November 2012

Hello everyone!

Well, I know I've been terrible at this whole blog thing, but it looks like I'll be giving it another go-round.  I plan to update on a monthly basis from here on out.

Bob and I had a great time visiting our families in America in October.  It was so nice to see everybody, and it reminded us how much we love and miss you all!  We ate ourselves silly, including the highlight of the entire trip, Mexican food.  It was glorious.  Man, I'll never understand the Australian aversion to Mexican food.  Bob claims, on the other hand, that Buffalo Wild Wings was the highlight, but at least we both agree that Jimmy Johns was up there.

On Bob's brother Richard's birthday, October 30th, he and his wife Carole had a baby boy James!  We were so happy to be there for that.

The poor new mom is the one who snapped the photo, so she's not in there.  We just had to put her to work right away!  Here she is with her new bub (one of my favorite new Australian words):

Bob and I had a really great weekend two weeks ago with our friends in Stradbroke Island.  To get there, you reserve a spot for your car on a barge.  You drive onto the barge, hang out for an hour while you're ferried over, and then you have your car with you for the weekend.  Straddie (as we locals say ;) ) is close enough to Brisbane that it's one of the couple places where most people around here escape to on the weekends.  Where we stayed though is a little quieter than the more popular Point Lookout a few miles away.  This is Point Lookout:

What I really liked about where we stayed was that it is not particularly nice - pretty much just a small house with a kitchen and some bedrooms.  And there's not exactly anything to do, like a television or anything like that - it's more the kind of place you go to do absolutely nothing and spend as much time as possible with your friends and family.  Here is where we stayed in Amity:

I discovered that one of our friends, Steve, is a major fisherman, so Bob did a little bit of that.  Steve tried to catch a shark for me, but alas, he was unsuccessful.  He tells me he has a 6' shark in his freezer at his house that he keeps for the explicit purpose of scaring his guests.  I will attempt to get pictures for you!  We also saw tons of blue jellyfish right outside our cottage.  I have to say, that is one of the funnest things about Australia, the crazy wildlife that you'll never see anywhere else in the world.  Although, I must be wearing kangaroo repellent, because I have yet to see a kangaroo in the wild, despite spending a fair amount of time outside and the claims of most Australians that they are as common as rodents.  And I've seen two koalas in the wild, an animal Australians claim are quite rare to see since they sleep 100 feet off of the ground in the tops of eucalyptus trees for 19 hours a day - and also that they have such a small population that they are considered a threatened species.  Our friend Dan snapped this photo of a koala on a morning walk in Straddie.

A crazy storm ended up rolling in on Saturday morning out of nowhere.  One minute it was sunny, and the next it looked like nighttime and lightning was striking everywhere!  We took that opportunity to teach Mormon bridge (or Oh Hell! to all you non-Utahns) to our friends.  The storm only lasted about an hour or two, and it left as suddenly as it came.  We found out later that Brisbane had gotten a much worse storm, and had about 3,000 lightning strikes and some pretty severe gusts of wind all right in the city center in the space of about 2 hours.  The newspaper the next day was full of pictures with homes with tree-sized holes in them.  Luckily we returned to an intact apartment just in time for a followup wind and rain storm.

Last weekend I got the crazy idea to do a triathlon on pretty much no training at all.  Yeah, it was hard.  Particularly the swimming portion.  The course was to swim 300 meters in a river.  The river itself was as great a place as you could possibly ask for for this purpose (you can see it on the map of Kingscliff, it was at the end of that river that leads into the ocean).  It was only about 5'-10' deep, slow-moving, and wide enough that we could do just one loop around three buoys to complete the course.  I actually impressed myself with my freestyle abilities, and made it through somehow.  After that we biked 10k and ran 2.5k.  So it wasn't a very long course, and I didn't die.

I don't have many pictures, because my friends and I didn't have an audience.  Bob was at home snoozing.  I don't blame him though, it was frankly very difficult for us to get there.  All three of our husbands stayed home.  The event was held an hour and a half away from where I live, across the border into the next state, New South Wales.  That meant that the insanely early start time was an extra hour earlier for us, because NSW is currently an hour ahead of us during daylight savings.  The reality of that dawned on my two girlfriends and I as we stared out at the ocean in Straddie.  We suddenly started doing the math in our heads and realized we'd have to wake up at about 3 am just to get there on time.  7:12 start time, bikes must be in the transition area by 6:30 at the latest, subtract another 45 minutes to give us enough time to make sure that happens and we're at 5:45, an hour drive gets us to 4:45, and then the hour lost for daylight savings puts us to 3:45.  So we woke up at 3 to get ready in time and pack the car.  I think any future events will be as close to home as possible ;)  The only picture we got was after the event when we could get back to where our belongings were in the car.

My friend on the left actually came in third!

