Too many possible titles

Title #1: If you can't beat em, join em.
So I've been complaining about the apparent lack of deodorant here in Australia for the past couple of weeks. It seems like there is a disproportionate number of people here that skip that morning step. Perhaps it is because there are so many backpackers in the area. Well... this weekend I stayed at a hostel in Manly on Friday night and I...uh... kinda forgot my deodorant. So I was the smelly girl all day long!! Good thing I just spent the whole day at the beach :)

Title #2: Don't hate cuz you ain't.
Australians are pretty friendly people. They seem to like everyone -- very open. But there have been a few derogatory comments made about America. Just a few people on the bus or some random place like that. Not very many at all. In my mind, my response to these people is this: if you are gonna be watching American movies, listening to American music, going to America to buy clothes cuz it is so much cheaper, etc. then stop dissing on America! Don't hate cuz America freaking rocks.

Title #3: Swear words
So apparently the curse word da** isn't considered a swear word here in Australia (I can't bring myself to type it out). It would be comparable to an American saying crap or something. This caught me quite off guard for a little while before I realized that it wasn't considered swearing. It is quite disconcerting when people are saying it as they teach a lesson in church or making a spiritual comment.

Title #4: Nudie beach
I went to Palm Beach today, which was about a 2 hour bus ride from downtown Sydney. It was a perfect day again and I had the best time. However, about half way into the day, I look up from my book only to find the beach has turned into a nudie beach. Okay that may be a slight exaggeration, but I look up and 10 feet to my left is a group of 2 girls and 2 guys and the girls are just sitting there with no tops on! A few minutes later, I hear a ruckus to my right and there is a man running through an obstacle course that culminates in a slip-in-slide into the ocean, wearing nothing but neon yellow suspenders that hold a narrow strip of fabric in front of the gentleman's private parts. What the heck? This is a family beach people! I do not wanna be seeing that!

Title #5: Heather would be so proud.
I've tried sushi twice since I've been here. That's right TWICE! That brings my grand sushi-eating total up to 3 times in my entire life. I'm really branching out here and going a little wild. I would still never order it if I was by myself, but I actually thought it tasted okay.

Title #6: Crazy bus lady.
I sat next to an old lady on the bus the other day and she just started yakking away, telling me her life story. You always kinda cringe when that happens cuz you know you are going to have to talk to that person for an entire hour cuz you are trapped on the bus. But this lady was actually pretty entertaining-- she led a full life to say the least. She spent all of her younger and middle age years traveling the world, and on one of her plane flights she met her future husband-- only he was already married. So they started an affair and he left his wife for her, then as she puts it, they "lived in sin" for 2 years before getting married. Then when she was 65 years old and he was 70, they backpacked around Europe for 4 months. Full out backpacking -- as in staying in hostels, having nothing but what you can carry on your back, days without showering. 65 years old!

Title #7: My redlight experience
My CI set up an experience for me to go watch some surgeries at a local hospital. They told me to be at the hospital at 7:30 am. Since I was unfamiliar with the area, I decided to give myself extra time to get lost. To get there, I had to take a one hour bus ride into the city, then get onto the subway, then walk about a quarter of a mile to the hospital. Well, they failed to mention to me that the hospital was in the freaking redlight district of Sydney!! I get off at the stop and there are ladies of a certain type standing on the sidewalks -- they may not have actually been prostitutes, I'm not sure if it is legal here or whatever, but almost every store along the street was an adult shop or gentlemen's club. In addition, there were lots of homeless people sitting on the side of the street. Not exactly the place a young female wants to be wandering around at 6:30 in the morning! And of course, I get lost on my way to the hospital! But I finally found it, went inside only to find that no one seems to know I'm coming or where to send me. So I basically wander around the hospital, opening doors and walking in. I finally find what appears to be the operating rooms, which they call 'theatres', so I just walk into the bathroom, get some scrubs off the shelf, walk into the operating room and tell them I'm here to watch the surgery. The lady that knew I was coming didn't get there for another hour or so. So I literally just walked into the operating room! I could have been anybody! They didn't know me from Adam -- I could have been deranged!

