Wednesday, July 28, 2010

Post 4: He Just Smiled and Gave Me a Vegemite Sandwich

I’m getting settled in a little at work now which is good. Being the new guy is never fun. You are always pestering somebody about something. It’s the only way you can get anything done, because nothing is set up for you (for example, my computer arrived yesterday, but won’t be set up until Friday) and you don’t really know where anything is or what to do yet. I find myself strategically mapping out who to pester throughout the day, so that I’m accomplishing things without bothering the same person again and again.

Anyway, one thing that I like about my department is that most people eat lunch in the same area at the same time, so you get some social interaction. Today at lunch, the topic of Vegemite came up. I had heard of this stuff before from the Men at Work song “Down Under” (see the title of this post), but didn’t know what it is. Now I know. As it was explained to me today, “after brewing beer, all the shit that’s left in the bottom of the vat – that’s Vegemite”. It looks like Nutella. A woman in the department had some, so she gave me a sample on bread. Then everybody watched me eat it to gauge my reaction. I wouldn’t say it’s terrible, but I can’t say I’d ever spend money on the stuff either. It certainly doesn't taste like Nutella. If you’ve ever been to a brewery and smelled that funky fermenting hops smell, that smell is what Vegemite tastes like, if that makes sense.

In other news, S and I might have found a place to live. There are three options in play: Apt A (very expensive and small, but nice and furnished), Apt B (expensive and unfurnished, but super nice), Apt C (relatively inexpensive, not as nice, but great location). We’ve been approved already for Apt A and Apt C, but S has her heart set on Apt B. I’m leaning toward Apt C, because price and location are more important to me than whether or not it has, say, a nice bathroom. But I’m going to mostly defer to S, because she’s the one who will be there the most. I’m in the office at least 8 hours a day during the week. Also, although we have different apartment criteria (bathroom niceness, for example), she’s practical financially and will definitely take into consideration cost differential – it’s all about the Benjamins. Or as they say down here, it’s all about the Unaipons.*

In other other news, Ice Cube is coming to town. (Or, as I saw him referred to as, Ice Cube (USA). I guess to distinguish him from impostors). What a weird career this guy has had. He started out in NWA doing explicit, hardest-of-the-hard, gangsta rap and then somehow transitioned into being an actor in kids movies**. Apparently he still tours. I wonder if he’s any good. Probably not, he’s old now, and let’s be honest, as a musical performer you get old and you can’t hack it. Anybody who’s seen Bob Dylan in the last 25 years knows what I’m talking about.


*Actually, I’ve never heard anybody say this. I am going to try to get it going, though. I’ll keep you posted.

**Although many will consider it blasphemy, I actually preferred “Are We Done Yet?” to “Are We There Yet?” – much better cinematography, in my opinion.

Saturday, July 24, 2010

Post 3: Everybody's Working for the Weekend


It’s our first weekend in Australia. Yesterday (Sat.), we spent the day walking all over “downtown” Newcastle. We were also checking out some potential apartments to let. Housing is a bit competitive and expensive here from what we’ve been told and what we’ve experienced so far. This is quite annoying since one of the advantages of not living in a big city is (or should be) that housing is easy to find and relatively cheap. This is not so. It does not seem to be much different than finding a place in DC. Also, everything here goes through property management agents. There is no direct landlord-to-tenant communication (which might be part of the problem, at least with respect to cost). We could only check out places from the outside. To see the inside you have to attend a prescheduled viewing with all the other would-be renters. It’s all a bit overwhelming, but I’m not too worried. We’ll find a place, and in the meantime our temporary apartment (see pic) is good. It is just out of our price range for the entire year.



Downtown Newcastle is pinched between the Hunter River and the Tasman Sea (which is part of the Pacific Ocean). S and I took the bus to the banks of the river and then walked to the beach. The views of the water are extremely pretty. (I really wanted to take and post some photos, but we forgot the camera, so all you get for now is the boring apartment pic, sorry.) This made me very happy to see, as a lot of the city is run-down-ish. It is great to know that there are some really beautiful spots.

We walked down Darby Street which is a sort-of happening area with lots of restaurants and boutiques. Several of the shops were kitschy places, like where you could buy earthy junk and “witty” t-shirts and bumper stickers.* We then walked up a hill overlooking the beach. We didn’t actually go to the beach, though, because we were tired and because somebody’s feet hurt (despite the fact that said somebody, upon being questioned if her footwear was appropriate for the occasion before leaving, assured her companion that it was). Instead we went back up Darby Street and had a terrific (but pricey) lunch at a cool cafĂ©. Restaurant food prices are fairly comparable to DC, maybe a bit more expensive, but if you factor in the exchange rate (roughly, 1 Aussie $ = .9 US $) and the custom of not tipping,** it’s pretty close.

After lunch we went to the mall to find a space heater (somehow it feels colder inside our apartment than outside it, I don’t know the thermodynamics behind this, but I swear it’s true), which apparently they call something other than “space heater” as nobody knew what we were talking about at first. The trip to the mall was mostly forgettable, although we did find the space heater (thanks K-Mart). It turns out I dislike going to malls in Australia just as much as I dislike going to malls in the US.

