Every year the Royal Perth Show takes place in springtime in Perth. The show is on for a week and it is a weird mixture of fun park, thanksgiving celebration, animal show, household appliances fair and much more.

This event takes place on the Claremont Showgrounds. That is a quite big area with some sort of cricket field in the middle. It has its own train station, that means the trains stop only there if there is an event on the showgrounds. The area itselfs contains many exhibition halls, many many booths with candy and there is even a chairlift which brings you from on end to the other end of the area.

In our opinion the Royal Perth Show is best described as a exhibition. You can see award shows for dogs, cats, chicken, horses, cows, oxen and many other animals. You can watch fashion shows of West Australian designers. There is also a petting zoo - little emus are really adorable!

Every year a different country exhibition is held. Last year they showed products of Italy, this year Malaysia showed their goods and services. There are three exhibition halls where you can buy everything you might be interested in or not - starting from pool cleaners, barbeque equipment, vegtable knives to original Western Australia olive oil and perfume.

A speciality of the Royal Perth Show are so called showbags. Showbags are plastic bags which are filled with candies and/or toys. At the booths you can choose your favorite candies which are shown on the wall behind the counters.

At the beginning we didn’t really understand what’s going on there, but as we’ve seen more and more people walking with at least one showbag, we decided to try it too. And that can be pretty dangerous, because these showbags can be quite addictive.

Of each comic figure there is a showbag. We liked especially the Winnie Pooh things, but reason was stronger and we finally decided that we are too old for a Winnie Pooh handbag with pencils and combs.

But there are also showbags for adults. In those showbags are magazines, perfumes, cremes, shavers, small musli packs, coffee sachets, frisbees, cosmetic bags and a lot more of these wonderful unnecessary things. We visited the show on the last day, so the showbags were cheaper than normal and we saved a little bit of money. Once started you just can’t get enough of these showbags!

On the Claremont Showgrounds is also an area with rides. There is a roller coaster, a ghost train, a ferris wheel and lots of fast spinning things.

Also they have many booths where you can buy tickets to win a soft toy. It was nearly scary. Everyone had a huge bear or an even bigger pink unicorn. I assume that because it was the last day of the show they tried to get rid of the ugliest soft toys.

In the evening they showed tuned cars and motorbikes racing on the cricket field. Partly the vehicles were clearly self-made. In between the races little girls sang and danced. At 9pm there are then big fireworks every evening.

By and large the Royal Perth Show is a mix between an amusement park and a household appliances fair with a bit of petting zoo in it. We really enjoyed it!

Visit the official web site of the Royal Perth Show.