Car!!:

I bought a car. It's a 1996 Suzuki Cino, 2 door (well 3, it's a hatch), kind of blue-purple. It doesn't have power steering (who knew such things were still made?) or airbags but it does have AC. The really important point here is that it's a manual transmission which I am still pretty bad at driving. Driving it home was mostly OK, by the time I got to Woden I could start it at after stopping without stalling. Except for the one light. I could have sworn that I downshifted, but apparently not. It's very hard to start a car in second gear... Sorry, people behind me.

Now I can think about going riding and deciding whether I want to learn to row. Both of those things require cars.

Buses:

1) Some of the older buses in Canberra have a little placard on the side. "Children are not permitted to sit while adults are standing." Strikes me as weird. I feel that I am better equipped to stand on a bus than a child is.

2) Riding a bus this afternoon, one of the outside panels (it looked like the door to a luggage compartment on a coach, if that makes sense) flew up. While driving 80 km/hr, the driver reached out the window and shoved the thing back into place. I was happy to be getting off at the next stop.

Uniforms:

The Australian Navy summer uniform includes:
1) white shorts, well above the knee.
2) either navy blue knee socks and shoes or white knee socks and (white) shoes.

Just...no. Grown men + white shorts + knee socks? Seriously, who thought that was a good idea?

I'm told that the US Navy has a similar uniform but that it is only approved in very hot places and US sailors never choose to wear it. Not true of the Australians. Not true at all.

From Wikipedia:

Umm, really? "Pizza Hut Pakistan also offers "All you can eat and drink" deal in holy month of Ramadan."

That doesn't seem calculated to win any fans.

Australian to American English Part I -- Food:

Biscuit (or bickie) -- sometimes a cookie, sometimes a cracker
Capsicum -- red/green/yellow/orange pepper
Chips - both fries and potato chips. Sometimes you hear "fries" but I've never heard "crisps"
Coriander -- cilantro and coriander
Devon - baloney
Flat White -- more or less a latte
Lemonade -- Sprite
Lolly -- candy, not just a lollipop
Long black -- my coffee drink of choice, espresso diluted with water
Maccas - McDonalds
Short black -- shot of espresso
slab -- a case of beer
Sultanas -- Raisins, more or less
Tim Tam -- a delicious cookie

Cycling:

Canberra's great for cycling. Things are generally pretty close together, it never rains, and the cycle paths are amazing. And I've realised how much I like to cycle.

When I cycle the 14 km into work, I start out on a suburban path along a drainage ditch. You cycle under buildings and low bridges. In the morning, there aren't many people on the path, but in the afternoon, it's full of walkers carrying packages from the shopping centre home and a few other cyclists on their way home from work.

After about 3 k, I switch to a path near the shoulder of a busy road. This is my least favourite part of the journey. Not only are you close to the road, but there is a killer hill and twice you have to cross over the road riding on sidewalk. It's always a relief to make it to Yarralumla.

In Yarralumla, the path leaves Adelaide Avenue and cuts up through an older suburb towards the lake. You ride past houses, tennis courts, and soccer fields. There are a couple of road crossings, but the streets aren't very busy. The other traffic tends to be kids in the afternoons and people walking dogs in the mornings. This is my favorite part of the ride.

You join up with the lake path after passing through Yarralumla. About 6km more to go, but this is where the professional cyclists are riding, whizzing past me on my poor overloaded hybrid huffing and puffing as I ride up the hill. This is also where I had the worst accident I've ever had on a bicycle. I got whiplash, bruised up one knee pretty badly, and have bruises all over the rest of my body in really weird places (why would I have a bruise along my shin? It makes no sense). Oh yeah, and damaged the front brake lines on my cycle. Go me! It can be windy here in the afternoons, but there are some beautiful parrots and cockatoos that live along here and the lake views are amazing.

A quick ride on the Commonwealth Ave Bridge (fine in the mornings, full of pedestrians in the afternoons), then a steep descent leads to another 1km or so on the lake path. Then you have to ride on the road, but just for 1 more km or so. There isn't a lot of traffic, just a couple of not very fun right turns. And you're there, feeling like you've really accomplished something before 8:30 am.

Melbourne, or never buy your tickets from Expedia:

Melbourne was pretty fantastic. We got in Saturday about noon, went to St. Kilda beach first thing since the weather was amazing. We found a sort of Mexican restaurant (they had margaritas, but it was definitely high-concept, walked along the water, and slept on the grass for awhile since we didn't have a towel to sleep on the beach. For dinner, we walked down to Southbank and had tapas-y things (well, I just had gazpacho since I had a LOT of lunch).

