Hotter than a certain fiery place!

Spending just a half hour on the payphone, chatting with the family out on the sweltering street in mid-afternoon nearly killed me today.

'How hot could it really be?' I thought. 'I must just be a big wimp!' I was inspired to check the weather, and found out it was actually 38 degrees (but with 19% humidity, it felt like 40). It's weird we get the hottest temperatures yet when we're so close to Antarctica-- but hey, the unofficial Melbourne slogan is "Four seasons in one day". And since us Canucks like to talk about the weather so much, we've linked to our weather [see "Our Favourite Links" on the left panel] so all of our readers can (A) get jealous (B) sympathize, or (C) laugh at us poor souls. Enjoy! -D.

It's been nearly a year blogging... and it's been so much fun! Thanks for following our travels, and we hope you'll keep up with us in 2008. We'll be updating our links and posting more frequent blogs in the coming months. We'd love to hear any suggestions, and thanks heaps to everyone who's sent us comments. Happy New Year! xoxoxo from BigQuestionmarks

Home sweet home (again)

It was much easier than we thought possible-- we now have a Melbourne home! After checking out that first doorless dump, the place we moved into was that much more fantastic. We signed the lease right away, and moved in a day later. It's actually a renovated former refrigeration warehouse that's down a little lane off a main street, but it's quite nice inside- ceramic tiles, big kitchen, large furnished bedrooms with exposed brick (reminds Dayle of her bathroom in Cabbagetown!). It's a little pricey-- Toronto rents have NOTHING on Melbourne-- but it's in the heart of Carlton, which is the university/Italian neighbourhood, and just a five-minute walk north of the CBD = millions of cafes, shops, restaurants, gelato shops, and bars to hit. And the perks: free wireless internet, laundry, all bills paid, nice landlords who pop by with coupons for attractions and 2-for-1 ice cream... hell, we can't go wrong. We're committed for two months, and will probably stay more, so feel free to send us mail-- there's nothing better than snail mail in this electronic age. :)

OUR ADDRESS:
18 Powell Lane
Carlton, VIC 3053
Australia
(SEE OUR HOUSE ON A GOOGLE MAP)

We also have some cute kitties who roam around at night, waiting for belly-scratching, which is cool. Last night we went for a stroll and stumbled upon a park full of small, tamed possums that stumble around like they're wasted (we promise you a video soon). Our biggest problem is parking-- and we love Daisy way too much to give her up! We were almost able to get a street-parking permit from City Hall, but then we read the fine print and our car has to be registered in Victoria (and Daisy's a true-blue Queenslander). Since we live down a "lane"- kind of a cobblestoned alleyway- we can't park in there, it's illegal. And while the city street-parking permit is only $20 for the whole year, the cost of changing Daisy over to a Victoria van- safety check, roadworthy certificates, rego fees, changing insurance- just isn't worth it. I think we're going to have to rent a spot for her in a parking garage, and hope she doesn't hate us for neglecting her. On the bright side, we did buy a detailed manual on our trusty Toyota Hi-Ace, and now we actually know which spot to pour the radiator coolant into... tee hee!

Happy New Year all- hope you have an enjoyable one! They're calling for 44 degrees here, so we're going to have some drinks and watch fireworks from the St. Kilda beaches, and go for a midnight swim (or maybe a toe-dip, for those afraid of sharks). For a few hours there, we'll be in 2008 and Canada will be still in 2007- how strange! We'll let you know how the future looks...

...well actually, it kind of looks like this:

Behold the Future from BigQuestionMarks on Vimeo.

Merry Xmas from us!

Melbourne Xmas (11)
Originally uploaded by bigquestionmarks.

Merry Christmas and happy new year everyone! We've been soaking up the atmosphere of Melbourne for the past few days and loving it. Our first few days were a bit chilly, but it's definitely getting hotter (33 today, hotter than Cairns). We've even been taken by surprise by city sunburns, and we're now slathering on the sunscreen!

We hope everyone had a wonderful Christmas-- we did, weird as it was to have no snow, no Xmas cookies, and no family nearby. (Miss ya all!) We spent Xmas Eve with our surrogate French family-- us and five Frenchies parked ourselves al fresco at a long table at an Italian restaurant hidden down a small cobblestoned side street in Melbourne's CBD (in Australia they call downtown "the CBD", aka Central Business District). We sat around eating yummy Italian food and drinking wine for more than five hours (those French like their long dinners-- apparently so do we!). Christmas Day was extra lazy... lazing in a giant hotel bed, watching movies on TV like The Grinch Who Stole Christmas (the live, Jim Carrey version, was actually pretty good!) and Babe ("That'll do, pig"). Then it was off to meet another international bunch for our good friend--and fellow pear-picker-- Andreas' last night in Melbourne. Andy's from East Germany (you may remember him from past blogs) and heaps of fun, and though we're super sad he's left us to explore South America, we're happy we managed to see him before he took off. With Andy, there were some lovely Italian ladies cooking the feast-- Anna and Marina-- and one Indian and one Malaysian girl to mix it up with a couple of Canucks. Good fun! Melbourne definitely has that international feel, much like Toronto did for us, so it's not hard to feel at home here. On Boxing Day, we dropped Andy off at the airport and then it was time to get onto apartment-hunting...our next true adventure, as it seems.

