Food Habits

For all those who love food, I will share today a few impressions about some Aussie food items. Probably the most traditional spread used on breakfast toast and school lunch sandwiches is Vegemite. It is also a symbol of Australia, along with the koala and the kangaroo. Vegemite is a very dark brown spread made from lysed yeast left over from beer brewing. Its invention dates in the 1920s and I believe it had to do with not wanting to trash all that organic matter rich in B vitamins but use it to feed hungry mouths. Vegemite has some of the B vitamins, but not B12. I read that Vegemite did not sell well in the beginning (actually until late 1930s) and that was no matter of amazement to me! Vegemite is saltier than straight seawater, darker than night, and even if you recover from these two unappealing features, your mouth is still abused by a strong savoury, slightly bitter concentrate that marries well only with a thick layer of butter and warm bread. School children and who knows how many adults eat vegemite and cheese sandwhiches for lunch, probably as much as Americans eat the PB&J sandwich. I confess I could never eat more than the first bite I tried… Yet, all of these things are nutritious and if I were to eat them from a young age, I would have liked them a lot, no doubt. Here is another sandwhich very popular with school kids (I hear from Chloe), fairy bread. It is a butter with hundreds and thousands sandwich. Did I get you again? Yes, hundreds and thousdands are what Americans call rainbow sprinkles. Are you hungry yet? I am, so I will prepare dinner now and I’ll discuss more Aussie foods and Aussie food names tomorrow. I couldn’t make myself show a picture with food, but some strawberries look good here. I took the picture on a strawberry farm close to Melbourne. Enjoy!

Grocery Shopping

Until 1989, when the Romanian grocery stores (called generically “Alimentara”) were devoid of groceries, I saw how real grocery stores looked like only in the movies. I had quick glimpses at black and white shelves through the screen of my bulky TV set. In 1991, I visited my friend Nicole in Paris and I loved it when she took me to run errands. Museums and grocery stores seemed equally interesting, artful and loaded with things to see. Thus, my fascination with them started and it grew when I moved to the US in 1992. Grocery stores just got bigger and better. To choose anything was complicated because I had to either randomly decide what I want or I had to come back until I tried everything that tempted me. To visit ethnic grocery stores and delis in the US was even more attractive. If you only knew how many hours we spent in Italian (New York) and Asian (in LA) markets browsing shelves like book pages, smelling “stuff” and guessing the use of products, and whispering “wow!” or “no way!” Of course, when I moved to Melbourne, the fascination got another kick. I am sure I am not the only one who noticed and got sucked into this game, “grocery store exploration”. In Australia, Woolworths and Coles have the monopoly of grocery stores, so walking the aisles of Woolworths, just arrived Down Under, these is what we stood out among other, more familiar, names: Nappies, Cordials, Long Life Juice and Milk, Biscuits, Porridge, Lollies, Vegemite, Manchester, Singlets, Rubbish, and Serviettes. More about vegemite and cordials soon! I took today's picture in our local Woolworths for you to enjoy.

