Happy Birthday Alexis!

Today was a day of sticker shock.

But, did you know you can make steel cut oats in a rice cooker overnight? Duh, I guess, but it was a revelation to me. A good rice cooker will be one of our first acquisitions once we have a place to live.

With no time to waste (as Ben convinced me – I rather wanted to go to the aquarium), we set off to be wildly productive.

After some breakfast and research online, we caught a bus (off of Jambaroo street. Yup.) to a train station where we acquired the 28 day transit passes my mom gifted us with for our adventure.

This is seriously one of the best things I’ve ever owned.

From there we walked, got lost (there will be a theme here), walked more, and found the Town Shopping Center we were looking for. Town Shopping Center is apparently code for Biggest Mall You’ve Ever Seen. That’s not true, actually. There was a bigger one in Kyoto, but still.

Our goal here was to wander, get a sense for how things work, find food, open a bank account, and find phone service. We may not have gotten a full sense of “how things work” around here, but we did find food (hooRAY close proximity to asian countries! hooRAY delicious stir fry!), open a bank account (hoo….ray? Getting money into it is going to be interesting), and phone service (hooRAY moms to think ahead and buy internationally compatible phones for birthdays! Ben is using his old iPhone 3GS). For not an inordinate amount of money a month I have a decent number of minutes, free voicemail, and most useful, infinite calls and texts between our two phones because they use the same service. (hooRAY) Actually, most useful is the 200MB of data I get to use. Welcome to five years ago, Adrienne! I’ve been putting this moment off because I suspected once I had a data plan I’d never be able to go back. I think I was right.

Now for the oh god moments. Cheerios are $8/box. Bananas are $3/kg. Computer monitors, TVs, and McDonalds hamburgers are all about 1.5 times the US price. I’m envisioning a lot of lentils and rice (in our future rice cooker!) around here. But in between those home cooked meals out of cheap staples I envision lots and lots of exquisite thai on those occasions that we decide to splurge.

Speaking of bananas, does anyone know what red tipped eco bananas are? The tips appeared to be dipped in wax – are they a no-pesticide banana, and the wax tips help protect against pests? If so, I’d expect them to have been dipped early on in their growth, in which case the wax would be cracked and warped… why do you dip your bananas in red wax, Australia??

The real oh god moments arise around housing, however. I looked for housing a bit before leaving the US, but I managed to miss the fact that most of the prices I was seeing were for shared residences. I’m afraid Ben is about all the roommate I want to handle, and I think he feels the same way about me. We’re probably going to end up paying out the wazoo for a small studio of some sort, but at least we’ll only have our own dishes to deal with. Our lifestyle is going to be different here, but the hope is that our location, in a big vibrant city on the other side of the world with close proximity to fascinating countries (and good asian food!) will make up for the things we have to give up. Like nuts and dried fruit :( It’s going to take a little while to adjust to this as a place where we LIVE, where we need to think about every purchase, and not a place where we’re on vacation, out to experience as much as possible in every moment.

On another note, malls here are interesting, and now that I think about malls I saw in Japan, I think maybe the malls in the US are the odd ones out. Malls here (and in Japan) seem to be more like whole-life-centers, with clothing stores and a food court like you might see in the US, with the addition of dollar stores, tiny pastry shops, strange little stores with merchandise that looks like it fell off the back of a truck, small tech stores, and lots of little groceries. There is more for me there than in US malls, at least.

So along with obtaining our transit cards and figuring out phone service, we picked up some information on health insurance, since as non-Ozzians we don’t get to participate in the national health care that’s available.

Oh. We also picked up some sun screen, since that nasty hole in the ozone is located uncomfortably close, and Oz has the highest rate of skin cancer in the world.

On the way home we got lost after evacuating the bus at the wrong stop, but it is the future now! Data phone future device to the rescue! Ok, it may have taken two backtracks to get it right, but the phone did eventually get us home. During our journey we passed two trees that had craggy bark and looked, for lack of a better word, badly burned. Huh.

They were also covered in tangled spiderwebs with funneled houses for the spider to hide in. Don’t worry, they’re not Sydney Funnelwebs (one of the many deadly things we’ve been warned about by Americans. When we mentioned this to locals they were all, “really? we’re still here, aren’t we? I’m not sure I’ve even ever seen one”), but rather the common black house spider, Badumna insignia. They don’t tend to live in houses, but around them, under eaves and in fences, and in craggy tree bark. I played with a twig in the web for a bit to try and lure the spider out, and managed to get it to hunt the stick and try to kill it, just long enough to get a good look at it. It is a big spider, hairy, but fairly timid, and it’s unknown how dangerous its venom is (i.e. not very). Quite neat though!

female hiding in funnel, loathe to show herself

The female had a plump, spherical abdomen, but none of the pictures of her outside of her retreat were anything but terrible. The spiders themselves are over an inch in length, and somewhat furry!

more adventurous male out investigating

Note the burned-looking bark in the pictures. What causes it? Some of the trees had rubbery sap accumulations. We thought at first that perhaps locals identified these trees as harboring large numbers of dangerous spiders, ooooh!, and burned them to get rid of the pests. But as we walked around more, we saw trees like this all over the place, in the bush, in public parks, in people’s yards. It seems much more likely that this is just what those types of trees look like (I haven’t identified them yet).

…

Viive and her family all get together for dinner on Monday nights, which is a lovely habit. She and Ian have two sons, one of which is married and has a new puppy cocker spaniel. Dinner was tasty if a bit rushed. Maybe it’s just their family, but we’ve eaten with them twice now and every member seems to race to finish their food. Ben and I were consistently eating long after the rest of them. I wonder if it’s an Oz thing? In any case, I got to cuddle the puppy for a good half hour after dinner, which made for a Good Night.

Goodnight!