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.

New Zealand was fun.  It rained the five days we were there, except for the last day, when it only rained sometimes.  But everything was extremely green, which was nice.

Auckland is pretty charming and stuff.  It’s a small city, with painful to no public transportation, but if it wasn’t for those two things I think I would be pretty much smitten.  When the plane landed, we came down out of the fog to see a bunch of cows munching on grass like that up there in the picture.  It’s a very spread out city, much like Sydney, and it has a bunch of weird little grassy hills sticking up everywhere, which are dead volcanoes.  The houses had clapboard siding and looked all 19th century and that sort of made me feel a little bit at home.

That picture up there and this next one are both of the crater at the top of Mount Eden, one of the more famous dead volcanoes.  We walked up it one night after T got off work.  Look at it!  It looks like a unicorn is going to come floating up that hill.  No wonder they shot Lord of the Rings in New Zealand.

I guess that muddy bit at the bottom is where the lava comes out.

They have a really great museum in Auckland, called the Auckland Museum.  If you like museums as much as I do and you find yourself in Auckland, you should check it out.  They have all kinds of stuff: natural history, Pacific islands cultural stuff, New Zealand design, history, and an interesting part about the wars that New Zealand has participated in.  They also have a floor for kids that would be really awesome if you were a kid.  I used the restroom on that floor and it was a train or airplane-style restroom, one stall with a sliding door to outside, and I got sort of worried that we were all going somewhere.

(You think the cars ruin the picture, but they don’t, because they left them there for all the pictures that became postcards.  I think they just really love cars in Auckland.)

On Saturday, we had one day together to do something, because T didn’t have to work anymore and we had paid for an extra night in the hotel so that we could see something together.  We rented a car and drove down to Rotorua, which is a tourist trap town about three hours south of Auckland.  It’s a tourist trap because they are famous for having steam pools and geysers, and bubbling mud spring stuff.  There are lots of things you can pay to do in Rotorua, and I kind of wanted to have a mud massage or go see the buried Maori village (a Maori village got destroyed by a volcano there in the 19th century) but in the end we spent all day walking around the town park, which is free and which has lots and lots of little steam holes and mud pools where water is boiling in the ground.  It was really cool.

Most of the irregularities had fences around them, so you couldn’t fall in and scald yourself, but T’s favorite one did not.  It was boiling so violently that we wondered whether we should tell someone.

There were some that boiled mud.  Those ones smelled like bacon.  Actually, T thought they smelled more like the steam from a hot dog cart, but we both had similar thoughts independently.

Yeah.  Yeah I do think it looks alien.

They also have a couple of lakes of steam, with dead trees along the sides:

And basically there are little clumps of bushes all over the park with steam rising up out of them, so you can just walk around and find the steam clumps and see weird things.  And hope that you don’t fall into a developing one, because apparently they just open up like that.

The town park also had some gorgeous flowers, and tons of giant bees that T kept trying to get a photo of.  The nature we saw in New Zealand was cartoonishly pretty.

Flowers on a bridge

New Zealand - fun and pretty.

T woke me up at 6am and said “Look outside, it looks weird.”  I glanced up at the window and said, “It’s just the sunrise.”  He said, “No, get up and look.”  It looked like this:

It doesn't help that we live across the street from a creepy church.

We couldn’t imagine what it was.  I thought that it was the sunrise filtering through a heavy fog, even though that didn’t seem plausible.  T opened the window to take pictures, and after a minute we were like, “Hm, it smells like chalk.”  Now that we know what it was, it seems really obvious, but we couldn’t imagine why an orange fog would smell like chalk, so he went downstairs to Google what was happening, and that’s when we found out and decided to close the windows right back up.

The other day I came home from class to find this guy perched on the chair in our bathroom:

Furrier in person.

You can probably tell by the chair, but he was several inches across.  I thought a few things:

1. I wonder if this is the most poisonous spider in the world, which lives exclusively in the Sydney region and I have no idea what it looks like?
2. How close can I get to take a picture before it jumps on me?
3. This spider is only the most obvious giant spider in the bathroom.

He was looking pretty stationary, so I decided to go downstairs and hope that he didn’t migrate to the bedroom or anything.  I don’t like to kill things that are bigger than a quarter if I can help it, because I don’t like to experience the crunch and squish.  So I waited for T to come home, and he didn’t want to kill it either because it was too fuzzy and he felt bad for it, so he put it in a Tupperware and released it into the wilds of Glebe.  I asked him, “Do you think that was a huntsman?” (giant but harmless house spiders of Australia) and he said, “No, it was way too small.”  We decided that it might have been a baby huntsman, since it’s spring and all.

Here, by the way, is a picture of a huntsman:

Yeah, we definitely need to move house before summer gets into full swing, because now that thing is out there and it knows how to get back in.

But the real estate agents usually don’t care about me or the apartments (that Aussie customer service ethic shining through), so our conversations usually go like this:

Me: I was wondering, does that unit have a stove?

Agent: I don’t know.  That’s what the inspection is for.

I’m pretty much 100% sure that the inspection is not for the agent to inspect the apartment, but whatever.

They also have this thing where you can “reserve” an apartment you really like by giving the agent a few hundred dollars on the spot, which makes the landlord look at your application first, and you get the money back if you’re not approved.  This sometimes causes the small crowd of people who show up to the 15 minute inspection to push to be the first to race through so they can come back out and give the agent money.

