Tuesday 18 August 2009

Early morning photos of my apartment PHWEE! Bathroom on the left ("toilet"). Bedroom below, including Willy the snake plant. Then part of my dining nook thing, which is attached to the big living room (complete with Simon's couch, not pictured here, and a big ol' TV on the floor. Still don't have cable,)

The kitchen is my favorite room by far. That's Theodore Laurence the Lavendar Plant by the window, and some lilies. Then, the window over the sink faces south and east--you can see the ocean, if you squint. Alice says that come summer, there's a tree outside the window that will cover my ocean view--but she assures me that Frank has a saw and we can "take care of it."

Yup, I bought a camera--I took my video recorder to the shop and the guy said that it's really not meant for taking photos at all--so I bought a cheap teensy digital and took pics of my apartment. Yayyy, I am happy to have both vids and photo. Tomorrow, to celebrate the end of classes for another week (hehe, class was cancelled Monday, so really I just had two hours today and that was it...) I will go along the Coastal Walk and show you some photos of the ocean. Bcause it's ridiculously gorgeous.

Sunday, 16 August 2009

I spent most of this week indoors, working on papers with a few hours each day to walk in the sunshine. Friday I went to a houseparty given by Stesha’s friend Sean, a 21-year-old teetotaler who is applying for ADFA (the Aussie Defence Force Academy—West Point, Annapolis, and Air Force all rolled into one). He’s also a Canadian-cum-Australian, which means he has a permanent crippling Propensity for Niceness. He fed us steaks on the Barbie and Doritos, which in this country come in two flavors, Cheddar Cheese and Plain. Sean also invited over two nice fellows he’d met recently in a club, who in the course of two hours drank a bottle of rum between them and then, fortunately, passed out on the furniture. Stesha and Sean and I, however, had a fabulous time playing card games until past two in the morning.

I woke up at Stesha’s place in Maroubra on Saturday. The day was so lovely that I took the bus for only a few blocks before I jumped off at the shops in Coogee and strolled in tank top and skirt along the boardwalk, past young men balancing on their bare toes on a wire strung between two trees, very young mothers texting in one hand and pushing their baby strollers in the other, a gentleman painting a vista of the headlands, dozens of runners and children on scooters and dogs and Japanese tourists. I returned to my own beach, Clovelly, with a chocolate croissant and my own cup of coffee and passed out on my back in the grass, surrounded by picnickers and young lovers, and waking in a flurry of startled pigeons—one of them had actually been between my elbow and my body, nibbling bits of croissant.

Later I took the bus into the city and met Simon’s friend David, a lawyer in Bondi, and we boarded a train to Olympic Stadium (a soaring geometrical experiment, remnant of the 2000 Sydney Olympics). David began to explain the finer points of Australian Rules Football, and soon half the train car, clad in red scarves and beanies and jerseys and red and white striped kneesocks, chimed in with friendly banter against the Sydney Swans’ rival, the Geelong Cats. A win would be Sydney’s last hope of getting into the Finals.

The game was utterly fantastic. The two most important rules are as follows: no one wears padding, and the clock never stops. I cannot understand why this exuberant celebration of sheer strength and speed and brute physical and mental effort has not caught on in other countries, except that perhaps only Australians—in particular the legendary Aboriginal players—have the physical stamina to keep it up. A player will only leave the field if he is actively bleeding—and then, only if he wants to. If a player deliberately breaks another player’s leg, he will be removed from play as well—but only after the game. AFL is not for the fainthearted. “Come on the Swanees!”

It was “a cracker of a match,” as David declared, but Sydney lost by a narrow margin and the train home was subdued except for a few singing, swilling blue-striped Cats supporters. David and I went for ice cream and spent until the wee hours of the morning, in a spirit of friendly competition, comparing Oz and the States. Davo spent two years in the US, and he insulted American cheeses and praised American peanut butter while I insulted Aussie cheeses and praised Aussie bakeries.

It is supposed to be 28 degrees today, a degree of achievement that the Australian radio attributes grimly to climate change. All the windows in my apartment are open and my Clovelly neighbors are out and about in their two hundred dollar black skinny jeans and four hundred dollar high heeled boots, clutching coffees and pushing strollers. Yes, I’ve started saying I live in Clovelly instead of Randwick…yes, this is a status thing. To say you live in Clovelly (think: West Hartford) is to admit that you commute into North Sydney every day, wear big sunglasses and gourmet sausages, and don’t believe in public transport—oh, and you would be living in Vaucluse (think: Greenwich) except for the fact that the parents just moved down the coast and you didn’t want to be too far from them. Anyway, since it is already noon, my plan for a lazy Sunday includes laundry, beach, and dinner tonight with a friend of Craig’s named Darryl, a photographer-journalist who surfs three days a week and has promised to teach me, come summer.

