Christmas Down Under

As we near the end of November, here in Australia everyone's thoughts turn to school holidays, summer time fun and Christmas.  Even though this is not only a tropical country, but one with season's in the reverse of the Northern Hemisphere, the Christmas spirit here is entirely having to do with winter themes:  snow, skating, Frosty and the North Pole.  There is also a store with some of the creepiest Christmas displays that either of us have ever seen.  The window above is a depiction of a scene from "The Nutcracker", complete with the eye-patch and cape wearing Uncle Drosselmeyer, flapping his arms in a rather hypnotic way. 

There are Christmas trees in every office lobby, a gigantic Christmas tree in the square outside of the city hall (due for the big lighting ceremony on Dec 3) and, as part of the "Fun Land World" on the Gold Coast, there is a place called "White Christmas" (or something like that) that features skating and other delights of the cold weather.  If only they knew about -30C plus windchill!  Now THAT would be a fantasy park worth building!

This week we go on our first Australian holiday.  We are giving "White Christmas" a pass and are heading an hour north to the Sunshine Coast on Thursday morning for a 3 day mini-break. 

A week of firsts

Now that we have been here almost three months, things are starting to get routine.  We have found ways to walk in the morning and not be completely overwhelmed by the sun and the humidity (carry an umbrella like a parasol and wear shorts!), we automatically know which way to watch for traffic when crossing the street and we are not quite so freaked out by big spiders or lizards in the house...well maybe we haven't quite adjusted to the last two, but it will happen.

After three months in Queensland, new residents are supposed to get a Queensland driver's licence.   We filled out all of our paper work and had our 100 points of ID (we first thought this meant 100 pieces of ID, but it is a system based on having ID with a photo and a signature...a passport is about 70 points) and went to the ministry for what we expected to be a two hour process.  20 minutes later we had our new licences.  Now we are completely legal to drive here.  Lucky for us (unlucky for Australia) we didn't need to take a road test!

This was also Joanne's first birthday in Australia (although far from her first birthday ever) and we discovered yet another fantastic restaurant.  Australia is very much a food nation.  We have just finished watching a television series to determine Australia's best chef under the age of 13.  It was amazing! 

Coastal Villages

One of the many advantages to living in Brisbane is that we are so close to the ocean.  On Saturday we hopped on a train near our house and, 30 minutes later, we were in Sandgate, one of the many coastal villages to the east of Brisbane.  There are about 12 of these villages that were once separate towns but are now suburbs of Brisbane.  It is a very easy train commute into the city and a lot of people live in these villages to take advantage of being right on the ocean, but also being close enough to the CBD that the commute is not ridiculously long.  There are some people who live on the Gold or Sunshine Coasts and commute for more than an hour to get in to work...crazy!
There isn't a beach at Sandgate (so the "sand" part of the name is a little misleading) but it does have a really nice boardwalk that is about 5km long.  The sea is really shallow here and it is a popular place for both windsurfing and parasailing (above photo).  There is a really nice steady ocean breeze, so it is a great place to cool down and watch the parasailers. 

The parasailers have quite a bit of speed and they can get launched into the air.  There are also many people of different skill levels trying to parasail in the same small area, so everyone needs to excercise control.  While we were there a couple of dogs decided that it would be great sport to chase down one of the parasailers.  The dogs didn't really have a chance of catching the guy but it was really entertaining to watch.  Clearly the dogs' owner was not too bothered by the "dogs must be on a leash" rule.
It is pretty hard to fault the dogs for wanting to have a run in the sea.  The water was as warm as a bath!

Sunrise

One thing that has surprised us here is sunrise...not that there is one, but how early it is.  By 5:00 in the morning the sun is fully up.  By the time we leave for work, between 7:15 and 7:45, the sun is high enough and hot enough that we need to wear sunblock for the walk in.  We walk east to the CBD and have to deal with the bright sun in our faces and the glint of the sunlight off the river...it is positively blinding!  We expected this in January and February, but it has been this way since we got here. 
Like anywhere else that is near a large body of water, they often get rain on really hot days.  So far we have been lucky and yesterday we just missed a sudden downpour by about 3 minutes.  It doesn't matter whether the umbrella is up or not, this rain blows around and soaks one completely within minutes!  It is more like the spring weather in Calgary, with the clouds building up throughout the day until a massive thunder storm rolls through between 4 and 5 in the afternoon, but these happen in the morning.  Yesterday it rained, but it wasn't even cloudy.  Just one more mystery from the other side of the world.