For those of you who have been to Melbourne before, you'll understand why we LOVE Fitzroy and hope to live there. It's artsy, bohemian, full of cool shops and bars, and just north of the CBD. But it's been a bit of a pain to be in the city with our van-- Adrian's become a brilliant parallel-parker and Dayle's been a super-awesome navigator--so we decided to move south to the beachy suburb of St. Kilda (where there's lots of parking) for a bit while we look for a more permanent place to live. We're in a hostel now-- hard to adjust the first night (how we LOVED our xmas hotel- Miami Hotel) but it's not a terrible place to sleep. Yesterday we went to the beach (not the greatest swimming beach, but hey, it's got sand) and had a nice breakfast out, and pretended we were tourists. Plenty of shopping and drinking temptations in St. Kilda-- it's a really cool neighbourhood, though we wish it was walking distance to downtown-- and we were highly entertained to encounter our first stray cats/prostitutes/drug dealers in ages. Good fun.

Last night we checked out our first apartment... errr, flat, I mean. Lovely sounding in the advertisement (as they always are): courtyard, washing machine, TV, fully furnished, short or long term stays OK. We got there and they forgot to mention: the kitchen stank and lacked a tap for hot water, the bedroom was sans curtains and had the air of a junkie palace, the bathroom was grunge central, there was a packet of rat poison sitting outside one bedroom door, and OH WAIT-- there wasn't a DOOR from the outside courtyard to the inside. It's unbelievable what people try to pass off as a "home". Daisy must have left some rubber on Fenwick Street-- we sped off as quickly as we could.

But, fingers crossed, we'll get out of bunk-bed life soon. For now, while the city is still asleep for the holidays, we'll take in as much beach and cappuccinos as we can (another great Aussie concept we've discovered: when a coffee's included in your breakfast, that means you can get an espresso, a cappuccino, whatever fancy coffee, etc). Soon enough, we'll be working and back to our normal city existences. And the jobs can't come fast enough, because Melbourne is full of exciting stuff to do and fantastic concerts to spend money on (and nooooooo Huntsman spiders, yippee)! Fingers crossed we can somehow get to Big Day Out to see Bjork and Rage Against the Machine at the end of January...

In the city that is about to sleep...

We did it, we reached Melbourne (and yarrrr, it's cold here)!
It was an ass-numbing four-and-a-bit days of driving, but Daisy wins again. From Stanthorpe, we rode the scenic New England Highway (think: mountains, rolling hills, flower-covered meadows, old country towns with gorgeous buildings) down through inland New South Wales for our first few days of driving-- and New South Wales is huge, though not as big as Queensland! We swerved around our first highway-crossing goanna (a big lizard-- he stretched across a whole lane-- and he made it across after all), and then passed another one, belly-up and not so successful a little later. We visited Tamworth, the "country music capital of Australia" so we could take photos with a giant golden guitar and buy tacky souvenirs. We've treated ourselves to some nice restaurant meals and a night at a huge old cinema in Newcastle (it's been ages for both movies and dining out). We watched "Into The Wild" finally-- two thumbs up, go see it if you haven't! (And don't worry, Moms and Dads, we're now going more "out of the wild" than into it, at least for the time being. But I guess we're rubber tramps!)

We finally dug our toes into the sands of the east coast in Newcastle, after being landlocked for a few months, yay! And we checked out Sydney in one whirlwind afternoon-- and sipped Coronas by the Opera House, which was every bit as impressive (maybe more) than we expected. The city itself is gorgeous- chock-full of old architecture and history (and living history-- we followed a guy dressed as a pirate through The Rocks district till we lost him). It's a nightmare to drive and navigate-- we circled the core and suburbs for 2 hours before we figured out where to park. Sydney's best discovered on foot, or on the super-futuristic monorails which we didn't get a chance to ride yet. As we left the city the next day, we were like "Damn, we kind of like Sydney, should we go live there instead?"

But we continued on-- this time along the long and boring 12-hour drive to Melbourne on the multi-lane Hume highway. The winds whipped up like crazy as we headed west (we don't know if it was just the mountains, or a storm) and Daisy was making almost no progress, so we finally stopped after a hellishly windy ride. We managed to stop in the sheep-shearing centre of Goulburn (a few hours west of Sydney) to climb up into the Big Merino, a funny, wrinkly-looking three-storey sheep with historical wool-industry displays inside (and his name is Rambo, said the lady in the gift shop).

