Letters from Lisa

Random tidbits from recent days (because organizing my thoughts right now is like putting popcorn back on the cob):

Started reading Monkey Dancing: A Father, Two Kids, and a Journey to the Ends of the Earth but had to put it down. Why? Good book, will eventually enjoy it, but I’m getting too jealous of their travel destinations. (Australia was their first stop.) I need to pick up a memoir about living in a trash heap in Nicaragua, or something, so that I can be fascinated, but not sad, at least in the nostalgic sense.

So I’m reading An Intimate History of Humanity instead. (That’s “intimate” in the sense of “knowing and appreciating on a personal level”.) I can’t decide if the author’s little “case studies” about charming but dissatisfied French people are going to turn out to be amusing and helpful, or just irritating.

On a completely different note, literally, the Bolivian flute players at the 42nd St - Times Square subway station have gotten completely out of control. It was one thing for Simon & Garfunkel to borrow “El Condor Pasa”, but now these subway folks are borrowing the whole litany of Simon and Garfunkel songs. And Beatles as well. I heard “Let it Be” today. Of course, now I can’t see or hear those people without picturing Heather and Ian out on the beach pretending to play — what were those, rocks? seashells? — in between turtle laproscopies. They were considering tricking the second volunteer team by having our group pretend that we’d all completely cracked and took up imaginary instruments. I think we should have done it. What a sad missed opportunity.

Back to Art Garfunkel for a second, I saw on the news that he was busted for possession of marijuana in almost identical circumstances to those of his first bust — he was pulled over for a traffic offense, after which the police discovered drug evidence in the car. Note to Art: either drive better, or stop keeping that stuff in the car!

Now to another music icon, Bob Dylan — I saw two new albums of some of his live/alternate recorded tracks being sold exclusively at Starbucks. What is this trend about, with Starbucks taking over the record industry? Are they trying to promote some sort of weird artificial, homogenized coffeehouse musical “culture”? They’ll be selling books of stuffy, self-important poetry next — not anyone local or unestablished, of course, but someone comfortably famous and probably dead. Having said this, though, I’m not at all irritated or angry with Dylan, since he’d probably like that.

OK, last stop: Klingon Fairy Tales. My two favorites: “Goldilocks Dies With Honor at the Hands of the Three Bears” and “The Hare Foolishly Lowers His Guard and Is Devastated by the Tortoise, Whose Prowess in Battle Attracts Many Desirable Mates”.

tags: books, subway musicians, Klingons

In the car last night, we were telling Chris’s parents that we would both like to win the lottery and travel the world. Her dad replied, “So basically you’d be Paris and Nicky Hilton?”

Right, you folks who know me in real life — I’m so Paris Hilton, aren’t I?

Let’s pretend for a moment that I am not Paris Hilton, but have Paris Hilton’s money. I’m starting to get a vague picture of the Dream Trip. Now at this point, I haven’t thought much (which is code for “at all”) about packing, weather, climate restrictions (i.e. avoiding monsoons or 24-hour darkness), budget considerations, time differences, or any of that messy practical stuff. I’m in the “wild stupid ideas” stage.

This is basically the version I ran down with my folks at dinnertime:

Start: New York. Or Newark, depending.

Europe
Stop #1: Iceland.
Stops #2, 3 and 4: England, Ireland and Scotland.
Stop #5: Italy.
Stop #6: Greece.

Middle East/Africa
Stop #7: Egypt.
Stop #8: Kenya.
Stop #9: Tanzania.

Asia
Stop #10: India
Stop #11: Nepal
Stop #12: Bhutan
Stop #13: Tibet
Stop #14: China
Stop #15: Vietnam
Stop #16: Japan

Australia and New Zealand
Stop #17: Great Barrier Reef
Stop #18: Alice Springs/Uluru/other outback destinations TBA
Stop #19: Melbourne
Stop #20: Tazmania
Stop #21: New Zealand (specific locations TBA)

Stop #22: Antarctica

South & Central America
Stop #23: Chile
Stop #24: Peru
Stop #25: Ecuador/Galapagos Islands
Stop #26: Costa Rica

Back to North America
Stop #27: Home

OK, so… completely crazy, right?

Will probably end up doing this trip in sections, i.e. one continent at a time. Over the next 50 years.

By the way there are other travel destinations I’d like to hit that didn’t make this list because they just didn’t fit into the itinerary… so this will probably be revised many, many times until I inherit my (imaginary) millions.

tags: travel, world travel, silly dreams

You know, ever since I left Ingram Island, I’ve been hearing voices. Actually, it’s just one voice. It echoes in my head at odd moments, often when I least expect it. Sometimes I have to completely stop what I’m doing and just listen, incredulous, to this voice berating me about… coins, perhaps. Or fruitcake. American sports. Americans in general.