Settling In

Call it Brisgary or Calbane, but we are now happily settling in with the arrival of our furniture.  As you can see from the photos above (top from Calgary, lower from Brisbane) we are not quite in the state of neatness that we should be, but that will come. 
We had more than 200 packages/items delivered on Thursday.  We have opened about 90% of the boxes, but have not unpacked everything.  We have a smaller place here than we had in Calgary, so we ended up with an extra couch and two extra chairs that we didn't have a home for.  Luckily a Canadian has arrived with no furniture and had intended to just buy things as he settled in.  He won't need too much by the time we are finished with him!  We did a good job of thinning out our belongings in Calgary, but we still have plenty of extras.
It was quite funny to go through the boxes.  It was almost inmpossible to tell what was going to be in each gigantic wad of paper packing material.  We actually spent two minutes unwrapping what turned out to be two mechanical pencils and an eraser, wrapped together as though they had to survive in King Tut's tomb!  It was also hard to guess the contents of each box, as almost everything, including our two cases of wine, were labeled "ornaments".  Of all the things that were sent, there were only two things broken: an old Rubbermaid container full of camping stuff and a frameless picture holder from Ikea.  Not too bad.
We know that there is still plenty to unpack and we need to get the owner's permission to hang pictures, but now it really is home sweet home!

Driving

For getting around the city, its been all trains, buses, ferries, and taxi's for us, but for the first time since we arrived, we drove!   We are getting our furniture from Calgary delivered on Thursday and so we needed to buy lamps and a few other things to replace the rental products that will be picked up before our furniture arrives.  And when you need lamps, a garbage can, a shelving unit and a bunch little things for the house, nothing beats IKEA.  Like all IKEAs, the one here is far away from the city centre.  The suburb it is in is about 25 minutes drive from where we live and we actually drove on the freeway!  In fact things went so well that we drove to another mall to buy a vacuum cleaner and we didn't get lost or cause any accidents.  What more can you ask for?
Jim did all of the driving and we aren't sure whether it is less stressful to drive on the opposite side of the road, or be the passenger.  Nothing looks right and there is no possibity of allowing your mind to wander for even a second.  You have to watch where you are in the lane, where the other drivers are and make sure that you don't get all "North American" and start driving on the right hand side of the road. 
Jim adapted really fast.  Going to IKEA was a little tricky, but it soon became second nature.  He turned when he should, how he should and remembered to shoulder check the right way.  Traffic roundabouts were initially odd to say the least, but they work so good...why hasn't North America embraced the roundabout?  Probably the hardest part is getting past the "muscle memory".  The signal is on the right hand side of the steering wheel and the windshield wipers are on the left.  When Joanne drove she washed the windows everytime she turned a corner.  The rental car was an automatic...you need a special license to rent a manual transmission.
This was a BIG step for us.  We won't be leasing a car (why pay to let a vehicle sit in the garage 25 days a month?) but we will definitely be renting a bit and have a vacation to the Sunshine Coast coming up.

Spider-blog!

Like everyone else in Australia, we dry most of our clothes on a clothesline.  We do have a dryer (negotiated it on our rental agreement) but it is very small and we really only use it for towels or things that will take a long time to dry.  We may, however, start using it just a little bit more. 
Our clothesline is in our backyard.  It is one of these collapsible dealies that folds down flat against the fence.  On Saturday morning we hung up some laundry and when we pulled out the frame of the clothesline, discovered an entire web-world created by one very industrious spider.  The spider seemed content to stay in it's own corner so, after great deal of toe and bum-clenching, we got the clothes hung up on the other end of the line and Jim called on his vast store of his spider-killing abilities.  These abilities worked very well in Canada.  The Aussie spider had a few moves that Jim had not seen before.  With Jim, heavily armed with a handful of paper towels, trying to lunge and grab spidey, Joanne stood on a chair in the house, with the glass doors closed, making squealing noises.  After about 5 minutes of war, a truce was declared and the spider abandoned his web, going off to live in a nearby tree.
After we got our heart rates back down near normal we went back out to hang up the rest of the laundry.  Some kind of movement caught our attention.  On a web above the backdoor of our neighbours' house was a spider with a body the size of an average adult's thumb...plus his legs!  He can easily be seen from 5 metres away, which was how far away the above photo was taken (with maximum zoom).
If we find one of these spiders on our clothesline, we'll just buy new clothes every week.  Neither of us is going near one of those things!