question and update

First, I wondered if Mike or Margaret could explain this whole thing to me about Waynedale saying we cheated and that they should have the WCAL title and what all they're saying about Teague and Hershey in the paper. I didn't quite understand what happened.

Second, at Carrie's request, I put my email update here on our blog so you can make "appropriately rude comments".


Hello again!
I’ve been keeping a journal and doing my best to keep it updated (which isn’t that great) but it’s been piling up for the past week or so, so prepare for a long e-mail! Here’s what I’ve been up to:
First of all, I’ve made a short list of words that I hear or use fairly often here. I put their meanings a little ways below, so you can try and guess what they mean if you want.
1. Cuppa
2. Good onya
3. G’day
4. Bogan
5. Esky
6. Muck Around
7. How you going?
8. No Worries
9. Petrol
10. Have a sleep
11. Sauce
12. Arvo
13. Training
14. Gridiron
15. Portaloo
16. Uni

Answers:
1. Cup of tea or coffee. Business people will normally have a morning and afternoon tea break, while blue collar or families will have neither or only the morning tea. Almost all churches have a morning tea after service. They invite everyone to “Come have a cuppa.”
2. Go for it!
3. Hello, good day.
4. Hick. I quickly discovered this word when describing Ohio to some Ozzies.
5. Cooler. The thing you put stuff in for a picnic to keep it cold.
6. Horse around.
7. How are you doing? I had a hard time with this one at first. They’d ask me How’d I go? And I’d think for a minute and say that I took the bus or something like that.
8. No problem/ It’s okay. They say this a lot.
9. Gasoline. They go to petrol stations. Which, btw, I may have said earlier that their petrol prices were very low, but then I found out that they buy by the liter. One liter here is at about $1.20 right now. 4 liters is about 1 gallon, so you’re looking at approximately $4.80 a gallon!
10. Take a nap.
11. Ketchup.
12. Afternoon.
13. Practice. Leroy starts practice for rugby tomorrow, but they call it training.
14. American football. We really are pansy puffy marshmallows compared to the sports they play here!
15. Porta-potty
16. University. If you go to college, you go to uni. College means something different here.
Also I’ve had about 87 people try to explain all the different rugby leagues and rules they have here. I watched a bit of one with Paul (my homestay Dad). He’s from New Zealand, and the one he was watching was Rugby Union, which isn’t quite so popular in Australia, but is in New Zealand. It was a combination of soccer, gridiron, and a couple other things. I personally think it’s much better than gridiron, as play still continues once a man is tackled. Other team members try to fight their way into the pile and fish the ball out and pass it and continue, whereas with gridiron, they stand around and debate for a while on a play, the play takes about 3 seconds, and then they stand around for a while to determine what in heck just happened and then decide on another 3 second play.
Okay, so now I’ll tell you what I’ve been up to. I’m not sure where I last left off, but I’m basically just copying and pasting bits from my journal, so it’s not the greatest organization.
I never expected to be learning about Asian culture living in Australia, but I am! Much like there is a lot of Spanish culture around the US because of our proximity geographically to Mexico and South America, Australia is probably closest to Asia, and therefore has a lot of Asian influences. The 5 Asian guys I’m living with in my homestay so far have been the best part of being here! They’re like my big brothers, and are so much fun to hang out with and learn about their cultures.
Not that you’ll remember their names, but Chao is from Taiwan, Ricky from Indonesia, Kazuki from Japan, and I’m not sure where Mon and Aroot are from. Ricky is just starting at uni, Aroot is still in grammar school, and the other three are well into their masters degrees. They all have different personalities. I talk to Chao and Ricky the most. Kazuki is a professional tennis trainer in Japan. I go to church with Ricky, and Chao and I seem to have quite a bit in common, so we enjoy discussing things and I always ask a lot of questions about living in Taiwan. I hadn’t realized this, but he says the U.S is the only thing protecting his country from being overtaken by China. He’s about to finish his degree here and wants to go to Harvard for another masters, so he’s been asking me advice while working on his application there (Like I’m a really big help or anything!).