It’s quite clear to me now that it will take some time before I can fully deprogram my consciousness, and that my recovery will be of some duration. But until then I, and all my fellow Americans who inhabited Ingram Island, will continue to feel the effects of our encounter with seemingly mild-mannered Sam, who in reality is none other than… Austra-Man!!

(man do we need some theme music!)

In these difficult times, when fear and despair seek to oppress the spirit of humankind, there are still those heroes among us willing to risk personal health and happiness for the greater good of all Australians everywhere. And not a moment too soon, for a new and heartless enemy has gathered its full strength to strike, and strike hard. This powerful foe invades under the cover of lies and deceit, with fast food and strip malls, with bad pop music and worse pronunciation…

Even when all hope seems to be lost, one hero stands tall against the infiltrators! Whenever the peace and harmony of the planet Earth is threatened by the fiendish race of Yanks, determined to impose their foolish ways upon innocents abroad, only one man can turn the tide of cultural combat against the forces of backwardness… Austra-Man!!

Setting: A quiet morning on a picturesque island, somewhere in Far North Queensland, where an innocent young Australian prepares for another balmy liquid-sunshiney day chasing hawkies on the GBR…

Travis: Hey Rik, how ya goin?

Evil Yank (played by Rik): Ha ha! I shall now attempt to confuse this innocent Australian with my fiendish American obsession with upside down light switches!

Travis: Loight switches?

Evil Yank: That’s right! Do you know how many innocent tourists have met their untimely end because your electricians fiendishly switched all light switches to flip backwards, thus causing hotel guests to stumble and fall and hurt themselves from lack of illumination?

Travis: You know, I never thought about it that way…

Austra-Man: Not so fast, Evil Yank!

Everyone: Austra-Man!

Austra-Man: The same! Now I’m aware of your scheming, you American, trying to convince US that WE’RE doing it wrong… You’re all alike, you Yanks! You do everything wrong! You drive on the wrong side of the road! You don’t know your donkeys from your bottoms!

Evil Yank: That isn’t true! Just because we pronounce a certain slang word for donkey the same as we pronounce a very similar slang word for bottoms…

Ian: What is this American obsession with bottoms?

Evil Yank: Curse you, Austra-Man! You have foiled my plan. But I shall return!

Later that day….

Austra-Man: (driving Turtle 4 with his foot while leaning halfway over the side of the boat to peer under the surface of Coombe Reef for a speeding turtle) Now you’re sure you want to try this, Yank?

Evil Yank: (balanced precariously on the bow of Turtle 4, clutching a rope, with a helmet jammed on his head) Of course! Just because I’m American doesn’t make me completely useless!

Austra-Man: It doesn’t?

Gresham: (pointing to a distant turtle somewhere between the boat and Mid Reef, several miles away) YEAH, THAT’S ‘IM!!

Austra-Man: (grinning slyly while maneuvering the boat around rocks and shifting waves) OK, wait… Wait… Go!!!

Evil Yank: Sam, that’s a shark!

Austra-Man: So? Jump! You can take him!

Evil Yank: No! You’re trying to kill me, aren’t you?

Austra-Man: Every chance I get! (steers the boat towards a large accumulation of coral) There’s one! Get ‘im!

Evil Yank: That’s a bommie!

Austra-Man: You’re not scared of coral, are you?? You Yanks are completely soft!

Evil Yank: It’s not going to work! You can’t get rid of me that easily!

Austra-Man: (chuckling softly)

The next day, Austra-Man and his crack team of turtle catchers are scouring the shallow waters of Beanley Island for juvenile green turtles when they spot a red-helmeted, wetsuit-clad figure waving to them from several feet meters away …

Another Hapless American: (played by Lisa) Hey, that’s Rik! What’s he doing standing around in the water? Turtle 2 didn’t just leave him there, did they?

Meg: No, there they are… They must have caught two turtles at once! Seems like they’re going to be busy for a while.

Austra-Man: OK, we’re going to drive right past him without stopping. Lisa, don’t laugh!

Lisa: (laughing) Okay!

Austra-Man: Shhh!

Evil Yank: (catapulting the turtle over the side of the boat and climbing aboard) Oh no you don’t. I’m coming in! (to himself) Now to continue with my evil plans! Say… I could try driving the boat for a bit, Sam, so you can have a chance to jump!

Lisa: I could try jumping! Hey look, there’s one! Think I could get it?

Austra-Man: Well, it’s missing a flipper and floating aimlessly in about two feet of extremely calm water… so um, well… never mind that, just get up here and jump!

Lisa: Really? Are you sure? Now?

Gresham: Yes, now!

Lisa: How about now? Should I really jump?

Everyone: Yes!!