I tried to watch some footy (I can’t get over that this is what they call their football) last night, but it wasn’t televised, so instead I watched rugby (union) – Australia (Wallabies) versus South Africa (Springboks). I was reading the rules as I watched. I mostly have the hang of it. It was OK, but it sort of made me sad about the prospect of not being able to watch much NFL this year. Rugby just doesn’t cut it – it’s all running and pushing. The lack of a passing attack makes it much less exciting than the NFL. Footy is a bit different, because everything is based on catching long kicks cleanly out of the air. I think I might like it better. There are many games being played today, maybe I can find one on TV.

* One bumper sticker I saw read, “Tell Your Douchebaggy Friends That Tights Are Not Pants”. I’m not sure if this is aimed at people who actually where tights as pants, or if it’s aimed at people who where really tight pants.

**After the cab ride from the airport, I tried to give the driver a $5 tip, but he refused it almost chastising me in the process, “This is Australia, mate! We don’t do all that tipping here!” When I relayed this story to an Australian in my department, she shrugged her shoulders and said, “If you did that to me, I would have just taken it.”

Wednesday, July 21, 2010

Post 2: Arrival

We arrived in Newcastle, Australia two days ago. The flights were long, but actually not that bad. I was expecting something much more arduous. Air travel is absolutely amazing, if you stop to think about it. Australia is about as far from the US as any country on the planet, and you can still travel between them in a little over half a day.

The culture shock so far has been pretty minimal.* They say “no worries” here instead of “your welcome”, and use weird words that I only know from crossword puzzles like “alight” and “fortnight”. Also, a lot of the men’s rooms have urinals that are long sunken troughs that I don’t like using because I feel like pee is splattering on my shoes.** Lots of little differences, but the only thing major so far is the driving on the wrong side of the road. That is going to take some getting used to, and I’m not even driving. I’m just a pedestrian. There are a few other things – public transportation is not very good and Internet is mostly slow and expensive – but I think those are things specific to Newcastle (it’s a very industrial city) not to Australia. If I lived in Sydney, I’m sure it would be a different story.

S and I went to dinner last night with some people I work with from the Uni (I’m picking up the slang). It was fun. I think I’m going to enjoy their company, which is good. It’s definitely a positive to like the people you have to spend everyday with. I inquired a bit about rugby, because I’m half-interested in learning the rules and the leagues and all that. I learned that there are actually two forms of rugby – rugby union and rugby league – and they play by different rules. The latter apparently is much less free flowing and more like football, in that you have a fixed number of tries (downs) to score. Then there is also the rugby-like sport Australian rules football (or “footy” as I hilariously saw it referred as). I don’t know anything about the play of the game, but I was told it has a very fanatical following. Apparently, a lot of suburbs have their own teams and they draw upwards of 80,000 people a game. It sounds a bit like the college football following in the US.

Anyway, jetlag is setting in, so I’m going to shutdown my computer and go to sleep. I’ll probably post this tomorrow morning. My connection is too slow to do it right now.


*I accidentally walked into a long, awkward conversation with an American in the store, and he said that I was in for a big shock, but the only reasons he gave me were that pickup trucks are more expensive, Volvos are disliked, and bacon and steaks taste different. His sense of culture seemed pretty limited to cars and meats.

**On a related note, you don’t see any sort of trough-like urinals in the US anymore, do you? Even in places like arenas and stadiums it seems like they are being phased out. Progress, I guess.

Monday, July 19, 2010

Post 1: Australia Bound

Note: This entry was written Saturday (7/17/10) at 2:30 pm (D.C. time).

I am moving to Australia for a year in about five hours. I have started this blog, because I think it will be another way to keep in touch with my friends and family. I am not so great at corresponding via traditional methods like telephone (or even email). Also, blogging is kinda fun.

Accompanying me to Australia is my wife S. I got married recently, but S and I have been together for over three years. There were a few breaks (or as I like to put it, we have a discontinuous relationship graph), but no need to get into that now. Suffice it to say we are happy to be together. We will be having a proper wedding in summer 2011, but we went to the courthouse a few weeks ago and made things official -- turns out it is a lot easier to have somebody move with you to a foreign country if you are married.

It also turns out it is quite easy to get married in Virginia. The entire process took about 30 minutes. We got a license at the Arlington Courthouse, walked across the street, met with a very nice gentleman named Gerald Williams (a name I will never forget since there is a former major leaguer of the same name), who performed a brief but sweet “ceremony” in his office and signed our license, then we walked back across the street, had our license verified and put on file, and that was that. BFF, only instead of a cheap half-heart necklace, we have expensive rings. (And our rings are not even that expensive relative to what one could spend. Shopping for wedding rings was a man-we-as-a-society-sure-have-some-strange-financial-priorities moment for me.)

Now, we are going to Australia, because I got a one year post-doc position at a university there doing research on the logistics of coal excavation. (I probably won’t be doing math, per se, but the work should be math-y.) I have set three goals for Australia: do some good research/publish, see some cool stuff, do not be attacked or poisoned by a wild creature. The last one is particularly important. I don’t know much about nature, and I have this fear of ending up on youtube: “Jackass Mauled by [fill in wild creature].” I saw a video of a guy trying to feed a kangaroo, and it reared back on its tail and kicked him, slashing his legs with its razor-sharp claws. I don’t want to be that guy. I’ll probably stick to the bigger cities for the most part. I’m not too big on the great outdoors anyway – not that great, in my opinion.

Well, I’ll end my first post here. There will be more to come.