Just for an example of what it’s like here at home: On Thursday I went out and bought a bike from a store similar to Wal-Mart. It comes in a box. I brought it home, and when Chao got home I said “Guess what! You get to help me put together a bike!” And he immediately sets his stuff down and wants to get to work on it. We go outside and start looking at directions and just having a good time working on it together. And when I say together, I mean that he worked on it while I occasionally read stuff out loud from the directions and watched him. Then we discovered we needed Allen keys, which Kazuki had. So Ricky and Kazuki got home a bit later and they came to the rescue with Allen Keys and the three of them start working on the bike together. Every time Ricky would touch the bike Chao would yell that he’s breaking it and he owes me $100. It may not sound so hilarious when you’re just reading it here, but it’s funnier because of their accents and sometimes broken English. I can just hear Chao in my head. “RICKEEEE! You break it! Hundred dollar.” The three guys had it put together within 45 minutes. Leroy (the 12yr. old) wanted to help too, and he came and tightened some screws and then rode it around for me because I wasn’t sure if their handy work was trustworthy. J It was great. It was at that point I just really started to like these guys. They treat me really well.
Anyway, another really nice thing Chao did was to take me and another one of his friends into Sydney this past Friday. Ricky and his friend Dewi (Day-Wee) had to go to their Indonesian Embassy and do some stuff, and Chao wanted to show around his Taiwanese friend Shalbie. Chao has a car, so he took us all in! I decided to forget all the campus tours and boring stuff I was supposed to do. So at 7:30am, we left. Even though it only takes 1 hour to get to the city, it takes another hour to maneuver into it. There is only one road leading into it, the Pacific Highway. This is the way it is in almost all Australian cities. There’s nothing but outback, so they don’t build a lot of roads.
The 5 of us walked around a bit before Ricky and Dewi had to go to the embassy. I’ll tell you about the restaurant we went to in a minute. We did a lot of walking. We bought drinks as Starbucks, took tons of pictures everywhere, and slowly made our way towards the Opera House. We rode the tram, looked in shops. I’ve found that when you go to any very large city in any country, they become fairly similar. They’re like international space stations. There’s a little bit of culture from many countries situated all over the place. There was a little strip of Chinatown there (that’s where we ate.) The difference between Sydney and NYC is the actual building structures. NYC has darker buildings and Times Square looks almost like a cartoon. It’s kind of artificial. Sydney has older more sophisticated or regal buildings. There was a huge shopping center that was a very very old building made into shops. I’m not sure what it was used for originally, but the inside looked like a huge train station like from Harry Potter The ceilings where what really made it look like that. I wish now I would have taken a photo of the inside. But anyway, there was a big cathedral in the middle of skyscrapers, and a round building that looked kind of like the NYC library. Stone pillars and stuff. The whole city is beautiful and clean.
So we finally got up to the Harbour with the bridge and the Opera House. We took pictures everywhere. It took a long time to walk around the Harbour. We saw lots of ferries, and there was a group of supposed Aborigines wearing body paint and playing a didgeridoo. It was cool, but I’m thinking maybe the guys were kind of like our Indians at home that don’t really dress up in headdresses and beat war drums anymore, but they’ll dress up like that just to make the tourists happy and get paid.
There isn’t a whole lot to say about the Opera House and Bridge. I guess it was kind of what I expected it to be. Just something to look at. But then after all that walking, we didn’t want to walk all the way back. Did I forget to mention how bloody hot it was!?!?! We timed it perfectly so that we were walking in the sun at basically the hottest time of day. The past several days it’s been around 95 degrees, with the humidity around 90%. It was terrible. So we were tired. For $5, we got to take a ferry around the harbour and back to Darling Harbour (which is where the Aquarium is, which Shalbie and I plan on going back to). Then we walked back to Paddy’s Market, met up with the others, looked at some souvenirs, and then headed home. The only souvenir I got was a nice sunburn. And that was my day in Sydney! It’s a great place to visit, but I wouldn’t want to live there. On the way home I asked more questions about their culture and found out that most of their names weren’t their real names, but ones they made up because nobody can pronounce their real ones. So I went around getting their real ones and writing them down and learning to pronounce them. It was pretty interesting, and it really impressed me that they take it upon themselves to learn English and even change their name in order to communicate with others. They’re very intelligent. Shalbie can speak 5 languages! It makes me as an American feel pretty stupid, taking about 6 years of Spanish and I still can barely speak it. Oh, and listening to the radio on the way home, we discovered we had just missed Tom Cruise’s arrival in the city. What a shame.
