Farewell to Sydney, we're off to NZ!

Dearest friends and loved ones—

Well, we’ve done it. Nod—ahem, Dr. Razi—is officially finished with physical therapy school after completing a 14-week internship in Sydney. We bid the fondest farewell to our adopted home, sad a sad goodbye over one last dinner together with our beloved housemate Alison, packed our enormously oversized bags (ok—we packed Nod’s reasonably sized bag and my behemoth bone-crushing sized pack), and set off for our grand two-month journey through New Zealand and SE Asia. 

Nod keeping watch over his modestly sized packs while waiting to be picked up from the airport

It's hard to smile when your pack weighs 60 lbs.

The last month we spent in Australia was some of the most special time we spent down under. My sister Lauren and her friend Kendall flew all the way to Sydney for their spring break, giving us the chance to play host and tourist all at once, and guaranteeing that they would make all of their friends completely jealous. Determined to pack in as much as we could into their 9-day stay, we all managed to:

• ·      swim with a sea turtle in the great barrier reef
• take a thousand cheesy photos in front of iconic Sydney sites
• ·      share with Lauren and Kendall all the glories of lawn bowling
• ·      eat our collective body weights in Australia’s delicious Tim-Tam cookies
• Introduce our Australian housemates to scrumptious American s'mores

Roasting s'mores with H. and Ms. A. 

We were so lucky to be able to spend time with these girls—it was amazing. Sadly, though, we knew that their visit was to mark the beginning of the end of our stay in Sydney—Lauren and Kendall left only two weeks before our own departure.

The end of our time passed by in a blur. There was the remaining site-seeing to be done: visiting the Koalas, Emus, and terrifyingly muscular Kangaroos at the Taronga zoo.

Terrifying

Nod had bittersweet goodbyes to say to his coworkers, who had become a close-knit family during their long days together treating patients.

I spent my remaining time frantically cramming French grammar lessons and re-visiting all of my favorite coffee shops in Newtown (the winner: Corelli’s, with its ricotta honey toast and soy dandelion lattes). 

I also have a completely non-morbid appreciation for old cemeteries (think history major, not True Blood). Sydney has some amazing ones. There’s the old cemetery on majestic sea cliffs by Bondi Beach, with the dearly departed pointed toward the horizon on $10 billion property. My favorite cemetery, though is nestled behind an old Anglican church in Newtown. The church has been restored and cared for over the years by a lively congregation, but the cemetery has been allowed to crumble in a sort of pleasant way—tombstones all awry and at obtuse angles in the afternoon sun, the graves’ writing completely worn away. The neighborhood uses it respectfully as an odd little park, a place to take an after-work stroll or play with the dog. The cemetery has a few famous residents—the first mayor of Sydney, for one. But the cemetery also has the woman rumored to have inspired the character of Miss Havisham in Charles Dickens’s Great Expectations, which is what sent me out to the graveyard with Nod’s camera in tow.

That wasn’t the end of our odd run-ins in Sydney, in fact. After Lauren and Kendall reluctantly returned to America, Nod and I spent Easter weekend in the Blue Mountains, just two hours outside of Sydney.  It was a rare two days of vacation for Nod and our last chance to gather our thoughts and reflect on our time down under before we plunged into our final week in Sydney. Looking for a place that could act as a reflective retreat, we were lucky to find this gorgeously constructed treehouse in the middle of the Blue Mountains’ eucalyptus groves. The family who built this treehouse lived on the other side of the property, in a gorgeous southwest-style home that could have belonged to Georgia O’Keefe. Wallabyes nibbled at their lawn in the misty morning hours, and brightly colored lorakeets chattered in the tree branches. The moment we arrived, I immediately booked the treehouse for a second night. Really, I was actually just ready to move in permanently.

Inside our treehouse

We spent our first day hiking through the lush canyons, through the canopy of the eucalyptus trees to the breathtaking waterfalls below, listening to the calls of the peacock-like lyre birds calling through the trees, photographing the stars at night. One of our hikes took us far from our house, though. Rather than re-trace our steps our hosts offered to pick us up. The father of the family picked us up. He was charming—he had a mop of white hair, focused eyes, and an absolutely terrible sense of time (when asked when he had built the treehouse, he replied “Oh, that would have been back in the ‘70s. Or maybe in the ‘90s.”) When we asked him what he did, he coyly responded that he was a writer, and that the treehouse had been his writing studio when his children were young. And what did he write? “Oh,” he said. “Just a little of this and that. I used to live in London. Let’s just say that Salman Rushdie really enjoyed staying at that treehouse, too.”

