Birds, bees, jetlag
Arriving in Australia was a surreal experience. If you have never moved to a foreign country to which you have never been, I'm not sure I can relate the experience. It's like diving off a 10-meter board into a pool of unknown temperature, in which there may be saltwater crocodiles.
We touched down in Sydney after a 17-hour red-eye from Houston. Getting through biocontrol and customs took us our entire layover. I had just watched six movies and was exhausted. Ever since getting a blood clot on a plane, I can't sleep in a chair. I just watched a bunch of not-so-memorable movies and stood up obsessively to stretch my calf muscles. And all that was between crying jags, since I had received news of a close friend's death immediately before getting on a plane. We ran through the airport and got on another plane, across the Australian continent. I had an aisle seat, so no view out the window, no access to movies, and insufficient bandwidth to read, by that point. It was a long 5 hours.
When we finally landed in Perth, we managed to fit our 7 suitcases, my guitar, and ourselves into a London-style taxi and checked into a hotel. Driving on the left side of the road feels wrong. The sunshine was bright. There were palm trees. The landscape is dryish, with succulents and the kind of tall, pale trees that don't look like home. It felt like Bizarro California. We had no idea where we were going to live, and vague plans of finding an apartment, furnishing it, and purchasing a car in the few days before my job started on October 1.
I usually react pretty well to jetlag, but it hit me like a ton of bricks this time. The first day we tried in vain to stay up until a reasonable bedtime. Disoriented, we walked down the street in search of food and ate some spaghetti bolognese (in Australian parlance, "spag bol") in the confusing sunshine of a strip mall courtyard. On arriving back home, we watched the second half of the semi-final for the AFL (Australian rules football) tournament. The local team went on to win the equivalent of the Aussie rules Super Bowl ("AFL Premiership"), so it seemed like an exciting time for sports. We googled the rules on our phones. I'm certain our cognition was compromised from lack of sleep, so I'll blame our confusion about how the game worked on that.
We slept early that night and woke at something like 3 a.m. This was pretty convenient for calling and texting people back home, given the 13 (or 14, depending on time of year) hour time difference. Still, it was a full week before we were sleeping and waking at anything like our normal times.
I have traveled fairly widely, though I know little about plants. For a long time I have been fascinated about how a glance outside can tell you immediately that you are very, very far from home. Or, conversely, how looking out the car window in Northeastern Oklahoma can be so comforting. The general impression of the plants and the landscape can profoundly influence my sense of place. And, well, not a single thing in Australia looked familiar.
The fauna proved disorienting in its own way. The most disconcerting thing was the sound of the Australian crows outside our window while we were trying to sleep. The crows here are extremely common and extremely vocal. Somehow, they sound nothing like our American crows and they have scary-looking white eyes that stand out from a distance. They make a sound that sometimes reminds me of a whining toddler. And they are loud. The overall result is that they are very difficult to ignore.
Birds can be comically exotic-looking here, too. The first time we walked from the hotel to the grocery store, I saw a rainbow lorikeet. They are native to the "eastern states" (as Western Australians are wont to call the states that make up the other half of their continent) and like a number of other pest species, have invaded WA. They look, to this midwesterner, like a bird that could only exist in a pet store. I couldn't believe we saw one just hanging out in a tree.
The first night we spent in our new apartment adjacent to Kings Park, I woke in the middle of the night to a horrifying chattering just outside the window. It turns out that laughing kookaburras sometimes go off in the middle of the night. It's a creepy sound. I think I have almost accustomed to it, now, after several months. At least, it no longer wakes me up.
I wandered around the campus in those first days at my job, marveling at all the weird-looking plants. I stopped to take a picture of a tree covered in feathery red blooms, and hovering there was one familiar thing: a European honeybee. I can't really explain how profound that honeybee seemed, at that moment. Australia's not so strange, after all.
We touched down in Sydney after a 17-hour red-eye from Houston. Getting through biocontrol and customs took us our entire layover. I had just watched six movies and was exhausted. Ever since getting a blood clot on a plane, I can't sleep in a chair. I just watched a bunch of not-so-memorable movies and stood up obsessively to stretch my calf muscles. And all that was between crying jags, since I had received news of a close friend's death immediately before getting on a plane. We ran through the airport and got on another plane, across the Australian continent. I had an aisle seat, so no view out the window, no access to movies, and insufficient bandwidth to read, by that point. It was a long 5 hours.
When we finally landed in Perth, we managed to fit our 7 suitcases, my guitar, and ourselves into a London-style taxi and checked into a hotel. Driving on the left side of the road feels wrong. The sunshine was bright. There were palm trees. The landscape is dryish, with succulents and the kind of tall, pale trees that don't look like home. It felt like Bizarro California. We had no idea where we were going to live, and vague plans of finding an apartment, furnishing it, and purchasing a car in the few days before my job started on October 1.
I usually react pretty well to jetlag, but it hit me like a ton of bricks this time. The first day we tried in vain to stay up until a reasonable bedtime. Disoriented, we walked down the street in search of food and ate some spaghetti bolognese (in Australian parlance, "spag bol") in the confusing sunshine of a strip mall courtyard. On arriving back home, we watched the second half of the semi-final for the AFL (Australian rules football) tournament. The local team went on to win the equivalent of the Aussie rules Super Bowl ("AFL Premiership"), so it seemed like an exciting time for sports. We googled the rules on our phones. I'm certain our cognition was compromised from lack of sleep, so I'll blame our confusion about how the game worked on that.
We slept early that night and woke at something like 3 a.m. This was pretty convenient for calling and texting people back home, given the 13 (or 14, depending on time of year) hour time difference. Still, it was a full week before we were sleeping and waking at anything like our normal times.
I have traveled fairly widely, though I know little about plants. For a long time I have been fascinated about how a glance outside can tell you immediately that you are very, very far from home. Or, conversely, how looking out the car window in Northeastern Oklahoma can be so comforting. The general impression of the plants and the landscape can profoundly influence my sense of place. And, well, not a single thing in Australia looked familiar.
The fauna proved disorienting in its own way. The most disconcerting thing was the sound of the Australian crows outside our window while we were trying to sleep. The crows here are extremely common and extremely vocal. Somehow, they sound nothing like our American crows and they have scary-looking white eyes that stand out from a distance. They make a sound that sometimes reminds me of a whining toddler. And they are loud. The overall result is that they are very difficult to ignore.
Birds can be comically exotic-looking here, too. The first time we walked from the hotel to the grocery store, I saw a rainbow lorikeet. They are native to the "eastern states" (as Western Australians are wont to call the states that make up the other half of their continent) and like a number of other pest species, have invaded WA. They look, to this midwesterner, like a bird that could only exist in a pet store. I couldn't believe we saw one just hanging out in a tree.
The first night we spent in our new apartment adjacent to Kings Park, I woke in the middle of the night to a horrifying chattering just outside the window. It turns out that laughing kookaburras sometimes go off in the middle of the night. It's a creepy sound. I think I have almost accustomed to it, now, after several months. At least, it no longer wakes me up.
I wandered around the campus in those first days at my job, marveling at all the weird-looking plants. I stopped to take a picture of a tree covered in feathery red blooms, and hovering there was one familiar thing: a European honeybee. I can't really explain how profound that honeybee seemed, at that moment. Australia's not so strange, after all.
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