Lisa: Now? (gets pushed off the front of the boat by Gresham as the boat is driven directly towards her)

Austra-Man: Hey! I’m the only boat driver allowed to kill anyone! (jumps off the front and nudges Turtle 4 to the side)

Lisa: (emerging, totally oblivious) I got it! Meg, take my picture!

Austra-Man: Typical…

Meg: Turtle 2! I’ll be safe there! (defects)

Evil Yank: Drat! My plan to discredit Austra-Man and his Austra-Powers has been foiled again!

Austra-Man: You’ll never win, Evil Yank! I have the power of the $2 coin on my side! And I measure my degrees in Celsius like the rest of the world! I don’t wear silly looking shoes on the beach at night!

Lisa: You mean his sneakers?

Austra-Man: (pouncing) Sneeeeeeeakers? What in the world do you mean by sneeeeeeeakers?

Lisa: (jumps off the boat)

Evil Yank: Now look what you’ve done! You’ve driven her to –

Lisa: (emerges with another sad looking special needs turtle)

Evil Yank: — never mind.

Gresham: I barely even had to push her that time!

Evil Yank: It was the power of the Turtle Whisperer!

(the radio crackles on — some American lady on board a shipping vessel would like to report that she is currently passing by… an island!)

Austra-Man: An island??? On the Great Barrier Reef? I hope they’re going to be all right! We should monitor their progress and be prepared to intervene! Good thing we are in Turtle 4, the far superior of the two catch boats in every respect! Now where was I? Oh yes! You Yanks! You probably eat peanut butter and jelly together, don’t you? Disgusting! No wonder your footie players wear so much bloody padding and don’t even use the proper rules! No wonder you have to have a World Series with only Yank players in it!…

Evil Yank: That’s OK. You play cricket!

Austra-Man: That’s right! A game far too challenging to the intellect for an American to understand!

Lisa: Sorry to interrupt, but do you think our readers have the general idea now?

Austra-Man: You might want to keep it going for a bit, so any Yanks with an attention span long enough to read this can begin to get the point.

Evil Yank: They’d have gotten it already if you didn’t pronounce the English language weird! You never say the letter R!

Austra-Man: You never say the letter H!

Lisa: No really, I think they get the picture.

Austra-Man: Fine. Just know this: that whenever Australian culture and language is threatened by evil Yank fiends, Austra-Man will be there!

tags: Australia, Great Barrier Reef, superheroes

Just time for another Renaissance Faire.

And an excuse to dress up in silly dresses!

tag: Renaissance Faire

My extended family left this evening to return to the midwest. That was a sad goodbye. And not just because they’re headed for the midwest (though that is sad in its own way — and Chris will be doing that in a few days too!) I wish they could live closer, though after this stressful week I don’t think THEY want to live closer — not anymore! Between the college moving and house-hunting and getting stuck in all kinds of irritating New York traffic, I’m sure they’ll be glad to get back to a quieter situation for a while.

For me the visit was nice while it lasted! I was probably the most relaxed person in the family, since I had just spent a month on vacation in Australia, followed by a week relaxing around the house, and didn’t have work or any other time demands. I chose to go into work one day to poke around in my classroom, but that was it. I’m especially glad I got to spend a lot of uninterrupted time with the kiddies. I was really sad when I said goodbye to them.

Yeah. And it’s 1 am. I’m supposed to be ready to leave the house at 8:45 tomorrow to go to the Renaissance Faire. In my fancy blue dress, to boot. I’m going to be one cranky royal lady if I don’t get to sleep.

tags: family

Busy few days helping my “baby cousin” get ready to move into the dorms for her freshman year of college… which means that it’s been ten years since I was packing my own Yaffa Blocks for my first year. Amazing.

(Ugh. It’s almost impossible to concentrate with CSI on in the background. I’m being treated to random snippets like, “First he was stabbed, THEN they dropped the container on him.” I’ll never understand the viewing habits of the American public. Or my dad.)

All of my work on the Australia stuff has come to a complete standstill as I’ve been spending most of my waking hours playing with the kids and helping Ashley pick out storage containers and clip-on lamps. So, I expect I’ll be able to update this page on Sunday, after everything settles down.

In the meantime, Smithsonian reports that green turtles in Hawaii are staging a comeback.

tags: college, TV, sea turtles

I had a great mail day! Several letters from students — proving what a conscientious class I had last year, as two thirds of them appear to have done their summer homework with two weeks of summer left — and two pieces of Ingram Island mail! One was a card, and the other a CD of photos and even some short movies. Excellent! Less excitingly, Earthwatch sent me a letter that my membership is about to expire. Honestly. I haven’t even been back for two weeks and they’re already hitting me up for more cash.

Spent a few hours at work setting up for the new school year. Other than a few pieces of furniture, and a sneaking suspicion that I had more stuff packed away but very little idea of where it might be, I’m not that far away from opening for business. We’re in for staff development next week, so there will be some time to set up then — I just like to get a head start.

