Nice accent!

So we're at the grocery store the other day, and the check-out girl says "Oh, are you Americans?" Yes, we are. "I love you're accent - it's so great!" Now, we've been to a fair amount of places, and I have never heard of anyone liking a Midwest accent (except possibly someone looking for a news reporter). Oh well - I'll take it! She was also convinced that people in the US were SOOOO much nicer than people in Australia, which we both thought was slightly amusing.

And speaking of fun accent stories, when we went to pick up a couch we bought off of E-bay, the guy was trying to figure out Ben's accent. After we had gotten the couch mostly loaded (and thus had been talking to him for some time) he asked Ben if his accent was Scottish. John, a post-doc in the lab who is actually from Scotland, found this highly amusing.

But the interesting thing is that we don't really notice the Aussie accent anymore (unless it's really strong). However, we will occasionally sit in front of the TV and imitate what they say in order to cultivate our Aussie accent. Don't think it's helping, yet.

Jack-o-lanterns

As I've mentioned to some of you, Halloween is not big here. It's possible to find a few Halloween things in the stores, but most people don't celebrate it in any way.

So it was that much more exciting when, after a bit of a hunt, we managed to find Halloween pumpkins! After searching all the big grocery stores and shopping centers (OK, well a few of them), they were right down the road in our great little fruit market! So we had to invite the neighbors over to carve pumpkins.

They did a great job of scraping out the gooey insides, and Eliza is reading a Geronimo Stilton book about Halloween, so she had some great ideas for face designs. Then it came time to actually carve the pumpkins. But the one thing we were missing was a pumpkin carving knife. Thought this sent a great message: "Halloween is this great holiday where kids get all loaded up on sugar, their hands get all slimy with pumpkin goo, and then we give them big kitchen knives." For the safety and sanity of everyone involved, Ann and I took over the carving, and the kids took over the responsibility of eating gummy body parts and taking pictures (see next entry).

I think it was a great success. I told them to take the pumpkins home with them, but then they dragged them back over when it got dark so I could see them with the candle in there. And they were all in their PJs, which made the whole thing even more cute.

The world according to Billy

This is what our backyard looks like in the eyes of a 4 year old. Mind you, he wasn't out there alone - he was surrounded by pumpkin carving, candy, siblings, a "funny" dog (as his brother Joe puts it). Hope this gives you a more thorough insight into our lives.





Note: I only posted ~1/3 of the photos. If you would like to see the rest, just let me know and I'll be happy to e-mail them.

Fast-tracked TV

So cable and satellite TV and all that other fancy stuff isn’t nearly as common as it is in the US. This leaves most people with 5 standard “free-to-air” channels. The shows are divided between those produced in Australia and those produced internationally (generally in the US, but some in the UK & elsewhere).

Of the Aussie shows, the soap operas (e.g. Neighbours, Here and Away) tend to do really well (although we haven’t seen them, yet). The crime shows don’t do very well, and based on what we’ve seen (a few minutes of The Strip), we understand why. If you thought the acting on CSI Miami was lame, you ain’t seen nothin’ yet. There are also lots of Aussie adaptations of US and British shows (e.g. Australian Idol, So You Think You Can Dance, Thank God You’re Here, Are You Smarter Than a 5th Grader).

Among the “imported” TV shows, there are 3 categories:
1) Re-runs (e.g., The Simpsons, Two and a Half Men, The Iron Chef (which has great voice-overs!), Friends)

2) “Fast-tracked” shows, which means the episode will air here a couple of months after it aired in the US (e.g., most of the US crime shows, So You Think You Can Dance, Amazing Race)

3) “Seriously Fast-tracked” shows, which means they air here a few weeks later (e.g., the new 90210, Fringe). This is a major advertising point, and it cracks me up when they use the dramatic deep voice to announce that a show is going to be “seriously fast-tracked from the US.”

