Christmas seems to get more and more distant the older I get. Perhaps it's because I don't have children. Or perhaps Christmas in America IS, indeed, changing. More frantic. Less time to prepare, but a stronger, unspoken obligation to prepare, and a heavy guilt trip if you don't.
There's a distinct voice in my head that says, "Your Christmases are numbered and if you DON'T take your friends out to look at Christmas lights, and if you DON'T go to choral concerts at churches, and if you DON'T put up lights and a tree, you'll have wasted something very precious."
But this isn't an essay on how Christmas in America has changed. This is an essay on Christmas traditions in other countries, just as a passing curiosity to all three of our readers...a lovely way to spend fifteen minutes during the holiday season.
J-P and I recently returned from Hong Kong. Christmas is certainly NOT an ancient Chinese tradition, but Hong Kong was a British territory for so long that the traditions DID get practiced there (by the minority British population) and the Chinese observed them with curiosity.
Now that the British are out (white westerners make up less than 1% of the population in Hong Kong), the Cantonese Hong Kongers have adopted and adapted Christmas and it is practiced with glee and delight. J-P and I sat on the lap of a jolly Santa Claus one night and he asked us what we wanted for Christmas. But you can bet that we didn't get funny looks, as we would at a mall in Dallas.
The children were getting pushed consistently to the back of the line, and it was almost entirely adults sitting on jolly St. Nick's lap, getting their photos made, and telling him what they wanted for Christmas. Also, the Chinese almost uniformly make the "peace" sign when they get their photos made with Santa.
They have another tradition which is an adaptation of the Christmas tree. They write wishes on little cards and attach them to Christmas trees in public squares. These trees become heavily overleaden with wishes, and you can stop and read them while you're out for a walk. (I never saw a Chinese do it, so perhaps it was inappropriate of me to do it, but I was certainly fascinated...) Most were written in Chinese, but the few that were written in English, or both languages, were heart-warming to read, and often dealt with the health of loved-ones and the peace of the world than wishes for Ipods and tiny camera phones and cars.
I spent Christmas Eve and Christmas Day in New York City with Christian's Brasilian family. Their traditions revolve around food, but not the turkey and spiral-cut ham like ours. On Christmas Eve they eat a pasta called cappelletti, which is something like a larger tortellini, stuffed with chicken, ricotta, and nutmeg, served in a rich chicken broth. Wow is it good!
On Christmas Day they eat pork tenderloin roasted with fruits. And they have a specialty stuffing or dressing called "farofa" that is prepared at Christmas, and is a wildly complex blend of manioc (a coarse Brasilian flour made from the root of the yucca plant), roasted chestnuts, scrambled eggs, olives, vegetables, and bacon. It has a very, very dry consistency and bland flavor from the yucca flour, but the items found in it are all very moist and exploding with flavor, and varying in texture. It's really delightful. Dessert is pastiera, a lightly-sweet cheesecake that has tender bulgar wheat mixed in with the cheese filling.
As a side note, on New Year's Day, for good luck, they eat 12 grapes, one for each month of the coming year, and they go to the beach and jump waves (maybe symbolic of leaping life's hurdles, I'm not sure.)
Leif, a dear friend of mine, recently moved to Buenos Aires, and this Christmas he went with a friend to the north of Argentina to experience a traditional Argentine Christmas. It consisted of dinner at 10pm, fireworks at midnight, followed by all generations going to the disco to dance until 10am the next morning.
So no matter how kooky Christmas becomes in America, rest assured that things are still stranger in other climes.
Trip Report, I
Posted by jerkboy on December 20, 2005 at 02:46 PM
Greetings from Sydney, Australia! I'm sending this on Friday morning at 10:00am, but for most of you it's 5:00pm on Thursday.
J-P and I flew here yesterday after just barely escaping a big ice storm that practically shut down the DFW airport just a few hours after our plane departed. Our flight from Los Angeles to Sydney was 14 and a half hours! Torture for some...especially J-P. I think he slept a total of 30 minutes. Not me! I probably slept 10!
