A Tennessee Girl in Oz

Friday, May 17, 2013

Reflection on the week

It ended up being quite a busy week for me, work-wise. So hardly anything blog-worthy happened or was photographed. But here are a few interesting tidbits from my week:

After seeing the story about the kangaroo scrotum souvenirs, I did a little research into the kangaroo culling practices here. It turns out, only city-folk and gawky foreigners like us are enchanted with kangaroos. To most Australians, they are a pest, and in fact, are considered by many farmers to be Enemy #1. (Yes, I too was surprised that spot wasn't taken by giant crocodiles.) So the government pays people to routinely cull the wild kangaroo population, which is where things like kangaroo scrotum souvenirs and kangaroo meat in the supermarkets come from. Incidentally, kangaroo meat is incredibly nutritious: very high protein and around 2% fat. Anyway, kangaroo culling is controversial, as you might imagine, but it's a practice I didn't even know existed until now. This short article about it was very good, if you find this topic as interesting as I do.
I was asked by an Australian friend to explain the concept of chicken-fried steak. I struggled to come up with a description that would make it sound anything other than completely over-the-top and a stereotypical American take on food.
It's consistently staying cool during the days here now. That means mid-fifties in the mornings and low-seventies as the high. For Sydney-siders, this means coats and scarves. For cafes, this means dragging out the heaters and putting blankets out. I know some Tennessee Swedes who would laugh heartily at this.

On the subject of cool weather, one of my co-workers came to work wearing shorts one day. I overheard this exchange between him and another co-worker:

"Dude! Shorts?!?"
"Yeah...I can't find my jeans."
And that sums up so much about working with brilliant developers.

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Seeing critters through new eyes

Last Saturday, T and I caught the ferry up to Manly for a night-time tour through Sydney Harbor National Park. This tour was extra exciting because it was at night and we used night vision goggles to see the all the animals that we don't usually get to see during the day! This post has a couple pictures that I took, but most of them are ones that our tour guide Jess took with his infrared camera.

Here we are with our gear, getting ready to start.

It's Bond, James Bond

The white box on my chest was part of the earpieces we wore. That let our guide speak really quietly when we were close to animals but we could still hear his instructions about where to look and what kind of animal we were seeing. I totally felt like a spy.

Our walk through the bush was really fun. Being out in the bush in the dark, away from the city, made me feel connected to Australia in a new way. I love Sydney and all the things happening in the city, but this was a different way to experience the country and the draw that some of the early explorers must have felt.

Anyway, we got to see some cool animals on our walk! We saw two types of possums: ringtail and bush tail. The ringtail possums look more like the possums from Tennesee, but they aren't ugly! In fact, they are really cute!

This is a pic of one of the possums we saw that night.

Here's one from another night's tour, just to convince you of their cuteness.

We were also introduced to a new animal that night: the bandicoot. These guys look kind of like mice or chipmunks except with a bigger, rounder behind. So they are really cute, too! They're also marsupials, so it was pretty amazing to think of them carrying around babies in their tiny pouches.

Here's what Google says they look like in normal light:

Another cutie!

Our guide works as a ranger at the national park during the day, and he told us that he'd been doing bandicoot trapping that week. They are trying to keep tabs on the population in the area, so each morning that week, he'd been out to check traps, tag any animals they'd captured, and then release them. He said sometimes the babies will jump out of the pouch and he has to tuck them back in. What a crazy job!

We also saw some flying foxes (fruit bats). Yay! Toby's favorite! And my favorite sighting of the night ended up not being an animal at all, but bio-luminescent fungi. It was incredible! You could look off into the bush and see a green glow. It wasn't bright - just...glowy. We also got to walk right by some and see it up close. No pics from the tour itself, but it looked kind of like this:

How amazing is that?!

Our tour group was pretty small, so we didn't make too much noise going through the bush and scare off animals. Here we are, ready to go:

We walked around the bush in the headlands for about an hour and a half. We stopped frequently to check out animals or to look at plants as Jess described their importance to Aboriginal life. About halfway through our tour, we stopped for some tucker, which was wattleseed scones with jam made from bush fruit, and tea made from garadgi and lemon myrtle. It was all very Australian. =)
Jess snapped a few pics of us along the way.

In the end, we decided this tour was money well spent, if just for the fact that we have been reassured that not every animal in Australia is out to kill us. Plus, who doesn't like crawling through bush with night vision gear now and then?

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Sunday, May 12, 2013

A weekend in reverse

Since Toby is heading back for a short visit in a couple weeks, I decided Sunday was a good day to head down to Paddy's Market and pick up a few things to send to people back home. Paddy's is like a souvenir flea market and generally chaotic. You can count on seeing something weird or interesting every time you visit!

So I snapped a few pics while I was shopping.

You can buy all the Uggs and knock-off Uggs you could ever want...

The rest of our weekend was great too. We met up with Emma on Friday for her birthday dinner at Jamie Oliver's restaurant in Sydney. Yum!

I rarely think waiting an hour and a half for a table is worth it. But drinks and fun company (plus delicious food after the wait) made it completely OK!