LIfe in Newcastle

I’ve been racking up a whole list of things to tell you all about. So this will be a sort of potpourri of Australiana.

Birds

Australia has good birds. We also live very near a Reserve that probably increases the bird population around our house. I’ve learned a bit more about them since my last blog entry about the birds. There are Rosellas and Cockatoos who make me feel like I’m living in a pet store. Cockatoos—you may know—are the big white birds with yellow tufts on top of their heads and very loud voices. They are the squawkiest birds in the ‘hood.

Rosellas are smaller than parrots but flaunt the same display of primary colors. And we always see them in pairs which is endearing. I haven’t separated out their song yet.

Then there is, I swear, the Kookaburra. And, yes, we sing that song most every time we see one. “Kookaburra sits in the old gum tree, eating all the gum balls he can see. Laugh, Kookaburra laugh, Kookaburra save some just for me.” And they are the birds who sound just like monkeys laughing.

There are, unfortunately, many, many crows whose volume hogs the stage. They are just as annoying, loud and ever-present here as anywhere in the US. That part is a bit disappointing.

But it is the crows who alert us to the nightly event that has captured the attention of our whole family since we first saw it. I mentioned when we first arrived in Newcastle that we saw a huge flock of birds flying in the same direction as though they were being blown out of a bubble machine. Well, on our first night back from New Zealand, we saw it again. This time we were on our back deck. Directly above our heads, there were literally thousands of dark birds who, upon closer inspection, looked more like large bats than birds, all flying from one specific place to another. We watched this show for close to 30 minutes before they were gone. It was clearly an event and since we’d seen it once before, we figured it was a regular event. We looked up bats on the website of this Reserve near our house and found out that they are in fact bats called flying foxes and they have a wing span of up to 3 meters! They all come from the reserve and fly inland where they spend their nights eating nectar and pollen and fruits. All 10,000 of them go out together at dusk. And all 10,000 of them come back home at dawn which I’ve had the pleasure of seeing several times when I’ve gotten up to run. It is funny that in the morning they are much slower flyers and fly much lower in the sky; they are clearly, night owls. I look forward to sharing our bat show with those of you who are able to make it out to visit us this year.

Language

It is a different kind of English down here. Mark spends a lot of his time at school, he’s told me, trying to keep up with what everyone is saying. Their accents are strong enough and they speak fast enough that he really has to listen closely to them and by the time he’s put together what someone was saying in the last sentence, he’s missed the follow-up sentence and gets behind quickly. He said he wonders if they think his personality is flat because he stands sort of dimly by while the teachers around him banter on. Most of you know Mark is not one to sit quietly in the midst of banter so I think that is a little tough for him.

I spent this weekend in a writing workshop and had a similar experience—I was on high alert trying to understand what everyone was saying. Sometimes I would just let pass a few paragraphs at a time just to keep up. I felt a little bit like Lucille Ball when she was working on an assembly line that was going too fast for her to do her part. The harder she tried, the more the objects piled up in front of her. It was best to just let a bunch go and start fresh with the next one.

There are a few words and phrases that I really enjoy:

*They tell people to “give it a go” rather than to try.

*When people do things smart or well, they refer to them as clever. Like when Jordan revealed that she understood a joke that an adult was trying to keep over the kids’ heads, the adult told her she was very clever.

*They don’t think about things, they “have a think.” This morning at the kids' school, one little girl was holding a snail and the other little girl said, "Can I have a hold?"

*Ha ya goin’? rather than “How’s it going” or “how ya doing?”

Culture

There’s this attitude in Australia I had heard about before arriving here and was looking very forward to experiencing. Aussies don’t hesitate to “Question Authority.” Actually, I’m not sure they really question it, I think they just defy it. Knowing their roots as a people, it is not surprising that they aren’t a country of brown-nosers, but it is an interesting behavior to see in action.

The other morning, I was running out onto the almost mile-long jetty. I was about halfway down when I came to a big fence, blocking off access to continue on. There was no sign on it but it was clearly put there by someone with some power. So, being a good American who sometimes does what she’s told, even though she doesn’t like it, I turned around and stopped these two surfers walking by. I asked them what the fence was up for. They guessed maybe there was construction or something on the other side. I said, “So I shouldn’t run around it, should I?” And they said, without hesitation, “Oh, you can run on, if you like.” So I did. That made perfect sense to me—there was no reason for that fence that I could see, and no one is the boss of me, so I ran past it. Aussies are a little less rebellious in their rebellion—they don’t necessarily feel the need to justify their actions when they don’t do what they’re told, but nonetheless, I agreed with them and was thrilled to live in a land where my idea of what I want to do won’t get stymied by someone else’s rules. The funniest part was that after I’d turned around and was on my way back from the end of the jetty, I passed a fisherman and then I passed another runner and when I got to the fence again, someone had moved it completely out of the way. And I thought I was bold!