About a third of the way through the flight we flew right across the Big Island of Hawaii, and could see the telescopes on top of Mauna Kea! The windward side of the island was covered in clouds, so we couldn't see the volcano erupting, unfortunately.
After a massive transportation fiasco when we arrived at midnight in Sydney, we finally made it to our hostel. Today we'll tool around Sydney, hopefully catching a good butt and scarf picture in front of the Sydney opera house, and tomorrow we fly to the Australian west coast to Perth, for a birthday party.
Last winter while on the cruise to Antarctica, J-P and I became very close with our tablemates on the ship, two Australian couples in their late 50s. They were crude, irreverent, and uncouth...and we were DELIGHTED to share our table each night with them! The oldest of them, Pete, owns a golf resort in Australia. He said his dream was always to be an American Cowboy. We grew very attached to them, and vice versa.
After the cruise was over, they invited us to Australia to visit them. We said, "Of course, we'd love to come!"
And they said, "That's what EVERYONE says, but they never do. Once you leave a cruise, you never see your friends every again."
But we had a few surprises up our sleeve. We tracked them down at their hotel in Buenos Aires and surprised them in the lobby. We later found out they were headed to Iguassu Falls, on the border of Argentina and Brasil. So we flew up there, and surprised them in the lobby of their hotel AGAIN!
Of course, despite all the laughs we all got from those two incidents, they never believed we'd fly all the way to Australia to visit them.
Pete's health has been failing for quite some time, and he needs a lung transplant. Saturday is his 60th birthday, and his wife's sister, Iris, is throwing a huge party in Perth. She contacted us secretly and asked if we could make it, and we have conspired through her to surprise Pete and his wife, and Iris's husband Wayne.
So that is the primary purpose of this trip...to give Pete a hearty surprise on what will probably be his last birthday party.
I'll let you all know how that goes in a few days.
J-P and I flew here yesterday after just barely escaping a big ice storm that practically shut down the DFW airport just a few hours after our plane departed. Our flight from Los Angeles to Sydney was 14 and a half hours! Torture for some...especially J-P. I think he slept a total of 30 minutes. Not me! I probably slept 10!
About a third of the way through the flight we flew right across the Big Island of Hawaii, and could see the telescopes on top of Mauna Kea! The windward side of the island was covered in clouds, so we couldn't see the volcano erupting, unfortunately.
After a massive transportation fiasco when we arrived at midnight in Sydney, we finally made it to our hostel. Today we'll tool around Sydney, hopefully catching a good butt and scarf picture in front of the Sydney opera house, and tomorrow we fly to the Australian west coast to Perth, for a birthday party.
Last winter while on the cruise to Antarctica, J-P and I became very close with our tablemates on the ship, two Australian couples in their late 50s. They were crude, irreverent, and uncouth...and we were DELIGHTED to share our table each night with them! The oldest of them, Pete, owns a golf resort in Australia. He said his dream was always to be an American Cowboy. We grew very attached to them, and vice versa.
After the cruise was over, they invited us to Australia to visit them. We said, "Of course, we'd love to come!"
And they said, "That's what EVERYONE says, but they never do. Once you leave a cruise, you never see your friends every again."
But we had a few surprises up our sleeve. We tracked them down at their hotel in Buenos Aires and surprised them in the lobby. We later found out they were headed to Iguassu Falls, on the border of Argentina and Brasil. So we flew up there, and surprised them in the lobby of their hotel AGAIN!
Of course, despite all the laughs we all got from those two incidents, they never believed we'd fly all the way to Australia to visit them.
Pete's health has been failing for quite some time, and he needs a lung transplant. Saturday is his 60th birthday, and his wife's sister, Iris, is throwing a huge party in Perth. She contacted us secretly and asked if we could make it, and we have conspired through her to surprise Pete and his wife, and Iris's husband Wayne.
So that is the primary purpose of this trip...to give Pete a hearty surprise on what will probably be his last birthday party.
I'll let you all know how that goes in a few days.
Trip Report, II
Posted by jerkboy on December 20, 2005 at 02:46 PM
So we spent a lovely day in Sydney, doing all the quintessential Sydney things...
