Wednesday 02September2009

September 1 is, according to Oz, the first day of spring. Yayyy! Unfortunately this is a cooler week, with highs in the high sixties. Wow, listen to me complain. You wouldn’t know I was born in CT, would you? But Karolina, my tiny Polish friend, agrees with me. “Yes, Poland was wow very freezing, but we come to Australia and is supposed to be desert and instead I am sleeping with heater on every night!” Oooh I have a photo of her, I forgot, and that’s Simon next to her—this was during Pols class on Tuesday—

And here’s one of her and her cute Polish boyfriend, Paul, on the beach at Cronulla:



Craig’s (another Fulbright alum) birthday was on Sunday and he had a party Saturday night. I did my usual cooking thing, by which I mean I gathered a bunch of recipes online and picked my favorite parts and managed to produce a chocolate cake with coconut rum frosting which had people surreptitiously running their fingers along the bottom of the cake pan to lick up the extra. The cake was fun to make, too, not the least because I had to buy a large bottle of rum and as you can imagine, my new recipe goes something like “three tablespoons of rum for the icing, a swig for the cook, half a cup for the cake, another swig for the cook…”

After my unhappy swimming experiment last week, Darryl took me to Bondi on Sunday and helped me pick out a wetsuit and boogie board. With my pocketbook considerably lightened, then, we tackled the waves. And oh my goodness…you have not seen big waves until you have come to Australia. This surf was BIG. I definitely had more than one “oh $*@” moment, and at one point I was perched on the crest of a MONSTER looking down a fifteen foot green cliff and pitching forward perilously (afterward Darryl said, in the understated way these people do, “you may want to try going sideways down the wave a little, or else you might fall straight down the front…”)

Anyway, we were happily beaten up by the sea for a few hours and pleased with how warm I felt afterward, I decided two days ago to go for a swim down at Clovelly Baths again. The usual twenty minute walk plus ten minutes to struggle into the wetsuit (my fingers are actually bruised from trying on so many wetsuits last weekend…) and I popped out onto the boardwalk to find a huge hose sucking all the water out of the bath, and jolly city workers in their bright yellow vests scraping the baths clean. How thoughtless!

So I gritted my teeth and marched into the surf. It wasn’t too bad, except for the psychological effects that accrue from reading too much Bill Bryson (try swimming among cliffs, rocks, surf, and more rocks while reciting the mantra “sharks. jellyfish. rip tides. sharks. jellyfish…”) Anyway I was joined by two or three other souls (who were braver, I noticed, and ventured all the way out to the far headlands where the surf was breaking). Anyway I survived and even enjoyed myself. Am going back tomorrow, as a matter of fact; lower impact than running, and you get the fun afterwards of putting on the new bikini and laying out in the sun with a hot coffee on the excuse of “must warm up before I venture back inside to do homework!”

No news yet on my furniture shipment. But my two new Denise Austin tapes arrived!

We conclude with this important message from the Randwick City Council.