Meanwhile, our guests went to the Jersey Shore. Now I’m about to sound like a complete snob, and I don’t care — I really dislike the Jersey Shore. It’s too crowded, for one thing. The water is freezing and dirty and often contaminated, for another. You can’t see anywhere near the bottom, but then again, that’s probably a good thing. And to top it all of, it costs money. I’ve never been to a beach anywhere else that charged admission — and I haven’t yet been to a beach as gross as the ones on the Jersey Shore. To be fair, you can’t really compare it to the Caribbean or Great Barrier Reef, but how about Newport, Rhode Island? That isn’t exactly the tropics. Yet it manages to have reasonably clear water, and they only get red tides once in a while. Newport also happens to be a fairly nice, quaint little place to walk around, whereas some of the towns along the Jersey Shore seem to specialize in being tacky.

Yeah, I’m being harsh. Still. I’m allowed to criticize my home state. I did suffer through being called “Jersey” through three and a half hours of climbing the Sydney Harbor Bridge. (The guide was an ex-pat New Yorker.) I might also take this opportunity to point out that the Hudson River is looking rather brown as of late. This is one area where New York definitely takes a backseat to cities like Sydney, which have beautiful picturesque harbors. Sometimes I see folks yachting or sailing along the Hudson, and it’s really kind of cute, but sad at the same time. The other night we saw a kayaker. How many shots did he have to get, I wonder?

I think I need to live somewhere a bit more outdoorsy. Or I need to get out of town more often. When I’m at home, I tend to spend a lot of time inside. Doing worthwhile things, of course — writing books and playing the piano and reading voraciously, and the like — but not anything particularly related to the natural world or wildlife, unless I’m watching Animal Planet. (But not the Discovery Channel. Has anyone noticed how drastically the Discovery Channel has cut back on its science programming? I swear it’s morphing into TLC, which in turn has become a music-less VH1. Discovery used to have more of a “PBS for grown-ups” feel to it that I rather miss.)

OK, Lisa’s attention span has officially kicked off for the night. Jeez. Where was I? Complaining about where I live? Ah yes. Silly, isn’t it. I suspect I’d find something to complain about no matter where I lived. The fact is, I’m quite spoiled with good public transportation, access to museums and culture, and great restaurants. I’d miss all of that out in the countryside. Everything has advantages and drawbacks, doesn’t it.

Oh well. Time to go process some more pictures.

tags: New Jersey, TV, New York City

My extended family is coming in to visit! Which means I’ll be spending very little time writing up details about my Australia trip because I’ll be spending a lot of time watching the kids. (OK, Ingram Island folks reading this, you can make your jokes about the turtle whisperer. Go ahead. I can take it. Everyone else… um… Nothing to see here. These aren’t the droids you’re looking for. You can go about your business. Move along.)

I haven’t seen this part of the family since the spring, so I’m quite happy that they’re coming. We see them, maximum, once or twice a year. This is what happens when folks are scattered geographically! Of course my sister is missing all this, as she’s out in Oregon moving into her new home for graduate school. There’s always one who didn’t get the memo, isn’t there?

Right before they get here I’ll be at a big family party — not my family, but my best friend’s, as we’re celebrating her grandmother’s 76th birthday. She has a huge family and there’s going to be lots of craziness, of the good kind of course, though it won’t be quite the zinger that they had for the other grandmother a few years back — a surprise 80th birthday party. That grandma is now 83 and talking about accompanying Chris to Greece! You can tell her grandmas are pretty strong, vibrant ladies! When I’m 83 I hope I’m dragging my granddaughter around Europe. Unless, of course, I still haven’t been to Africa yet.

Actually, my new dream vacation (new because I just came back from the old dream vacation) is to take an entire year off and travel the world. It’s rather wasteful to spend a full day flying somewhere, piddle around for a few weeks, spend another full day flying home, then a while later spend another day flying to the country next door, spending two weeks, then flying back, only to wait a while and then fly AGAIN, and this has just become a run on sentence and you’ve got the idea anyway. It would be much better to, say, fly to a country and then spend a few months traveling across the continent. I would love to, for example, start in China and then keep going into Southeast Asia, where there are a half dozen countries I would like to visit, all of whom require long flights and adjusting to a high altitude. So why do them one at a time, or even worse, packed into a few days?

I don’t have the risk-taking temperament for it, but I’m generally a restless person. I love reading books in which much less risk-averse people wander around exotic places for months or years at a time, without a pre-planned itinerary or firm grasp of the native languages, and they manage and meet people and learn all sorts of wonderful things about the world and themselves. I don’t know if I’ll ever be that crazy brave, but then again in order to be brave you first have to be afraid of something, right? My wandering will most likely take a more temperate form, given the fact that I’m pretty shy and not particularly fearless.