From there, we crossed the border to Victoria and the road became even more boring. Luckily, it was a short three hours to Melbourne-- via Glenrowan, the little town where the infamous bushranger Ned Kelly and his gang met their final fate in a big shootout with police in 1880. And Ned's huge here, so we went to pay our tributes. We're going to check out the homemade armour (from ploughshares!) he wore in the legendary gunfight soon-- it's in a museum here in Melbourne.

Our plans to sleep at friends' houses didn't work out so well (everyone's between houses) but we scored ourselves a sweet hotel room in the Miami Hotel for $80 a night-- with free parking, a king sized bed, fridge, walk-in closet, and a swanky bathroom! It's sparkling white and pristine, and the carpet's really soft. But my eyes keep darting to the sprinkler system on the ceiling, which looks like a Huntsman spider from the corner of my vision. Slow but sure, we'll get out of bumpkin mode.

And Melbourne's wicked--this is the 3rd time here now (almost feels like home), but we'll see how it works out for jobs and apartments. Looks like the whole place might shut down till after new year's (it was a battle getting a dinner out last night!), so we might end up camping again for a while after all. but thanks to all you spider sympathizers and blog-readers, and MERRY CHRISTMAS to you all! (photos to come on Flickr soon, promise). xoxoxo, A&D

Southbound we go

Daisy's got a new pair of shoes (snazzy new Bridgestones, that foxy lass) and she's itching to get on the road. I guess we are a little, too-- though country life has been swell, we are excited to get to the big city, where there aren't so many creepy critters!

We finally finished up the last of our work at Cherry Park (yes, I know I said that before, but there was more) yesterday... and in just a few days of weeding and putting mulch on cute little cherry tree saplings, we've totally destroyed our work clothes and gardening gloves, acquired ourselves achy and sunburnt backs, and had our nerves shattered by creatures hiding in the pine mulch. Anyone heard of the wolf spider? It's something that only existed in wildlife books for us till last week-- it's a giant, hairy spider that, if it bites you, is thought to sometimes cause necrosis-- translation: the spider injects digestive juices into the bite and your arm (or whatever was bitten) rots off painfully over time. Without a cure, no less. Ew! Wolfie's death came promptly a la the shovel, needless to say. Adrian also encountered a killer giant blue centipede, and thanks to his gloves it didn't get him. [WATCH OUR VIDEO HERE] We also uncovered a pile of lizard eggs, and one big bird egg, which we were hoping it didn't belong to a magpie-- those things are vicious! Let's just say we're pretty stoked to be finished the orchard work.

But it's not all doom and gloom... Stanthorpe's been good to us. Our boss took us all out for a fantastic night out on the town Friday night, we've found a pretty awesome pizza place in town, and we've relaxed lately by feeding the birds-- gorgeous king parrots and crimson rosellas flock outside our house-- and the cows, who are now so loyal they sleep by our cottage. We've even spotted the big lizard that lives in our roof, and we're expert firestarters, thanks to our wood stove.

Apparently it's a 24 hour drive to Melbourne (this country is so big!) so we'll do the trip over a few days. We haven't even seen a movie in ages, so we're very excited to check out Into The Wild (anyone seen it?) and have some good restaurant grub along the way. We're also planning to spend some time cruising around Sydney Harbour on the ferry-- it's hard to believe we've been in Oz for 10 months and haven't visited Sydney yet! And then it'll be off to Melbourne, for our third time, though this time hopefully to stay, to visit friends, get proper jobs, shop, eat, drink, and go to all the live concerts we can handle! (We just hope nobody notices our farmers' tans.) We're thinking of you in Ontario, all snowed in... one more week till "Chrissy", as they call it here!

We live in a house, a very small house in the country...

Sweet mercy- we're done fruitpicking!

Cherry season ended a bit earlier than planned due to the crazy amounts of rain we've been getting here lately (a real shocker, since Stanthorpe is a drought-stricken community where the town water supply is -or was- expected to run out in February 2008!) Saturday was our last day, a real scorching-hot, sunny, humid summer day. It was getting to be a real nightmare finding any ripe cherries on the trees that hadn't split from the recent rains. After a few hours of sweating, and dodging snails, spiders, and Korean tourists picking their own baskets of fruit, we all agreed that was it. Not an hour later, we were treating ourselves to McFlurries at the local McDonald's (or, "Macca's", as they call it as they call it here) the thunder, lightning, and biggest downpour began... and the storms here aren't like any Canadian summer storm. The lightning's brighter, the thunder louder, and for such a dry place, the rain just keeps on pouring. So good bye cherries!