Sunday, we went to the Victoria market, which is truly amazing. Huge, and the stuff is generally pretty nice and reasonably priced. I got some stuff to decorate my bland apartment and a suitcase to replace the $10 Target one that I've been lugging around with me. Then we went on a cruise on the Yarra (not all that cool, I wish we'd done the ferry to Williamstown on the bay instead... especially since we could only understand about every other word that the captain said) and saw a surprisingly good performance of The Plague (yes the Camus novel. I don't know) in our hotel (also a pub. Still weird). And ate Italian food, insanely fresh fish and squash... And I forget what I had for breakfast and lunch, but I'm sure it was delicious and fattening.

M. had to leave Monday morning, so I went to the University district to walk around, go to the used book stores and generally be a bum until my flight at 4:00. At about 10:15, I get a call from my friend and they can't find her booking. After some back and forth, we figure out that, when she changed the booking on the phone with Expedia, they changed mine instead. Uh-oh. So I'm supposed to be on a plane in 45 minutes and she can't get back to work Monday afternoon. Umm. I call Qantas, and they say that since we booked through Expedia they can't help us. I call Expedia, and the supervisor there says that someone at the airport should help us. Umm. Then my mobile phone dies. Battery is dead. So basically I'm tethered to one pay phone, at which 50 cents seems to buy me approximately 22 seconds of phone time. Finally, I give up and go to the airport. By the time I get there, M. has managed to get it straightened out, she's on a 1545 flight and I'm on the 1615 that I'd wanted to begin with. Expedia is even refunding some of the money. Of course, it ruined my morning in Melbourne, and I definitely took advantage of the free alcohol on domestic Qantas flights on the way back.

Pictures:
Me on the beach in St. Kilda. Did I mention that it was about 85 degrees? Yeah, didn't think so.

Sydney:

Sydney was last weekend, for Australian Labour Day, and it was pretty fantastic. I did the BridgeClimb thing, which was pretty cool if probably not worth the money. No pictures from that though, since you're not allowed to bring cameras up on the climb. It was quite an assembly line process, though. Go in, sign a release, change, put on a belt, put on the rest of the gear, practice climbing, walk out. All very carefully timed to not interfere with the groups 10 minutes ahead of and behind you. The other surprising thing, possibly a function of the holiday weekend, was that of the 11 other people in my climbing group, 10 were Aussies (most living in Sydney) and the 11th was a Namibian who'd been living in Australia for years.

Anyway, Saturday I took the ferry out to Manly beach. The ocean beach is absolutely gorgeous, lined with a row of Norfolk Island Pines. I walked out to North Head and sat in the sun and got a tan and enjoyed aerosol sunscreen and the best fish and chips I've ever eaten. The Manly Jazz festival was happening also, so I got to sit right by the ocean and listen to good music and watch the surfers and eat fresh strawberries. Did I mention the weather was amazing?

Monday I went to the Hyde Park Barracks Museum, and learned about the convicts and some f the later immigrants. And walked across the bridge and ate delicious food and walked around the Rocks. The weather? Still gorgeous. So yeah, it was a good weekend.

Pictures below:


The Harbour Bridge. The tiny red and white flag you may not be able to see is for the Sydney Swans, who unfortunately lost the Grand Final (footy... That's Aussie Rules Football) on Saturday night. The part that I climbed on is the top of the arch.

The Opera House, naturally. Couldn't not include a picture of that.

Manly Beach. Too cold for me to swim, but there were people in the water.

And...it's magpie mating season. Let's see if I get knocked off my cycle tomorrow morning.

Do-overs:

It's unrealistic of me to expect that I get a do-over for this past summer just because I'm getting two summers in a row. It may be spring again, but that doesn't erase the terrible things that happened over the summer. I can't pretend that all of that never happened.

I keep trying to convince myself that I'll wake up one day and all of this won't have happened. After all, it's springtime when it should be autumn, so that summer must have all been a bad dream. I can tell her not to get into that car, because it hasn't happened yet, in alterna-verse where it's still spring.

And what do you say when strangers ask you if you have any siblings? It's a standard intro question and one that I can't deal with. I usually just say I have a brother, but I feel like somehow I'm slighting her. I have a sister too, after all.