Rule #32

We’ve been in Australia for two months now; we’ve explored beaches and forests, eaten delicious food, and experienced some of the culture. It’s been a blast! But there are a lot of little things that make living here enjoyable that are easy to gloss over in blog posts. I’ve briefly mentioned some of them in previous posts, but to exercise some of the survival skills I learned in Zombieland, I wanted to spend some time enjoying the little things.

A vine has crawled through the fence from the neighbors yard. It has these striking orange flowers.

Australia has quite a range of incredibly beautiful flowers. Some of them are strange, petal-less bulbs. Others have incredible coloration. Recently, one type of tree with brilliant purple flowers has started blooming. The flowers are so densely packed on theses trees that it almost looks like they have purple leaves. These trees provide excellent contrast when outlining other trees, and are striking when you come across a row of them lining a street. Many of the flowers here seem more vibrantly colored than the ones back home, and the patterns many of them have in their petals are very cool. Everywhere we look seems to have one sort of pretty or another for us to bask in. I guess its what we get for moving to a more tropical place!

This type of tree becomes covered in these cylindrical clusters of petal-less flowers.

My phone camera isn’t great for capturing this, but I love how the tree on the right provides nice purple accents to the rest of the trees. It’s a bit more clear if you blow the picture up.

The bird calls are much more interesting as well. There’s the Australian Raven, and the Kookaburra, and the Lyrebird, and just about everything in between. The Australian Raven has long low caws that sound like it could be a dying cat. While taking a run a few weeks ago I came across a flock of them loitering around a park, their white eyes are too far forward and they have these scraggly feathers on their neck. Truly, a bizarre and creepy bird. We heard Kookaburra more often out where Viive and Ian live. Their call really does sound as if they are laughing, and I can’t help but laugh along every time I hear them. Adrienne and I have taken to singing “Kookaburra lives in the old gum tree” in rounds when walking the dogs, wishing the Kookaburras to start up. Hopefully you watched the Lyrebird movie I linked to last time I talked about them. Adrienne and I actually got to see a male doing his dance the second time we went to the Blue Mountains! It was awesome! They can imitate so many sounds, and this one was doing a remarkable imitation of the stream it was standing near. Recently, a very strange bird call has been waking me up around 6. The closest thing I can relate it to is well oiled metal sheers. Obnoxious, yet intriguing. During the day, the birds are frequently noisy, their calls are so interesting, new, and different.

Many of the restaurants here allow patrons to bring in their own bottle of wine. It’s a pretty neat practice, and makes drinking in a restaurant actually affordable! They do charge a “corkage” fee per person, but this is usually only a couple dollars. We went to a restaurant last week on a LivingSocial deal without realizing that part of the deal was the corkage, so before our food arrived I quickly went out and got a bottle. Instead of paying 30, 40, or 50 dollars for a bottle of wine, we paid $12! Not only that, but if you plan ahead, you know you’ll be drinking a wine you like. You’re not restricted to what the restaurant carries. Do like.

There are a few little things that I can say I don’t enjoy much. First off, the internet here is really spotty. I don’t know if that’s purely because of the ISP, but we’ve had troubles everywhere we’ve tried to use it. It’s slow and frustrating. This is probably our biggest and most common gripe.

The street numbers here are also quite confusing. I haven’t been able to figure out what the pattern is yet, so if we’re looking for a particular address Google maps is a much better way to find it than by trying to find which way the numbers increase or decrease (the numbers may increase on one side, but decrease on the other.)