The good thing is that the application process is all extremely regimented and the real estate companies act like disinterested middlemen between you and the landlord, whom you never actually meet.  There are rules governing what they can and can’t say about you to another real estate company when that company asks for a reference on you, so you never have to deal with a weirdo landlord who hates you for no reason and won’t give you a good reference.

Well I happened to have seen Avenue Q on Broadway and thought it was funny and that T would like it, so I was pretty happy.  Plus he Googled it and found out that the cheapest tickets are like $79.

It reminded me of going to a show in New York in every way except that they didn’t give out programs, they sold them for $15 apiece.  I asked the usher if they had regular programs, aside from the souvenir programs, and he was like “Um, no, theaters don’t do that.”  I could have been like, “Actually, buttface, they do,” but I didn’t think that would make me any friends, so I just sat down and imagined information about the show.

The main reason we wanted the program was to see if any of the actors were American, but it turned out to be more fun to guess based on whether they slipped up and sounded Australian.  Most of them did once or twice, but it wasn’t really obvious.  The funny part (to me) was the set.  The show is set in Brooklyn, and this production seemed to be set in the part of Brooklyn where the housing stock is mainly Australian condos.  It was way too clean, for one thing, and also way too pastel.  Also the doorknobs were up high like Australian doorknobs and the tops of the buildings were infested with those old-fashioned TV antennae that I now associate largely with Australia (not many people here have cable).

I am kind of obsessed with the differences in building materials and styles of house between the two countries so I had fun picking out everything that I would change about the set, and then annoying T by telling him all about it.  Halfway through the second act I was like “I’ve got it!  The frames around the windows need to be black instead of white!” and T was like, “…What?  I guess.”  (Later I Googled the original NY set and was vindicated.)

Anyway it was a good show and we both had a great time - I recommend it if you’ve got 79 Australian dollars kicking around in your pocket.

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.

Anyway, it definitely recharged my batteries and made me feel much happier when we got back to Sydney.  Now T and I are both in full swing of our classes at TAFE (which we missed the beginning of over in New York) and are also starting our search for a new apartment now that our six-month lease is up (we’ve been here six months!) so we’re going to be doing a bit of running around.  Well, before we got here, T warned me that the first six months would be the hardest, so maybe this was a perfect time to take that trip and recharge.

Our guidebook was promising Aboriginal rock carvings and “abandoned 1930s sea shanties” over the course of the hike, so we decided just to start it and see how far we felt like going.  Of course, at the point where it still would have been worth it to turn back, we were this close to the sea shanties so we had to keep going, and etc. etc. we did the entire 10 kilometers.

It was a really cool walk.  It goes through this brushy national park, up a little mountain or hill to some views of the harbor, and back down again.  It’s also pretty vigorous, in case you’re considering it.  Lots of stairs.  We came out muddy and sore and I hurt the next day.  But some nice views from the top:

View out to sea from the top of the hill

Another view from the top - with ferry out there

Sydney CBD skyline from top of the hill

Those pics were all taken from different lookout stations along the walk.  It feels really deserted up there - we did run into a few other hikers but it didn’t feel at all like the “city” park that it technically is.  We heard a lot of birds, including this one called the whip bird that makes a sci-fi noise:

The sea shanties are at the bottom of the cliff in the second picture; unfortunately we couldn’t get right up on them and go in to look for ghosts, like I would have preferred.  Here’s a zoomed in (blurry) shanty:

Shanty!

By the time we came across the Indigenous rock carvings, it was getting kind of late, and we were racing against time because we wanted to be out of the park before it got dark.  The rock carvings are big outlines of different symbols like a kangaroo, boomerangs, and a fish, carved into the ground.  The parks service has set up log structures around them on the ground so you know where not to step.  (Still, they didn’t do a fantastic job of making that clear at the first symbol; we both stepped on it inadvertently trying to figure out where we were supposed to go!)  We didn’t know if it was cool to take pictures of the rock carvings, but we figured it would be ok to take a picture of the sign.

Sign at rock carving site

We also took a picture of the general area:

Rock carving site

And we figured that the 1940s vandals wouldn’t mind if we took a picture of their own rock carving:

Oh, you guys.

According to our guidebook, the local council took the initiative to re-groove the carvings a few years back.  Niiice.  It was a pretty cool thing to see, though, and I wish there had been more information about the meaning or purpose behind the rock carvings (I don’t know if you can make out the sign above, but you’re not missing much).

Anyway, it was getting dark, and we had to skip the optional turnoff to the lighthouse.  The last part of the map made it look like the end of the walk was along streets and beaches in a neighborhood, much like the beginning of the walk was.  We came out on a beach in a little neighborhood and looked for the way to the “Spit,” the bridge back to the city, which we could see in the near distance.

But the maps lied!  We had to follow the trail back into the woods, and continue going up and down stone stairs in the pitch dark.  Um, there’s nothing quite so nerve-wracking as being in a pitch-black forest park thing that’s in the middle of nowhere but also technically in a city, at night.  It seemed like exactly the kind of place for dumping bodies.

Eventually the trail spit us out onto the highway at the beginning of the bridge, with no indication of how to find the promised bus stop.  We used our woodsman instincts, honed from a long day in nature, to walk across the bridge and find a cab.