Odd Sports and Flowers

Just when I thought I had nothing “cool” to report today I got an idea! It jumped at me from an email message sent by my daughter’s primary school. They are listing all the sports teams and special groups (choir, environment club, etc) at the school, asking parents to reply with what team/group picture they want their kids to be in. At the end of the month a photographer will take pictures of these teams/groups for a fee (always substantial!). I felt compelled to share with you some of the sports names, which I had no idea existed and whose name I had to search in the dictionary. They are: bat tennis, bootball, Danish Rounders, hooptime, Kanga cricket, and matball. Even my spell-check function on the computer sees them as typos and kanga cricket didn’t make it yet to Wikipedia! I was not sure why school kids need to play sports like this, so I did a little search for kanga cricket. I found out that “the aim of Kanga Cricket is to enable EVERY player to have a chance of success, as well as participating in an enjoyable game. To achieve this, game Coordinators should adopt a flexible attitude and be prepared to adjust wicket length, speed of bowling, etc to suit each player’s size, strength and ability. Coordinators should be prepared to offer ON THE SPOT coaching/assistance when the need arises – this also includes encouragement and reinforcement.” This introduction to the summary of rules turned me off from trying to find out anything about the other sports. I thought all sports enable EVERY player to have a chance to success and all are enjoyable to those who decided to participate. However, to adjust a sport to suit the players’ abilities sounds less like sports and more like ordering from a restaurant menu, where there is “something” for everyone. Gluten-free, vegan, peanut-free, etc… Today's picture is that of an unusual flower that is actually called "tree echium" as the blooms can reach 3-4 meters in height! I have never seen it in the US, but apparently it is cultivated and it grows there, too.

Fruit Fly Enemy

I learnt about fruit flies when I was in the last year of high school and was introduced to genetics. After Mendel and Morgan, my genetics manual said that fruit flies (aka, the gnats I chased off of my endlessly flavourful apples or damagingly sweet grapes and plums) had such a variety of characteristics (genetic traits), they made an ideal medium for genetics. Better than Mendel’s peas! After that I treated fruit flies with less animosity and, dare I confess, I started to like them. Did they have red eyes? Short wings maybe? A few more genetics courses later, during graduate school, and I started to respect them. So much of the progress in genetics was due to them and so many of their genetic traits were similar to those of mice and even humans, who wouldn’t tip their hat to THE gnat? This relationship was momentary, and soon gnats fell off my interest, but one interesting trip to South Australia twenty years later and gnats returned to intrigue me. Indirectly. Three quarters of Australia's irrigated crops and pastures are grown in the Murray-Darling Basin, as the mighty Murray River is the third largest navigable river in the world after the Amazon and the Nile. This fruit and vege basket of Australia is apparently fruit fly free and, in this entire area, fruit flies are a feared pest. So much so that approaching the Basin, warning signs bloom on all roads, telling drivers to discard in special containers any fruit or veges they may be carrying with them. The problem is that there is no information offered as to why this food has to be discarded. No explanation is given about the Basin being free of fruit flies and that these creatures, which I assumed are omnipresent in the world, would need to be kept off the area. No sign explains that fruit flies destroy the crop by using it to reproduce. The choice of fruit and veges in Oz is very limited and the prices are ridiculously high, so past this threatening sign ‘throw it out or pay a fat fine’ kind of thing, I was thinking “should I trash THE big, red, healthy looking, juicy apple in my backpack or should I sneak it in and eat it as planned after dinner? IF I don’t get caught and lose the apple anyway, just in a more expensive way…” I decided to take the risk. I ate the apple in the hotel room after dark, with the curtains down, fearing an imaginary fruit and vege police. Still, I could not grasp why the insignificant gnat is an enemy of such proportions! Locusts, yes, but gnats? The following morning we hopped back in the car and drove from Mildura towards Mungo National Park. It was a week day and a few kilometres outside the town there was a fruit and vege check point. We stopped behind another 10-20 cars and waited (forever!) to be checked (car and trunk) for the “forbidden fruit”. You can see in the picture the signs posted at the check point, but we had the confidence of being “clean”. A seriously unfriendly lady refused to tell us why fruit flies are such a threat (she didn’t look like she knew, anyway), asked us to open the boot (trunk), she looked around and then found a cooler. We let her open it and there it was, another apple, the one left over from yesterday’s lunch! She suspiciously asked if there were more, took it and threw it in the rubbish (trash). No fine (what a relief!), but off we went after being 20 min behind schedule and with about 500 km left to drive for the day. We sped from the checkpoint happy not to had been fined, but, short-lived victory, a police car started to flash its lights right behind us very soon... Ooops, we realized we literally sped off from the checkpoint, maybe too happy to remember speeding is also fined. At least we knew why we paid the fine!