At this point, my jaw hit the floor. Too polite to ask our host who he was exactly, since we only knew that his first name was Richard, the mystery squirmed inside me until we could get back to Sydney.

It turns out that our host was Richard Neville—little-known outside Australia, but a major figure for Australians who had grown up near the counter-culture movements of the 1960s and 1970s. Richard Neville was one of three Australians charged with obscenity for publishing unflattering political satire in their offbeat journal, The Oz. The case went all the way up to Australia’s Supreme Court, where the charges were eventually thrown out and the freedom of speech was definitively confirmed. In the movie version of his life, Richard Neville was played by Hugh Grant. And I rode in the back of his jeep with my muddy hiking boots.

There was one final coincidence to be had with Richard.  When we returned to Sydney, I had been breathless with excitement in unraveling the clues about our host’s background (this being second only to the time when I found “June 18, 1984: I set her free. Now she is happy” scribbled under the desk in my rented room in Newtown). As I scoured the internet for more facts about Richard, I saw that he co-wrote a book about a 1970s serial killer named Sobhraj with a woman named Julie Clarke. The very next day, I walked by the used bookstore next to my house and a book propped in the store window caught my eye. It was Richard Neville’s book! Looking at the book jacket, I saw that Julie Clarke was none other than his wife Julia, who had looked after us during our stay in her treehouse. Mind. Blown. Of course, I bought the book immediately and read it all in one sitting (note for the future: reading a book about a serial killer for an entire day is kind of unsettling; I wouldn’t recommend it). The book itself was really well-written and gripping, though.

So there you have it: Richard Neville and I, bonded for life. (Not really, of course. But now I’ll totally win in the “Six Degrees of Separation” game if I ever need to find a link with Salman Rushdie).

Of course, I realize that I haven’t even gotten to the biggest news of the day: Nod and I are in New Zealand! We’ve been touring the mountains of the South Island in a campervan for the past 4 days.

In fact, I’m writing to you now in the soft, red glow of our budget RV (the drapes are red, the reading lights are in Amsterdam red).  We totally have campervan envy. It turns out that there’s a pecking order in the world of motorhome travel, which is a really popular way to tour NZ. The Maui company has a fleet of posh BMW campervans, complete with ladders to the upstairs loft bed, ensuite showers and toilets, and nicer cooking ranges than your home kitchen. Apollo and Britz are just a step below, with VW engines, spacious living rooms, and these handy little awnings that you can pop out to protect you from the sun while you’re enjoying a roadside picnic. I’m not sure what manufacturer originally made our mighty little van, but with over 200,000 miles on the odometer, I’m not sure it really matters anymore.  Rather than a cute little house door to welcome you inside to our living area, we just have a sliding van door—the kind you have to heave with all your body weight to overcome the rusted hinges. The two long benches that line the inside of our “living room” double as storage units and transform Tetris-style into a bed when you rearrange the jigsaw-style cushions. The problem is that the bench cushions long ago lost the Velcro that kept them in place, so our entire living room goes flying whenever we make a sharp swerve (usually to avoid a wandering sheep).

Our mighty campervan!

Another thing I’ve learned: New Zealand has a population of only 4.4 million. That’s it! And one in three of them live in Auckland, up in the north island. I’m not sure how many people live in the South Island, but based on what we’ve seen, I would estimate that there are approximately 485 sheep to every person, which is a kind of paradise for me to be around so many sheep. I haven’t convinced any to jump into my arms yet or to sit with me in our campervan while I strum the ukulele, but we have a few more days to try to work my sheep whisperer magic.

Speaking of the ukulele, it’s been going great. I know only four or five chords, but the beauty of pop music is that this is sufficient to play all of Jack Johnson, most of Adele, a healthy sampling of Beatles music, Rufus Wainwright, and Lady Gaga a la ukulele. Bad romance never sounded so good. Nod, who had to listen to me playing “Rolling in the Deep” while he was driving down windy mountain passes on the left side of the road, might have a slightly different perspective on how my ukulele is progressing.

That’s it for now—we’ll have lots more to report soon, and even more photos to post. Until then!