We still had one week remaining to "do our time" for our second visa, but we'll plant blueberry seedlings at Cherry Park for a day or two to finish it off this week till we're back on the road (and despite our blog polling results, it's looking more and more like Melbourne's in the cards). Somehow along the way we really began to enjoy cherry picking (and especially the people we work for and with) and are pondering coming back next year after some travels...plus, we'll have to see what our boss, Graham, does to his house next year for Xmas-- we visited on Friday evening and he surprised us by being the local Clark Griswold!

We're also happy to have a little time off so we can enjoy our new home-- last weekend we moved to a tiny stone-and-timber cottage just across the state border from Stanthorpe in New South Wales. (We're actually living in another time zone, though no one goes by it here! Crazy.) The cottage belongs to the neighbour of our Cherry Park co-worker, Sandy, and she rents it out to backpackers while the cottage's owner is off on the coast studying naturopathy. And it's a steal, at $60 a week (our trailer was $200!). It's a little "basic", as Sandy describes it-- you've got to fire up the wood stove to create hot water for the shower, and we've got a dunny (that's Aussie for outhouse, ew!). But we figured, it's only for two weeks and then we'll be city slickers again, so what the hell!

The cottage itself is about five times the size of the caravan we used to rent (we're moving up!), and it has a kitchen, bedroom, bathroom, office, and a huge living room area complete with couch and super-old-school TV that gets no channels at all. It's nestled in a grove of red gums and spotted gums (huge eucalyptus trees), and we're right next to a paddock where seven cows greet us every morning (we've been tossing apples to the pregnant one, and we think she's warming up to us!). The house, we're told, is about 20 years old and entirely made of found pieces-- part of it is made from granite boulders, part raw-looking logs; there's fringed lamps and red velvet theatre curtains that must have been the ultimate garage sale score. And each window is totally different.... it's really cool.

But I know after our last blog, you're all wondering about the critters roaming nearby! Let's just say that I (Dayle) have TOTALLY kicked my fear of small spiders (I can stick my hand through a web without a squeal!) because the monsters who inhabited our dunny were unbelievable-- till we unleashed the power of Mortein, the aerosol spider killer, that is! Luckily, so far they've all been the non-threatening Huntsman type. (Lately we were reading in horror about the Wolf Spider- Aussie of course- that when it bites you it injects digestive juices so your arm slowly rots off over years and years. UGH!) But anyway, the Huntsman we found inside on the dunny wall the day we moved in was terrifying nonetheless, so big we stared in awe while he wiggled his mandibles and ate a piece of a grasshopper with its very large and hairy front leg. Ew! [WATCH OUR VIDEO HERE] A few days later, there were two Huntsmans in there-- one perched on the ceiling (it's a pretty low ceiling, too) that had me running out screaming, and another stretched out on the door. Adrian poked it with a broomstick to see what it would do, and after a few nudges it began running in circles at warp speed and we both dashed into the house screaming. (We were quite literally scared shitless!) The next morning, the ceiling spider was hanging in the same spot, but dangling from two legs in a strange acrobatic pose. I gave it a few sprays of spider death before realizing it was probably dead (or a really good actor) and tried to nudge it down with the broomstick. But it was still so scary, Adrian woke up to my screeches and was braver with the stick-- and when the spider dropped, the THUMP it made on the ground really resonated that these are no ordinary spiders... these are the Australian version of chipmunks!

The other creatures around here pale in comparison to the Huntsmans, but keep life interesting. Yesterday a fat little black lizard wandered in and hung out behind the open front door until I scared it off with the camera flash. We were late for work one day when we had to get a tree frog out of the van. Every day, we wake up to the cackles of kookaburras, king parrots, and crows, and sometimes come home to find a bunch of idiotic belly-up beetles who decided to die in our cups and mugs. And there are probably about 20 big charcoal-grey moths that live in the cabin, but we just leave them alone since they were here long before us (though there are times when we dislike them, like when we pull a curtain and one swoops out to freak us out).

And if the cottage is cool, our neighbours are even better. Though Sandy does enjoy 'freaking out the tourists' by lending us books like "Australia's Deadliest Creatures" and inviting us over to watch Wolf Creek (eek, have you watched that movie back home??), she and her family have treated us like family ourselves and had us over for beer and barbeque feasts, and yesterday they took us out to Undercliff Falls at a nearby national park, where we hiked down what was pretty much a sheer cliff to a gorgeous towering waterfall, where we swam around for hours and had a great time till the thunder began rumbling again. It's a pretty cool spot to be in-- though Liston (where we're staying) is a village now, apparently in the gold rush days (like 1870s) it had a population of 80,000. Sandy's partner Lionel's a big fossicking enthusiast and said it's not hard at all to find rocks full of gold and tin that the miners missed, today just laying on the ground in dried-up creek beds. And we still get excited just by seeing a kangaroo jump by!

PS. Come see the creepy critters hanging out around our country cottage, and more-- we've put up a pile of new photos on Flickr.