I Am a Pedestrian Today

My blog today may sound like a militant declaration, but it’s nothing more than a comment on being a pedestrian in Melbourne and its suburbs. You’re guessing right, I will talk about jaywalking in the city and how pedestrians are treated in the suburbs. In case you wonder how expensive is crossing the road in Melbourne when the traffic light is red or you are within 20 m of a pedestrian crossing and decide to jaywalk, it’s $60. A parking ticket is at least double, and my fine for 0.5 sec on the red light (I crossed the intersection half a second after the light turned from yellow to red) was 5 ½ times that amount… We’ll come back to red-light and speed cameras later. I remember when Mayor Giuliani raised the fine for jaywalking in New York in 1998 from $2 to $58 (ouch!), but policemen didn’t really care to re-enforce it. I've never been caught, or I just escaped punishment. I thought that official measure was unfair because in a fast paced city like New York, people will always rush to cross the streets and if they can do it without waiting for the light to change, they always will. Melbourne’s pace is ten times slower, yet people rush, like me. I feel that cars are more privileged and looked after than pedestrians in this city. Distances between lights and between pedestrian crossings are long (of course I'd like that if I drove, too!), and green light time for pedestrians is shorter than for cars. So, I hereby confess (and admit to not feeling guilty at all) to always trying to SAFELY cross the street independent of the traffic light color and location of the pedestrian crossing. In the city. Now moving home, to the suburbs, I feel in danger and offended when I try to cross the street. Seriously. As a pedestrian in Mount Waverley, or in any other suburb, I will not be given priority to cross at least at street corners, neither alone nor holding my daughter’s hand. Have I been spoiled all these years in the US, as a pedestrian? I have to wait until the cars passed and then I can set foot on the road to cross (this is not jaywalking!), although I know they (car drivers) will get anyway to their destination before I do, even if they let me cross first… There are few pedestrians around anyway, so a courteous driver would not have to stop too often. But by law cars have priority where there are no pedestrian crossings, so they pass fast in the suburbs, dangerously fast, even at crossings and roundabouts. Thinking back about California, I remember how I had to allow pedestrians to finish crossing before I could drive over the crossing behind them, and if I didn't I could get a fine. Hmmm, that was courteous... How about looking at a place without cars, roads, and pedestrians now? This picture shows Port Douglas, Queensland, from a boat coming back from the Great Barrier Reef.

Trains and Trams

Melbourne has excellent public transit. I am guessing this asset had a big say in pushing the city to the top of the ranking for most livable places in the world (#1 in 2011). It certainly made me think of how New York must have been 100 years ago. Easy to navigate, but with trams… Besides trams, Melbourne’s public transit includes city trains. My ex best friends. I used to take the train every day when we moved here and I worked close to CBD (downtown). Being able to walk to the train station and the frequent trains suited my needs. But soon I started to count lots of cancelled trains at rush hour. I sat on a train hit by lightning, which was then stuck for hours between stations. A while later I rode a faulty train, which produced sparks that lit the dried grass underneath the train. We waited for the firefighters to put that fire off, then for the "authorized personnel" to help us jump off the train, and finally for the buses that had to replace the immobile trains on that line. Three hours later I got home and wondered whether I should drive instead... Trams zigzag in and around CBD, which puzzles me a bit, not so much because they are slow and passé, but because I can't understand why with all the trams (and buses), trains also run in a redundant loop around the CBD. It takes each train 20 min to finish this loop and then go radially towards the destination outside the city. It's dizzying and painful and if you don't like this carousel movement, any other alternative takes twice the time. Anyway, I took the train in the beginning. The alternative was to drive on the left side of the road, so what right-side-driver wouldn’t have liked to commute by train instead? Last year, when I started to work in the North-Eastern suburbs, I realized that I had to change three trains each way, go into the city, through the loop, and out of the city again. This was infuriating, but because the train network was built to bring workers into the city (I guess), my commute doubled in time. I admitted defeat, gave up the "green mom" award and started to drive. Melbourne, we need to do something about your transit system soon if you want to keep that #1 spot! To change this boring subject (but I had to tell you about it!), I pasted a picture with a tree from the rainforest of Mossman Gorge (Queensland).

