Typically Australian snapshots

No, not actual snapshots, like with a camera. Verbal snapshots.

- Sitting in the park at the foreshore, having a family picnic (which in Sian's family means mostly ducking projectile foodstuffs...anything small and round is fair game, which means we have a lot of salads with cherry tomatoes and grapes to ensure plenty of ammunition), when we saw a wedding go by. Everyone, including the bride and groom, were carrying their shoes and meandering around barefoot; everyone, including the bride and groom, were carrying stubbies; and everyone, including the bride and groom, had sunglasses on. The groom was also dragging an Esky. Which he put in the trunk of the Rolls limousine.

- I walked past an elementary school in the middle of the afternoon the other day, and saw all the kids bouncing off the equipment, screaming and yelling, all with their bright green Cancer Council hats on. Hats are mandatory for schoolchildren in Australia, because otherwise they are one giant melanoma before they even have a chance to vote. Which is also mandatory.

- Standing on a street corner, I heard the screech of tires as a Holden ute thundered up next to me, the open window blasting AC/DC. The driver was young, about eighteen, wearing sunglasses, and a t-shirt with the sleeves cut off. This is such a stereotype of a bogan hoon, you have no idea. I love that newspapers will have headlines with the word "hoon" in them, since it basically means "thug who drives around dangerously in a car" as well as "the act of a thug driving around dangerously in a car" (noun and verb, all purpose). So you could say that somewhat was a hoon, or that they were hooning around Perth. And a bogan, well...hmm. See if you can figure that one out. It took me a while to get the contextual gist of it.

- Speaking of bogans, Sian and I noted: bogans always have dogs with muscle-y names, like Macho and Mustang and Tractor and so on. So we voted that bogan dogs are now called "dogans". This may only be funny to Australians. And me.

Stationary Claire

Rottnest Island, tourist hellhole, except when you go on a weekday. Then it's still a tourist hellhole, but the beaches are emptier.

Not being actively traveling, but rather, settled down in a completely foreign country, is an interesting experience. I did some calculating the other day, and realized that except for my Big Trip when I was 19 (6 months traveling through Europe and Morocco) and 6 weeks in Australia in 2004, all of my trips have been only weeks long. As someone who views traveling as being, by its very nature, a longer-term endeavor, this makes me a big ol' fraud. All my pretentious "be free and vagabond around the world, drinking life to the lees and some other old-fashioned, high-faluting-sounding stuff that makes you think I'm smart" persona presentation (and alliteration) are actually based in very little fact.

I like to travel. I like to travel for long periods of time. I actually think that's the best way to travel. So why haven't I done that? Am I afraid of something (being lonely, getting lost, figuring out the money)?

What is there to be afraid of? Falling off a cliff while doing the YMCA dance.

And living somewhere is way different from traveling through there, although you can approximate living somewhere if you stay for three to four weeks. You can develop the favorite coffee shop where they recognize your order, the familiar stores where you buy familiar pants, the same place you leave your toothbrush every night.

The most important rhetorical question: what the hell is "Manchester"?

You can even approximate living somewhere with short bursts of long-term travel by developing lasting friendships, getting jobs and bank accounts, finding a romantic entanglement or some sort of lover. But then, when the month is over, you pick up and move on, and you have enough of a place's imprint to memorize a map of its city streets, but not enough to know where the best walk to take your dog is. You don't know what it smells like in fall, but you unpacked your bags and put the backpack in the closet for a while.

The top of this mailbox came off. They deliver mail there anyway.

Which one is better? I really don't know. Is it better to settle somewhere, or is just a taste of settling enough? Is it okay to confuse doing something with pretending to do something, and figure out the difference later? Or are you really conducting a mini-life in that month-long stay,with enough veracity behind it that you could really say you've lived there?

Is it more important to SAY you've lived somewhere than actually live there?

What's up there? Drop bears?

What's with all this freaking navel-gazing, anyway? I don't know, but it sure is pretentious. In order to make you forget about how omphaloskeptic I've been, why don't you go read about Lady Gaga instead?

Art is cool.

I went to Sculpture by the Sea at Cottesloe Beach. This is a sculpture festival where they plop down artwork by the side of the Indian Ocean and you can look at it or touch it or totally ignore it while you are sunbathing or perving on other sunbathers.

There is some cool art.

This is the seawall, and they put this huge rusted metal archway at the end of it. The lamp-post was already there.

The sign at the other end says "Please do not walk through sculpture."

Neat standing mirror tower

The swimmer was made out of layers of wood glued to sheets of glass all stacked together. The artist is there on the left, repairing a crack in the glass from a night-time bashing.

Creepy. I asked Jason, who took the picture, why he thought the man was screaming, and he said, "Because he's got another person coming out of him."

Steampunk horse. It had little swinging doors, and a ladder into its interior.

I want to know what they're looking at. Steampunk bathers.

What culture have you engaged in?

I'm writing my First Report for my Rotary scholarship, which mostly involves discussing what Rotary-related activities I've been involved with since I got here, and also how I have a) learned about Australian culture, and b) shared my culture with Australians. Unfortunately, they don't mean things like figuring out what "half a rabbit" means, which is too bad, although I suppose I could count that towards my degree. So here are some of the cultural things I've been involved with since the last time I posted:

• Went to the Perth Writers Festival. This was actually quite amazing; held on the UWA campus, it featured panel discussions with all sorts of authors, including American ones and, fabulously for me, Garth Nix, which made my geeky, YA-loving heart flutter. My notes for the session on landscape in literature and art, which I took on my cell phone, since I didn't have any paper, say: "the inutility of hierarchy...the intimacy of landscape" and "i-thou relationships with land...congruence/consistency." I was quite struck by that talk, actually, and stood up at the end to ask a question about why landscape seems to act as a narrative character more often in Australian media than in American ones, which caused several people to come up to me afterwards and question ME. I also really enjoyed what the panelists said about, if you could express landscape perfectly in words, it would have been in words to start with, which is what I always tell my students about dancing.
  
• Went on a Rotary river cruise. I mostly, unsurprisingly for me, spent my time talking to the hired help, who told me about how hungover they were. One did, anyway. the other one wanted all my notes on Laos.
• Had my first week of school. It was largely uneventful, except for talking about penises in class, for credit.
• This Monday, we get to watch penises.
• I dressed up hilariously to go see Alice in Wonderland.
  I never dress up to go to movies. Cat was sort of the March Hare. I, as housemate Jason pointed out, resembled a Fruit Tingle.
• I read poetry at an open mic night. It was my poetry (sharing culture), and I listened to a poem about RAIN in Australia going down the DRAIN (receiving, unfortunately, someone else's culture.

Culture has been spread. You can tell cause I used the passive voice.