Living in Australia now, it sometimes feels like I've moved to a different planet, similar to Earth, but not the same planet. That may sound like a strange thing to say, but look at it this way: In terms of nature, I have no landmarks to grasp. The plants look different. The night sky looks very different. No big dipper to look for up there anymore. Instead there is the Southern Cross, which as you might have noticed, appears on the Australian flag. Can you find it in the picture above?

The Southern Cross, I've learned, is the smallest of the 88 modern constellations, but easy as pie to find in the night sky, because of the two bright pointer stars that bring your gaze right towards it. In the picture to the left, I've circled the pointer stars in green, and the Southern Cross (or rather, the Crux) in red.

Australia is great for stargazing, too. Even here in suburban Melbourne, light pollution is far less than suburban areas in the United States. The darkest sky I've found so far is in remote parts of Tasmania. It's Star Wars starry out there.

Real Estate is a hot topic here, as it is in many places in the world. Frankly, I don't really see what the big deal is - Australia is a huge country and if you're willing to live a New York City sized commute from Melbourne, you should be able to find something affordable. Understandably, people are reluctant to do so and rather do enjoy living close to the city with all the community and amenities that come with it.

Most of the properties here are sold by auction method. You can see the houses on the market as you drive past them since they have huge billboards in their front yards, as you see above.

The auction mentioned on this sign was one Ilana and I actually attended - we happened to be in the neighborhood at the time and we were curious to see the auction in action. The property, which was an estate sale following the death of the owner, was a three-bedroom, one bathroom unrenovated unit (in desperate need of a complete makeover) with a small garage and no other land. It was a unit in small row of joined units, a common cost-saving layout you see in Melbourne's suburbs. It sold for AUD $465,000, which was considered a very good deal. (FYI, 1 AUD = approximately 0.95 USD)

If you want to talk about the other extreme, it is possible to find blocks of undeveloped land of varying sizes listed in deep rural Victoria for about $15,000. And we're talking about land with access to local utilities. Can anyone say, "summer home?"

This just in on ABC news website here tonight. Carrum is, oh, about 10 kilometers south of here as the crow flies.

Shark school spotted off Melbourne beach

Police say a large school of sharks has been spotted about 100 metres off the beach at Carrum, in Melbourne's south.

The sharks are chasing salmon and were reported by Air Traffic Control. [!!!-Ed.]

Police says the sharks are not considered a threat at this stage.

Water Police and the Police Air Wing are on their way to monitor the situation.

Must be some pretty damn big sharks in order to be spotted easily from the air like that. I'm guessing any plans for a late night skinny dip is off the agenda. Hell, I'm not answering any knocks on the door tonight, either.

Today, Ilana had a long-overdue lunch alone with her sister and I had a long overdue walk in the woods. I decided to go somewhere convenient to get to, so I chose Arthur's Seat, which is on the Mornington Peninsula, about 50 kilometers SSE of where we are staying in Black Rock. Arthur's Seat is the tallest hill in the area and offers fabulous views of Port Phillip Bay, north towards Melbourne as well as south in the general direction of the Bass Strait. It is the picture of the southern view that I open this blog with today.

Arthur's Seat has a chairlift to take you to the top, but for whatever reason it is temporarily closed. I'm sure they'll get it all sorted out in time for the busy summer season. But never mind all that as I came for the walk, not to ride, so I took the Two Bays track, towards the summit.

At the summit, there is a lovely restaurant with a million dollar view. The meals are very reasonably priced there, but they are just as happy to let you just buy a pot of tea and gaze out at the view to the north that the restaurant offers. These lovebirds are doing just that.




And here is the unobstructed view. Nice, huh?



A pot of afternoon tea will only set you back three dollars fifty. Now, what you do then is buy a couple of fresh scones with jam and cream to keep that tea company for another six dollars. The combination is called a "Devonshire Tea" which I assure you is worth every penny.

The truth is, you don't even have to use the restaurant at all, since Arthur's Seat is a state park here and they have ample, free picnic grounds available complete with barbecue stations. The public barbecues are, curiously, electric-heated, coin-operated devices which might sound peculiar given that electric is not ideal for tasty cooking. However, it does make sense when you consider the very considerable danger of bushfires in Australia, especially in summer months. The risk of an outbreak of fire from embers would be just too great.

All in all, it was a good day. Melbourne is that you are close to nice places to visit such close by, pretty much regardless of what direction away from the city you choose to pick. There is an abundance of lovely walks and day trips to experience.

I'm blogging from St. Kilda Library today. The free wifi available in this library is the slowest I've used since I visited an Internet cafe in Sanliurfa, Turkey nine years ago. That place refunded my money because the dial-up they were using was so slow that Yahoo mail hadn't finished loading up my Inbox after 30 minutes of watching it trickle in, byte by byte. But I digress.