Public Transit and Parking Choices

It sounds like a boring blog, but i'll try to sweeten it. And another picture with the Yarra river should make it "flow" (see below)... Some funny facts first. When we lived in Manhattan, buying a car was not a choice because parking fees could equal the price of another rental apartment. Rent was expensive enough to chop up any fantasy about buying anything other than food, clothes and yearly plane tickets to Europe. Public transit was divine! Buses, subways, trains and cabs left no destination out of reach on a radius of a few hundred miles around the city (add horse-drawn carriages, too! At least around Central Park). Yes, there was no submarine to step into once you arrived by train or bus in Montauk, but why not take a plane if you really wanted to go farther? Well, all that was left behind in 2006, when we landed in LA. Public transit? Let me put it this way: in the 3 years we spent there, I have never met a person who used one of the 6 subway lines serving the county, buses were infrequent and slow, and until about 2008 one could not hail a cab by the curb, they had to call to reserve it or walk to a taxi station (called taxi rank in Oz). Here I am in Melbourne, year after year ranking among the top 10 most livable cities on this planet. Public transit scores high and it is an attractive choice. It consists in trains, buses, trams and cabs. Plenty of trains criss-cross the city and its suburbs, in and out, but never around. So tempting to commute by train, but should I drive the logical short way or should I take the train from home in my South-Eastern suburb to the center of the city, run around the City Loop (I am not kidding!), and then finally arrive at work in the North-Eastern suburb? That is three trains and twice the time it takes to drive. So I drive again… And here comes parking into discussion. There are plenty of parking places around, because I work in a hospital located in a sprawling suburb. The only problem is that parking is a business here (more expensive then in crammed Santa Monica), and I can park at work for $10 to $30/day, I can park on the street for $4/day if I get there before 7:30AM (it’s too cheap not to be in high demand), or I can park gratis on most streets BUT for maximum 2 hours. Since I would have to walk at least 15 min to these parking spots, the 2-hour restriction puts them entirely out of reach and keeps the rich neighbourhood car-free. My solution? I found the tiny, hidden street where there is no 2-hour restriction and will not reveal the location not even under torture! I walk 1 km from there to work, but it’s a pleasant stroll during which I can think about what I will blog that day. What do others do? Melbournians started a website that connects people like me with little entrepreneurs who live in areas of high-parking demand and are willing to “lease” their driveway for daily parking. How do you like that?

Traffic Patterns

I am stuck with the highway, public transit, commuting theme just a bit longer. It’s a side-effect left from my over a year of commuting on I-10 in LA maybe... Weekly traffic volume in Melbourne follows a steep descent from Monday to Friday. My commute feels like swimming in mud on Monday mornings, but by Friday I am flying through air. Not literally, but you get the idea. Don't think its because of the (at least) four weeks of paid vacation we enjoy every year. It's called "annual leave" because it really feels as if it's a leave! And if you worked for a while, you may already have six weeks. Take them all at once and for co-workers who cover your duties, it does feel like it's a year long! (I know you all American friends are now jealous on me... Sorry) So, no, I cannot explain the low volume of commuters on Fridays on vacation days. I think I am right though that part of the reason is that in Australia (Oz) a huge percentage of women are employed part-time (40-50% of women between 30 and 59 years work part-time, most likely NOT on Fridays). About 10% of men do part-time work in that same age range. Although Australians are very proud of this large number of mostly mothers who stay home to look after kids, and they see it as improved quality of life, I do see it as a lack of emancipation. It's Romania of the nineteen thirties, but at least if traffic improves towards the end of the week because of this, then let it be! I do not mean to open a can of worms (what is quality of life anyway? is there a uniform definition for all of us?), so I shall return to today's theme of heavy Monday morning traffic. Not only I got upset for arriving at work later than usual, but I also had to listen for longer to a boring radio station, and I could not park in my usual spot. I will discuss parking in Melbourne tomorrow. And I will tell you why I cannot take the train to work the day after that. To soothe my driving frustration, I added here a picture of a bottle brush flower. I feel better now.

Parenthesis I

Two weeks have passed since I started this blog! Every night or morning I calmly sit down and type my thoughts away with a sense of excitement and duty. It is like a self-imposed homework, but I am the self-conscious student who knows her writing will only improve if she writes every day. What I haven't achieved yet is letting you know about how I feel in these Australian adventures, how I react to new things, new habits, and to everything that challenges what I am used to. Do I get crazy, mad, sad, frustrated, elated? I am looking back at my blog, or I should say "I'm scrolling down", and I see something like Thomas The Engine pulling behind wagons of uneven sizes and loud colors. They carry the load I meant to put in my blog, but the choppiness of the train reveals its infantile structure and wobbly balance of descriptions and feelings. I will probably come back to some of the subjects, where the gaps I left are too deep. For example, I haven't elaborated enough on fauna and flora. Have I told you about our encounters with venomous snakes? And I still have to add a lot to the public transit and driving subjects. Finally, every picture I inserted so far in my blog is a little sister of the truly professional pictures Tiziano and I post on our smugmug web page: www.tirophotos.smugmug.com. I hope you enjoy browsing the comprehensive galleries we posted there! In today's picture is the Eureka tower. Eureka!