The ironic thing is that people often say things to me like, “Wow, you were pretty brave to….” and my first reaction is, “God, no!” because I either:

1. didn’t notice that there was anything I needed to be “brave” about, just sort of went and DID it, or
2. was completely terrified of making a mistake or encountering problems, and just sort of went and did it while unconvincingly pretending that I didn’t notice that there was anything I needed to be “brave” about.

So there you have it. I’m a wimp, albeit a wimp with a plan.

But before I can execute that plan, I need to make sure that the house is clean for the guests arriving tomorrow. So many adventures, so little time.

tags: travel, family

Australian news. What a refresher to watch news that doesn’t revolve around Bush’s Supreme Court nominees, Bush’s vacation, Bush’s malapropisms, or Bush’s war (well… they do cover that a bit). Besides exhibiting the pleasant truth that not everything that happens in America needs to be front page news around the world, Australian news also covers a far greater spectrum of international issues and events, particularly in Asian and African countries, but without being as stilted and random as the BBC. Their newscasters actually come out and state their opinions without going into tirades and heated rhetoric under the guise of being “fair and balanced”. Their interviewers ask more direct questions that prompt people to respond to their opponents’ viewpoints. And it’s less soap opera-y — you don’t feel like crying hysterically as you’re watching something sad. (Insert your own Presidential joke here.)

Australian coins. I recall there being some controversy on Ingram Island between certain Americans and Australians who came down on opposite sides of the Coin Debate. It is a fact that the $2 coin, in particular, suffers from reduced stature while its 20 cent and 50 cent counterparts engage in delusions of grandeur. Then poor silly tourists assume that bigger coins must have bigger values and, due to the increased intensity of the Australian sun (hole in the ozone, you know) temporarily lose the ability to read numbers. Which leads me to the reason that I miss Australian coins, mainly that they have the value printed right on them. Do you know how many MONTHS of math instruction I could bypass if American coins did this?

Interesting birds. Yes, urban pigeons have incredible polymorphism for coloring, but they’re less exciting than pelicans, darters, eagles, honey-eaters and jabirus. Of course I don’t live near large natural habitats that would attract diverse species… and that is exactly my point. Even Sydney’s botanical gardens have more interesting looking birds, in greater variety, than comparable parks in the United States.

You know, I’m going to extend this category to Wildlife in General.

Heat without humidity. The air around here makes it feel like we’re walking around in somebody’s pot of soup. It’s incredibly unpleasant. And all that water in the air doesn’t prevent you from getting dehydrated or dizzy. I walked around for only an hour yesterday and was quite miserable, whereas I lasted several hours up in the Northern Territory in a hotter (but drier) climate without even feeling it.

Bundaberg’s ginger beer. Much better than ginger ale.

OK, I can’t think of anything else that isn’t sappy. So we’re going to stop there.

tags: Australia, travel, wildlife

The night before I departed for Australia, my parents returned from a shopping trip with a perky yellow handheld GPS unit, which they gleefully presented to me to “use on the trip”. When I protested that I wasn’t THAT direction-impaired, they giggled nervously and backpedaled — “Oh, it’s for the whole family, of course. We just figured, since you’re going and we happen to have it…”

a perky yellow handheld photo of the GPS, taken from the product’s website

I am, in fact, not the swiftest, navigationally speaking. I dread field trips to large, complicated places like the Museum of Natural History — despite it being one of my favorite places to visit — because I fear accidentally steering my students into an inappropriate area (two words: GIFT SHOP) or going down the same set of stairs four times while searching for the exit. I’d be giving them extra exercise, of course, but after about the third time they’d likely catch on that I was kind of an idiot. Still, I study the maps, I take along another chaperone who isn’t spatially fuzzy, and I manage. To this day I’ve never gotten a group lost.

My sense of direction does seem to improve (to a point) when I’m abroad, possibly because I’m less ashamed to be seen in public engaging in a prolonged staring contest with a city map. It’s probably clear from the silly hat and sunburn that I’m a tourist anyway (well… everywhere except the Northern Territory) so I choose to be an obvious tourist who at least isn’t wandering around lost, dehydrated, and delusional. Those do abound, which is the only way I can explain the proliferation of furry faux leather koala keychains proudly sold in Australian gift shops under bright orange signs that say “Classy Gifts! 2 for $3!!” In Cairns, there were even ones that had GREAT BARRIER REEF printed on them — because if you’re not careful, you get eaten alive by koalas out there. They’re attracted by the snorkel tubes.