We missed out on Thanksgiving this year.  But I must say, all of our friends down unda kind of enjoy having the token Americans around to introduce them to all of this stuff!  I baked a pumpkin pie for my work on Thanksgiving day, and everybody's first reaction when I told them about it was "yuck!", but they all ended up liking it so much that my boss actually took the little that was left of it home to his family and finished it off.  So, now we're hosting a true American Thanksgiving tomorrow with 5 of our friends - complete with a turkey (I had to special order that baby since they don't keep them in stock around here) and all of the traditional side dishes!  I'll have pictures for you in the December update :)

My November blog is not complete without showing you Bob's 'stache!  Movember is extremely popular in Australia.  It's really weird walking to work in the morning with tons of dudes sporting full mustaches.  It's so interesting how a little facial hair can turn their entire look into a very retro one.  Bob got into the fun and, well, I'll just leave this here:

Cheers.

2012

Happy New Year!  I can't believe it's 2012.  We had an amazing time last night.  I only wish our pictures could do it justice.

The Brisbane River is truly gorgeous, and they really take advantage of that in their New Year's celebration.  The picture above is the Story Bridge, and as soon as somebody comes out to visit us, we hear you can climb some stairs up to the top of one of the two towers and view the sunrise.  We'd love to try it.  Yesterday we saw a group of people who were lucky enough to be up there at the top right when the fireworks started.

The city puts on two rounds of fireworks on New Year's Eve.  One at 8:30, and one at midnight.  They anchor two boats framing the Wheel of Brisbane, just next to the Victoria Bridge, and shoot the fireworks there in the middle of the river.  For the 8:30 fireworks, we were unsure where they would start, so we started out by the Story Bridge and walked along the edge of the Brisbane Botanic Gardens until we found them.  Wow, I've never been along that trail at night, and it was gorgeous.  I found the LDS temple, lit up right on top of the Kangaroo Cliffs on the other side of the river between the Story and Victoria Bridges.

Even though I don't go there, it really made me feel close to home.  They're just now completing this project of lighting up the Kangaroo Cliffs at night, and they're this really beautiful purple color.  We ended up finding the 8:30 fireworks just in the nick of time.  There's a footbridge that crosses the river to the east of where they were going off, so we stopped and viewed them from the middle of the river.

Later on for the midnight fireworks, we secured a great spot right in front of the Wheel of Brisbane, so close that I couldn't get both boats in one picture.

The Brisbane Performing Arts Center and Art Museums are those blue-ish buildings in the background.  I'm really starting to love this city.  I find it so charming to experience the world the way others do.  The world is pretty exciting.  Tiny differences, like a New Year's celebration over a river, can be so moving, even though life itself is really the same.

Well, we're so close to having a regular life again.  We've been on vacation now for 1 1/2 months, living in hotels, not having anything but the bags we drag along with us and the same 6 rotating outfits, and having so much fun.  Real life is about to set in though.  We either now have all the essentials, or we'll have them soon ... bank accounts, bank cards, driver's license, health insurance, an apartment.  We purchased a new washer and fridge yesterday - the only appliances missing from our apartment, and they'll be delivered Tuesday when we pick up the keys to our new place.

A really huge thing is that we'll likely be purchasing a new car at the end of this week!  Yay!!!!

It's a 2005 Holden Astra Hatchback.  Remember all my house-hunting woes?  Well, this was the exact opposite experience.  We looked online for days and made a list of about 15 cars we liked.  We made a bunch of appointments for test drives, and cancelled them all after visiting our #1 choice on the list, which we also visited first.  It's really beautiful in person, and the guy selling it appeared honest and forthcoming.  He even gave us a ride home afterwards so that we wouldn't have to take the public transport.  There are a few things that need to be fixed, like an oil leak, a timing belt and a seat belt, so he's going to get those fixed Thursday-ish, and we're going to buy it immediately after.  I can't believe it was that easy.  And, we're under our budget.  It is a manual, however, so that'll take some getting used to.  We test drove it, and it was actually a lot easier than I imagined to switch the gears with my left hand.  The photo here is from Google, so I'll post some photos once we have the real deal.

All that remains now is the phones.  Oh yes, the phones.  Man, those things must be made of solid platinum, because getting one is apparently harder than getting a car, a year-long lease on an apartment, a credit card, and a driver's license combined.  We're expecting that to be done by the end of the week as well.  Hello, iPhone!

So now that everything's squared away, we'll be moving into our new apartment on Tuesday with nothing but a blow-up mattress and some paper plates.  Then it'll be subsistence living for 2-3 weeks until our things arrive.  Oh, the life of two young people in a foreign country.  Bob's boss is nice enough to lend us some sheets, pillows and a blanket for our bed, but it looks like we'll be spending a lot of time out on the town.

My post is getting pretty long here, so I'll update you in a few days when I can show you some great pictures of our new apartment.  Miss you all, and Happy New Year!