Some Bonus photos from the past few days:

Baby Lamb Alert

My dearest readers,

Let me begin by apologizing for the inordinately long delay between posts. I know that some of you may be annoyed, put-off by the seeming one-side commitment to this blog as of late. Some of you may even be wondering if you want to even keep reading this blog. But know this: today's story ends with baby lambs. That's right. The cutest creatures on God's green earth. So it's alright--you can be upset. You have every right to be. But don't walk away, or you'll miss out on the adorableness that awaits you below.

The completely boring truth is that I've been pining for this blog, yearning to write it in again--but I have been too busy with real, actual, honest-to-goodness work to have enough time to sit down and do this properly. It turns out that those of you who have pictured me in Sydney with sand perpetually between my toes, sun always in my hair, and wine close at hand--you are only right about 60% of the time. For the last few weeks I have been earning my keep around here: roaming the library stacks at Sydney University to do research for professors back at Georgetown, finalizing my reading lists for my Ph.D. comprehensive exams coming up next year, and otherwise proving to myself that I can still read and summarize like a champ ("Reading and Summarizing" being one of the few marketable skills I have honed during my nine years of post-High School education).

Now, it is true that I've had the luxury of being only intermittently tied to my books and research during our time here, and thank goodness. I've been a full-time student for 23 years straight, and I was in bad need of a sabbatical. But now that I've had a chance to rest, swim around in the ocean, and read a year's-worth of novels, it has been a little fun to get back into the groove again this week and work against a few deadlines. To help me get into the spirit, I ordered a pair of clear-lens hipster glasses from China on eBay. I'm obsessed; I haven't taken them off since last Tuesday. I tell you this just so that when I show up in every single picture of our Honeymoon wearing these glasses you can explain my poor fashion choices to my future children.

I like this photo because the "Wanted" frame makes my glasses look even more hardcore.

But work and glasses are not the most important news of this week. As you may or may not know, March 20th is Nowruz, the New Year celebration for Persians, Kurds, and a smattering of other peoples in the Middle East. What makes Nowruz the most awesome New Year celebration ever? 1) You celebrate by jumping over bonfires 2) You get a free goldfish--holla! 3) the holiday is originally Zorastrian. How many times a day do you think about Zorastrians? Probably zero times, most days. But not on Nowruz!

Nowruz is fun for everyone!

Here's another fact about Nowruz: March 20th marked the beginning of Year 3751 in the Zorastrian Calendar, and it also marks Nod's 28th birthday! 3751 Zorastrian Years, 28 Nodair Razi years. We couldn't build a proper Nowruz bonfire because of Australia's strict fire ordinances, but on an unrelated note, I did buy him a ukulele for his birthday. Now we can sing and strum on the Ukulele all the way through Southeast Asia--hooray! We're only just starting out on the Uke, but if I must say, we're not too shabby at it so far.

Now, at this point you're probably getting a little impatient about the lambs, and I don't blame you. So here it is: Cute Animal Fest 2013.

So some of you may remember our friend Dani--the sweet, blonde, gun-totin' and horse-ridin' physio student who joined us down in Tasmania. She had long promised that we could visit her house, which is two hours west of Sydney and officially in "the bush" (since this was our first time going to anything approximating the outback, we were super honored to be invited). So last Saturday, Nod, Huub and I boarded a train and started our journey through the gorgeous green valleys surrounding Sydney, heading out West towards the Blue Mountains. Huub and Nod were busy playing scrabble to pass the time, while I had my eyes glued to the scenery, waiting to spot some equally exotic and cuddle-able animal. (Did you know, by the way, that Koalas just live in the trees surrounding the city of Adelaide in south Australia? I thought they were shy creatures living only in the mists of the mountains, like elusive Pandas or Gorillas. Nope, there they are, just munching on some gum tree leaves). For one second I was absolutely convinced that I saw two little kangaroos in a grassy field, but I have no witnesses back me up. In any case, the memory of any half-glimpsed kangaroos was soon eclipsed by the real barnyard animals that awaited us at Dani's house.

At Dani's house there are the following animals: 4 gorgeous competition horses, 1 angry pony, 10 turkeys, 2 exotic birds we couldn't really name, and 1 dog.

Dani and the Angry Pony. Yes, the pony is on a chain. It's for your own protection.

Dani and one of her non-angry, beautiful horses at her enormous home in the country.