I stripped naked in front of the opera house and got a fantastic Butt and Scarf photo. We strolled through The Rocks, a collection of the oldest buildings in Australia. We took the ferry to Manley, Sydney's beach town, and walked around. The ferry back home was after sunset, so we got to see the spectacular Sydney skyline, complete with the Opera House and Harbour Bridge, all lit up.
One amazing thing I didn't discover about Sydney on my last trip here is the AMAZING variety of bird life here in the inner city. There are magnificent green parrots, little parrots about the size of a small pigeon but splotched with reds and yellows and purples and blues, and LARGE white cockatoos with yellow head feathers...EVERYWHERE. The little colored parrots all alight on this one type of flowering shrub, and they drink the nectar of the flowers and get drunk. They'll fall to the ground and stumble around, swawking loudly. Wayne says that sometimes they'll fly right into buildings if they're drunk enough. The big white cockatoos screech and land on people's chimneys. It's so strange to see these birds that Americans pay $2000 and $3000 each for...just as common here as street pigeons.
Lunch was fish'n'chips, which didn't agree with J-P. He's now holed up in the hostel trying to get control of everything. I'm going to stroll about the seedy district where all the backpacker hostels are for a bit and then hit the sack. We have a long flight tomorrow to Perth (5 hours...not long compared to the flight here from LA! But just as long as a New York-LA flight.)
I stripped naked in front of the opera house and got a fantastic Butt and Scarf photo. We strolled through The Rocks, a collection of the oldest buildings in Australia. We took the ferry to Manley, Sydney's beach town, and walked around. The ferry back home was after sunset, so we got to see the spectacular Sydney skyline, complete with the Opera House and Harbour Bridge, all lit up.
One amazing thing I didn't discover about Sydney on my last trip here is the AMAZING variety of bird life here in the inner city. There are magnificent green parrots, little parrots about the size of a small pigeon but splotched with reds and yellows and purples and blues, and LARGE white cockatoos with yellow head feathers...EVERYWHERE. The little colored parrots all alight on this one type of flowering shrub, and they drink the nectar of the flowers and get drunk. They'll fall to the ground and stumble around, swawking loudly. Wayne says that sometimes they'll fly right into buildings if they're drunk enough. The big white cockatoos screech and land on people's chimneys. It's so strange to see these birds that Americans pay $2000 and $3000 each for...just as common here as street pigeons.
Lunch was fish'n'chips, which didn't agree with J-P. He's now holed up in the hostel trying to get control of everything. I'm going to stroll about the seedy district where all the backpacker hostels are for a bit and then hit the sack. We have a long flight tomorrow to Perth (5 hours...not long compared to the flight here from LA! But just as long as a New York-LA flight.)
Trip Report, III
Posted by jerkboy on December 20, 2005 at 02:45 PM
I’m sorry I haven’t written in three days. It’s not because I haven’t had access…a connected computer has been sitting next to my bed the entire time. It’s simply because these Aussies live a RIDICULOUSLY hedonistic lifestyle, and we’ve just been caught up in it all.
After our long day in Sydney, we wanted to sleep in a bit before our Saturday flight to Perth…hopefully sleep off a little of the jet lag…because we knew that the birthday party on Saturday night would be a doozie and we wanted to be ready for it. So we were hoping to sleep in at the hostel until 9 or 10.
Wrong! At 4 am, a Scottish guy stumbled into our room, cursing in the dark, and crashed into bed. That’s normal for a youth hostel, people coming in at all hours to pass out. Normally, you just roll over and go back to sleep.
At 5 am, a British guy burst in, saw the Scottish guy asleep, and hollered, “Bugger me, you bastard! Is all you do just sleep all day? Last time I saw you was 5pm, and you were asleep. Now it’s 5am, and you’re still asleep!”
The Scottish guy woke up, groggily, and cursed a bit. “I’ve been out getting pissed, you fuck. And now you woke me up. Well, I’m awake…might as well go and get pissed again.” (For those who don’t know Limey speak, “pissed” means “drunk.”)
So this Scottish guy gets up, an hour after passing out drunk, and heads out to get drunk again. Sydney has no drinking laws, and many bars just don’t even have doors because they never close.
