Archive for April, 2008
Travel perspective 2: chocolates and pedals
April 27, 2008Here we are in Belgium, and I forgot to mention chocolate. Yesterday I said a person cannot live on beer alone. I said you need cheese, too, which the Netherlands has in great varieties and impressive quality. But I forgot to mention chocolate.
Belgium is famous, of course, for its production of that cocoa-based product, and travelers shocked by exchange-rate inflated restaurant prices here and in the Netherlands (AU$35 for lunch, US$80 for dinner, per person, without wine?!) quickly learn to supplement their diets with chocolate as well as cheese.
Relative to restaurant meals, the luxurious brown, or sometimes white, stuff — said to have health benefits, to be a mood lifter, and even to be an aphrodisiac — is cheap here. You can, of course, pay high prices for it molded into various shapes including shells, small animals, and bare human breasts with prominent nipples. (Chocolate shop windows can be aphrodisiac.)
In Bruges’s tourist area, you can buy assorted chocolates elaborately gift-boxed in any one of 40 shops, but you can get the same good stuff in plain bars in grocery stores for much less. What a diet! So relatively frugal.
Fortunately, given our high-calorie intake, our main mode of getting around in the towns and cities here is walking hour after hour through the sight-laded streets. We’ve even rented bikes a couple of times.
Bicycles are everywhere and amazingly well provided for by the planners of infrastructure, especially in the Netherlands. We rode from a small town called Oss to a smaller town called Heesch on the country’s longest dedicated bike path. It’s marked with a symbol proclaiming bikes to be king.
Bike riders surely rule on Amsterdam’s downtown streets even when Read the rest of this entry »
An other-side-of-the-world perspective
April 26, 2008
Moving to Australia gave us a new perspective on our home country, the United States. Now Kristi and I are traveling for a bit in the Netherlands and Belgium following a work conference she had in Amsterdam and we’re getting a new perspective on Australia.
* Most noticeable of all is the fact that Australia is, relatively speaking, less pricey than we thought. We asked our friend from Amsterdam if anything is cheaper there than in Australia, where she now lives, and here answer was unequivocal: no.
Our experience verifies that with one exception: beer, very good beer of many varieties, costs less than a euro per bottle in stores and you surely can’t beat that in Brisbane.
* One cannot live on beer alone. But you can come pretty close if you add in cheese. The Netherlands has incredible cheeses.
* The Internet speeds I experience with my ADSL connection at home are put to shame by all the connections speeds we’ve experienced here. Gmail comes up fast! I watched a brief movie sent to me via email and there were no interruptions for more downloading. None. Amazing.
* Really old things in Australia tend to be trees, like Read the rest of this entry »
Comfort foods of home
April 16, 2008People everywhere, even those of us who enjoy travel and find ourselves able to adjust well to living in countries other than the one in which we were born, long for “the comforts of home.”
Being near family and friends is at the top of the list of what we miss. Knowing one’s way around and speaking the most-common language, is up there, too.
But sometimes what we expatriates miss is “comfort food” or, at least, food we’re accustomed to buying and eating.
Friends of ours from Amsterdam were missing “pindakaas” until they found a Dutch food store not far from where they live now in Brisbane. That Dutch word means “peanut cheese,” which is Read the rest of this entry »
Birds and bloodsuckers
April 13, 2008The best places for us to see birds and wild creatures during our hiking trips turns out to where we leave our car, in car parks where the hiking trails begin.On the lookout and with binoculars ready, we hike kilometer after kilometer along trails through eucalypts, in rainforests, and in open spaces, seeing little that hops, runs, slithers, or flies.Then, if we’re to see wildlife at all, we find it back where we left our car an hour or two or three earlier.
Maybe our next book will be entitled “Birds and Beasts of Aussie Car Parks.”
Girraween Park’s main parking area for Castle Rock, for example, was our richest venue for sightings during one day of our Easter Weekend hiking trip. In contented groups close to pavement, kangaroos and/or wallabies grazed contentedly so long as we didn’t get too close.
Bird life was easy to hear and sometimes in our line of sight, in part because of the large trees with open space beneath them where land had been cleared for cars.
One crow-like bird even let us get within six feet or so as he sat at eye-level among the limbs of a pine tree, staring back at us for several minutes. Looking closer, we saw that this bird was dark blue, not black. His yellow eyes let us, with the help of our bird book, identify him as a satin bowerbird.
While he is easy to mistake for a crow, the male satin bowerbird will never be confused with the female of his species. She’s decked out in fancy, decorative feathers that are mostly green, and we were lucky enough to see two of her kind, briefly, later.
On this trip, we did get to see more than 30 bird varieties, including a half dozen that were new to us. We also saw rabbits the size of cottontails (one at a time, on three occasions), skinks, and red ants more than an inch long.
The wildlife that got my attention most dramatically, however, was small, black, and as lively as an inch worm on a warm day.