Our absolute favourite are 2 comedy/political humour shows: Rove and Good News Week. I think you should be able to check out bits and pieces at the following links:
http://www.rovedaily.com.au
http://ten.com.au/gnw-video.html

Rice Krispie Treats

As we mentioned the other day, we made rice krispie treats to take to the kids next door. But more accurately, we made “rice bubble” treats, because that’s what they’re called, here. Also, there are no plain marshmallows; only vanilla and raspberry, or a mix of tropical flavours. We went with vanilla and raspberry, but we both agree we like plain, better (probably just because that’s what we grew up with).

But rice krispie treats are indeed a novelty, here! They do something with rice bubbles and condensed milk, but not butter and marshmallows. Glad we could introduce another way to fight that obesity problem!

Quiz: Which is the world's fattest country?

Living in the US, we've had it pretty well pounded into our head that the US has the highest rate of obesity in the world. BUT - that's no longer true! Australia is now the proud holder of that esteemed title. Certainly can't blame it on Ben moving here!

Dinner with Neighbours

Last night, our neighbours (Rob & Ann & 4 kids - you initially met them 11 Sept.) had us over for dinner. They also invited the neighbors on their other side, too (John and Grace). It was a great night and felt so comfortable! And it was so much fun to hear their stories - both couples are pretty amazing.

Rob and Ann both grew up out in Dubbo (~6 hrs NW of Sydney) and come from big farming families. John is an electrician, and was telling us about how he installed electricity at lots of the big farms out there. He's only ~37 yrs old - that really makes you realize how young the country is. Bill Bryson writes about this town that just got electricity in 1995, but you kind of get the feeling it's an unusual case. It's not - it's the norm.

And John and Grace are in their 70's, and I think they've seen the entire world. When they were in their 20's(?), they bought their house in Epping and then decided to travel around the world. They took 6 months to do the Overland Route from India to England, and then settled in England and bought an MGB. But the trick was, to avoid paying some kind of tax in England, the car had to leave the country within 1yr. And to avoid taxes in AU, they had to own the car outside AU for 18 months. So after working in England for a year, they did a road trip around Europe for 6 months. They sent the car back to AU after the trip (and still own it), but instead of following the car, they decided to move to Toronto. They worked there for a year, and then started another road trip in a $200 rusted-out station wagon. They worked their way all the way down through South America. They said the 2 big things they didn't make it to were the Galapagos and Tierra del Fuego. And then they sold the car in Paraguay(?) for $250 - made $50!! ...and finally headed back to Oz (but didn't stop traveling).

Lots of other neat stories about the history of our neighborhood (since John and Grace have lived there 40 years) and insights into AU culture and even a little bit of talk about US politics. We learned that our house used to be connected to Rob and Ann's years ago - we're in the one that the elderly parents lived in. Hopefully that doesn't say anything about us!

And a great dinner, too! Started with fresh oysters that Rob's brother just brought up from Merimbula. For dinner, we had steak or sausages, roasted potatoes, and a beautiful salad with beets, pumpkin, feta, and walnuts. For dessert, Ann had made a cheesecake and Grace had made a pecan spice cake. We ended up making rice krispy treats with sprinkles, but the kids mostly took care of those. Rob and Ann have a beautiful back porch and it was a beautiful night, so we just sat out there and talked until nearly 11:00.

And we even got a fantastic art show:

Random musings

Not that I expect sympathy from people heading towards winter, but it's just a yucky day. We're having an unusual cold snap - it's 50 and rainy and really windy; it's snowing in the mountains. And Julie's mom is arriving today. Welcome to Oz! But we're kinda jealous that Julie has a visitor. You'd think that since we have each other to share adventures with, it would lessen the desire to share our adventures with other friends and family. And maybe it does lessen it, but it's still definitely there! So if anyone wants to head this way, let us know!

Newnes State Forest

With our snazzy new tent in hand, we headed out for our first over-night excursion! We decided to go Sun/Mon so we'd miss a little bit of the weekend traffic. So we headed west, across the Blue Mountains, toward Lithgow, and ended up in Newnes State Forest (pronounced "noons"). We stopped in Lithgow at a hot bread shop and picked up some food (meat pies, a sausage roll, some things with ham and capsicum - all really good!). Then we headed up the dirt road in our little low-rider (our car has no clearance).

