made it to the place in town that is noted for having a massive selection of beers....

And what was this thing doing in the home brew shop?



We made it into a micro brew pub one hot afternoon, where they poured us five tasters since we had no idea what the beer was like. Everything we tried was excellent, I think we're going to have a bit of catching up to do when we set up our own brews here.

We're also going to be able to afford to bake most of the stuff in Dr. Oetker: we've been told that cherries and hazelnuts are cheap and common here. We found evidence of this for hazelnuts, at least, when we noticed the shells get used for garden chips....