Kids Start School

Yesterday, the kids went off to their first day of school. The night before, as I was saying goodnight, I said the same thing to each of them, “Tomorrow is your first day at your new school—the day we’ve been talking about for months!” Gabe started jumping up and down in his bed, more excited than I’ve ever seen him, even on Christmas Eve. Jordan dove under her covers, poked her head out and said, “Yikes!”

I dropped them off and Gabe was like a flash of light zipping across the parking lot headed straight toward the open field filled with boys and balls. I didn’t see him again until I picked him up 6 hours later. Jordan and I went over to the sand pit and I stayed there with her for about an hour which his how they have it set up.

You can drop kids off anytime between 8:30 and 9:30 and they all play outside, supervised by a handful of staff milling around. The grounds of this school are vast and look like a lush botanic garden designed just for children. It is a magical place where you can find children weaving under and around flowering arbors, darting out from bushes, balancing on big rocks lining a garden, and making up games in the open field. They don’t require the children wear shoes outside, except in the wood-working shop, so most of them weren’t. It looked like summer camp in fairy tale land.

So while Jordan played in the sandpit, I chatted with the teachers and other parents until it was time for her to go inside. Most parents dropped their children off and left and I’m sure I’ll work my way to being able to do that too. When it is time for the kindies and primary school children to start their day, someone rings a sweet bell and they all head off to their classrooms. That is when all the remaining parents leave. Jordan knew it was time for me to go, said good-bye to me and followed her new teachers and peers up the stairs into her classroom. I walked away with tears in my eyes and I realized they were tears of pride. I know how scary this is for her and I know that if she truly doesn’t want to go, she will refuse and not back down. But she was ready for this and, mustering up all her courage, she started a new school. I am so grateful for her Waldorf experiences up until this point as I am sure they are a great source of her courage.

When I picked them up at the end of the day, Jordan came out first, she ran to me, gave me a quick hug and then stepped back a bit, looked me in the eye and said, “I want to come back again tomorrow.” I think she said that both because she knew she’d made it through the day and that the jury had been out until she had, but I also think she said that because she knew I was a bit worried about how she’d feel--I felt her reassuring me by the way she told me it was good. Then she immediately told me about the sick bird they found and how they made a nest for it and, and, and…

Gabe came out a few minutes later with a very happy look on his face. He’d just come from wood-working and said he couldn’t wait to come back again tomorrow. Jordan said she made one friend, which for her means that she genuinely connected with and enjoyed somebody and is looking forward to seeing her again. We’ll get her name here at some point, I’m sure! Gabe counted off the number of friends he made which for him means that he played with them at some point in the day—again, we’ll work on names down the road.

Mark is so funny; he wanted to know all about their days at school, of course. But a few hours after we’d returned home, he asked them how the temperature was in their classrooms. He’s so uncomfortably hot in his that it seems as though this may have become the most important factor in a school—the temperature in the classrooms!

And I spent the day by myself. First I went to this big mall-type shopping center because I was committed to spending as much time as it took, without children, to figure out how to make that place work for me. It seems as though everyone else thinks it is a wonderful place to go to the grocery store, but the parking and the layout of this center are so unmanageable for me that I actually had to turn grocery shopping into an activity and commit a whole morning to figuring it out. Half-way through my whole-hearted attempt, I gave up and walked out, vowing to never return again so long as I live here. If you can picture Colorado Mills with no outdoor parking, only underground, and the grocery store is inside, and the parking garage has more non-useable space than parking space, and one-way arrows everywhere, and only about 20 spaces near the “Parking close to Woolworths” sign (Woolworths being the grocery store) and that once you finally surrender to parking far away, you walk in the closest door you can find and discover that the grocery store is literally on the other side of the huge Colorado Mills-sized mall, and that when you go into a closer store which is Kmart, they only have ¼ of what is on your shopping list so you decide to go back out to your car and drive around to look again for a closer parking spot to Woolworths and in the process of looking for a closer space, you get lost again in the underground parking garage, you might give up too.

So I went home and started working on my writing project and had a lovely day. I had to remind myself several times, when I got anxious that my day was almost over and I hadn’t gotten it all done yet, that I was going to have another day like this tomorrow and then 3 more after that and then a whole slew of weeks like this all year long. Then I’d smile. It felt like the difference between having a really small ice cream cone and spending the whole time you’re eating it wishing it was bigger, and owning the whole damn store. Who said less is more?

I best move on to my next thing now and let you move on with yours.