The Brit tears off his shoes, filling the room with an unspeakable stench, and jumps up onto the bed, quizzing J-P and me about our origins.
“I hope I don’t offend you by asking this, blokes, but you got a spliff I can buy off you?” (For those of you who don’t smoke pot, “spliff” is Limey-pot-speak for “joint.”)
“No, sorry, man. If I had one, though, I’d give it to you.”
“Just as well. Still, I need something to put meself to sleep. If I ain’t got a spliff, I’ll eat a sleeping pill.” He opened his backpack and dug out a little pill, swallowing it without any water.
“Did that Scottish guy really go out to get drunk at 5am?” I asked.
“Damn right, he did! How long are you blokes in town?”
“Our plane leaves in about six hours.”
“Well, then, we’d better go and have a beer ourselves! Pub down the way sells a schooner of Guinness for only $4.80!”
J-P, still a little green from the fish and chips, moaned.
“Come now, don’t make me go back to London and tell everyone how dreary Texans are!”
You can’t say such a thing to J-P, whose personal goal it is to redefine the image of Americans in the minds of the international public. But he was just too sick and exhausted to redefine the image for this particular Brit, and I knew we’d never get any sleep staying in the room with this guy. So out of personal sacrifice, I decided to go have a beer with this guy at 5am, and let J-P get some much-needed sleep.
That…and…how often do you get to say you got drunk in Sydney at 5 in the morning?
I tugged on some clothes, and Marc and I headed out into King’s Cross, the seedy neighborhood which surrounded the hostel. Hookers were stumbling around the sidewalks, bouncers were beckoning us into XXX theatres, and people were smoking pot all over the streets.
At the pub, I ordered a schooner of Guinness at exactly 5:43 in the morning. A typical Sydney breakfast. A portly Aussie bird (they call women “birds” here) came up to us, drunk as she could be, and she and Marc proceeded to have a heated, 30-minute debate on the correct pronunciation of the word “cashew.”
Then Marc and I wandered the streets for a bit, talking about politics, drug culture, and the politics of drug culture. Then we ordered a meat pie (the quintessential Aussie snack) from a street vendor, and went back to the hostel.
J-P and I packed and headed to the airport for our 5-hour flight across Australia to Perth. We were met at the airport by Iris, the mastermind of the surprise party. She drove us home to freshen up, and then we headed to The Cricket grounds to surprise Wayne.
The Cricket is Australia’s favorite sport. And it’s always referred to as “The Cricket.” When we got to The Cricket grounds, Wayne was sitting in the attached pub watching his son Joe captain the local cricket team. We snuck up behind him and scared him good. He couldn’t speak for about 5 minutes, he was so shell-shocked that we were there!
He ordered us a beer and invited a few friends over to the table, and we proceeded to be regaled on the finger points of “The Cricket” by a large man named Angry who had furry mutton-chop sideburns and a tattoo of Tweety Bird on his left bicep.
The party was scheduled to start at 630pm, and Iris was expecting 70 people, including two Olympians, several vintners, lots of relatives, and many old friends. Pete and Ruth Murphy, the other Aussie couple we met on the trip to Antarctica, were flying in from Melbourne, and we scared them good before they walked into the house.
I simply can’t describe the party to you. There was a never-ending stream of lamb, pork, and beef from the “barby,” and throughout the course of the night, the 70 folks in attendance consumed 30 bottles of wine and more than 400 beers. It seemed like every person in attendance could be the title character in a novel. And though many of them had never met the others at the party, there were NO fractal groups, everyone mingled, laughed, and gabbed with everyone else in a constantly simmering swarm.
The climax was a touching moment when Wayne’s children got up and talked about their childhood, and when Wayne’s long-time friends told the stories about he and Iris moving to Western Australia in the 1960s when the government was giving away free land. They got a particularly nasty plot, but cleared it away with backbreaking labor and farmed it as best they could until drought claimed everything. They lived in a tent for a number of years before finally moving to a tin shed. Then they gave up the farm, moved to Perth, and Wayne took a job working the coal mines. Then he had a long career as a police investigator, working the drug squad. And finally he and Iris bought a horse-betting business, which became their gold mine. And friends were present from every phrase of their life.