So a fast note about Newnes SF. It's seems to be a big recreational hub, which mostly means it's a place for people to drive crazy. You either take your big ol' 4WD truck off on side roads that have ruts big enough to swallow our entire car and see how long it takes to break an axle, blow a tire, or get stuck, OR you take your dirt bike and speed along the plateau until you wipe out or run into a kangaroo. It has a very testosterone-ish "I drink my rum from a can and my truck's bigger than your truck" kind of feel. So we felt a little out of place putting along in our little car, or stopped on the side of the road to watch birds. But we drove to the far end of the road, just before it becomes national park, and it got a lot quieter.

On Sunday we meandered around the woods checking out termite mounds, looking at flowers (which are great, right now), and watching birds & bugs.
Ben and Ani checking out a termite mound:

Kerry and Ani enjoying the flowers:

Then Monday we headed into the national park to the glow worm tunnel! This used to be a big mining area, and they made all these crazy tunnels so the trains could negotiate the steep edge of the plateau. One of the tunnels curves 180 degrees, so it gets really dark in the middle. When they abandoned it, glow worms took over, and it's so neat! And on the hike back to the car, we spotted our first male lyre bird - another very cool animal!

'Roo Poo

So since we included them in the title of our blog, it was a major priority for us to find kangaroos (other than on the supermarket shelves). So this weekend we went searching for 'roos. We knew we were on the right track when found great tracks.
Big Eastern Grey Kangaroo tracks:


Smaller Wallaroo tracks:


And we knew we must be getting even closer when we found 'roo poo. And not just a little, but TONS of it - there were piles everywhere.


And sure enough - right around dusk, we finally spotted a wallaroo!! And a little further on we saw a group of Eastern Greys!! They're so cool - they'd sit there and look at you for a little bit, and then SO effortlessly, they'd hop away a little bit. It's just incredible to watch them move. We spent a while that night spot-lighting them - I'm sure we looked real classy with big headlamps and binocs protruding from our faces. It looked a lot like night-time shots that they have in wildlife films, where you can't get a lot of color, but you can still see the animal really well and catch their crazy eye-shine. And sometimes we'd just turn off the headlamps and listen to them hopping around us. Very cool! (Sorry - no pics. It was too dark, and when we spotted them during the day, they were too far.)

Driving

Driving is different here, and not just because you drive on the left instead of the right. The whole inside of the car is also flipped (except for the pedals, thank goodness!). This means that for the first several days, we got in on the wrong side of the car; we flipped on the wipers instead of the turn-indicator; we fought the urge to look over the other shoulder when backing up; we reached to the wrong side for the seatbelt; we smacked our hand into the door when we went to shift. Interestingly, it also meant that more than once, the passenger would reach up to adjust the rear-view mirror so they could see out the back. It’s funny what habits die hard.

Other notes about driving here:
- it's legal for dogs to drive (...OK, not really)

- there are round-abouts everywhere (which is actually really convenient when you need to do a U-turn)

- lane lines are not always clear (i.e. dotted white lines can be used to divide 2 lanes heading the same direction, or they can be used as a centre line for traffic heading opposite directions. If traffic is sparse, it can be hard to tell if you’re on a one-way or two-way road!)

- we don’t need AU or even international licenses – we can just use our regular old US driver’s license (which is actually a bit disappointing)

- sometimes they have these zig-zag lines down the middle of the lane - we don’t know what that means, yet

- speeds, of course, are in km/h, which means speed limits look really high (e.g. 60 in a residential area)

- highways (in Sydney, at least) aren’t always what we think of as highways – many are just big roads. In fact the ‘highway-ish’ highways have only been built in the last several years.

Voting

It's done! We've voted! We watched all the debates and feel we've made informed decisions. (... oh - the debates aired on SNL weren't the real debates???) Kerry's vote might actually mean something this year, which is a very exciting thing. [Kerry is registered in Indiana; Ben is registered in Illinois.] We'll be very curious to see what happens on 4 Nov., and it's really nice that we'll be able to follow the results without needing to stay up until 3AM.

Oh yeah - and it's mandatory to vote here. If you don't vote, you get fined. Wonder how it would change results if every US citizen of a certain age HAD to vote.

Merry Christmas to us!!!

