The Plunge Down Under

Six Enthusiastic Tour Guides, Reprise

About three months after we moved to Melbourne, we welcomed our first set of North American visitors to our house.  I well remember the excitement as we prepared for the visit of my parents.  The joyful reunion at the airport was followed by the pride of showing them around, of introducing them to the things we had discovered in our adopted city. 

Today there is a similar buzz in our house as we prepare for our first set of Australian visitors.  The anticipation has been slowly building for weeks.  Menus have been planned that include our favorite American foods, beds are being made up, and we have completed a sightseeing list that is ambitious for the six days that we have to share with them.  Best of all, however, will be the pleasure of spending time together.  Facetime and skype are wonderful tools, and we are beyond grateful for them, but nothing compares to being in the same geographical location.  We will treasure these days, we will laugh, and no doubt we will cry when the time comes to say good-bye.

Welcome to Pittsburgh, Browns.  We can't wait to show you around.

 

Image at the top from wikitravel 

Resurfacing: A Taste of Home

Shortly after we moved to Melbourne, I remember a moment when R suggested that we purchase a membership at the newly opened Costco, the first one in Austalia.  "No," I told him.  "I want to shop like the locals, not like an American."  

All it took was one visit to change my mind.  One whiff of Costco's distinct smell, one look at the familiar displays, and I realized just how homesick I was. Walking the aisles was like a hug from home.   The layout made sense to me.  I knew where to find everything.  We left that day with a membership renewal, and I returned every couple of weeks for about two years.

I had a similar experience last week, only in reverse.  A friend invited me to accompany her on a trip to Pittsburgh's Strip District, a place that I hadn't visited for over ten years.  Our first stop was an Italian cafe and bakery.  The coffee and pastries were excellent and reminded me of the Italian bakery not far from our house in Melbourne.  Every place we stopped, from a fruit and veg shop to a Greek market, reminded me of the way I shopped while we lived overseas.  The best find of the day was a block of Australian cheddar cheese.  I have no doubt that I will be returning to this part of Pittsburgh frequently in the weeks and months ahead.

The following photos come from my iphone camera.

Cars parked on both sides of the street, drivers waiting to parallel park--I could have almost imagined that I was back in Malvern ... except for the black and gold merchandise on every corner.

 

Swimming with the Whale Sharks at the Ningaloo Reef

" Go! Go! Go! Now! Go!"  

With adrenaline surging through my veins, I obeyed orders and plunged into the cobalt blue waters of the Indian Ocean.  "Keep up, I must keep up," I thought.  Each ineffective stroke caused me to bemoan my awkward swimming style.  Desperate to reach our whale shark tour guide, I continued to swim blindly.  What I saw when I finally opened my eyes blew me away.

I was staring into the massive mouth of a gorgeous 5 meter long whale shark. My furious swimming had brought me within reach of its beautiful skin.  The placid eyes of the shark looked straight into mine, and I began to panic.  It wasn't the 300 rows of tiny teeth that bothered me.  Rather, it was the stern warnings from our boat crew before we jumped in to maintain a distance of at least two meters.

June Expat Blog Challenge: Change

Expat Blog Challenge for June

"Tell us one way in which you have changed."

The Downy Woodpecker, a frequent visitor at our place. The male has a bright spot of red on his neck. It was a female that visited us this morning.

I had a visit from a furry friend this morning.  She stopped by our backyard deck to say hello, and I was delighted at the chance to become reacquainted.  I marveled over her delicate black and white pattern of feathers, her dainty movements as she flitted from the railing to the floorboard and back again.  All too soon she flew away, but what had been a difficult morning was now a bit brighter and a bit happier.

A renewed appreciation for Pennsylvania's backyard birds is just one example of the ways that living overseas has changed me.  The challenge for expat bloggers provided by Cristin over at "In an Opal-Hearted Country" for the month of June is to discuss one way that the expat experience has brought about change in our lives.  I don't have something particularly profound to share in today's post. I have no doubt that we all have changed in significant ways, but in this transitional stage of muddling through each day as it comes, of struggling just to get the basics accomplished, it's hard for us to see the big picture. Watching the Downy Woodpecker make her way from our deck to the trees in our backyard, however, and making plans to photograph her sometime in the future, reminded me that moving to Australia brought the gift of photography into my life.

It's not just the birds that I notice now.  Getting behind the lens of a camera taught me the joy of slowing down and observing the beauty in everyday surroundings.  In fact, I think the best part of taking up photography is not the treasured library of 20,000 odd photos sitting on my hard drive.  They will no doubt give us much pleasure in the months and years to come, but even better in my mind has been the fact that taking those photos has caused me to look at the world differently.  Rather than rushing through every moment in order to get to the next event, I occasionally remember to stop, look and absorb whatever there is to be seen.

Resurfacing: The Trials of a 7 Year Old

"Mom, I don't feel right.  Can you check my forehead?"  

I called our youngest over to me, felt his forehead (it was neither too warm nor too cool), and gave him a hug.  He whispered into my ear, "I think I might have a disease."

I gave him a second squeeze.

"If you have a disease," I told him, "then it's a disease called homesickness."

Resurfacing: Four Week Update

Tomorrow will make full four weeks since we landed in Pittsburgh.  Melbourne is never far from our thoughts, and Saturday's mail brought it even closer to our with two envelopes postmarked Australia.  In many ways the two pieces of mail represent what we liked most and least about our adopted country.

The first enevelope I opened caught me unaware.  I have stopped dreading the official looking envelopes with the word "motor vehicle" written on the outside that arrived all too often in our Melbourne mailbox.  This particular one reached us at our Pittsburgh address all the way from Western Australia.  It was one last parting gift to us, a fine of $150 for driving 11 km (6.8 miles) over the posted speed limit.

Resurfacing: Second Impressions

 

It's another beautiful spring evening in Pittsburgh.  The birds have been singing mightily all day long.  This morning they nearly managed to cover the noise of the traffic from the nearby highway.  Tonight they are competing with the whir of distant lawn mowers.  The light coming through the window near me has mellowed into a beautiful golden hue, and for the moment I am content and at peace with the world.

An hour or so ago S and I went for an after dinner stroll.  We paused halfway down our hill to inhale the cool air from the nearby groves of trees.  No other place smells quite like this one, I told her.  It is a rich earthy smell that can only come from trees who have woken up after too many months of hard winter. I thought of the lemon-scented gums near our house in Melbourne.  They always seemed to me to be at their most pungent toward the end of summer rather than at the beginning.  The two smells, so different, have become part of our experiences now.  I love them both.