Oh boy, there are just so many things to tell, but not enough energy to keep typing them all. Suffice it to say, I'm having a great time out here and really enjoying myself. The only thing that would make it better is if I had someone to share more of these things with! I'm making new friends and everything, and have had people to go do things with, but crazily enough they have real lives and can't drop everything to come tour Australia with me. Weird. So I do end up doing a lot of things alone. Better to do them by myself than not do them at all. But as the great Whitney Houston says, "What's the sense of trying hard to find your dreams, without someone to share it with, tell me what does it mean?" I find that people want to go do fun things, not hear me tell them stories about me doing fun things. But, hey, I spent the entire day at the beach, so life ain't really that bad :).

Australian word of the day

Word number 1:
Naughty. For example, "I was very naughty today." These Aussie's use it all the time.

So this is what it is like to have a wife…

I’ve always been jealous of my classmates who have these fantastic meals prepared by their wives or lovely little sack lunches. Well, now I get to experience the joy of having someone prepare my lunches for me – the sweet lady that I am staying with here in Australia offered to make me a sack lunch for work. And when I got home from work today, dinner was waiting for me on the table! How awesome is that? I’m probably more excited about that than I should be, but seriously, coming home after a long day of work or school and having to either cook something or eat frozen microwave bleckiness is not nearly as much fun as having a warm, tasty meal on the table when you walk in the door!

Going back a little bit, I arrived in Australia on Saturday morning at 7:15 a.m. The trip over was quite brutal (2 hours early at SLC airport, 2 hour flight to L.A., 2 hour layover in L.A., 14 hour flight to Sydney), but luckily I had a great book that took me about 6 hours to read, so that helped the time go by much faster. At the airport, a lovely girl from one of the wards named Anna picked me up (after I spent about an hour going through immigration/customs). Thank goodness for Annie, a lady in my parent’s ward, who helped find accommodations and a ride from the airport for me! I’m staying with a wonderful family in Castle Hills – it is a young couple with two boys (ages 3 and 2). They have been so amazingly kind to me so far. I have my own room and everything.

It was a beautiful day, about 80 degrees, quite humid, sun shining, smell of flowers in the air, so they took me to Collaroy beach and we spent the afternoon playing in the surf and eating fish and chips. I also had my first Australian hamburger, which consists of everything pretty much – bun, hamburger, lettuce, tomato, egg, onion, pineapple, and barbeque sauce. Very delicious.

I went to church the next day, which was pretty much the same except for crying babies. I’m going to a family ward because there is only one singles ward in the whole area and rumor has it that it isn’t very good. Plus it would take me an hour to get there every Sunday. It sounds like most young single adults go to the family wards. They have a young single adult Sunday school class, but I’m not a huge fan of it so far – everyone is very nice and the teachers were absolutely fantastic, but it just kinda had the feel of being back in seminary again rather than an adult. The funny part is I have had the same Sunday school lesson the past 3 Sundays-- once in my parent's ward, once in the 37th singles ward, and once here. Each class focused on a totally different part of the lesson out of the manual though, which was interesting to me. I went to a young single adult fireside that night as well, which was fun.

I’m getting a tad bored of typing, so here is a summary of the rest – rode the bus into Sydney this morning, went to my internship (very modern, high tech place), wandered around a bit, rode bus home, had dinner (missionaries came over), read the kids bedtime stories, and here we are. I’m going to enjoy my internship a lot, maybe I’ll write more about that later.

Being in a different country, staying with a family I’ve never met before, starting a new internship, and having to make new friends is a little bit overwhelming, but I’m enjoying it already. There are so many things that are done differently here and it has been fun to learn them! The language is actually giving me more problems than I thought it would. They use the same words, but they have totally different meanings. For example, instead of napkin they say serviette and I’m 80% sure they use napkin to mean diaper-- or maybe it is nappy. They love to abbreviate everything too – Feb instead of February, Macker’s instead of McDonald’s, Uni instead of University, etc. Rock up means to show up (i.e. my boss told me to rock up at 9 am). Those are just a couple of examples, but seriously, sometimes I have no idea what people are saying. I either have to have them repeat it a couple times or I just smile and nod like I know what is going on.

The driving on the other side of the road thing is kinda trippy too. It is the turns that are the weirdest. You wouldn’t think it would be that complicated, but to break the habit of 24 years of driving on the right side of the road is kinda difficult. I’m still trying to figure out which side of the sidewalk I’m supposed to walk on.

