Phew!

For a minute I was afraid that I would never again be able to put anything on this website... the tragedy! But hurrah! I have triumphed over the quirks of this crazy network and its cookie handling, and now bring to you: My Movements of the Last Two Weeks and a bit. I know you've all been waiting anxiously for it.
It's funny you know, how attached to this site I am -- more than ever I live my life in narrative, thinking how I would write about one situation or another here. Alas, my narrative life in no way resembles the one up here anymore. Things have become complicated, and that's where the pesky self-censoring comes in. There are so many things now that I can't write about online because of the people I know are in my audience - my family, friends... and under age children - and I don't have the guts to put it all up there and possibly hurt them. So I've got this nifty internet half-life. I hope you enjoy. It makes me admire other bloggers who just lay it all out there, for the world to read. It makes my site seem mundane... but then I'm just not that in to drama, so I guess this is okay. I'd rather make people laugh than anything else, and I think I may achieve that from time to time, so that makes me happy. Plus, JHR gets a laugh when I write things in code that only she can understand, and there's no better person to make laugh than she.
Anyway, on to it -- what I've been up to. I've written a couple journal entries out in my actual REAL PAPER AND PEN journal, so I've decided just to type them up here for starters.

February 6th 2005

In the airport, checking the same flight as me, are many Brits and Russians dressed very bizarrely. One man, watching vaguely as his bottled blonde wife totters around in stilettos after their toddler son, has the word "RICH" embroidered across the ass of his jeans. My mother kindly suggests that perhaps its his name. I hug her goodbye, pass through the departure gates, and spend the next half hour thinking up 4 letter words better suited to his skinny ass:
LAME comes to mind immediately. They get on the plane for Moscow. I begin to understand.
Then I watch a young British couple and reflect idly that Europe has completely disproved my theory that people end up with partners of relatively equal attractiveness. It just doesn't seem to work that way on this continent. In this particular case, the girl has done very well for herself. But then I'm being entirely superficial... The old man sitting directly behind me smells very strongly of, well, old man. My first stinky old fat man of the trip. Another thing I wonder -- why do stinky people choose to sit as close as possible to otehr humans, even though there are plenty of other seats further away? The other people in this part of the lounge have spaced themselves evenly - far removed from eachother. They don't look stinky at all.
While I'm at my wondering -- why does the woman with the announcer feel she needs to yell? It's already loud enough. Why, the further East you go, do languages begin to sound more and more aggressive?
Oh well, no answers there, but I'm on my way to a place where really none of this probably matters. Hurrah! Now all I have to worry about is whether or not I'm going to be eaten by anything. A pleasant shift in anxieties.

February 12th 2005 7:15 am
Music: Ben Lee "If you gamble everything for love you're gonna be alright."

I've been up for 3 hours already watching music videos. The jet lag is on and off. I can stay up for 20 hours one day and 10 the next. Yesterday I was out at 5pm, on the couch.
The sun has just risen and there are 6 hot air balloons floating above the lake. The view from my apartment is incredible. Every once in a while a big white bird (I think it's a cockatoo?) flies screeching by. Yesterday, while waiting in line for enrolment, I watched four red and blue parrots fighting eachother in a gum tree.

(aside: One of the balloons has just made its way almost right up to my window, and as I was sitting in the living room in my underwear, I've run and put some shorts on, cheeky bastard)

On Sunday, I left Cyprus after a calm week of preparation. Although I was in a beautiful country, rich with archaeological interest and orange and lemon trees in fruit on every street, in every courtyard (I'm going to make a list of strange things I've been hit in the head with this year -- fireworks, oranges), my mind was already in Australia, with all the things I've had to do this past week. With the great help of a friend in Canberra, we were able to secure an amazing apartment really close to the ANU campus. So, after 34.5 hours of straight travelling, I turned up at the Canberra bust stop at 11:30 am on Tuesday, and was met by my landlords, a charming elderly couple who drove me around all day to get everything settled with the apartment and groceries. They even took me out for lunch (I had a "Ham and Cheese Deluxe" sandwich -- the only thing deluxe about it was that they remembered the two key ingredients, ham and cheese: things are SO expensive here!), otherwise I'm sure I would have starved, because I'm still finding the downtown confusing after half a week of walking around, and as it is, subsisting on a diet of instant soup, cereal and mangoes.
Tuesday and Wednesday were two of the loneliest days ever. Orientation didn't start till Thursday and I had no phone, no internet, and BA lost one of my suitcases (thankfully not the one with my clothes in it). I spent a lot of time wandering around begging phone calls from people so that I could locate my baggage. Then Thursday rolled around and all in one day I met some great Dutch girls (DS, who said "I can make Pad Thai for dinner tonight." Hurrah!), got my phone hooked up, talked to my dad, made another exhorbitantly expensive but at that point essential phone call, spent some time by the pool getting a tan (okay, maybe a bit of a burn) and reading a Trashy Romance novel (yes, you know what it means when I start reading the TRN's -- this one is 750 pages long). The last two days have been such a relief. I feel like I'm back in reality, and even though the next 5 months are stretching out in front of me, they don't look endless. I can do this, and I can have a great time. Classes don't start for another week, but I'm so excited to get started, to finally get back to it.
For now though, it's 8:15, and I'm going to run down to the gym (thank god finally a gym -- no more slug!).

~~~

So there you have it kids. The dumbed-down details of my first week in Oz. A more interesting e-mail will follow once I've got settled into classes, promise.
Right now I have to go figure out my schedule (what to do about ALL the conflicts, argh), and then I'm heading back home for lunch -- well, really for the pool. My skin is warm from the sun, remind me again why we live in Canada? It ain't for the climate, I can tell you.
Pictures will follow as soon as I can, I know I've been a bit behind with those lately -- need to update ones from Germany, France, Cyprus and now Australia. Stay tuned.

Cheers