Yes, I realize it's still more than 2 months away, but in our house, it's Christmas! (Actually, it's been Christmas in all the stores for a while, now. Without Halloween and Thanksgiving to act as buffers, they get the commercial side of Christmas started REALLY early.)

But in our house, it's Christmas because our new tent just arrived! Our old, reliable, $70 Kelty tent that Kerry bought 10 years ago served us well - was part of many camping trips, went to Kenya and back, functioned as our house for a while. But it's days had come to an end, and we were in desperate need of a new one.
old tent:

Thus started our quest for a new tent. But good back-packing tents are hard to get, here. For as outdoor-sy as I pictured Australians, their idea of "camping" is loading up everything but the kitchen sink, driving to some big campground that charges you a bunch to stay there, and setting up a gigantic 15-person tent and a grill and hanging out by the car for a few days. And their idea of "back-packing" is hopping from hostel to hostel. You can find back-packing tents at specialty stores, but they're really expensive. So we turned to good ol' Sierra Trading Post, and we got a great deal on a great tent!
new tent:

And we got new sandals and shorts and a hat, too. So Merry Christmas to us! So guess what we're doing this weekend?!? Camping!!!

Turkish Pide

We've been cooking a lot more, here - partly because we don't have our Trader Joe's instant dinners or DiGiorno frozen pizzas, anymore. (Yes, I realize that sounds pathetic, but cooking has not been our forte the past several years.) But I also think our cooking habits have changed because our perception of time. At Purdue, we just never felt like we had the spare time for making a real home-cooked meal. But time is just different here, and we don't feel that 'US grad-student guilt' if we take the time to make a real meal.

So our 'new recipe of the day' is Turkish Pide (PI-DAY). There are Turkish food stands everywhere that sell kebabs and pide (which has been nick-named Turkish pizza). Turns out it's really simple to make at home, too. So here's the basic idea:
1) buy pide bread

2) cut up a lot of fresh vegetables

3) score around the perimeter of the bread and pull out the top layer. Then fill the centre with the fresh veggies and some cheese

4) stick it in the oven for 15 min

5) eat it and marvel at your new-found cooking skills

Epping Twilight Market

The Epping Twilight Market happens once a month, and, since we live in Epping, we figured we should go at least once. It's a great little market with just about everything you can imagine: produce, meat, hand-crafts, manchester (aka, linens), all kinds of restaurant vendors, activities for kids. It was a gorgeous night, perfect for strolling around the stalls, or just sitting and people-watching. We bought some produce and two 1/2 metre lengths of sherbet-centred licorice: passionfruit and rasberry - lots of fun! We also decided to sample 2 Chinese buns and some poffertjies (Dutch pancakes - second photo below). I think we'll have to go next month, too!

Bio-Nerds, Part 1

So generally, we try to pretend like we’re quasi-normal people. But the truth of the matter is, at heart, we’re bio-nerds. And I’m sure this will not be the last entry with such a title, so I’m having the fore-sight to label this one “part 1.”

There are tons of great spiders here (yes, including several of the world’s most deadly). And the other day, Ben discovered two Black House Spiders on our back porch. So what would a bio-nerd do? Feed ‘em. We spent at least 30 min catching flies and throwing them in their webs and taking photos when the spiders ran out to get the flies. The next morning, the porch was littered with little eviscerated/ compacted fly skeletons – like when dad used to suck the air out of the milk carton to collapse it and Jen and I thought it was so cool. One spider is more skittish; one seems a little more bold. They’re both getting really fat.

And bug hunting is also a common form of procrastination at the office. Since most people in the lab study some local bug, they can call it “work.” Kerry has to admit what it really is: future (hypothetical) job training. And there’s some really cool stuff out there! But our all time favourite spider right now is the wrap-around spider (Dolophones sp.). It has the biggest, flattest, funkiest abdomen we’ve seen, and it does an amazingly good job of camouflaging with tree bark – just looks like a little fuzzy patch (it stands out more in the photo than it did when just looking at the bush).

Great time to visit AU!

So you might not have much money left right now, thanks to the lovely economic situation, but whatever money you do have will go further in Australia! So come visit!

