Another day in Paradise

Friday, November 20, 2009

Ugh. I’m sick and tired of dealing with this phone issue; we still don’t have a phone in our apartment.

We rode our bikes this morning over to the university. We made it there in about twenty minutes. It took us less time to get back since we were familiar with the route now. It was a nice ride this morning, St Lucia, where the Uni is, is a really pretty neighborhood.

Leah had an appointment to get some vaccinations that she needed to start school. While she went to the health center, I popped over to the bike shop and returned the grease I had borrowed a few days ago. After that I grabbed a paper and a long black and sat around the square and waited for Leah.

She was done in about an hour and we walked over to the post office and I grabbed a couple of post cards. The postage to get a card to the states is $1.75. Cards in hand we then made our way to the student recreation center and Leah got herself a membership. They have yoga classes and a bunch of other random classes that she’s interested in. The membership for students has all the classes included. I hopped on a scale while Leah was signing up and found out I weigh 92.5 kg. I don’t even know what that means. I had to get an app for my ipod to do metric conversions.

We finished up at the rec. center and logged on while sitting in the square to check e-mails. We were both able to log on at the same time on Leah’s student account so we spent about an hour surfing. We also checked Skype and found Leah’s parents on line so we chatted with them for a while. (Hi Guys!) While we were on with them a bush turkey walked right by us so they got to see it. The funny thing about those things is, even though they’re everywhere, we’ve had a hard time getting a good picture.

At noon we had a date to meet Rebecca, a professor here and cousin of a friend from home. She’s an American who’s lived here for fifteen years. We met her at her office and walked over to the pizza shop on campus for lunch. Leah and Rebecca have been e-mailing for several months and it was great to finally meet her. It’s funny to see what fifteen years in country does to an American accent; hers was a great blending of the two. She invited us over to her house for Christmas, saying she couldn’t stand the thought of us being without family for the holiday. She also offered us her car for a few days after since she and her family will be in New Zealand for a bit. We may just take her up on that, since we want to go camping around Christmas anyway.

By the time we were done with lunch the sun had come out and it had gotten, as Leah likes to say, hotter than Hades. The ride home was a sweaty one.

We got back to the place and met one of our housemates, Fred. He’s from Sydney, has a super thick accent that Leah had a hard time following, and has moved up here for a few months for work. Fred is old, likes to walk around shirtless slash barefoot and is about the size of a hobbit. He works for Telstra (the main phone company in Australia) as a linesman. We had a nice conversation where he told me he got his phone hooked up “not a drama” (Aussies like to say that one; It’s a nice change from “no worries”). He told us our mistake was listening to the landlord and not calling Telstra direct. I called a service that was supposed to get all of our utilities with one phone call. Lesson learned. Enough whinging (Aussie for complaining) about the phones, we still don’t have one.

I think we’re both missing home a little so we made tacos for dinner. Just what the Doctor ordered. (aside from Diet Dr. Pepper, how I miss thee)

Some observations for today:

-That critter on the power line was indeed a Possum.

-Burger King in Australia is called Hungry Jack’s

-Aussies are crazy for breaded chicken breast sandwiches that they call Schnitzel Burgers.

-The bats fly every evening from St Lucia up to the botanic gardens at Mt. Coot-Tha

-Canadians aren’t exactly happy when you ask them if they’re American