Okay, so it's been a wee while between posts. We have been kinda busy though…
So a quick précis of the past few months is probably in order, yeah? Well here we go then, and pay attention: there'll be a quiz at the end.
1) We visited Sydney and Canberra on our way to Tassie. It was my maternal grandfather's 90th birthday, and we had a lovely weekend up in Leura catching up with family. On the Monday we hired a car for a flying visit to Canberra so Iola could meet her paternal grandparents, as well as having afternoon tea with the Ugandan Ambassador.
Tuesday we spent with Tash's brother Marcus, and started the process of getting Iola hooked on snorkelling and scuba diving by taking her to the aquarium at Darling Harbour. She was very taken with the enormous tank with reef fish in it, and spent ages tracking angelfish, damselfish, batfish etc.
2) I did the CELTA course down in Tassie. Everyone I know who's done the course warned me that it would be intense, and they weren't kidding. I don't think you could describe any particular aspect of the course as being overly challenging from an academic point of view, but they manage to pack an awful lot of material into a four-week course. Plus, everything you learn about teaching is expected to be put into practice pretty much straight away during the prac teaching sessions in the afternoons (teaching real live students in a real live classroom from day one of the course. Scary, but invaluable experience).
The hardest part of the course wasn't so much the course itself, but the fact that it chewed up so much of my time and energy that there was bugger all left over for Tash and Iola. It was up by dawn everyday, get stuck into some lesson planning/materials development, head into school before the girls were awake, school all day, then home for dinner and a bit more school work before bed. At least it gave Tash a chance to catch up with her Tassie crew and play babies with Myf (Myf and Jake had a little girl-Nieko-the week we arrived).
I did get a chance to see a bit of the countryside before the course started. Peter (Tash's dad) took me for a walk up Pine Valley. The plan was to head up to the Labyrinth and the Acropolis, but the weather closed in on us and we decided that (a) discretion was the better part of valour, and (b) we weren't really in the mood to spend a couple of days slogging through slushy snow and mud when we probably wouldn't be able to see anything anyway, so we turned back after spending a night at Pine Valley Hut.
We might not have got to were we were going, but we still saw some beautiful country, and I got snowed on for the first time in years, which was great fun and made me feel quite nostalgic! I've never really experienced that sort of temperate rain forest before, and it was quite odd seeing pandanus plants, which I associate with the tropics, covered in lichens and weighed down by snow. There was also lots of the sort of country that makes me want to dump my pack, build myself a hut, and just relax for a month or six. Beautiful little winding and ox-bowed creeks with overhanging moss-covered banks making their way through forests of moss-covered trees, studded with moss-covered tree stumps and moss-covered boulders. I'm a bit of a sucker for moss.
Speaking of which, on the track heading up Pine Valley (which branches off from the main Cradle Mountain-Lake St Clair trail—AKA the Overland Track) I saw my first ever proper-style sphagnum moss bogs. As I already pointed out, I don't mind contemplating a bit of moss from time to time, and the sphagnum bogs formed a gorgeously delicate little community, best appreciated with your head near the ground at moss level. They reminded me a little bit of diving on certain kinds of reefs, in that what can give the appearance of bland homogeneity at a distance can reveal itself as complex, intricate and aesthetically delightful at a macro scale.
Next time I go to Tassie I'll have to get Jenny to teach me a little about sphagnum bogs. Jenny and Russell are old friends of Tash's parents, and Jenny is something of a world authority on the cheeky little bryophyte (apologies if that's the incorrect terminology these days—my biology's a bit rusty and I don't have any reference works here) and regularly jets off to remote parts of the world to get to know it even better.
Jenny and Russell (an engineer with a delightfully dry sense of humour and a bit of a fetish for tractors) have a little farm at Sandfly with a cottage garden that made Tash nigh to weep with jealousy, ducks, chooks, cows and a hay paddock that did make Tash weep. And sneeze. And snuffle. And itch. Hay fever is a serious disease, people, and I'm here to tell you that laughing at people who suffer from it is the first step on a very short road to a world of pain. The farm makes them about fifty per cent self-sufficient, and the tentative plan is for Russell to take early retirement and push that figure closer to the eighty mark.