For reasons I don't fully understand (and I'm not really looking for a detailed explanation), the Australian economy is allegedly one of the most stable economies in the world right now (although that's not saying much). However, the value of the Australian dollar (AUD) has plummeted to 40 year lows. When we arrived, the AUD had reached record highs - it was worth 98.5 US cents - almost equal to a US$. (Yes, this is when we transfered most of our money.) Now its value is bouncing around 68 US cents - your money would go almost twice as far! Plus, AU currency is WAY prettier than US currency.

Alternatively, if you don't feel like coming to Oz right now, you could just send us your money. We'll take good care of it...

Labour Day Weekend

So yesterday was Labour Day, here. We pretty much celebrated the good ol' US grad student way - we laboured. We mostly worked on thesis stuff, but we also finished up some of our settling-in shopping (and yes, shopping is work for us).

But we did manage to squeeze in a little bit of fun. Friday night was a departmental barbeque. They cooked up burgers, sausages, mushrooms, prawns (yes, we had "shrimp on the barbie," even though no one calls them shrimp here - that was just for a US ad campaign). It was great to get to know some of the people in other labs, too. The people in the pic below are some of Ben's lab-mates: Anne, Sam, Ben (hopefully you still recognize him), and Julie.


Then on Saturday, Julie invited us over for dinner - even Ani got to come! Julie is from MA, and she's part of a program where she does 1/2 her PhD here and 1/2 in MA. She prepared this great Greek dinner for us - grilled lamb skewers, spanakopita, baba ghanouj, even really good ice cream. She's just a great person, and we were there until 1 AM talking (a pretty late night for us old fogies!).

I Spy: Flowers

Not to rub it in for all you northern-hemisphere-ers, but spring is here. New flowers are popping up every day, birds are starting their mating calls, the little black-and-orange moths in our backyard are mating, ducklings are out and about, Kerry has emerged from her down cocoon and has decided to put her microwave beanie away for the time being. But the great thing about Australia is that even before spring arrived (when Kerry was still in hibernation) there were flowers out. Just not as many flowers as there are now.

So here are some of the flowers in our yard:

This doesn't happen in Australia

Just to set the record straight...


So this is an e-mail going around, and the caption at the end is:

"Also, please note that the problem with the second one isn’t the kangaroo in the house, nor the cigarette in its mouth, nor the over-sized stubby, nor the fact that a child has it, nor the fact that he’s drinking beer with a straw (I saw somebody do that in a pub yesterday).

The reason it’s wrong is that no-one in Australia drinks Fosters."

HOWEVER, this does happen in Australia:
- A man in Darwin was pulled over and fined, not for buckling his precious case of beer into the seatbelt, but for having his kid on the floor without a seatbelt. (Thanks to "Wait, Wait..." for alerting us to that great story.)

- A politician in Western Australia admitted to sniffing the chair of a female colleague, and also to snapping the bra-strap of a female member of the opposition party. He did not loose his position (at least not over those incidents).

- A town mayor in Queensland suggested "beauty-disadvantaged" women might consider moving to his town, where they might find a happier life with the 5:1 male-female ratio. He refused to recognize that his comments were politically incorrect. (See blog entry 25 Aug '08)

I Spy: Sidewalks

OK, actually I don't spy sidewalks. At least not many of them. One guy from Britain had a theory that this meant you were just supposed to drive everywhere, but we (and most people) disagree. There are paths worn into the grass where a sidewalk might go, and most people have little fences or hedgerows ~1-2 metres from the road, creating a public pathway. When it rains it gets a little messy, but that's not too often.

...yes, the boat in the photo is ours...

The other interesting thing about walking here is the existence of short-cuts everywhere. I think Sydney expanded and developed before there was ever any real development plan, so consequently there's not much rhyme or reason to the streets - no grid system at all. So sometimes it can be harder to get from point A to point B than you'd think. But if you're a pedestrian, there are all these sidewalks (yes, sidewalks) that cut between houses and connect streets. There are also parks and nature trails that work as shortcuts, too. We're discovering new shortcuts all the time, so it makes walking and running a lot more fun. It's also changed the way we look at maps.