We live in a town called Alstonville, which has a population just under 4000, and is only a 20 minute drive to the University in Lismore. We live with a lady named Marlene Davey who is wonderfully crazy in the best kind of way. She's a little bit deaf so you choose your conversation topics carefully because it takes too much effort to say something menial. In her backyard there are two types of mandarin (pronounced mandareen) orange trees that are both producing fruit, a banana tree which is still kinda green, lemon trees, passion fruit tree, naval orange tree, and I think that's about it. I probably eat 5-10 mandarins per day and although every time I offer Rosalin some she spits it out, she always thinks it's something she really wants. We have mandarin juice (freshly squeezed of course) for breakfast and home made lemonade on occasion. Don't go anywhere without some mandarins.
Everyone here has FIFA fever although our Socceroos aren't doing great. We lost the first game 0-4 to Germany who went on to lose to Serbia I think, but we tied Ghana Saturday night keeping our hopes alive. I honestly don't think they'll make it much further, but don't tell anyone I said that. Here in Australia, the sports are kind of confusing. There is soccer (as we all know it), Rugby league (which is rugby as Canadians play it), and Rugby which is a confusing sport which baffles me to the extreme. Rugby is an interesting mixture of rugby, soccer, and basketball. You should see if you can find a video of it, because it requires dribbling every 5 steps, but is generally rugby rules I think.
The streets of Alstonville and Lismore as well as every other community we've driven through is full of roundabouts!! At first, it was confusing but everyone treats them like an uncontrolled 4-way. We had the opportunity of driving with Marlene into Lismore one day, and she is a crazy lady driver! She never looks going into a roundabout because most people don't really, but when there is actually someone coming, she just stops irregardless of whether she's blocking the other vehicles or not. Sh has confided with us that she has had her license revoked (3 speeding tickets within a certain time period) and recently totaled her car because she was trying to back out of an exit she took accidentally and miscalculated how quickly the vehicles behind her were approaching and she got rear-ended. Whenever we drive with her now, she lets Spencer drive which makes me feel a lot better.
The weather has been forecast between 20-22 since we got here and we're told it won't get much colder this winter. Yesterday was about 21 degrees and ladies were definitely wearing toques and wool sweaters in church with several people who had blankets on their lap. I think the low at night has been fairly mild also, with a low of 8 the other night which had people talking.
Spencer keeps telling me that I need to introduce the Australian people to black sweatpants that are Lulu Lemon style. There is a fad here in Australia that is quite disturbing but for some reason the girls here think it's fashionable. Imagine this --denim leggings-- That's all, no skirt over top and don't you dare imagine a long shirt to cover the bum. All on their own painted on denim leggings with flats and a cropped t-shirt which is abominable in itself. These girls need to see that black stretchy pants really are the way to go.
We don't have internet at home unless the neighbours turn on their wireless so it's really hit and miss especially because they choose to go to bed around 10 and turn it off every night. We're looking for somewhere to live and are looking at spending about 200/wk for a furnished place or 150/wk for unfurnished. We're tempted to go unfurnished because in a month or two we would have saved the money needed to buy rudimentary furnishings. The ward has been great and we've been lent a car seat (we'll take pictures, it's ridiculous), a highchair, and a porta-cot (play pen). We've looked at the op-shops (second hand stores) for furniture but nothing yet.
Rosy woke up, gotta run. Love to all.
The first day and night spent in Australia was spent in a city called Surfer's Paradise. We got to our hotel mid afternoon, and after so long traveling we were all pretty tired. From our balcony at the hotel we looked over most of the city and could see a smidgen of a bit of the Ocean. Around 5:00 we decided to have a small nap to help us survive until bedtime and stave off some jet lag. Rosy didn't wake us up until midnight, and then she woke up her usual amount until about 5:00 in the morning when we got up for the day. We decided to head to the beach to see the sun rise over the ocean. It was unfortunately a cloudy day, but that didn't stop us from thoroughly enjoying some quiet time at the beach at 6:30 in the morning. Rosalin was such a good girl, and we were able to run through the waves and take some videos. As I was splashing my fingers in a small wave as it returned to the ocean, I failed to notice a larger wave coming in which went half way up to my knee and soaked my shoes, socks, and jeans. I learned my lesson though, and I will only wear my flip flops from now on.
On our trip down to Alstonville where we are currently living we stopped in a little hippie town called Byron Bay. This place is full of little shops and dread locks. An interesting thing we noticed there was that none of the cars wait for pedestrians to cross the road, even for us with a stroller. We had to run in between cars and try not to get hit which was harder than you think considering we still hadn't figured out which way the cars were going to be coming from. We spent a little bit of time on the beach, but had to leave earlier than we wanted because life is somewhat dictated by Ros at this point. We did, however, get to see a sad man in his twenties throwing a frisbee out at the ocean and trying to catch it himself as it came back in, poor guy didn't have any friends to play with.