Back here in St. Kilda, I turned off the laptop's built-in wifi and instead plugged in my 3G wireless broadband adapter Ilana and I got for free for signing up for a $69 cellphone plan at the "3" cellphone company. It's working very well, indeed.

Anyway, earlier today, a Qantas 747 aircraft flying from Hong Kong to Melbourne had to make an emergency landing in Manila after a sudden decompression occurred mid-flight. Here's a quote from a passenger taken from one of the articles about the incident:

"Speaking from the Manila airport, Melbourne woman Dr June Kane says she heard a loud bang from underneath the plane, and saw debris fly through the cabin.

'I'm looking at the plane now and on the left hand side, just forward of the wing, there's a gaping hole from the wing to the underbody,' she said.

'It's about two metres by four metres and there's baggage hanging out so you assume that there's a few bags that may have gone missing.'"

I know these things happen, but I'm glad the plane landed safely and I am just hoping nothing like this happens on the flight when our cats are airlifted to Australia three months from now. They put them in the cargo bays, too. Imagine the horror!

No picture today. Sorry!
Australian police set up roadblocks very often around the city to find drunk drivers. At the stops, each driver is asked to blow into a breathalyser. So, today was my turn. I passed. Yay!

So, I took the Connex commuter train from Sandringham into Melbourne tonight. Boy, are they punctual! The station at Sandringham is the terminal for that line and only has one platform, and they turn those trains around fast! Unlike the Long Island Rail Road or the NYC subway, there are no signals at the end of the line to gradually slow the train into the station. Instead, the train pulls into the station as quickly as it would in any station along its route. Then, there is a digital clock on the platform, and sure enough, the train reverses direction and leaves on the minute, no ifs, ands or buts.

The public transportation system here is split into two zones - the city and the suburbs - and if you life in the 'burbs, it doesn't matter if you live five miles away or twenty miles away, the price is the same. And it's all relatively cheap. your train ticket is good on commuter trains, trams and buses for the duration that it's valid.

I was going into the city to go to the weekly meeting of the Melbourne Bushwalkers Club. It was interesting, but the long and the short of it is that they specialize in day walks and they sensed I usually go for overnight trips, so they recommended another club. more about that later.

P.S. The radio program I mentioned yesterday is only hosted by high school girls for half the week - the other half of the week is hosted by high school boys. Brilliant idea! However, all they seemed to want to do is talk about sports, which was actually predictable and boring. Oh well. Can't win them all.

Ilana and I have found ourselves in the car quite often around 5 p.m. and as we putter about in the very mild Melbourne traffic, we surf around the radio stations. There are a lot of stations in Melbourne that identify themselves by "triples" - Triple R, or Triple J, Triple M and so on. They're not bad, but what has really caught my attention is on another station - SYN. It's an hour-long music and talk show called "Objection" that apparently is being hosted by a group of high school girls. Believe it or not, it is actually a lot of fun to listen to. Yes, it's sophomoric, but that's the point. Today, I got on the Internet and tracked down the story behind this station. SYN stands for the Student Youth Network. The Student Youth Network broadcasts radio programming with powerful transmitters that cover some of Australia's largest markets. They also have an Internet presence and deliver television programming. It's impressive, inspiring and entertaining. Nothing like it exists in the United States, to my knowledge, and that's a shame. It has become one of my SYN-ful pleasures here.

Melbourne is a city on the Yarra River, and next to Port Phillip Bay. Some of the nicest suburbs are along the beach that runs southeast from the city towards Frankston, the town on the far end of the bay and on the way to the Hamptonesque villages along the Mornington Peninsula, where the bay meets the ocean. My mother-in-law is blessed to live three houses away from the beach in Black Rock, one of those southeastern suburbs, about halfway between Melbourne and Frankston. Two minutes from her door, I can enjoy views such as the one above, that of Red Bluff.

Walking between the towns along these beaches, you often have the option of walking along a sea wall that appears from time to time. Today, there was a strong sothwest wind from a departing storm passing just south of Tasmania. Out in the Bass Strait between Victoria and Tassie, winds from this storm have created waves up to an incredible seven meters tall (that's 23 feet!). The waves are comparatively big here in the bay, too. The waves are crashing into the sea wall and throwing up bursts of spray.

Tomorrow, things are supposed to calm down and the bay will return to glassy smoothness, with clear waters.