I never used the GPS, of course. Not for navigation, anyway. I poked around inside its electronic innards to test it out, like Consumer Reports, and started tagging silly waypoints like my hotel bathroom. Though that never quite worked, since the pesky thing would have a tantrum if you tried to use it indoors. This eventually led to some difficulty — in Kakadu, I had to stand well outside my little lodge to get a clear satellite signal, so the (very capable) guide spotted me and wanted to know exactly how little confidence I had in his ability to get us through the park without becoming hopelessly lost. I tried to convince him that I was just tooling around, but I don’t think he believed me. So Gary, if you ever get to see this, I never doubted you. Even if you told me it was safe to swim in that one water hole because there were no fish for crocodiles to feed on, and I counted at least THREE fish. We’re all entitled to one mistake, yeah?

After a day or so on Ingram Island, I remembered that the GPS was in my bag. Going into my bags on the island always felt like opening birthday presents, because I had to dig through layers of wrapping to get to the contents and was often pleasantly surprised at what I found. “Oh boy, a pair of pants not marinated in salt water! Just what I wanted!” Some days, especially towards the end, it was like a garage sale — I just browsed, hoping to find something that wasn’t junk. A GPS sort of qualified as “not junk”.

I dutifully tagged my tent’s location (S 14° 25.055′, E 144° 52.770′) for posterity, noting that even when I zoomed out as far as possible (an 800 mile radius, I believe) the nearest waypoint barely grazed the edge of the screen. And, the GPS didn’t know of any path back to my last known position.

For all intents and purposes, according to the GPS, I was lost.

That made sense to me. I felt a little lost.

Continue Reading »

This morning I was scanning in some photographs from my trip and found one of my favorite photos from Kakadu National Park:

What I love about it is that I’m clutching my trusty towel, like in Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy. No crocodile would be a match for THAT.

(in case you’re wondering, yes, I did go swimming)

tags: Australia, travel

(note: this entry, and all others like it, will be jointly posted on the Australia Travel Blog page)

I’m leafing through volumes in the travel section at my favorite bookstore. France on $30 a day. Wine growing in Sweden. Culture Shock: Antractica. My hand reaches for a guide to the Himalayas, but my gaze falls upon a shelf labeled Australia, New Zealand and the South Pacific.

The full force of my homesickness hits me. My hand drops to my side.

I shouldn’t feel homesick. I am home. In the United States. New Jersey. The same little highrise apartment where I took my first steps, had my first imaginary friend, broke up with my first ex. This is where I have lived my entire 27 years. Even during four years of college in New England, “home” was always here.

I came home from Australia four days ago. Now all I can think about is going back.

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It took a full day, plus a few hours, to advance from my familiar front door to the Esplanade in Cairns (where you can Dive The Great Barrier Reef! or Snorkel For A Day or Half Day! Equipment Provided! Boats Leaving Daily! and in Japanese as well!) and another full day bouncing and swaying on a cramped but homey little ex-trawler to reach my Australian destination, an island almost no one had heard of. Most maps didn’t show it. Weather reports didn’t mention it. Tour boats didn’t frequent it. This was simply because, 11 months of the year, nobody lived there.

Nobody human, that is.

Continue Reading »

Crosses Vandalized at Crawford Protest via yahoo.com

If you have so little respect for dead soldiers as to run over crosses in memoriam to them, don’t you DARE accuse peace activists of not “supporting the troops”.

I really can’t think of anything more unpatriotic.

Sign me –
One angry, disgusted liberal

Sorry folks. We now return you to your regularly scheduled drivel.

If you’d like to have a look at some Australia photos, they are here. There will be many more shortly, so stay tuned.

If you’d like to read about Australia, I haven’t written much about it yet. But I do recommend this brief travel guide to Ingram Island, which is where I volunteered on the Earthwatch project, as well as this entry about my tour of Kakadu (including proof of what a fabulous naturalist I am) and this rather inadequate discussion of the second best part of my Australia trip, Mt. Borradaile.

Thanks for your patience while I get my circadian rhythms twisted back around and un-fog my cognitive apparatus enough to write coherently. (Do I ever do that? Uh… nevermind.)

My skin color. The Australian sun did what stage makeup could not — make me look Spanish. (I was in West Side Story many years ago, and the guy who did my makeup went on to become a professional makeup artist. But even he couldn’t make me look dark-skinned.) I am quite tan at the moment. Particularly my hands and feet, which I guess never got properly sunscreened.

My friend Christine got engaged which I found out via email, causing me to exclaim, “What???” in a crowded internet cafe in Cairns. Congrats, Christine and Joseph.

My sister is moving out of the house to attend graduate school across the country. She left today. Actually, at last check, the flight was sitting on the runway waiting out a rather large rainstorm. Once she gets there, it’ll be awesome.

My opinion of American Airlines went from Worst Airline Ever to Still Pretty Bad, But At Least You’ve Slightly Redeemed Yourself. Not that my opinion will change all that easily. Remind me to tell you about the time I flew to the Caribbean and out of 9 total flights altogether, they managed to mess up 8 of them in some significant way.