When everyone was finished speaking, it was Wayne’s turn. “I want to thank you all for this,” he began, with emotion mounting exponentially with each passing word. “Iris and I just want you to know that every single person here is a member of our family…and that’s about all I have to say!”
He later confided to me that he had MUCH more to say, but there was no way it would come out.
I thought, after I went to bed that night, that the party was over. But we were roused the next morning and told to dress up…we were going to the wine country of the Swan Valley for a family lunch. After a drive through the lovely river valley we arrived at the Riverbank Estate winery, where we tasted the entire line of 2003-2004 wines. To be totally honest, they were terrible! But the lunch that followed the tasting made up for it.
J-P and I both ordered roast duck on nectarine and peach salad with fortified Shiraz and mulberry sauce. It was incredible. Dessert (a mango passion fruit trifle, followed by an extraordinary blue cheese from Tasmania) stuffed us to the point of bursting. The wine had taken its toll, and when we got back to the house, I was ready for a nap.
But the Aussies were ready for a beer.
So we drank beers and cut up for a few hours, laughing and bullshitting each other, and then it was time to make dinner. Wayne threw some steaks on the barby, along with the largest shrimp I’ve ever seen. More bottles of wine were opened and more beers were popped, and we stuffed ourselves again.
This morning we went to visit Iris’s cousin’s flower farm, where they raise gerbers, a huge, brightly colored flower that’s popular in wedding bouquets here. Then we had lunch in Fremantle, Perth’s port city, which is filled with sidewalk cafes and lined with fantastic white-sand beaches on the Indian Ocean. After that we explored King’s Park, a vast, magnificent park overlooking downtown Perth and the Swan River, and then Iris and the girls took us into downtown for some shopping. Ugh.
It really has been incredible to experience this big, friendly Australian family. They’ve all come up from nothing, living in tents and working until they bled, to become millionaries. Wealth has a different face in Western Australia. Iris and Wayne are so loved in the community, their children Tim, Peta, and Joe are incredible people, and to see this family together has been a rare treat. Watching and listening to the stories and the interaction at Wayne’s 60th birthday party has made me want to live the same kind of life, so that I might be lucky enough to have the same kind of experience when I’m that age. I really has been priceless.
If we survive the beer and food for another 24 hours, we plan on heading over to New Zealand for a few days on Wednesday (Tuesday for you all).
After our long day in Sydney, we wanted to sleep in a bit before our Saturday flight to Perth…hopefully sleep off a little of the jet lag…because we knew that the birthday party on Saturday night would be a doozie and we wanted to be ready for it. So we were hoping to sleep in at the hostel until 9 or 10.
Wrong! At 4 am, a Scottish guy stumbled into our room, cursing in the dark, and crashed into bed. That’s normal for a youth hostel, people coming in at all hours to pass out. Normally, you just roll over and go back to sleep.
At 5 am, a British guy burst in, saw the Scottish guy asleep, and hollered, “Bugger me, you bastard! Is all you do just sleep all day? Last time I saw you was 5pm, and you were asleep. Now it’s 5am, and you’re still asleep!”
The Scottish guy woke up, groggily, and cursed a bit. “I’ve been out getting pissed, you fuck. And now you woke me up. Well, I’m awake…might as well go and get pissed again.” (For those who don’t know Limey speak, “pissed” means “drunk.”)
So this Scottish guy gets up, an hour after passing out drunk, and heads out to get drunk again. Sydney has no drinking laws, and many bars just don’t even have doors because they never close.
The Brit tears off his shoes, filling the room with an unspeakable stench, and jumps up onto the bed, quizzing J-P and me about our origins.
“I hope I don’t offend you by asking this, blokes, but you got a spliff I can buy off you?” (For those of you who don’t smoke pot, “spliff” is Limey-pot-speak for “joint.”)
“No, sorry, man. If I had one, though, I’d give it to you.”
“Just as well. Still, I need something to put meself to sleep. If I ain’t got a spliff, I’ll eat a sleeping pill.” He opened his backpack and dug out a little pill, swallowing it without any water.
