It’s been a busy couple of days for us. Even though we had been told Sundays were sleepy here, we still managed to get a lot done yesterday.
We started at our usual six or so and waited around for someplace to open for us to get coffee. The news promised it’d be warm and they weren’t lying. The temps reached about 34 C, or about 88 F. Hot enough for us, but nothing, apparently, to what is to come.
We went down the street to a coffee shop about eight and grabbed some breakfast, I had eggs bacon toast and baked beans (not at all uncommon for brekkie here) and Leah had toast and jam. We discovered that they had free WIFI there but unfortunately we didn’t bring the laptops. After food we headed over to Woolworths to get some groceries. Woolie’s isn’t like the five and dime stores we used to have in the states, it’s one of the largest grocery chains in the country. We found it to be much like US stores, fewer options for most things. For example, in King Soopers you have an entire aisle devoted to chips, here you get about fifteen feet of an aisle and maybe twenty choices. Doritos original are just plain corn chips, Cheetos come in bacon flavor and you can get potato chips with honey chicken soy flavor. We did find salsa but only one choice and it was Old El-Paso, a bit shocking when you’re used to Denver.
On the other hand, the Asian options here are unbelievable; seriously, there are more Asian foods in a regular grocery store than I’ve ever seen in the states. It’s great. We’re looking forward to expanding our pantry and getting to know Asian foods as well as we know Mexican.
The meat department was a nice surprise as well, beef is a lot cheaper than I expected. You can get T-Bones for $15 a kg. (it’s going to take some getting used to this metric system thing ) Many of the cuts of meat are named differently here, so I wasn’t really sure what I was looking at sometimes. For instance, they had a steak that looked like a New York strip labeled porterhouse. Believe me, I know my porterhouses and this wasn’t it. But I’ll get used to that. We grabbed some steak for stir-fry for about $6.
As I expected there was a ton of lamb reasonably priced, and also lots of veal. You don’t see too much veal at a regular grocer in the states, but it must be popular here. Sausages have weird names, I’m not sure what most of them are, but mostly they look like long hotdogs.
One of the most common questions people asked in the states before we left was, “Are you going to eat kangaroo?” Well, we saw it and I’m not going to try it until someone cooks it for me first. It’s really dark and gamey looking, so I don’t want to screw it up and turn myself off of it. I will say, we haven’t seen it on any menus yet.
We picked up a few staples including butter (it’s more yellow here) Jam, yoghurt, Vegemite (course I would y’all), coffee, a couple of bananas and some veggies to make stir-fry. The produce is a bit more varied than it is in Denver; they just don’t have as many types of chilies, though there are a few so we won’t be eating too blandly. There were at least six different kinds of cabbage, bok choy, mok choy etc. It must be an Asian thing. We took some baby Buk Choy. It’s tiny and adorable.
We dropped the groceries off at home and hopped on a train to go to Indooroopilly (pronounced in-drugh-pilly) a suburb two or three stops south of home, to check out a huge mall there. It’s big and we did a bit of shopping. We found target (Sarah, rest assured they have it and its glorious! Leah was in her dream) and bought some much needed cleaning supplies and a few other things. We also took the opportunity to check out Coles, the other major grocery here. It had a bit of a wider selection. We stopped into all of the mobile phone providers again and tried to make sense of the wacky system they have here. I think I may finally be starting to understand how it works. In fact, I may be qualified to work for them by the time I choose a plan.
We made our way back home about five or six and spent the next few hours rearranging our apartment. There’s only so much you can do with one room and the cheapest Ikea furniture, but it was fun anyway. By the time we got done with that we were too tired to cook the dinner we planned so we settled for ramen and crashed by 9:30 again. We are so rock and roll!
Monday morning was a miracle, we slept in! We actually slept until almost 7:30. And here’s the kicker, I kinda felt guilty. We must have finally kicked the jet lag to the curb. I’ve never traveled this far before so I didn’t realize just how much one is affected by it. If you come to visit us, plan on three weeks. You’ll thank me for it.