My feelings about tiny aircraft went from No! No! Nooooo! to (Sigh) Not Again… Ah Well. You really don’t want to hear the horror story about small aircraft, or you’ll never want to fly in one again. I didn’t.

My knowledge of cricket went from Cricket? That’s an insect, right? to Warnie bowled a wicket over the batsman’s 3rd test match — uh — never mind..

So it’s true what they say about long trips — they are life changing experiences!

After missing its release by only one day (I was on a flight to Australia when it came out) I finally got to see Charlie and the Chocolate Factory yesterday afternoon. After a full year of working on our own musical version for the elementary school theater production, I wasn’t sure if I could handle another infusion of the same story, while at the same time I was anticipating the coolness of Tim Burton’s visual interpretation. (The set looks like a candied version of The Nightmare Before Christmas — really neat! Tim Burton has another cartoon movie coming out — starring Johnny Depp of course — called the Corpse Bride, which is like the set of Charlie but with corpses and cobwebs and that sort of thing.)

I’m a purist, so of course you mess with a story I know well and I’m going to protest, at least initially. Those folks (un)lucky enough to have seen Lord of the Rings in the theater with me know that my reactions went somewhere along the lines of, “Hey… HEY! Wait! That’s not — WHOA!! That wasn’t even in the book! He doesn’t say that! Where’s that other — HEY!!!!” (That’s when I wasn’t going, “You really shouldn’t have done that!!” and “Just wait until he… no, I won’t give it away, just wait!!” I’m terrible, really.) Now if the movie’s good, eventually I’ll get over my initial angst about things being different and appreciate the new version — hence the marathon day I spent watching all the special edition Lord of the Rings back to back.

You know, they ought to consider doing that on transcontinental flights — the three LOTR movies put together basically would have been my entire flight to Sydney!

Anyway, I suspect something similar is going to happen with the new Charlie and the Chocolate Factory. Because basically my first reactions were, “Hey… HEY! Wait! That’s not — WHOA!! That wasn’t even in the book! He doesn’t say that! Where’s that other — HEY!!!!” Charlie happens to be one of my favorite books, and a surefire favorite whenever I read it with kids, so when you change around the main characters, you’d better have a very good reason. I really liked what the movie did with the kid characters (particularly Violet Beauregarde, who turned into a hyper-competitive brat, and Mike Teavee, who became a video-game obsessed antisocial brat) and I had some serious reservations about what happened to Willy Wonka, who never ends up being portrayed the way he is in the book, anyway.

Gene Wilder’s Wonka was vaguely dangerous, crafty and slick, while Johnny Depp’s Wonka is awkward, fluttery and psychologically scarred (and bears more than a slight resemblance to a certain very pale pop star who lives by himself in a huge playground ranch and occasionally invites children over) but my take on Willy Wonka is that he is not maladjusted or weird at all — just visionary. You can be visionary without being mentally ill, yes? I always thought of Wonka as a strong-willed non-comformist type who doesn’t want to deal with folks’ nonsense, rather than as someone who couldn’t deal with it.

For the new Willy Wonka, the movie invents a pop-psychology subplot about a distant, disapproving father (featuring the marvelous Christopher Lee, in a bold departure from playing turncoat evil wizard/Jedi right-hand men who get knocked off minutes into the 3rd installment of the trilogy) who so wounded his son through dentistry that Wonka can’t physically bring himself to say the word “parents”. Call in Dr. Phil! I guess it’s just a reflection of the culture today, in which everyone is used to blaming parents and parenting for all of kids’ problems, and people still truly believe that what happens to them as children is more influential than their own decisions and thoughts as adults. Which I don’t believe, by the way. Many people go on to make peace with their miserable childhood lives and are able to move forward, while others with far less traumatic backgrounds continue to see themselves as helpless victims. I believe in the basic resilience of the human spirit. I have seen it firsthand!

It’s amazing to me that the story is so successful, considering its blatant moralizing and finger-wagging. Kids genuinely don’t mind that the nasty characters who chew too much gum, or watch too much TV, are physically punished for their misdeeds — the text of the book (now restored in the Oompa Loompa songs) explicitly bewails the evils of each naughty behavior and promises certain doom for those bad little boys and girls who engage in that behavior. But even postmodern, savvy kids fall in love with the book, with no complaints about its didactic elements. Not many stories could get away with that. Then again, it just proves what I already believe — that if kids respect you and know you’re out for them, they genuinely don’t mind being told what to do.

So I know my students are going to love the movie. I’m looking forward to reading the book with them in the fall (maybe my reading group, maybe my homeroom, hopefully not both because I like the book a lot but not THAT much) so that we can talk about the story and how it changes depending on who’s doing the interpreting. One thing we WON’T be doing is putting on our own interpretation — I am DONE with that show. Besides, I’ll be busy with the new musical, Niagara Falls (Or Does It?) which probably won’t be becoming a movie anytime soon. Not yet, anyway.