I've been living in Australia for two weeks and besides looking for work and getting registered with medical insurance, a bank account and the like, I've been trying to work out exactly how hiking is going to figure in to my new life. I am not a newcomer to Australian hiking (bushwalking, as it is called here). On my past two visits to Australia, I have gone on three major bushwalks. I completed a successful winter traverse of the Overland Track in July, 2005 (see picture). I attempted a traverse of the Overland Track in August, 2007, but had my plans derailed by a three-day snowstorm on Cradle Plateau - I spent those days either waiting it out or slogging through waist-deep snowdrifts probing ahead on the track, only to turn around when the risk arose of running out of daylight. I followed the unsuccessful 2007 Overland Track hike with a successful hike to the Tulane Hut at the base of Frenchman's Cap (followed by another three days stranded at the Vera Hut waiting out one of the worst rainstorms in Tasmania in decades.) Bottom line, I am confident that I can handle myself out in the bush with due preparation and have the experience to lead a group as well. Be that as it may I am thinking about joining a bushwalking club, the Melbourne Bushwalkers. It should be a good way to get to know some people I might eventually go on hikes with. They require you to join them on three hikes before they extend membership to you, probably just to be sure you are not some weirdo. Now, while most of their hikes are very, very easy, they do have a few expert level (read, winter backcountry) hikes as well. Still in some way, I can't help but feel like it's a step back twenty years to a time when I depended upon the Explorer Post One outing club to help me go on the hikes I wanted to go on.

Short post today. It deserves elaboration, but I'm just going to put out there that I've found Australians to be friendly beyond explanation and generally happy people. One anecdote: On the same trip to Brighton that got me those car pics from my earlier post, I witnessed two girls in their early teens skipping gleefully down the sidewalk. Not a skip here and there but unrelenting, long-distance skipping from the moment I glimpsed them out of the side window of the car to the moment they disappeared from view behind me - a good twenty seconds, with no end in sight. Clearly, Skippy is not just a bush kangaroo. I'd have taken video footage had I not been driving. I haven't seen such a blatant gesture of childhood innocence since I bought a glass of lemonade from a group of children on Nantucket in the summer of 2005.

The car culture of America is well known, but what many people might not be aware of is that Australia has quite a car culture of its own. Perhaps it should not be so surprising, given the sheer size of the country. There are a number of types of cars that are native to Australia, like the Holden, and major international manufacturers have often produced specialized automobiles for the Australian market, an example of which I will get to in a moment. Now, outside of the metropolitan areas, a vehicle is a must. For the sake of versatility and utility, many families own a pickup or SUV ("ute") such as the one you see above. That black snorkel attachment you see is quite functional. It prevents the engine intake from being smothered by water if the truck is forced to ford a deep stream.

There are, of course, Australian vehicles that were never intended to come anywhere near the mud. While walking through Melbourne's bayside neighborhood of Brighton, I had the pleasure of running across an exciting rare car of the Musclecar era, a 1972 Chrysler Valiant Challenger R/T 265cid Hemi Six Pack, which appears to your left. The history of this limited edition performance car goes beyond the scope of this blog and is readily available on Google. However, suffice it to say that it is very different, say, from the American musclecars Chrysler was producing at the same time across the Pacific.
First of all, the engine is a high-compression six-cylinder, with specially tuned six-barrel carburetors. The body is smaller and lighter than the American Dodge Challenger - in this way it is way more Valiant than Challenger. Mated to a four-speed manual transmission, with a racing suspension that loved to be tossed into corners, this car was arguably the fastest car on Australian roads in its day. While I generally don't pay much attention to cars these days, to see a car like this used as a daily driver was pretty exciting.

Much will eventually be said here about the streetcars - sorry, trams - of Melbourne. However, for the time being, I have only a few minutes to jot down a short homage to the nicest trams of the bunch. Namely, the classic trams that have been assigned to the Chapel Street line through the Pahran neighborhood.

These old trams were the kind of trams my wife Ilana would take when she was a child. There have been at least two generations of trams that have overtaken these models since then. However, given the choice, I would take this sort of tram every time. It rattles down the track and the faded green and yellow takes me on a ride - to another place in time.

First things first:
Lets get the Vegemite out of the way, shall we?

Vegemite is yeast spread. It looks like Nutella or some other yummy chocolate spread, however, I assure you that there is nothing sweet about this substance. It has an overpowering sharp, bitter taste that demands respect in terms of how you consume this concoction. That is not to say that it is without its merits. According to the label, it is one of the best sources of B vitamins of any food on the planet. I'll have to take their word for it.

How not to eat Vegemite

What is wrong with this picture, you ask? Vegemite, is, indeed, spread on toast. So that seems right. However, I have spread it too thick on the bread. It should be hardly visible, like the way snowflakes settle faintly on the lawn after a snow flurry. Chomping into a dense layer of yeast gook such as the one shown here was ill advised. My verdict was swift and unequivocal.

"It tastes like poo."

I'll try again tomorrow with a third of the dollop and an underlying shmere of butter. From what I understand, with the proper tweaking, it can eventually be palatable.

Welcome to my blog about life in Australia from the perspective of me. And who am I? Well, if you don't know me already, there is a little bit about me on the side of the page.

What I hope to do here is get to talk a little about the people, places and things that make this neck of the woods what it is. Actually, to call it a "neck of the woods" at all would be misleading. Australia is more like the toe of the woods... Albeit a big toe. The big toe of the woods.

Sorry about the unimaginative name for the Blog. Maybe we'll do something about that later.