After checking out the local news for a while we flipped channels and discovered, much to our surprise, that the Packers were playing the Cowboys on channel nine. (In fact, as I write this I just found New England and Indy) I’m not sure if the game was live or not, but it was cool to see some NFL after a steady diet of Rugby and Cricket. I’m not kidding, at any given time out of the eight or so channels we get on the antenna, at least three have sports and most of it is Rugby and Cricket. Rugby is a bit of a mystery to me still, though I get the gist of it. Cricket is much easier to grog after watching a bit. I think I’ll really like it. I just need to get the lingo a bit. It’s got enough similarities with baseball that I think most Americans could suss it out quickly. (How ya like that lingo?)
It’s also funny to see that America isn’t the only place that has Tiger fever. Mr. Woods has been in Australia all week winning the Australian Masters, a tournament I didn’t even know about before now. Every news program and newspaper has given him quite the welcome. The organizers of the tourney paid him three million dollars just to show up, not to mention the prize for winning. I think Tiger enjoyed himself.
Our first meal at home was brekkie this morning, toast, jam and peanut butter for Leah, and toast butter and Vegemite for me. Vegemite is tasty, provided you don’t get crazy with it. Daniel advised us before we left, lots of butter, little vegemite. He was right. If you haven’t ever tried it, go out to the store and get some. Leah’s dad found it in Madison, I’m sure you can get it in Denver. DO IT, you’ll feel closer to us.
We didn’t stick around to see if the Pack could pull it out. We headed down to the coffee shop and got on the internet. We had a bunch of things to get done early. We switched the power, gas and phone over to our names. It was a painless process, I only had to make one phone call and it was done. The whole thing only took about five minutes. We’ll have the power and gas switched on Tuesday, and the phone will be done by Wednesday. The phone costs us $29 a month and we can’t make international calls on it. I’m not sure if we can even receive international calls, but we need to have it in order to get internet access at home. Our place isn’t equipped for cable and looking at the prices, I’m not sure we could afford it anyway.
After that we tried to get library cards but couldn’t cause we didn’t have proof of address. We’ll do that tomorrow. So on a whim we headed off to Ikea, Leah needed a few more storage/organization options and I wanted a couple of things for the kitchen. Little did we know, Ikea is a long freaking way from our house. We took a train, to another train, to a bus, to another bus, and then had to sprint across a freeway to get there.
Ikea is still Ikea, even in Oz so I’ll spare you the deets, we did manage to get $85 worth of stuff and head back home. It took us an hour and a half to get home and by the time we made it back to the city everyone was getting off work so the train home was packed.
At home we finally made ourselves a dinner at home and promptly set of the smoke detector (holy shit is that bugger loud) about ten times. The only cooking device we have is an electric frying pan, so I’m not sure how we’re gonna avoid a repeat in the future. I’ll probably have to move the whole operation across the room and get used to cooking with the window open. The ceiling is about twelve feet in here, and the smoke detector is hard-wired right in the middle of it. I have to figure something out or I’ll go nuts.
There are at least two full pages in our rental agreement about how it’s unlawful to tamper with the smoke detectors in apartments. Perhaps I can use a pole with an inverted bowl on it to cover it up while I cook. I’ll post some pics when I figure something out.
Speaking of pics, the only internet access we have been getting at this point is free WIFI at a few key places. Data is so precious to Australians I worry about using up their bandwidth loading photos, so we’ll be posting pics only after we have access at home. I think that’s gonna be at least a week and maybe longer. In the meantime, bear with us dear readers. We’ll get them as soon as we can.
Whew, that seems like a lot, doesn’t it? It’s all mundane now that I look back at it, but somehow it seems exciting.
Observations from the last couple of days:
-Froot loops in Australia are still Froot Loops but Rice Crispies are called Rice
-Power is billed every three months here, gas, every two, and phones every month. You can pay all of your bills through a system called B-Pay that you can access from your internet banking site.
-the on the spot fine for littering in Brisbane is $200 and it is enforced!
-“Tasty” is a flavor of cheese here, I think it’s supposed to taste like cheddar, but it doesn’t
-Eggs are not refrigerated here; they’re just down a regular aisle like bread (Kathleen, your worst nightmare). The yolks have a deep orange color like eggs in Mexico. They still taste good with a couple of rashers of bacon.
-Leah here…we also saw the most extreme raptor arms on a human that we have ever seen in our life (easy, T-Rex)
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7 "a bit"s. Yes!
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