“Did that Scottish guy really go out to get drunk at 5am?” I asked.
“Damn right, he did! How long are you blokes in town?”
“Our plane leaves in about six hours.”
“Well, then, we’d better go and have a beer ourselves! Pub down the way sells a schooner of Guinness for only $4.80!”
J-P, still a little green from the fish and chips, moaned.
“Come now, don’t make me go back to London and tell everyone how dreary Texans are!”
You can’t say such a thing to J-P, whose personal goal it is to redefine the image of Americans in the minds of the international public. But he was just too sick and exhausted to redefine the image for this particular Brit, and I knew we’d never get any sleep staying in the room with this guy. So out of personal sacrifice, I decided to go have a beer with this guy at 5am, and let J-P get some much-needed sleep.
That…and…how often do you get to say you got drunk in Sydney at 5 in the morning?
I tugged on some clothes, and Marc and I headed out into King’s Cross, the seedy neighborhood which surrounded the hostel. Hookers were stumbling around the sidewalks, bouncers were beckoning us into XXX theatres, and people were smoking pot all over the streets.
At the pub, I ordered a schooner of Guinness at exactly 5:43 in the morning. A typical Sydney breakfast. A portly Aussie bird (they call women “birds” here) came up to us, drunk as she could be, and she and Marc proceeded to have a heated, 30-minute debate on the correct pronunciation of the word “cashew.”
Then Marc and I wandered the streets for a bit, talking about politics, drug culture, and the politics of drug culture. Then we ordered a meat pie (the quintessential Aussie snack) from a street vendor, and went back to the hostel.
J-P and I packed and headed to the airport for our 5-hour flight across Australia to Perth. We were met at the airport by Iris, the mastermind of the surprise party. She drove us home to freshen up, and then we headed to The Cricket grounds to surprise Wayne.
The Cricket is Australia’s favorite sport. And it’s always referred to as “The Cricket.” When we got to The Cricket grounds, Wayne was sitting in the attached pub watching his son Joe captain the local cricket team. We snuck up behind him and scared him good. He couldn’t speak for about 5 minutes, he was so shell-shocked that we were there!
He ordered us a beer and invited a few friends over to the table, and we proceeded to be regaled on the finger points of “The Cricket” by a large man named Angry who had furry mutton-chop sideburns and a tattoo of Tweety Bird on his left bicep.
The party was scheduled to start at 630pm, and Iris was expecting 70 people, including two Olympians, several vintners, lots of relatives, and many old friends. Pete and Ruth Murphy, the other Aussie couple we met on the trip to Antarctica, were flying in from Melbourne, and we scared them good before they walked into the house.
I simply can’t describe the party to you. There was a never-ending stream of lamb, pork, and beef from the “barby,” and throughout the course of the night, the 70 folks in attendance consumed 30 bottles of wine and more than 400 beers. It seemed like every person in attendance could be the title character in a novel. And though many of them had never met the others at the party, there were NO fractal groups, everyone mingled, laughed, and gabbed with everyone else in a constantly simmering swarm.
The climax was a touching moment when Wayne’s children got up and talked about their childhood, and when Wayne’s long-time friends told the stories about he and Iris moving to Western Australia in the 1960s when the government was giving away free land. They got a particularly nasty plot, but cleared it away with backbreaking labor and farmed it as best they could until drought claimed everything. They lived in a tent for a number of years before finally moving to a tin shed. Then they gave up the farm, moved to Perth, and Wayne took a job working the coal mines. Then he had a long career as a police investigator, working the drug squad. And finally he and Iris bought a horse-betting business, which became their gold mine. And friends were present from every phrase of their life.
When everyone was finished speaking, it was Wayne’s turn. “I want to thank you all for this,” he began, with emotion mounting exponentially with each passing word. “Iris and I just want you to know that every single person here is a member of our family…and that’s about all I have to say!”
He later confided to me that he had MUCH more to say, but there was no way it would come out.
I thought, after I went to bed that night, that the party was over. But we were roused the next morning and told to dress up…we were going to the wine country of the Swan Valley for a family lunch. After a drive through the lovely river valley we arrived at the Riverbank Estate winery, where we tasted the entire line of 2003-2004 wines. To be totally honest, they were terrible! But the lunch that followed the tasting made up for it.