Anyway, off to bed I go! It is only 9:00 p.m., but I’m still a bit jet lagged. It is a 19 hour time difference.

I'm on a roll...

... Two blog posts in less than a week.

People are so nice.

If I stop and think of all the nice things people do for me every day, I am overwhelmed by the thoughtfulness and generosity of the people I'm surrounded by. For example, this weekend my mom, dad, and brother came and helped me move all of my mounds of stuff to my parent's house. That same Saturday, one of my patients at work gave me a little box of chocolates as a Valentines Day gift. My roommate Red also got me a little something for Valentines Day. My sister is always sending thoughtful little notes and thank you's, and this V-Day she sent a little card from my nephew. It is always the little every day things that mean so much -- when you come home from an awful day at work and you get a little card in the mail, or your friends sit and listen to you whine incessantly.

It reminds me of a story I recently read in the book My Grandfather's Blessings: Stories of Strength, Refuge, and Belonging by Rachel Naomi Remen, the author of Kitchen Table Wisdom. If you haven't read KTW, I HIGHLY recommend it. Anyway, here is a cut and paste version of the story (my book is packed away, so I had to pull this story from different websites) ...

Dr. Remen told a story about Molly, one of her former patients who had been hospitalized with fractures of both elbows. She had been in an automobile accident as she was driving to the airport in a city 2,000 miles away from her home. When she awoke in the hospital, her arms were encased in rigid casts that went from her shoulders to her wrists. She could become dangerously ill if she inadvertently ate the wrong things. It was critical that her food needs were addressed while she was in the hospital.

Soon after she was settled in her bed, a dietician took more than an hour to document carefully her unusual food needs. "The questions that she asked were so thoughtful," Molly told Dr. Remen, "she really knew her stuff. In all of these years, no one has ever asked me some of those questions or understood so quickly and completely how things were with me. I was really impressed."

Within a few hours, special food was ordered for Molly. Three times a day, this food was served to her by food service staff that brought it to her bedside, put it on her bed table, and left it on a tray. Then they left. The first time this happened, she told Dr. Remen, "I just sat there looking at the food unable to feed myself. I was certain that someone would come in to help me, but no one did. After a while, the woman in the next bed noticed that I could not eat. Trailing her own IV lines, she got out of bed and fed me my dinner." That same thing happened at every meal in the 4 days that Molly was in the hospital without the use of her arms. No one on the staff ever offered to feed her. Day after day, the right food would be bought in and the patient in the next bed would feed it to her.

In Hell people are seated at a table overflowing with delicious food. But they have splints on their elbows and so they cannot reach their mouths with their spoons. They sit through eternity experiencing a terrible hunger in the midst of abundance. In Heaven people are also seated at a table overflowing with delicious food. They, too, have splints on their elbows and cannot reach their mouths. But, in Heaven, people use their spoons to feed one another. Perhaps Hell is always of our own making. In the end, the difference between Heaven and Hell may only be that in Hell, people have forgotten how to bless one another.

Today Is A Very Sad Day...

My wallet and I are going through a trial separation. Do you recognize this wallet? Think back a decade and a half and that might trigger your memory. If you recall, these shiny wallets were quite the craze back then. I bought this at Claire's when I was in elementary school and it has been my trusty companion ever since. Sadly, you will notice that I have too much stuff to zip it all the way now, but the zipper is broken anyway. It has seen better days to say the least. I bought a new wallet over a year ago, but just couldn't make the switch. But, in attempt to be a grown-up, I've switched to a snazzy new black wallet today. Not loving it. I'm giving it a week and then if I still don't like it, I'm going back to my trusty wallet.

In other news, I'm moving to Australia in a little over a week. Woohoo!

Is this the blog update you were going for Mom?

Look what I found...

It is a BYU garter. Something blue. Perfect.

Man in the Arena

“It is not the critic who counts: not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles or where the doer of deeds could have done better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood, who strives valiantly, who errs and comes up short again and again, because there is no effort without error or shortcoming, but who knows the great enthusiasms, the great devotions, who spends himself for a worthy cause; who, at the best, knows, in the end, the triumph of high achievement, and who, at the worst, if he fails, at least he fails while daring greatly, so that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who knew neither victory nor defeat.”

Theodore Roosevelt; “Citizenship in a Republic”, Speech at the Sorbonne, Paris, April 23, 1910