Dani kept apologizing for how small her house is. "It's only five acres," she says. She says this to us--we who live in the concrete jungle of Newtown, we who regularly exclaim in delight to see all of three stars in the light-polluted night sky, and whose only real run-ins with wildlife are the huntsmen spiders in our house and the obnoxious birds that wake us up at dawn. Five acres was paradise, as far as we were concerned. True, as she points out, there is a ranch in Australia that is larger than Belize or El Salvador, so I suppose everything is relative.

It was immediate apparent that our roles for the day were to be the well-meaning city cousins trying to "be useful" while really creating 10 times as much work for our hosts. Our hosts, for their part, graciously accommodated all of our blunders while asking themselves, "Are they really doing all our chores around the farm just for fun?" Win-win all around.

Pictures can do our day more justice than words can, and happily, we had not been shy about capturing every little moment with a cute hoofed creature nearby. So! Here goes.

Task #1: Herd the Sheep

So if there was one moment in the day where I wondered if our gracious hosts were pulling one on the city kids, this would be it. Josh has twenty sheep that live a life of luxury, grazing in a lush twenty-acre field. The sheep needed to be given some medicine, so Josh asked us to round them up. To round up a small group of sheep that have twenty whole acres upon which to scatter. Naturally, it was a bit of a disaster.

This is us looking cluelessly at the sheep. "Move, little sheepies! Into your pen!" I thought, trying to use all my non-powers of clairvoyance. As it turns out, I am not a sheep whisperer.

These are the sheep running away from us as fast as they can.  Fail.

Finally Josh took pity on us and brought out Diesel, his sheep dog, who herded the sheep into their little pen in about, oh, 15 seconds. Being ridiculously outsmarted by a dog is an excellent exercise in humility, should you ever need one.

Diesel the Dog, reminding us that he's boss. 

Task #2: Give the Sheep Medicine

Giving sheep medicine is also known as "drenching" the sheep. When I heard that phrase, I thought we were going to give them all a little bubble bath. But no--instead we had to a) sit on the sheep or b) flip them onto their hind legs and then c) stick a metal tube in their mouth and squirt some medicine inside, then finally d) spray paint a pink mark on their bum to let us know that we had finished. The process looked something like this:

Our early attempts to wrangle the sheep involved us sitting on them, which didn't always work out so well. 

Later, Nod and Huub finally mastered the technique to sit them down

which was a much more successful way to go

Except that it still took at least four of us to get a handle on the sheep most of the time

Mostly, I was just really elated to be surrounded by so many sheep.

 Task #3: Learn to Ride a Horse, and then Play Polocrosse

Josh, Dani, and Dani's entire family are all amazing equestrians. They compete in formal horse events, they compete doing rodeo-style events, they play this crazy hybrid of Polo and Lacrosse on horseback--even Dani's two-year-old niece was riding better than I ever will. Now, I have ridden a few horses in my time. My family has always been a big fan of "Dude Ranch" family vacation destinations, and my older sister used to compete in English-style horse shows, complete with jumps and riding crops and ribbons. If I don't exactly know horses, I feel that I should have some horse credibility at least by association. Like if horses and I went to the same high school, we would probably wave hi to each other in the hallways.

But it turns out that the horses that take you on one-hour trail rides are very different from the kinds of horses that compete in polocrosse or barrel racing. These horses seemed to have a preternatural sense for trepidation and inexperience; they would buck or take off if you shifted your weight in the wrong way against their sides. These were, in other words, horses not to be messed with. I should also mention that if I felt like I was at least on lunchroom-acquaintance terms with horses, Nod and Huub were not even in the same building. They were not from the same school. Nod had, to his credit, ridden a horse in Ethiopia once before in what turned out to be a bit of a harrowing adventure, but that was the first and last time he had ever been on one. Huub had never ridden a horse, and for that matter, had a healthy fear of them after watching someone else get kicked once. But up onto these wild, beautiful creatures we went! (Helmets on for safety, of course. And, ok, Dani totally walked us on lead ropes for a while. But soon we were walking our horses in slow circles like champs).

Then, when we had just mastered the art of walking our horses, Dani and Josh suggested that we try our hand as playing polocrosse. You know, just control the horse and a flying ball at the same time, no big deal. Eye-Hand coordination was never really my thing, but Nod managed it really nicely.