Okay, so I haven’t told you about the restaurant yet. It’s called Yum-Cha. I guess Yum-Cha has multiple meanings. It’s kind of a way of eating. All the food that we eat is collectively known as Yum-Cha. It was a very new experience to me! We walk in and the people seat us. The dishes we have are a very small cup for tea, a very small bowl, a small plate, and chopsticks. They immediately bring out a big teapot, and because in Asian culture it’s the duty of the guy to keep everyone’s tea cup full, Chao poured all the tea. So then the weirdness happens. Instead of menus, the people just bring around trays with lots of little wicker baskets that have different dishes. You point at what you want and they give you the dish. And you don’t pick stuff just for yourself. It’s all set in the middle and you all share. I was so bewildered when they just started setting these things in front of me and I didn’t know what any of it was (even after I ate it, I still didn’t know what half of it was). To be completely truthful, I was kind of scared. I didn’t know what to do! I didn’t understand what was going on and I felt so stupid and was worried the others would be offended because this is how they normally eat. But they got things explained to me and just told me to try some things. I decided I’d do my best with the chopsticks instead of chickening out and getting a fork. So Shalbie helped me a little with getting stuff off the plate and into my bowl. You only take one thing at a time and it goes in your little bowl, and then you eat it and put the next thing in the bowl. I had all kinds of different things and amazingly I liked all of them! It was delicious! I calmed down and got a little better with the chopsticks, and of course Chao kept my tea full. Dessert was an egg thing, I think an egg cake or something. It was very similar to flan, except it had the most delicious flaky crust. It was very good. Then the bathroom had a code on it that you had to enter a password to get in! I went there, couldn’t figure it out came back and sat down and said “okay, so how do you get into the bathroom?” and shalbie laughed and told me how. So yeah, that restaurant was a great experience. I’m so glad I did it. It was pretty expensive, and doesn’t really fill you up, but it was so hot that I didn’t want to eat the rest of the day anyway.
Random fact: At the request of Don Clifton, my father, and several others, I made sure to check which way the water drains here. It most definitely drains counter-clockwise. Just thought you should all know. You can sleep peacefully now.
This past Thursday I had a BBQ to go to for a christian group on campus. The meeting place was at Nobby’s Beach, which is the most easily recognized beach in Newcastle. It has the lighthouse and pier extending off of it, and this is how most Australians recognize Newcastle. At any rate, it was beautiful.
On the busride there, the bus driver and an old lady talked to me the whole time about different types of weather, and a lot of trying to explain all the rules in the 87 different types of rugby here. It was threatening to rain most of the time I was there, but it was perfect for me because it brought the temperature down to a bearable 75 degrees or so. I went on the beach for a bit, went into the surf up to my knees, took photos of the lighthouse and had a walk out on the pier. The meeting with NCS was great. I met a lot of new people, made friends with a girl that’s a huge cricket fan, and had an interesting conversation with some people about how the Australian government runs. It was interesting to see the differences with the U.S, and of course they also asked me a lot about the justice system in the U.S (one of them was just finishing her law degree). Hopefully some day I’ll actually be able to show you some of these pictures I took.
Saturday was the trip to Nelson Bay that I’ve been anticipating for a while. We were supposed to go on a cruise to watch dolphins. It turned out to be mostly a waste of my time. We got on the biggest boat in the harbour, but were only on it for about 1 ½ hours. I did get to see dolphins, and they were a lot darker than ones in the zoo. They were a very dark grey, almost black. At one point, a group of them were out a ways and they went underwater. I gauged where they would show up again, and so moved to a different part of the boat to get closer to them. I guessed right!! They came up right along side the boat exactly where I was, so I was pretty proud of myself. I was the only one at that spot. I got some really good pictures of them, and a baby dolphin was there too. It’ll be neat to see those photos.