When we visited them there we had the nicest meal I've had in ages. Freshly butchered duck cooked to perfection (I forget how it was prepared—I love good food, but I'm not enough of a gourmand to be able to describe it properly afterwards), home-grown vegetables and fruits, all washed down with some lovely wines, including, for dessert, a botrytis semillion. Ahhh, the Noble Rot! Not what you'd call a quaffing wine (which I guess is a negative for a lot of my friends!), but damn it makes for a nice treat every now and then.
On weekends I took a break (mostly) from study, and we got to catch up with a lot of Tash's old friends, and some of mine who seem to have the knack of popping up in the weirdest places (nods to you here, Nina—seems there isn't a pub in Australia I can walk into without you popping up and going 'Hey! Darwin crew! So are we going to get trashed or what?). Some of Tash's friends I knew and liked already, others I knew only by reputation.
Years of listening to Tash, Jorji and anyone else from Tassie who was passing through Darwin gossip about their friends meant that I'd already soaked up a fair bit of biographical detail about most of the people I was meeting for the first time, and Tash had to point out to me that it kind of weirded people out when, upon meeting, I'd say something like 'Oh! So you're X. You live out at Y, yeah? And you're Z's dad? How is Z, anyway? I heard she was having a few problems with allergies.'
You get the picture. My apologies to any of those people reading this—I didn't mean to come across as some sort of trans-continental stalker, I was just stoked to put some faces to names that had become so familiar by proxy.
Anyway. I should stop rambling on about Tasmania, much as I love the place. This is supposed to be an update on what we're doing in Surabaya, and nearly 1500 words in I'm still in Tasmania!
To summarise the summary:
We got to see lots of good people (Cate, Myf, Jake etc etc etc—I can see why Tash has such a sense of loyalty to her Tassie friends; they're a really good crew of people).
Tash's extended family and network of old family friends got to meet Iola.
Iola rolled over-both ways-for the first time.
I rode down Mt Wellington.
I got a horrendous flu and only survived the middle two weeks of my course (which I don't remember very well) because Tash kept me supplied with cold and flu tablets (in the process managing to persuade the girl at the chemist that she was running the smallest speed lab in the world. As an aside: this really gave me the shits. Sure, if someone walks in and says 'Give me forty packets of whatever you've got with pseudo-ephedrine in it.', then you're going to be a trifle suss on the transaction. But if someone comes in and says their boyfriend's really sick, and you sell them a pack of cold and flu tablets that lasts for four days, and you come in four days later for another pack, does that justify searching data-bases of registered drug offenders and giving Tash a lecture on abusing non-prescription medications?).
I'm rambling again. Sorry.
3) We spent a few days in Melbourne catching up with Iola's Aunty Ness on the way back to Darwin, which was a lot of fun. We also caught up with Dirk and Jane. After a couple of nights with Ness, we lushed it up in a serviced apartment on Collins St. We took Iola to the zoo, which I think she enjoyed, although she slept through most of it. We also took her to the Victorian art gallery, where she displayed a marked preference for figurative work and a distinct distaste for abstract expressionism.
4) Back to Darwin, and back to work… I'm going to miss working with Don and the lads. I learnt a hell of a lot in the eighteen plus months I spent working there, and Don was a lot of fun to work for.
The plan was to stay in Darwin until late February, or preferably into March, while we slowly got the house sorted and ready to rent out and looked around for good ESL teaching work. Things didn't quite work out that way, as I was offered a position in Surabaya starting mid-January. This was the cue for several weeks of frantic activity, finishing off renovation projects, getting rid of surplus material possessions, and…
5) Getting married!