Q: So, you’re back from Australia. How does it feel?
A: Wow, creative first question. Well done.

Q: Obviously you’re jet lagged and cranky. Anything else?
A: Hungry. That little bowl of cereal at 6:30 this morning wasn’t enough.

Q: I’m sorry. Your life is incredibly taxing and difficult. Any other hardships to complain about?
A: Besides this interview?

Q: Oh. I’m hurt. I’m really hurt.
A: I’m sorry. Your life is incredibly taxing and difficult.

Q: Look, it’s too early in the morning to fight like this. Besides, I’m sure everyone wants to know what your favorite part of Australia was. And don’t say something flip like “the coffee” because we all know that’s a lie. You want to gush, and you know it.
A: OK, fine. I have two favorite parts. The first is my 2 weeks on the Great Barrier Reef, working with endangered turtles. And the second is Mt. Borradaile, the rock art and wildlife sanctuary in the Northern Territory.

Q: What about Sydney?
A: I liked Sydney. I just wasn’t in city mode. I was in outdoors mode.

Q: Are you back on indoors mode now?
A: It’s extremely hot and humid here, so yes, I’m on indoors mode now.

Q: Good. Then you can scan in all your pictures for us.
A: I have a long day ahead of me. I hope I can stay awake.

Q: Speaking of which… the water’s boiling.
A: Oh good. More coffee.

Q: You’re incorrigible.
A: Thanks.

My poor jet lagged body woke up at 6:30 this morning. What was it thinking?

Probably that I was on Ingram Island. We were always up with the sun. We’d say, “Oh, lovely, we can sleep late tomorrow!” as we shuffled exhausted to bed at 8:00 (or if we were really adventuresome, 8:30! living on the EDGE!) and then the following morning, we’d all be shuffling into the kitchen area fumbling with the French press (Australian: “plunger”).

Today’s tasks:
-Drop the seven disposable cameras off for developing
-Wade through the approximately 600 digital photos I’ve taken and toss out the really silly ones
-Wade through the approximately 583 photos that will be left, and organize them into folders or files or something appropriately official sounding
-Attack my written travel journal with a scanner
-Have another cup of (non French press) coffee

Actually, that last one sounds important. I’d better do that first.

By the way, it was good to sleep in my own bed last night with a real comforter and pillow. Not that I have anything against airlines or airline chairs (well I do actually, but that’s another entry). I actually feel a bit rested.

So, it’s 27 hours since I woke up, and I’m back at home.

::blink::

I’m going to eat some pizza and go to sleep now. Will say more when I’m coherent.

A quick cultural observation before boring you with the details of my day in Sydney. As a matter of fact, this observation was brought about by Bridge Climb, which could more accurately be termed Bridge Walk (or Bridge Stroll, or Bridge Casual Saunter, or Bridge Nearly Aimless Meander) despite the Batman-like toolbelt of Very Important Climbing Items that is strapped to you in an hourlong War Room briefing ascent before your climb (walk, saunter, meander, whatever you wish to call it). But you’d think, from the souvenir merchandise, that you would be slogging past Kilimanjaro and possibly Everest on your way up, and we won’t even mention the way down. I climbed it! the merchandise proclaims. Some of the shirts also contain references to wind (yeah, there was a bit) rain (none) hardship (none) and glamour (definitely none).

Which leads me to the main point of this entry: the art of Aussie exaggeration for the benefit of stupid tourists, like myself.

In my humble godd— Yank opinion of the typical Australian psyche (and take that for what it’s worth, folks) you know that the moment an Australian person starts going on about hardships and difficulties and danger, you are witnessing the moving gears of a working ego as it oils and puffs itself for the benefit of an audience. Anything truly shocking is going to be treated in a far different manner — mainly by stiffening the apparently Commonwealth-wide upper lip and brushing the whole thing off. This is why, when you’re on a tour of some forsaken remote bushland rife with poisonous snakes and spiders and crocs and who knows what else, you’re told matter of factly that you could be killed within moments (”It’s a bit of a problem, yeah”) and then the matter is dropped. You’re also likely to hear absolutely no grumbling when an Aussie’s got a painful injury or serious problem (other than maybe the occasional curse). I’ve seen people on the news whose houses have just burnt down, and they’re likely to say, “Oh, yes, that was a bit of an adjustment”.

No wonder they think we’re wimps. We Americans cry, stomp our feet, complain a whole lot, and generally let everyone think we’re even worse off than we really are. I chalk it up to the American legal system encouraging lawsuit damages for pain and suffering.

Oh, well. I walked up and down the bridge today. I’m going to the opera in a bit. More on that when I get back!