People from home are finding it hard to believe me now, at the end of January, but I miss the seasons. It’s so bizarro to have seasons that not only run backward, but also don’t really happen at full strength. Basically, the way it seems to me after one year is that the Sydney summer is long, very hot, and muggy. Then it sort of gets cooler and stuff and stays cool for about three months, but the landscape doesn’t change — no leaves fall, no snow comes. It just gets cool, and because the buildings don’t have insulation or heating, it gets cold and damp inside your house. Then it starts to warm back up until it is reliably hot and muggy again.
I miss the snow, and not just because of the hot-wind days that we’ve been having here. I like the atmosphere of snow. It also opens up the possibility for spring as I know it — trickling melting ice, green shoots poking up through the mud. I don’t mind summer, although nowadays I sometimes want to ask it, “How can I miss you if you won’t go away?” And I definitely miss the New York fall, with leaves and pumpkins and wearing socks again!
Also, seasons, in my mind, are tied up with holidays. Holidays here obviously happen at the opposite times. Easter is an autumn holiday (or late summer, really, because summer is so long). Other holidays become non-entities, like Halloween, which is seen as a tacky American thing and is also a summer holiday. No hayrides or Indian corn here, I can tell you. In general, holidays here are not actually that big. I was surprised by Christmas this year, because everyone talks up the “Aussie beach Christmas” and for some reason the gossip got me to thinking that an Aussie Christmas is the biggest holiday of the year, far bigger than an American Christmas. Well, no. I had a nice Christmas but I was sort of taken aback by how not-celebrated it is, when everyone makes such a big deal about it. I get the feeling that people here like their holidays for the fact that they get off work, but they don’t care much about the trappings.
It can get really confusing. We traveled to the mountains in August for our anniversary, and they have more seasonal weather up there, they get a dusting of snow in the winter and stuff. When we were there, crocuses and grape hyacinths were poking through. Recently, I thought to myself, “Oh, Easter’s coming up in a couple of months, so our anniversary must be getting near… wait… when is our anniversary? Spring, right?” Oh, you tricky grape hyacinths.
Coming from the United States, the land of the monthly occasion to seasonally decorate, it seems weird and depressing to me to not have a lot of major holidays. If they made one of those school timelines for kindergarteners where they have a different picture to represent each month, I’m not sure what they would put. I guess like nine versions of kids going to the beach, and three kids who are damp and bored.
1) I found a new band I like called the Avett Brothers. I only have one of their albums (Emotionalism) but I can’t stop listening to it. Check it out if you like catchy tunes on guitars, or folkish poppy rocky bluegrass, or things like that.
2) I came across this story and I thought it was great. I could have written it myself (except for the Dutch plop-gnomes): Funny story
3) I think it might be spring here. It’s hard to tell.
How am I supposed to find a job when employers are posting their job listings in another dimension?
I scalded my hand a week ago trying to make a hot water bottle for my husband (seriously, someone needs to bring electric heating pad technology to Australia) so typing was kind of a bitch for a while, which is somewhat of an excuse for not making many posts lately. Oh forget it - I don’t have to apologize to you, blog.
Anyway, we’re going away for the weekend to visit T’s family. In the meantime, I’ll leave you with this impression of the weather right now in Sydney: cold and wet. Actually, not that cold, just cold inside the house. When you go outside, the humidity overpowers you and you get really warm and gross-feeling. The humidity is pretty amazing actually, and I guess I’m not used to having a house with zero insulation. The mirrors are always foggy, either because your breath fogs them up, or because the humidity just sits everywhere and fogs them up itself. Yesterday T said, “Did you realize that all of the paper in our house is damp?” and I said “Thank god I’m not crazy!” My poor Nov. 5 edition of the New York Times (yeah I’m a huge dork). Hmm… we thought we would avoid the basement vibe this time by choosing an apartment that’s on the third floor, but I guess it was just meant to be.
Someone relatively near our apartment (we think it’s the greyhound racing track) sets off fireworks several times a week. Sometimes we can see them from our bedroom window in front of the city skyline, which is pretty cool. But I think it’s weird that someone has so much money to blow on fireworks… they do it all the time, like on Monday nights and stuff. I thought of this because they’re doing a fireworks display right now, and it’s pouring rain. (Well, they’re making a lot of fireworks noises anyway, not so much on the visuals.) Fireworks sounds combined with rain sounds is sort of surreal.
Another surreal sound that happens a lot is the birds singing at night - they do it all the time and it’s really weird. One time we passed an entire tree full of parrots yelling at each other at like 11pm. Often I hear this one particular kind of bird (I think it’s a magpie maybe?) singing in the middle of the night, around midnight or 1am. It’s like you give these guys a continent with almost no native predators and they think they can do whatever they want. Jeez.
I just came across this picture so I thought it would be appropriate to put it up. This is T and me on the day we left New York, posing with our 14 pieces of luggage. (Have you seen what it costs to ship things to Australia? Yeah… we don’t have any heirloom armoires or anything so we thought we’d just do it this way.)
Traveling in comfort and style.
We got so used to herding those things around. The best part was all the stares we got in the airports and hotels… after a certain point when people asked about it we’d just say “long weekend.”
Although if you’re considering doing this yourself, one good thing to know before you get to the end of your flight, to prepare yourself, is that they don’t have skycaps in the Sydney airport.