Of course, Dani and Josh were really amazing at polocrosse. The entire day we had struggled so hard to herd the sheep, flip over the sheep, give them medicine, get on the horse, control the horse, walk it, try to pick up a polocrosse ball while on the horse, and totally failing. To watch these two these gorgeous horses so masterfully and play so elegantly was really awe-inspiring, and all the more for having tried ourselves to know how very difficult it all is.

And then at the end of the day, there was still Diesel, reminding us that he was still boss, and that he could probably ride a horse better than us, too.

Task #4: Shear a Sheep

Shearing the sheep was sort of our final test for the day--a last chance to prove that we had, in fact, learned a thing or two about the art of sheep farming. For me, this was the last chance in the day to try to pick up a baby lamb and hold it in my arms--a life dream I had never come so close to fulfilling. Earlier in the day when we were drenching the sheep, the lambs were playing hard to get, so no dice. 

The trick with shearing the sheep was that we had to drag them from their holding pen over to where we had the electric shearer set up. And sheep, being delightfully pear-shaped, are really, really heavy. 

Not as easy as it looks to man-handle a massive sheep.

Once you brought them over to the shearing station, you took a massive electric razor and just hoped for the best.

And with the final snip and buzz of the razor, our task was complete. The only thing left was to...

...hold a baby lamb! And now, my life is complete.

Special thanks to Josh, Dani, and Dani's family for making all of our dreams come true. 

Luck of the Australian

Dear friends,

Greetings once again from Sydney, where the cool, rainy weather has kept us indoors all week. On the bright side, all of this rain allows me to indulge in my other favorite activities--namely: eating cookies, playing rummy, and reading on the couch. I'm going to be a fabulous geriatric someday.

Today was also another day of French class, and sadly, it was David's last day. He decided that one good way of spending his retirement would be to book a three-month vacation to France (again: old people have the most amazing lives ever), which was the raison d'être for his classes in the first place. David still can't conjugate the verb "to be" to save his life, but I trust he'll make it alright. We bid him a fond farewell by putting together a little afternoon tea at a local cafe called "Le Petite Paris," where we all ate little cakes and nodded obediently as our teacher waxed poetic about the beauty of reflexive verbs. David's fondness for slapping his forehead cartoon-style whenever he forgets a word will certainly be missed. Marilou, with her indomitable dedication to the perfection of French grammar, will soldier on with me as her unwitting comrade-at-arms for another six weeks. "I think I give the teacher diarrhea," Marilou confided wistfully in a rare moment of self-reflection. Marilou's exact impact on the teacher's digestive tract not withstanding, I get the feeling that she's determined to get me proficient in this language whether I like it or not, and that's not such a bad language partner to have.

But all of this is mere prelude to the real story of today, which all began with a dream I had last night.

Last night, I dreamt that I won the gold medal in the women's 100 meter dash. I didn't even train--just sauntered up to the track and discovered, almost by chance, that I was the world's fastest runner. No big deal. I seem to recall that I beat out U.S. gymast Gabby Douglas in the race, so clearly this was no small feat.

Gabby Douglas: Gold Medal Gymast, but a Silver Medal Sprinter. In my dreams, at least. 

 THEN, dream-Alissa went straight from the medal ceremony at the Olympics over to Georgetown where I graduated with my Ph.D. on the very same day. No one there had heard the news about the Olympics yet, so I played it cool. Ph.D., gold medal--all in a day's work.

This was when I realized that today was going to be my luckiest day ever. And so it was. By breakfast, the rain stopped for the first time all week. Before lunchtime, I had scored a 96-point word in scrabble ("eloping": a bingo on two different 'double word' boxes). In the afternoon, Nod and I went lawn bowling at the beautiful seaside club that we love, and I played my little bocce ball heart out to victory.

And then, if the day couldn't be any more effortlessly amazing.... we saw a double rainbow! A Double Rainbow!

Nod was very nonchalant about the whole thing, which is probably because he actually goes out into nature on a regular basis and, you know, sees naturey things. Like rainbows. For my library-bound habits, though, this was truly novel. And while I was freaking out in jubilation and dancing all around, I also smiled because I remembered that double rainbows have caused others to freak out, too. Because it's been way too long since you've seen this, I bring for your Sunday enjoyment: Double Rainbow Man. Have an amazing week, everyone!