Food

We are loving the food. There is no shortage of local, organic produce or free range chickens and eggs. Fish can be bought fresh off the boat every week at the market. The shrimps are huge. I am spoiled because in addition to excellent Australian food, all of my favorite US and UK brands are here. WOOHOO. Yes, I can get a Cadbury Flake and a bag of Doritos at the same store which I can see from my apartment. It's quite dangerous.

You've got to watch out in restaurants. They will sneak beets and/or pumpkin onto or into a lot of things. I like beets and pumpkin, but I wouldn't want them on my burger.

We went to a regional flavors festival today at the South Bank and sampled lots of the local specialties. Bought some lime and ruby grapefruit cordial (squash or saft) made locally. There were live chickens and a pig there as well, and an experimental farmer who spoke about his garden where he grows enough food for one adult to feed himself all year on 100 square meters of land. Here's a glimpse of the festival:

There are farmer's and crafts markets at South Bank most weekends, and with the artificial lagoon at Streets Beach I think we'll be spending a lot of time here:

Critters

Even though we are a quick walk from the city, it sounds like a tropical rain forest in the morning. I am useless at identifying bird calls, but they are loud and they are plentiful. I am also useless at taking photos of the critters. They move quite quickly. So, I'm linking to the most common animals we see around here:
Australian white ibis - they are not shy at all and I fear for my noodles when I picnic in the park.
Australian Brush-turkey - looks like a turkey because it is a turkey.
Cormorant
There are also lots of different kinds of herons, and our favorites: the lorikeets. A couple of days ago, two of these perched on the railing of our veranda! We are trying to figure out how we can attract them without attracting any of these:
Flying foxes (aka BATS) - we have seen a few at night, but I think bats are cool, so for now it's all OK. However, they are struggling with a virus that the bats spreading to horses and so far one dog in another suburb of Brisbane. Seems smart to avoid areas with too many of them!
Geckos - we had one visit us on our verandah, and yes I do understand that they are helpful critters but I still don't want one in my house, at least not for now. Also, ours was just light brown, not colorful like this one.
Possums - these guys are cute and playful, but they're fairly noisy and I suspect they can play havoc with a bag of garbage. We spotted one walking absolutely in sync with the kids, on a tin roof covering the walkway where they were walking completely unaware of his presence.

We have only seen one proper spider, but the people here talk about spiders and snakes incessantly. Not a single one of them has been bitten by either.

The Queensland Museum has an excellent overview of all the dangerous critters in the state. I was a bit worried to see these:

 and much more disconcerted to read about a cockroach that weighs more than 2 mice!

I also took a trip to the University of Queensland, which has a beautiful campus. There were quite a few critters there as well (mostly ducks), but I also found these trees:

Just to give you a nice close-up of those trunks (any caption suggestions?):

Shooting in Oslo

We are sitting here in shock. I woke up today with three emails linking to the attacks in Oslo. It is completely unreal, and I feel for the parents of those poor children. They were most likely some of the best that Norway had to offer. An attack like this attempts to destroy everything good in society, but I believe that Norway has a solid enough foundation in freedom that it will not be undermined. I hope they have the right guy and I hope they change the law in order to punish him appropriately.

From here, I have found the New York Times to be the best source so far, although the Australian news agency is not doing a bad job either:
http://www.news.com.au/world/twin-attacks-gunman-opens-fire-on-youth-camp-car-bomb-explodes-at-pms-office/story-e6frfkz9-1226100157179

Orientation at QUT

I was lucky enough to be able to tag along for exchange student orientation at QUT yesterday. It's actually the first time I've been to another university's orientation, and it was great to see things from a different perspective. The Norwegian contingent was by far the largest, with 55 students who were obviously happy to be in Brisbane.

The ones waving their hands in the air are Norwegian. They were also shouting WOOHOO :).

The police made sure they all knew what a breathalizer was.

Everyone with a birthday got a cupcake. I thought that was a nice touch. The cupcakes were  WICKED tasty.

The highlight was definitely the performance by the police who demonstrated their various torture instruments (gun, tazer, baton) and got the point across that students should do as the police said or invariably experience pain. Not sure that would work as well in Norway where the point would be they should do as the police said or they may risk a night in a single bedroom with shower and two free meals. Tonight I am even luckier and get to take a river cruise with the QUT International staff and all of the new students.

Spent most of today so far trying to update the address on my CV on my new Windows computer which will not let me download Open Office, use my scanner or print to .pdf. WordPad has screwed up the alignment and formatting...and it keeps beeping at me. (This is the type of blogging the husband approves of, by the way.) I absolutely refuse to pay for Word when I could have Office for free. I am soon giving up on Windows and installing Linux, and then I will be on track again.

I forgot to mention that the water in this building smells like pool, so having been spoiled by the Norwegian water for 15 years, we have been buying water in bottles and lugging them back from the shop. This all changed Monday when we invested in a Brita water purifier. I can highly recommend them. The water tastes great now (which is to say it doesn't taste at all, least of all like pool).

One of my big concerns about living here without a car was grocery shopping, but as we observed the day we did rent a car, the car parks are so big and our supermarket so close that it is actually further to walk from the shop to the parking spot in most shopping centres than from our shop to our apartment. But, if we did get a car it would definitely have to be one like this:

I believe they call it a "ute" as in utility vehicle.

The liquor store is also dangerously close and open all kinds of hours that a Delawarean living in Norway is not used to, but so far we have been very good. Just buying wine on a Sunday for the novelty of it all. Also, there is a cool little DVD vending machine where you can pay by credit card and get at DVD at any time of day or night. You can return it to any similar vending maching 24 hours later. Now, why do we not have these in Norway? It's all Soegne would need since the video store shut down.

Well, those are some little thoughts from me for today which I cannot see have infringed significantly on anyone's privacy (well, maybe except for the ute owner's and the birthday girl). I will now have to Google "smart casual" to choose an appropriate outfit for the river cruise.

We're here

It's our tenth day in Brisbane, and I'm seeing the limits of the blogging due to some imposed restrictions due to privacy issues in this household...I've got plenty of photos out on Picasa, and if you haven't received them but would like to please send me an email.

I am able to give you a little taste of Australia with some koala and kangaroo photos. (They seem not to have privacy issues.)

This one here is a wombat, and I just love the word wombat.

All is well here. We are settling in nicely. We're dining al fresco (largely due to a lack of indoor furniture, but also because we enjoy it). It's cool in the mornings and evenings, but nice and hot midday. similar to a Norwegian summer. The Australians are as friendly as everyone says they are, and the kids are getting along well making friends at school. The apartment looks just like it did on the web.

We've briefly checked out Surfer's Paradise (aptly named), the Lone Pine Koala Sanctuary (above), the Royal Botanical Gardens, both campuses of QUT, and the neighborhood (which will remain unnamed here because of blog stalkers, of course). It's quieter than we expected and very student-oriented, both pleasant surprises. The cool little cafe just across the street got a nice write-up in the paper this weekend. They had an Irish band playing live music last week. The big city is just a half hour walk away, or 5 minutes by bus. It is strange to think that we are half-way around the world. It really doesn't feel that way yet!