Life Around Adelaide

Ok, so my eyes are getting a little droopy reading papers, and since Dave just uploaded some new pictures of Adelaide, I am giving myself permission to write a blog about some of our activities around Adelaide.

We are living in the Adelaide Hills, in Hawthorndene to be exact. It’s an excellent location, especially right now because the Hills are definitely several degrees cooler than down in the city. Although we’ve still managed to avoid the experience of a 40+ degree C day, we’ve still had a few hot days, and we always notice the temperature difference when we get back home after being in the city. We’ve also been cooling off by swimming—Dave found an excellent pool. It’s outdoors and is 50 meters long. We’ve been going in the middle of the day when it’s hottest and least busy. The water is great, the chlorine seems to be at a much lower concentration than in most pools in the US, and it’s really nice to be swimming again.

The pool is right next to the Goodwood train station, which is very convenient for us, since we ride the Belair line to/from our station and the city. The Goodwood station is definitely the most colorful of all the train stations, and has a sign up on one of the posts that says the Church of Scientology has adopted the train station, and that all of the quotes are by L. Ron Hubbard. We’re a bit confused, because the train station is painted with cartoon kids and messages telling people not to do drugs. Hmmm…

We live about a 43 second walk away from four tennis courts, and so we decided to get some tennis rackets. I’d like to say that we invested in our rackets, but they’re about as cheap as you can get here, so it’s hard to really consider them an investment. It’s been great to play, though, and we’re already getting better, which actually isn’t saying too much. However, it seems like the rest of Blackwood (the local neighborhood) is also trying to get better at tennis as well, as the courts are almost always in use. Perhaps it’s a side effect of the Australian Open just having been on—everyone’s sure that with just a little more practice he or she can be the next Roger Federer or Justine Henin. Speaking of the Australian Open, it was fun to watch it live since we’re in the same time zone. Although I was sad that Henin and Murray both lost, we really got to see some excellent tennis.

The Central Market is definitely our favorite place for food—both for produce and for eating out. It’s probably the cheapest place in town—you can get meals for under $10, which is definitely as cheap as it gets here, and they have bagels! Most of the produce seems to be grown in Australia—a lot of it in South Australia for that matter. I’ve actually been thinking a lot about that since it certainly takes water to grow all of that food. I start to wonder about which has the lower environmental impact—taking water out of the River Murray in order to grow food locally, or growing food in wetter areas and transporting it longer distances. Hmmm…. I guess my job is to figure out how to be efficient with water so that there’s enough water in the Murray and for irrigation. And, I hope there are lots of people out there working on developing non-CO2 emitting transportation methods, so that soon, my question will no longer be pertinent.

We’ve also been watching some of the morning and afternoon news shows on television. The news is not really all that exciting, but it is a bit of a cultural experience to watch some of these shows. For instance, we learned that AC/DC is from Australia, and that they fondly refer to them here as Acca Dacca. They really like to put ‘acca’ onto the end of words. For instance, McDonalds = Maccas; anyone with a last name that begins with Mc is called Macca (I think I remember that Paul McCartney was also called Macca in England). Chris McCormack, the Hawaii Ironman-winning triathlete, is widely known as Macca to devotees of that sport. And, now we’ve learned about Acca Dacca, which has to be my favorite.

The other semi-mystery that we’ve just had explained to us today is the coffee. You can get a short black, long black, cappuccino, baby cino, flat white, great white… No just kidding, no great whites. But, lots of other mysterious drinks. We learned today that short blacks are espressos. Long blacks are espressos with hot water (sort of like an Americano, I think, though less water.) Flat whites are sort of like lattes, but with no foam. Lattes have a little more milk than cappuccinos, and a little less foam. Cappuccinos always come with chocolate sprinkled on the top, and so they are my favorite. Even Dave tried one and liked it (!) All of them, however, generally come in much smaller sizes than in the US. One of the cleverest ads I’ve ever seen was a picture of a bottle of Coca-Cola, with the slogan, “The original long black.”

Oh, and one last thing. The backyard birds here are awesome. They’re so colorful and talkative. Just excellent. There are magpies, sulphur-crested cockatoos, galahs, rainbow lorikeets, rosellas…and this is just around the neighborhood. Imagine if the sparrows and finches and jays that fly around outside your window were really, really brightly colored. We’re looking forward to getting a little further afield to see even more birds while we’re here….

Well, hopefully that gives a little more insight into what our daily life is looking like at the moment. And, for those of you who read the end of the last blog, we did recover my underwear from the vacuum. But, all of my clothes that were in that load still have little hairs on them, which are surprisingly pokey. Dave says if I just wear them, the hairs will eventually go away. I sure hope so!