Adjusting My Blog

When I started this blog, I confessed to trying to achieve two goals. One was that to create a routine for myself, where I'd write every single day, and which would help me strengthen the habit of writing. I am not a procrastinator and I don’t suffer of writer’s block, but I need to build routines so that other things I do are not interfering. I am thinking chores here: cooking, running errands, doing dishes, preparing healthy lunches, taking the kid to do her extracurricular activities, etc. Posting daily blogs helped me, indeed, sit down and dedicate time to writing. Besides the blog, I managed to write/revise/re-write my memoir and some personal essays. This is work-in-progress that benefited from the writing routine I developed. The second goal of my blog was to share with my friends and family from the Northern hemisphere as much as I could of the experiences I/my family had in Australia. Although we didn’t do much travelling between June, when I started posting, and now, even opening the back door to the garden offers encounters worth writing about (look at today’s picture, which I took just yesterday right in my backyard!). I shared most of the time things, impressions, experiences that I thought would not occur in the US or Europe, but you all would like to know about in an anecdotal way. Now I’d like to change my blog and commit to posting notable experiences whenever they occur and I have access to a computer. If I travel, it may be twice a day, like I wanted to do the other day in Sydney (if I only had Internet access all the time!). If routine swamps me for a few days, you may not read any new posts and that may as well be a sign I am finally adapting to life in Oz… Finally, if pictures only are what I can deliver, there will be at least that. So far, I enjoyed blogging, challenging myself to observe the uniqueness of Oz and to relate it from the eternal foreigner’s perspective (I am an eternal foreigner doesn’t matter how much I struggle to belong). I hope you continue this trip with me!

Sunrise in Sydney

I had such a wonderful evening with my friends the night before, in Sydney, I could not sleep. Still excited, I witnessed the sun rising just in front of my window, above the Sydney Harbor, a bit after five the following morning. It reminded me of the time I used to go to the Black Sea as a student (twenty years ago? Oh, no!), just once a year, and how I struggled to get up early and see the sun rising from the sea. For me, who lived away from the Black Sea, this was one of the most thrilling events of the entire summer. When I moved to California, I wanted to see the sun setting in the water as much as Tiziano wanted to meet a rattle snake. He did, this is not a sarcastic comment! Indeed, the sun's falling under the horizon line, just above the steel grey ocean, had an almost religious effect on me. The colors, energy and voice of the world before and after sunset and sunrise are polar opposites. So sitting at the window in my hotel room in Sydney, I relived solar transitions in many other places and times of my life.

Hot Day in Sydney

I’m back from my business trip to Sydney. I was lucky to stay centrally, in a hotel just opposite the Milsons Point train station. This means that from my room on the 11th floor I could see the water on each side of the strip of land called Milsons Point (last picture), and I had a glimpse at the Sydney Harbour Bridge and Sydney Opera House, too (on the side of the second picture). But being outside was even more rewarding: sunny, 30 Celsius, posh cafes and restaurants, and elegant houses built on the cliff and overlooking the water (picture). I do give Sydney credit for being more attractive than Melbourne, with warmer weather and more sunny days and waterways giving it a Venetian flavor. It’s just my opinion, and I stick to it. One striking thing about Sydney that I experienced in this trip was that cab drivers didn’t want to use the air conditioning unless I asked for it. Thirty degrees Celsius is 88F, and cars get hot quickly in the sun, but these drivers invariably (2 rides to the airport and 3 within the center) wanted to drive with the windows down even in the tunnels, with the excuse that they are well ventilated. I asked them to turn on the AC and charge me. And they did.

Blue Tree

Just when I thought that only small flowers could be blue, this is a blue tree posing for me from a garden around my home. By all means, I am endlessly amazed here by the variety of colors and I am sure my posts (pictures and words included) continue to reveal this feeling. This post is brief, as I am going on a two day trip to Sydney. I'll come back this week-end with more pictures and impressions.

Shopping in Melbourne

On a scale of 1 to 10, I think I’d get myself a 5 for shopping. I enjoy this activity somewhat, but most of the time I shop out of necessity. Don’t blame me for being boring or old fashioned, but I found out what shopping was when I was 24 years old, during my first visit outside Romania, in Paris. In Romania we had small stores with limited, very limited choices of any item, and one large general store, which seemed to be a bazaar with items from all the small stores gathered in one building. People shopped out of necessity, not for pleasure. My trip to Paris was short, yet, there I met the mall and the haute couture. My mouth never quite closed on that trip and I came home equally impressed with what I saw in the Louvre and the Printemps. The problem was that I left Romania with $20 for the entire month I spent in France with my friend Nicole, so I didn’t really do more than window shopping and gratefully accepted the gifts Nicole gave me. A year later I moved to the US. The shopping scene bent me over. I still remember the first trip to the mall in New Jersey and the first walk down Madison Avenue in New York. So in all these many, many years in the US I learnt to shop, I shopped sales and then new-season items. But the Romanian girl remained frugal while enjoying the dizzying number of choices, the fun of trying on “stuff” and browsing even late at night. The perfume, the music and the people, i.e., the atmosphere of shopping… mmm…. Well, so this is the hiatus. I arrive here in Melbourne and discover these things: very few sales (when was last time you saw a 5 or 10% sale in the US?), a lot fewer choices, and 9-5 opening time! Ok, except Thursday and Friday, when the stores close at 9PM. Except the liquor stores (called Bottle Shops here), which are open late every day… My manageable shopping pleasure and desire are now suffering in Melbourne, and I haven’t even discussed prices yet! So I am ending my post today with a nostalgic comment: overall, what I miss the most about the US and I cannot find here is “the” choices. Wait! Except for these tulips. When it comes to tulip color, you can see that choices are endless!