We finally arrived in Alstonville thanks to our GPS (named Destiny thanks to Papa Wallace who made sure to point out that it was because she got us to our Destination) and me constantly telling Spencer "LEFT SIDE, LEFT SIDE". We're at the point where we have driving on the left hand side down, but we worry that other people are going to forget that they drive on that side and run us over. Stay tuned for our adventures at church which I shall write word for word from a journal I started during sacrament meeting. You should be excited for it...Love to all.
Melanie dropped us off in Great Falls where we luckily got there well in advance because we ended up spending 3/4 of an hour while they tried to sort out our tickets and visa information. Then we were lucky to go through security before the rest of our flight deemed it necessary because Spencer and Rosalin both had to get pat down and all of their luggage searched and chem wiped because we had all of Rosy's baby food with us as we had two days of traveling ahead of us and I had packed a lot of food for her. The flight to Salt Lake was rather uneventful as Rosalin slept most of the way. We had a two hour layover in Salt Lake and then Rosalin slept again on the flight to L.A. where we had a 6 hour layover ahead of us.
L.A. is the most annoying airport to have any kind of layover in. We tried to think of a place to eat, but there was nothing besides pubs and McDonald's in our terminal. We saw a sign to go to another terminal so we went downstairs where we were met with two employees just sitting against the wall and a 200m completely white hallway that was empty. We decided we were in the wrong place so we went back upstairs to have a supper of McDonald's.
We eventually ventured down again and almost got murdered 5 times before we made it to the other terminal. That terminal was about as boring as ours so we walked back and sat in the uncomfortable rows of seats for several hours. One exciting thing though was that I saw Cory from last season's bachelor. I didn't say anything as there was a creeper there doing enough talking for the whole airport. She was politely trying to get rid of him but he was quite persistent, talking while she ate and texted on her phone.
Finally we got on our plane to go over to Australia and we had quite a bit of luck! We tried a trick we learned from the Hughes and booked seats one apart hoping that they wouldn't fill the seat between us and it worked out! We had an empty seat between us and so when I got Ros to sleep, I could lay her down and sleep myself. Our plane was 9 seats wide and the business class had these sweet sleeping pods that they could curl up in. We were served two meals during our flight which left at ten at night and got there in 2 in the afternoon. The meals were generally disgusting, but there were some perks such as bottomless pop supply and a dinner bun with every meal. Rosy slept most of the time which was wonderful and Spencer was able to sleep fairly well also. I wasn't as lucky as I spent most of my time trying to make sure that Rosy wasn't going to roll off of her seat. Plus, every seat had a touch screen on the back of it with over 50 movies to choose from and games like sudoku and solitaire.
Coming in to Sydney, the weirdest thing started to happen. I felt a stabbing pain starting in my forehead and it started to spread all across my forehead and above my eyebrows. It hurt like nothing I'd felt before and didn't let up until we'd landed and then I could still feel the remains of the pain until we took off on our next flight. After a 14.5 hour flight to Sydney we had to gather our thoughts together in order to go through customs. We didn't have our boarding passes for our last flight yet, and we had to pick up all of our checked bags and check them again for our last domestic flight. Try to imagine Spencer and I in charge of 4 huge checked bags, 2 carry on size bags, a longboard, a diaper bag, a computer bag, a stroller, and a Rosy. We were quite a sight.
We managed to get through customs and then to our check our bags and boarded the bus to take us to our terminal to make our flight to Brisbane. Our flight was scheduled to leave at 9:00 am and we were leaving on the bus to get to the departures area of the airport at 8:50. They assured us we would make it, but with a baby that was starting to pee through her diaper and would soon be hungry and all of our bags, I had my doubts. We got to the airport and they hurried us to security. Spencer and I start taking off our shoes, and belts and then pulling out all of our liquids, and the guy was staring at us like we were some kind of crazy. I guess their security is a lot less strict than those in U.S. and they don't require you to take off shoes or belts and they only make you show things in aerosol containers. That would have saved us a lot of time if they would have told us this prior to us getting undressed.
We got to our terminal at 9:20 and our plane wasn't even at the gate yet. I guess Virgin Blue (our airline) is notoriously late, and they proved to be consistent as our 9:00 plane didn't leave the gate until 10:10. Rosy slept again on this flight and as we landed, again I got the stabbing pain in my forehead. The headache from this pain lasted for over 24 hours and according to the internet it could happen every time I fly -->crap.
Overall our flights were fairly uneventful, we didn't lose a single bag, we made it to all of our flights, and Rosalin slept on every leg of the trip (thank goodness). We didn't even run out of gas on that long leg from L.A. to Sydney (although I think I heard the engines sputter a bit Dad, maybe you should talk to them). I didn't get really sick although turbulence as we landed in Sydney while they were feeding us soggy eggs made my stomach a little upset but nothing that didn't go away as soon as we landed.
We're here safe in Lismore and hopefully student loans will come soon so I'll have more to write about. It's time for bed, but I have some more stories to tell (an interesting ward in Lismore) and I plan to get better at blogging once we have a more reliable connection. Love to all.