J-P and I both ordered roast duck on nectarine and peach salad with fortified Shiraz and mulberry sauce. It was incredible. Dessert (a mango passion fruit trifle, followed by an extraordinary blue cheese from Tasmania) stuffed us to the point of bursting. The wine had taken its toll, and when we got back to the house, I was ready for a nap.
But the Aussies were ready for a beer.
So we drank beers and cut up for a few hours, laughing and bullshitting each other, and then it was time to make dinner. Wayne threw some steaks on the barby, along with the largest shrimp I’ve ever seen. More bottles of wine were opened and more beers were popped, and we stuffed ourselves again.
This morning we went to visit Iris’s cousin’s flower farm, where they raise gerbers, a huge, brightly colored flower that’s popular in wedding bouquets here. Then we had lunch in Fremantle, Perth’s port city, which is filled with sidewalk cafes and lined with fantastic white-sand beaches on the Indian Ocean. After that we explored King’s Park, a vast, magnificent park overlooking downtown Perth and the Swan River, and then Iris and the girls took us into downtown for some shopping. Ugh.
It really has been incredible to experience this big, friendly Australian family. They’ve all come up from nothing, living in tents and working until they bled, to become millionaries. Wealth has a different face in Western Australia. Iris and Wayne are so loved in the community, their children Tim, Peta, and Joe are incredible people, and to see this family together has been a rare treat. Watching and listening to the stories and the interaction at Wayne’s 60th birthday party has made me want to live the same kind of life, so that I might be lucky enough to have the same kind of experience when I’m that age. I really has been priceless.
If we survive the beer and food for another 24 hours, we plan on heading over to New Zealand for a few days on Wednesday (Tuesday for you all).
Trip Report, IV
Posted by jerkboy on December 20, 2005 at 02:45 PM
This one will be short, but I figured I'd better bash off another before we head off to New Zealand, where our time will be short and we probably won't have time to write...
This morning we had coffee at the house of a man named Killer. He's an automechanic, and I was a bit too nervous to ask him how he got the name. After we left, I asked Wayne and he said his last name starts with "Kill" and so everyone just calls him "Killer." But then he said something to the effect that he had proved himself worthy of his nickname, and I left it at that.
We also visited the free range egg farm where Wayne and Iris get the incredible eggs that I've been scrambling each morning. And we visited the wholesale seafood place where Wayne gets his fish and those MASSIVE shrimp we ate two nights ago. Today he picked up some boarfish, which he ordered several days ago to ensure that we could eat it. Boarfish is a deepwater fish that's very hard to get, and Wayne claims that it's HANDS DOWN the most delicious fish ever. And it should be, at around $35 a pound!
This afternoon we all went to Yanchep National Park, where there's a small koala colony. J-P remarked that they're actually quite ugly, despite their reputation. We also played with a family of kangaroos on the golf course in the national park. J-P chased them around the green.
We'll be quite sad to leave these people. They have redefined hospitality for me.
This morning we had coffee at the house of a man named Killer. He's an automechanic, and I was a bit too nervous to ask him how he got the name. After we left, I asked Wayne and he said his last name starts with "Kill" and so everyone just calls him "Killer." But then he said something to the effect that he had proved himself worthy of his nickname, and I left it at that.
We also visited the free range egg farm where Wayne and Iris get the incredible eggs that I've been scrambling each morning. And we visited the wholesale seafood place where Wayne gets his fish and those MASSIVE shrimp we ate two nights ago. Today he picked up some boarfish, which he ordered several days ago to ensure that we could eat it. Boarfish is a deepwater fish that's very hard to get, and Wayne claims that it's HANDS DOWN the most delicious fish ever. And it should be, at around $35 a pound!
This afternoon we all went to Yanchep National Park, where there's a small koala colony. J-P remarked that they're actually quite ugly, despite their reputation. We also played with a family of kangaroos on the golf course in the national park. J-P chased them around the green.
We'll be quite sad to leave these people. They have redefined hospitality for me.
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