But beside that, it was a waste of time. We had 4 hours to kill once we got back to shore. The buses took everyone to a beach nearby, but I thought I would die if I went. It was so hot and I knew I’d get sick if I was out in the sun much longer. Thank God I took one of Helan’s hats. But about 10 of us elected to stay back and shop in the few shops that were there. I tailed around with a Canadian named Heather. She was nice, but a bit fruity, or flaky, whatever you want to call it. But there was nobody else really to talk to. I was just happy to go into air conditioning. So we shopped around, I bought some ice cream, she had a drink at the pub there. Then we waited around to go home. I ended up talking to this guy Matt for a while, who I’d sat by on the Newcastle tour the week before. He’s from Finland, and very nice and good with English. I found, after talking to him, that I really don’t have a home accent anymore! I talk the same way as whoever I’m talking to, basically, if I’m around them for a bit. When I’m with Helan, I talk Aussie. With Chao and Ricky, I talk somewhat normally but fight the urge to use a bit of broken English. With Emma and Matt and Heather, I was definitely using a Finnish/Canadian accent. I think that one is the easiest. It almost sounded a tiny bit Amish, too! And I couldn’t help it! Really!
So then once we got back to campus, I walked the 2 miles home and was absolutely dead. I think I had a mild case of heat stroke. I got a nice burn, and I was too tired to do anything Sunday. I couldn’t eat, and I slept most of the day in my sauna that pretends to be a bedroom. I did go to a new church with Ricky, though, and I loved it. It’s exactly like any church back home. There were two guest speakers there, and I talked with them a lot after the service. They’re kind of like a comedy group with a good message. It’s hard to explain. They’re trying to get into the television business to get their program and message into more places, and so they actually asked for my email address to keep in contact! I told them it would be a long time before I graduated and even got into the business, but it is kind of neat to think I could be their connection to bring their show to the states. They also really valued my opinion on their program because I was an American. They said a lot of times Americans don’t tend to understand the type of comedy that British and Australian people do, so they wanted input on what I thought of the program. It was nice to help out! At any rate, I really enjoyed the church and will be going back. The only thing that really surprised me was that Ricky said it was very similar to churches in Indonesia. I guess I just kind of assumed that Christianity wasn’t very widespread in Asian countries, but apparently I was wrong!
So I think the last thing on my list to mention was what little wildlife I’ve seen here. I finally am starting to see the little lizards that people have told me are all over the place. They come in all different sizes. And yes, I have finally seen some spiders. And I hope never to see them again. When I finally discovered the bike path that runs around the uni, that’s when I found the spiders. Ohhhhh, the spiders. They have huge webs spanning trees that bend over the path, and they’re all overhead. The spiders are huge!!!! Big fat bodies with long thick legs. I saw four or five, and they were all different colors. They really gave me the creeps. I took a picture of one, and then as soon as I did I just got the heebie jeebies and wanted to get out of there as quickly as possible. The bike path is kind of isolated, and it was getting late and I was by myself, and I just felt like at any second one of those monsters was going to drop down on my head and eat me. Oh, they’re so disgusting.

I finally went to the park that‘s next door. It was fairly nice. There was a big group of people there watching a cricket game. The players all wore all white uniforms that kind of looked like what you’d wear to go golfing. I watched for about 10 minutes and didn’t understand what in heck was going on. Sometimes the spectators would cheer, and I had no idea what for. Since then I’ve had someone explain it to be a little better, and it’s very similar to baseball. I’ve got a friend at the uni that’s a huge cricket fan, so she may take me to a few matches.
Oh yes, one more thing. I was riding my bike home from uni today, and my handlebars started acting up. They kept swinging downwards and getting really wobbly. I guess the guys didn’t do as good a job as I thought! They need to be tightened. That was interesting riding home, being scared the bike would just fall apart on me! But I made it home in the lovely blistering heat. I don’t think I’m ever going to get used to these blasted UV rays here.
And the food here actually isn't that great. it's almost all very similar to american food, except with little things changed. i can't really put my finger on it, but they'll put different spices in their meats or something. its just...not quite right. and i'll do my best to eat it because i don't want to be rude, so i've ended up just eating much smaller portions and i drink lots and lots of water and eat fruit and cereal and pb&j sandwiches! it's actually kind of sad. They have restaurants like Hungry Jack’s (Burger King) but I don’t ever eat out. We also eat a lot more lamb here. Lamb, chicken, and beef are the normal meats. I don’t think I’ve seen any pork yet.
Okay, I think this e-mail is plenty long enough! Hopefully you’re getting a better idea of what it’s like here, and you’re not getting put to sleep by this extremely long e-mail. You can expect one in another couple weeks! Bye for now!
Love, Steph