To be honest, this wasn't really that big a deal for us. As far as we were concerned, we were pretty much already married anyway. Unfortunately, when it comes to obtaining visas, the Indonesian government isn't quite so relaxed about the formalities of commitment, and like to see an actual marriage certificate, so we decided to take the plunge.
We had a bit of a party/lawn sale the week before the wedding for all our friends (at least, those who could make it on 24 hours notice!), and then a quiet registry office ceremony the following Friday. Tash's parents flew up for the occasion, and Harry and Lisa-Marie came along as our witnesses. I think the celebrant was particularly impressed by our rings. Mine was made from an old spoon, and Tash's was a big red thing packed with fake rubies that I'd bought for three dollars at the corner shop.
As usual, we managed to time things beautifully, and managed to get married while Darwin was on a cyclone warning. After the ceremony, everyone raced home to batten down the hatches before heading over to my folks place for dinner. In true Darwin style, no one was going to let a petty little thing like a cyclone get in the way of a good piss-up, and we had a great evening with our parents, Lisa-Marie and Paul, Harry and Lou, Don and Belinda, and Basil and Marg.
We toddled off home to bed, quietly confident that the cyclone would miss us by several hundred kilometres, and woke up the next morning to find that a tree had fallen on the house. Fortunately there wasn't much damage, and the insurance guys got everything sorted pretty quickly.
Tash's parents decided to stay a few extra days and help out, which was fantastic. I don't think there's any way we could have got the house sorted in time without the help of our respective parents.
Oh yeah, and somewhere in there amidst all the chaos, Iola had her first Christmas! She actually ended up with quite a few very nice pressies, despite my best efforts to persuade everyone that she wouldn't remember anything about her first Christmas, and it would be much cheaper and easier just to get a picture of her sitting under the tree and photoshop in a bunch of images from a toy catalogue.
6) We moved to Surabaya!
Well, initially it was just me—Tash stayed on for two weeks to finish organising everything and for Iola to get her six month shots while I headed off into the wild blue yonder to blaze a trail and hopefully find a house for us before she arrived.
I arrived in Surabaya in one piece on a muggy Friday morning after a pretty cruisy transition through Denpasar, complete with fifteen kilos of extra baggage (all Iola's!) that I managed to get through the system without having to pay any extra (Jetstar could take a few pointers on customer service from Garuda…), and was whisked away by the English First driver to one of the houses EF rents for teachers to share.
First priority was to explore the city by cabbing it to somewhere central then getting myself good and lost. The alleged CBD (Surabaya seems a little like Canberra, although not as beige, in that while it has a purported centre, it is littered with super-malls and commercial centres. We technically live in the outer suburbs to the South-West, but we're five to ten minutes in any direction from retail/commercial centres twice the size of Darwin's CBD) was easy to navigate, being littered with high-rise hotels with their names blazoned across the top floor, most of which were conveniently marked on my map.
I found lots of interesting things that day. I toured the Russian sub that was instrumental in the Indonesian struggle for independence in 1945, wandered along Jalan Kayun (sellers of plants and flowers), ate some wicked nasi campur for about fifty cents, and slowly relearned the skill of crossing four lanes of cars, trucks, motorbikes, becaks (bicycle rickshaws), bicycles, kaki lima ('five legs'—mobile cafes in miniature, usually one or two dishes only), delivery trikes etc etc in a country where pedestrian crossings are symbolic at best: the trick, which takes a bit of a leap of faith, is to just walk slowly across the road waving your hand as if patting the air beside you. In Australia, this would leave you smeared over twenty meters of asphalt; here it seems to work surprisingly well.
Most of the time.
I must admit, now that Iola's here I feel a little less confident crossing the busier roads, and tend to maintain a keen awareness of the whereabouts of any available pedestrian overpasses.
The centre of Surabaya seems to be laid out along fairly traditional lines—a structure that cities in Australia have mostly moved away from—in that different industries, services and products tend to be clustered into distinct zones (sound application of access economics, eh Dad?). Thus there's a street of shoes, a street of furniture, a street of bathroom fixtures, and so on. I checked out a few of these, then hit the mega-malls.