We’d driven down to the Washpool National Park in New South Wales and hiked into the World Heritage area rain forest there. It is the wettest and most lush rainforest we’ve seen here and we enjoyed its narrow trails.
I was listening to the varied calls of a lyre bird (they’re much easier to hear than to spot with one’s eyes), when I noticed a small black worm on top of one of my fingers.
I flicked it off. Then I saw that it hadn’t left. A second flick didn’t dislodge it either. It was a leech. I had to pull it off.
Before the day was out Kristi and I had spotted Read the rest of this entry »
Finally: the Southern Cross
April 8, 2008A part of our Easter trip to the Granite Belt of southern Queensland was out of this world, literally.
We chose to stay at the Twinstar Guesthouse on the New England Highway in Ballandean because it advertises itself, accurately, as “a cozy B&B with stargazing facilities.”
This relatively inexpensive three-guest-room lodge near Girraween National Park is owned and run by a Japanese couple whose last name we’ve misplaced, Naomi and Eiji.
Eiji, whose name is pronounced much as the last name of the American writer James Agee (long “a” and then “gee” or “age-ee”), has been an amateur astronomer for much of his life and he loves sharing his extensive knowledge.
It was our bad luck to be Twinstar guests during full-moon nights with lots of rapidly-drifting clouds, but we did get some brief and rewarding looks through Eiji’s 46 cm reflecting telescope one evening.
Inside a backyard dome that revolves when Eiji pushes it along its circular track, the telescope collects, he told us, 4500 times more light than the unaided eye, so we were not disappointed.
Even in bright moonlight Eiji’s scope let us see the rings of Saturn; a beautiful cluster of stars known as “the jewel box;” Sirius, the brightest star in the sky, only (only?) 8.6 light years away; and Omega Centauri, which, Aiji told us, is a cluster of one million stars that hang out together about 16,000 light years away.
Best of all, perhaps, was Eiji’s authoritative identification Read the rest of this entry »
It’s about time
April 2, 2008This was supposed to be yesterday’s blog, but something more pressing came up. It would have been perfect for April Fool’s Day, a Y2K sort of story in 2008 … except that it’s all true.
Here is a paragraph from a report by Ryan Emery in “The Australian” for March 31: “Yesterday Western Australia returned to standard time, leaving NSW, the ACT, Victoria and South Australia keeping track with Tasmania … and Queensland and Northern Territory somewhere in the middle.”
That was, more or less, the good news. Before I get to the bad news, I need to offer my US readers a few translations and bits of fact. NSW means New South Wales and it is a state, as are Victoria, South Australia, Tasmania, and Western Australia. “The ACT” is the Australian Capitol Territory, where Canberra is located. “Northern Territory” is a federal territory that occupies most of the north end of Australia.
Now, with the geography lesson done (don’t feel bad, I needed it, too), let’s turn to time. Time in Australia.
Australia has Western, Central, and Eastern time zones. Parts of the Northern Territory are in each of the three.
In Tasmania, until this year, daylight savings time ended on the last Sunday in March, which put that island state south of Victoria out of sync with its neighbors.
So, this year, officials in New South Wales, the ACT, Victoria, South Australia and Tasmania agreed to a new plan — they’d all turn their clocks back one hour at 2 a.m. on Sunday, April 6. The only problem was that a lot of people and a lot of computer programs didn’t get the message about delaying the shift for one week.
They result was, in some parts of this country, a mini-Y2K.
Personal computers, some hand-held Blackberries, many cell phones, and even some automated telephone company correct-time services gave people Read the rest of this entry »
The King Kong of book sales makes a grab…
April 1, 2008
Angela Hoy, one of the two owners of the company that published my print-on-demand book, Moving to Australia: Two Texans Down Under, blew the whistle last week on a heavy-handed threat from a company about which I’d always had positive feelings, Amazon.com. Now their “goodwill” capital with me and lots of others is fading fast. This is not, unfortunately, an April Fools joke. It’s real, and here’s a short version of the story.
Print-on-demand (POD) publishers, and there are many of them, are being told by Amazon.com: We have our own POD company now. We’re going to sell on line only the POD books our company publishes or those of POD companies that pay us a hefty fee and meet other requirements. Take it or leave it.
Authors and would-be authors, who are among Amazon’s best customers, are getting the same message.
Kathy Hendershot-Hurd, my friend and advisor, correctly notes that this story is turning into a viral firestorm for Amazon.com. Of course, Amazon.com may be too dominant in their market to care. Might doesn’t make right, but it may, this time, let Amazon get away with a monopolistic dictate.
Or maybe not. At the end of this blog, you’ll see Kathy’s list of more than 60 bloggers who are speaking out and spreading the word, along with her invitation for the rest of us to help spread the virus. Maybe Amazon.com isn’t inoculated against this blatant power grab’s effects after all.
For the full report from Angela in Writer’sWeekly, click here. For Kathy’s views, go to her blog by clicking here. Here’s her invitation:
I’d like to do my part by listing the 60+ references to this story. Feel free Read the rest of this entry »