Thursday, 13 August 2009

I have two papers due on Monday, so I apologize for not blogging more. I made corn chowda (experimentally, it came out decent too)--enough to last about a week, and so I have been holed up in my apartment since Monday, writing furiously. Don't worry, I leave the house for at least two hours every day to shop or go running. And tomorrow Stesha and I are going swingdancing! Yayyyyy!

Check out this article from Channel 7 news:

Australian men have been rated the worst in the world when it comes to being good husbands.

According to an Oxford University study of men in 13 western countries, Aussie blokes hate to help with the housework.

The men from Norway, Sweden, Britain, the US and Northern Ireland were said to make the best marriage partners.

The Netherlands, Ireland, Spain, New Zealand, Japan, Germany and Austria followed, with Australia coming in last place.

Ha. That's what happens when you're so durned good lookin'. Too busy surfing to wash the dishes.

In other tidbits, I have a date Sunday! :D

Saturday 08 August

My Aussie friend, Craig: The American accent is the second most irritating accent in the world.
Me: Hey!
Craig: The Australian accent is the first.

Still Friday 07 August

Today’s Pronunciation Tip #2: Quay = “key.”

Today I went to the zoo! Karolina and I hopped the ferry from Circular Quay to Taronga Wharf. We saw our very first koalas and kangaroos and my personal new favorite animal, the Echidna, which looks like a porcupine and waddles in the most endearing manner. The flying foxes were great, and so were the squirrel gliders in their little nocturnal habitat. We saw THE MOST POISONOUS SNAKE IN THE WORLD, called the “fierce” snake, which was kinda terrifying…I mean, it’s bad enough being THE MOST POISONOUS SNAKE IN THE WORLD, but you have to be FIERCE on top of it? Sadly there were no bearded dragons, but several other kinds of dragon were quite adorable. We saw dozens of parakeets and many kinds of pigeons (?) and a kookaburra, and were pleasantly surprised to see a free kookaburra sitting in a tree just around the next bend from his captive friend, commiserating, or maybe lording it over him.

A freak wind storm sprang up while we were walking around the Botanical Gardens (things were still blooming, but all the shrubbery was chopped back for the winter and even the eels were hibernating at the bottom of the pond) and within seconds, the city centre became a vast wind channel, sort of like Chicago. Large cold drops of water were falling, so Karolina and her boyfriend took off and I hurried home on the buses to take my (newly sopping) laundry down from the line. I was saved most of the labor, anyway, because most of the laundry had flown away and come to rest in piles of leaves against the walls of the courtyard.

Plan for tonight: cooking beef stroganoff. I’ve been putting it off because the act of slicing the bloody beef still freaks me out. Wish me luck!

p.s. Don’t bother seeing The Ugly Truth. The funny parts don’t outweigh the stupid and offensive.

Friday 07Aug2009

Today’s Aussie Pronunciation Tip: it’s not “Aw-see,” it’s “Awz-ee.” Hard z sound instead of an ess. It really bugs them when you get it wrong, much like it bugs Canadians when foreigners ask them if they're American, or so I've heard. Although honestly, any country that willingly refers to itself as “Oz…”

Sunday is the City2Surf, Sydney’s 14km race from the heart of the city, east beside the harbour and south along the coast to Bondi Beach. Your Favorite Blogger—er, except for Uncle Mark, and Jessie, and Yasmeen, and…um…well…One of Your Favorite Bloggers signed up. Why? Peer pressure and a desire to belong, I guess, because I will be racing along with seventy thousand other people. Yayyyyy!

I am signed up in the Back-of-the-Pack, a cheery euphemism for the Toddler, Pregnant-Women-with-Strollers, and Those-People-Who-Drink-Beer-While-They-Walk, Group. I think this will be fun! Seriously, I am ready for a nice day in the sun with free Gatorade. It will essentially be a guided tour of the city, with lots of cheering fans and people dressed up like gorillas.