The first one I went to was TP Plaza, which claims to be the biggest mall in South-East Asia (the new biggest mall is being built at the end of our street!). I believe them. Floor after floor and wing after wing of high-end consumer goodies (with high-end prices to match) ranging from exercise equipment to haute couture. I didn't last long in TP before I had to run away.
It's a typically SE Asian city, though, in that it's a mosaic of old and new, rich and poor, traditional and cutting edge. Walk out of TP, turn two corners, and you're in a traditional fruit and veg market with goats, chooks and kids running around in the dirt—you could do your week's shopping here for less than the price of a latte and muffin in TP!
On the Sunday of my first weekend I was invited to a Martini Brunch at the Shangri La, a lush, 5 star hotel just around the corner from where we're living, to farewell Ben and Ide (two teachers returning to the UK) and welcome me and Hugo (a Canadian teacher who arrived at the same time as me).
This was fun, but definitely not something you'd want to do everyday.
The Martini Brunch costs about fifteen dollars. For this you get a buffet of luscious anti-pasto, a main course of your choice, a delectable desert buffet, and, as the name suggests, all the martinis you can drink (they have a variety for each letter of the alphabet!). Have you booked your ticket yet, Lisa-Marie?
By the end of lunch people were ordering their martinis two or three at a time, which meant that it seemed eminently logical to round things off with a couple of bottles of tequila at Ben, Ide and Ajay's house. Not the most sensible thing to do the day before you start a new job, but it was great to meet some of the people I would be working with on a social level first. Good crew of people, too.
The first week was a bit of a blur of orientation—going through the different course types at EF, resources, assessment and so on—and classroom observations. Meanwhile, I was trying to find us a house. In the end I got lucky. The house next door to John (the Director of Studies at Bukit Mas, the school where I teach) was vacant, and pretty much exactly what we were looking for. Three bedrooms, two bathrooms, a largish living area, a little garden out the front and a courtyard out the back. It was a little more expensive than the ideal, but this was more than compensated for by the location. It's a five-minute cycle to school for me, and a five minute walk to anything Tash could need during the day (from large supermarkets to cinemas to Japanese restaurants to custom furniture makers!).
The next week also went by quickly. It was my first week of proper teaching, which I really enjoyed, juggled with meetings with the landlord and lawyers to sort out the lease on the new house. Finally Friday night arrived, when Tash and Iola would be arriving from Oz!
They flew to Denpasar in the morning, and spent the day there catching up with Jorji, Alex, Jahva and Zirrian. I had to teach until 9pm, but Tash couldn't get on the late flight from Denpasar, so in the end I arranged for the school's driver to pick them up from the airport and take them back to the house where I'd been staying.
It was great seeing the girls again. Only two weeks, and Iola seemed to have grown so much! I was a little bit embarrassed though. A few days before they arrived I'd been whining like a little girl to Muji (the maid at the house I'd been staying in) about how much I was missing Tash and Iola. Turns out Muji's got a little boy, but he's four hours drive away back at the village she comes from, and she gets to see him once a month or so if she's lucky.
We moved into our new (rather empty looking) house the next afternoon, and started the process of getting to know Surabaya and turning the house into a home (is that really cheesy? I've copped a dose of a nasty flu that's been doing the rounds at work, and it's making me a bit tired and emotional. I just re-read that line and thought 'Awwwww. Making the house into a home,' and durn nearly started bawling).
Maybe I should leave it here until I get over the flu and then start doing proper-style updates—weekly, or even more frequently. The trouble with only updating this blog every few months is that by the time I get close to the current date I'm bored with talking about myself and start skipping over all the good bits.
Selamat Jalan, then, and I'll follow up in a few days with an entry dedicated exclusively to the latest carryings on of the cutest little bule princess in Jawa Timur…
ps I'm posting this using this dodgy post-by-email thingy. Hopefully I'll be able to edit it and add some pics once it's up
