Incapacitating The Kangaroo You Hope to Eat

It is said that women who play a didgeridoo will become infertile.

Well that’s great to know.

Today our Indigenous Cultures & Identities class partook in a demonstration of the wonderful variety. Ross, a Wiradjuri man of the Goana dreaming, came to show us how to play the didgeridoo, throw spears, and effectively launch a boomerang.

We quickly found that, if we were to find ourselves stranded in the treacherous outback desert with nothing but a bamboo spear and a boomerang, getting our hands on a kangaroo even just a few feet away would fail. And we would die.

Also, since I’m left-handed, I would require a special spear-launcher and a different kind of boomerang.

So I would die twice.

Oh … and … also … I’m probably now infertile. 

I have added some proof below that, yes, I throw like a girl.

Warm woolen mittens

Some favorite things lately:

Apricot Yoghurt Topps

Pink tights

Walking downhill

Epic failures with Allana

Aussie ketchup packets

Ice and Ibuprofen

Rosa's Tomatoes

Today I finally, officially, met Rosa.

Rosa is an Italian woman who lives on the corner of one of the streets I cross to go to uni in the morning. Each time Allana (my roommate) or I walk past, and she is out gardening, she greets our wandering faces with, “Ciao bella!” She seems to be the type of woman who smiles just because the sun chose to rise in the morning, and feels the crisp evening air strongly enough to require that all wear a jacket so as to not catch vicious colds.

While I walked home this afternoon, she was out on the sidewalk scrutinizing the sky. I paused to say hello. She asked if I was walking back from work. When I replied that I was, instead, returning from school, she quickly and resolutely hugged me.

Then, while holding my hands, she told me about her tomatoes, her granddaughter who will turn 21 in October, and that I should go put on a jacket. 

I am not a mosquito

This is the 7:00am view from my bedroom window.

Though the picture itself is kind of fuzzy because of the mosquito screen, hopefully you can kind of make out the Sydney skyline. I wish there was a better way to capture how striking and lovely it is each morning. Maybe if you go make yourself some chocolate chip pancakes and couple them with some red gummy bears --- then you, too, can feel the same happy feeling I get in the mornings. 

Stealing curled hair

Today our Aussie history class led us to meet at the CBD in order to see the Hyde Park Barracks. The Barracks were the main facility where male convicts in Sydney’s early years slept and worked --- essentially a compound much like a prison. However, the detention centers often found themselves to be a little bit free-er in Sydney because of the fact that in Australia, if you wanted to escape your sentence, your choices were either to flee to the Outback desert, where you can pick your poison in 25 shades of black, or you can try to swim … until you drown …. because you are on a colossal island …. far away from ….. everything.

This is Paul. He’s in a hip hop class along with the rest of us who are trying to attain swagger.

One of the most interesting rooms in the museum was one that displayed a roster of all the inmates who had come through the barracks: their age, their crime, and the length of their sentence. People could be sent from Europe for one of three time periods: 7 years, 14 years, or Life. Some interesting crimes pictured below: Stealing handkerchiefs, and stealing curled hair. : )

Also pictured below is the room of hammocks in which the convicts slept. Further down you’ll find another list, of sorts. This list is the specific record from one man’s time at the Hyde Park Barracks, detailing his punishments for misbehavior at the prison; things such as 100 lashes for Obscene Language and 5 days in Solitary Confinement for being “Drunk, etc.” (I think we are left to fill in our own interpretation of what the “etc.” might mean ….)  

Let me know if you have any specific questions about Australia’s history – it has been very fascinating to learn about.

President of the Universe

This morning I walked downstairs to the question of “Are YOU a Cylon?”

My host brother, along with a few other people, were deeply involved in a Battlestar Gallactica board game of epic proportions, commanding the entire dining room table with an expansive assertion of conquest through cards and little plastic figurines of spaceships. I popped a piece of bread in the toaster and countered with the possibility that everyone is probably, at the end of the day, a Cylon. As that slice of bread absorbed the amount of Nutella I insisted it bear, I sat down and observed their game with amusement. I learned that there can only be one president of the universe, that Michael talks less when he is the Cylon, and that playing with three expansion packs means someday the fourth expansion pack will simply be a bigger box to keep all the pieces in.

It was a good morning.

Then, after a lunch of wheat buns filled with chicken, “chips” (French fries), and gravy (I told you Aussies have many meals – see? Food is now all I can write about!), my roommate and I ventured out to try to meet up with some people who would be attending an evening service at Hillsong Church.

Our quest epically failed as we took a car, and then were told the wrong bus time, and so had to find another bus, and then took a train, and then tried to find a Hillsong bus in a huge city square, only to be told that the people we were to meet would not be coming, to then decide it was too late to try making it to the service, to then take the train back, then find out that we were going in very-much-the-opposite-direction-of-home as we realized we were going across the harbor bridge into the north, to then eventually get off, turn around, take the right train, get off the train, buy 50 cent Macca’s ice cream (mmm food), and walk to find the bus to then walk home ….

Where we then made scrambled eggs with cheese and sandwiches and juice and later ate granola bars and peaches ….

Mmm food.

Above: On the topic of food, this is a picture of a dinner outing last night with my host family and some of their friends. It was in celebration of their daughter’s, and their daughter-in-law’s, birthday. Excellent company and wonderful food! : ) 

The earth in two

From Mumford & Sons’ I Gave You All

.

Rip the earth in two with your mind

Seal the urge which ensues with brass wires

I close my eyes for a while

And force from the world a patient smile

And how can you say that your truth is better than ours?

Shoulder to shoulder now brother, we carry no arms

The blind man sleeps in the doorway, his home

If only I had an enemy bigger than my apathy, I could have won

But I gave you all

I gave you all

I gave you all