I haven’t been preparing, unless you count the last month as preparation: every day I have walked between two and six hours, which is what happens when you live in an expensive suburb where everyone has a car except you. I am forty minutes from everything: the shopping center, the bus station, the library, the grocery store, the cinema, and the university. However—gloriously—I am a six-minute run downhill to the Beach. Twice in the last week I have run the 9km from Clovelly Beach through Bronte Beach, Hunter’s Park, Tamarama Park, and north into Bondi. Who needs a gym membership when you have an ocean view??

An Aussie friend once said that Sydney would be just like everywhere else, except that it happens to be on the beach. Certainly, the City Centre consists of businessmen, Versace, several breweries, Chinatown, two customs houses, a score of cafes and a few parks; if you lose your way you can find North by locating a wing of the Opera House, whitely fluttering beyond the dozen or so skyscrapers that make up the City Line. The sun shines and the buses run mostly on time and the population gets deeply involved in television series like Masterchef, and once in a while Cate Blanchett puts in an appearance in the muesli aisle at Cole’s.

But considering Sydney in this light doesn’t do it justice…because it IS on the beach.

The Coastal Walk is one long boardwalk, mostly pavement, sometimes wood or natural stone, running 100km along Sydney’s coast. The Walk plunges and slopes and rolls along hundreds of jutting headlands and natural bays. Join the dozens of Sunday strollers leaning on the fence, and you can gaze for hours as the surfers work their way out to sea again and again, falling silently through waves, as the wind and the heave of waves on rock below drowns out any human noise. Walking out on a promontory, looking to left and right, you feel that you can see the entire sloping coast of a continent in an endless ripple of cliffs and inlets. Perhaps the most remarkable part of the walk is where the pavement turns east and runs briefly inland through historic Waverly Cemetery (no, seriously, it’s historic, I just Googled it…established 1877 and turns out that Henry Lawson is buried there, and he must be important because there’s a street named after him…ok, he’s the famous Australian poet whose works included the collection “While the Billy Boils” (he he he). And according to Wikipedia, the cemetery was briefly featured in a scene from Mel Gibson’s movie “Tim.” Nope, I haven’t seen it either.) The cemetery is vast, the graves are packed like so many bathtubs side-by-side, their lids caved in, grass and weeds poking up at the feet of stone angels. The names and dates are remarkably well-preserved, despite the centuries of exposure to salt breezes; many of these patrons were dead before the 20th century.

Anyway, the view is incredible and the wintry sun has given me a deep tank-top-shaped tan. I plan to rest my legs Saturday; I am confident about the race: it’s just an extra-long walk. The only pressure is the pressure I put on myself to finish (OK, and also I want to finish relatively soon because my Fulbright friend Craig invited me to a real-life Australian Barbie afterwards and it only goes til 3 and I want to get there before everyone else eats all the food).

Saturday 01 August

The Saturday night blogging trend continues! Ha. Don’t worry, I have been getting out a little more. I had classes on Monday and Tuesday evening (it’s quite nice because it fills the long, dark, cold hours, and I can spend all the bright sunshiny morning and afternoon doing whatever I want). Wednesday, I had a doctor’s appointment; Thursday I made enchiladas (mmm) and then went out with three of the people I met at the Fulbright thingy last Sunday…Craig (Australia, 30, accountant), Stesha (San Francisco, 22, medical student), and Michelle (Baltimore, 20-something, law student).

We hit up a posh wine bar, Ash St Cellar, in the City. Michelle and I each ordered a Flight, to try a few different wines, and all four of us were surprised when the waitress brought out Three Full Glasses of wine for both of us. Oops! Craig left after an hour, to go to class; two hours later, we ladies were still enjoying our goat cheese and pine nuts in honey (mmm) when he returned. We bar hopped, briefly; ran for a few blocks to get Michelle on the last ferry home; and got me (just in time) on the last bus back to Clovelly. I had a brief chat with a German student riding the bus; he was traveling around the world, he said, before starting university in Hawaii; in the meantime he was trying to get to some address in the next suburb but he had no idea which bus he was supposed to be on, so I directed the bus driver where to let him off and then hopped off the bus myself, proudly, at the right stop for once; just like a local.

Friday was another study day; today, I hit up a “car boot sale” at a nearby elementary school, followed by the “mega book sale” at the library. Returned home with four new books, having successfully resisted such acquisitions as a tablecloth, a whatnot (how would I have carried it home?), and a TV (sheer stubbornness). I did, however, pick up another plant. This is Molly the snakeplant, and she will live in my sunny bathroom.

Did my laundry in the tub today, and hung it out to dry on the line. Ugh. What a miserable chore. With the miracles of modern plumbing and concentrated detergent, I cannot even imagine Washing Day for poor Laura Ingalls Wilder. If Almanzo had handed me his socks, I would have smacked him with my red, raw, soapy hand; hiked up my petticoats and, aching back and all, fled to live with the Indians, who (I hear) didn’t hold with such nonsense as clean clothes.

Monday 27 July

So I asked my landlord about his pet policy. The pound nearby has a "rescue kitty" program where people volunteer to be foster parents for kittens until they find a home. I want to do that SO BADLY, not least of all because I want something furry to love (Theodore Laurence just doesn’t cut it), and because next year I won't be able to have a pet either since I'll be at sea several months out of the year.

Landlord’s response: "No pets whatsoever! We've never allowed pets in the units and we're not going to start. Because one person wants a fish, then the next wants a cat and then one wants a dog and next thing you know the cat's making messes on the carpet and the dog's barking all night. No, no, no pets whatsoever."

After some further discussion--I explained what I wanted to do, and how Yasmeen pays a deposit every month on her cats, and I tried to work up some tears like Mom told me to, and finally he said "Well if you reeeeally want, it would be all right if you get a fish. Just so long as you put something under the terrarium so it doesn't leak or get water on the carpet." He then added “Umm…so do you want a fish?”

I bit my tongue instead of saying that the woman upstairs has a baby, for heaven's sake, which is far more likely to "leak or get water on the carpet" than a fish or even a cat, who doesn't bark OR get colic OR cry all night so that its parents have to thump up and down, up and down, rocking it at two in the morning.

Sunday 26 July

I walked to the market in Bondi Beach, and bought some expensive fancy candles to make my apartment less stale (I don’t dare open the windows for fear of letting the heat out). Walked home, and got a call from Karolina; she and Paul wanted to go to the beach. Walked back to Bondi Beach. NB: it takes an hour, walking fast, to get to this beach from my house. I was pretty darn tired by the time Karo and Paul arrived; also, it was raining. We had a nice dinner in a little pizza place, followed by a few drinks (more Fruity Tingle! he he) before heading home. Interestingly, took us three tries to find a bar that served, not just beer, but cocktails…despite the fact that every third shop on the strip was a bar. And this is a big strip. I still don’t get Australia.

Saturday 25 July

I hope I don’t set a trend of writing in my blog every Saturday night; I can think of many things to do on Saturday night that do not involve sitting home alone and typing on a computer.

This morning, Alice walked in the door in a state of high excitement. "I passed a garage sale on the way here and they have furniture!" she cried, practically throwing the stool at me, and we rushed out the door. Alice, who understands the vitality of speed at a garage sale, dropped me in front while she looked for parking.

I couldn't believe my eyes. It was Table Heaven. I instantly found a beautiful yellow one that needed a coat of varnish and maybe a piece of cardboard under one of the legs, and Alice stalked around it and fended off any potential buyers while I hurried over to the man in charge. "How much for this table?"

He held up four fingers. Well, of course it wouldn't be anything less than four hundred dollars, after all the other ones I looked at, I thought, and I was just turning away sadly when he added, "And five dollars each for the chairs, or sixty for the whole set."

I tried not to hug him, but handed over the cash, and he even promised to deliver. So now I am the proud owner of a big table and five chairs and I can have people over for dinner, so long as they don't want to watch telly, because of course I don't have one of those. Or a couch. That's my project for next weekend.

Friday 24 July

Today I forked over EIGHTEEN DOLLARS for two loads at the Laundromat. I think from now on I will do as Yasmeen advised, and just swirl my clothes around the bathtub with a bit of detergent. If you love me, you won't mind the smell.

I visited four or five secondhand furniture stores, and came away with a despairing little notebook full of entries like "red wood, the man says it's antique, missing center leaf, $565." I was even depressed by the kitchen stools I looked at, because one was painted white with a little posy in the seat and weighed in at $199, and another was pinkish plastic with rusty metal cross bars and looked like someone had tried to paint it, maybe in the 1980s, and was even scarier because they were asking $95. I called Alice and she said she would loan me one of her kitchen stools. To console myself, on the way home I bought a ladle, a wire fruit bowl, and a candle, and made a fancy dinner of beef bourguignon.

There are palm trees here, and the birds of paradise and Japanese magnolias are blooming. I, however, spend my nights swaddled in blankets, toes enclosed in fur-lined boots, curled around my space heater. Right now I am trying to acclimatize, so I am bravely typing away with stiff fingers, in sweatpants and sweatshirt and thick socks, in the kitchen with the cold sea breeze breathing in through the windows. The Aussies are prancing around outside in shorts and t-shirts. Well, these are the same nutters who don’t install heating OR air conditioning in their homes. I have acquired a knitted hat and gloves and they see frequent use.

Thursday 23 July

My International Trade Law course lasted Monday through Thursday, from 9-5. It was fascinating, but quite exhausting! When I finally got home every evening, it was dark, and I just had the energy to make dinner and watch a movie and go to sleep early. Every night at 8 pm, I bundle up and walk to Blockbuster to rent a single video, and all too frequently, buy a Cadbury bar. The Blockbuster people have started to call me by name.

My furniture situation is starting to look desperate. I don't mind sleeping on the floor, after four years in a barracks, where you might as well be sleeping on the floor anyway. I love my bedroom far more than any bed because I can roll around the entire room if I want to, and never fall off the edge of the mattress. Still--my dining position is rather more precarious. I have jury-rigged a sort of table, by knocking all the shoes off my shoe rack every evening and putting my laptop and my plate on it, and sitting in front of it in the loungey-sort of camp chair Alice loaned me. It's quite nice because the shoe rack has three levels and so I can have laptop on top and a glass of water below it and then rest my feet on the bottom. Still, my landlord walked in the other day and made a joke about my Spartan tendencies, and even the men carrying the refrigerator were giving me odd looks and saying delicate things about the high prices of home furnishings.

Monday 21 July

Well today was my first day of school. I got there right on time at 0900 and got home about two hours ago, around 8:30 pm, yuck! I have all this reading to do but I am too braindead right now. I have the same schedule tomorrow and then Wednesday and Thursday, I will be home by 6. Today, I just had the energy to call my landlord, make a little pizza in my fancy new oven and watch half of Cold Comfort Farm.

Pizza, you say? Yes, Australians believe in pizza, and most restaurants have “The American” (a pie with mozzarella, tomato sauce—pronounced toe-MAH-toe—and pepperoni. But their concept of cheese seems to be another matter. The other day, I asked the waitress in a café what kind of cheese they put on the burgers (I shouldn’t have to explain that in America you often get a choice between cheddar, American, jack…) She got a blank look on her face. "Oh, you know, the normal stuff...Tasty Cheese." At first I thought she was describing it ("Oh, really, you don't serve Nasty Old Unpleasant Cheese here?") After a bit more research, I am still in the dark. Apparently Australia’s favorite cheese is “Tasty Cheese,” which is not a brand name, but refers to the type of cheese (it’s actually a sharp white cheddar). It bugs me a little because it makes me think of the game of Adventure ("tahsty cheese!") , but I suppose that’s just the xenophobia kicking in. I mean, this country gave me Internet and cell phone (“mobile”) access within three days, so who am I to complain about the name of the cheese, especially when they do sell Brie and Gruyere in the specialty shops.

The other funny thing was when Alice, in an effort to be helpful, offered me “some nice Kraft slices” and then she and the waitress looked at me, apparently expecting that all Americans eat plastic-flavored processed cheese byproduct. I sneered, and ate my burger with Tahsty Cheese (“what do you want to do with the cheese?”).

School was all right except that the building was UNHEATED. OK, OK, I take it back. School was like a slow death. Everyone was bundled in their jackets (except those of us who don't have jackets) all day and our hands were so cramped we couldn't take notes, barely. I drank more coffee in those four days than I have in the last two months (it helps that I rarely, if ever, drink coffee). It was about ten degrees warmer outside the building, on the stones of the courtyard in the sun, and we all huddled outside during the breaks.

My classmates seem friendly. We are of all ages and all nationalities. In every class I sit next to Karolina, this sweet Polish girl who arrived in Oz a week after I did. She lives in an apartment with her boyfriend Paul. It takes her an hour and a half to get to class every day, by train, so she and Paul are looking for an apartment closer to the city. I am trying to convince them to move to Clovelly. I bought a friend, Theodore Laurence the Lavender Plant. He lives in the kitchen. But I would like to have people friends, too.