Picnic Time

When the weekends roll around here, I feel an all-consuming need to be outside. We keep a stripe-y blanket in the car and have taken to plopping it down wherever we please...

...like off the PCH to watch the sun go down:

Or on the big hill next to the Page Museum:

Now, we're adding food. I have officially declared picnicking to be our new hobby. Yesterday we toted treats to Santa Monica beach. It was a bit windy, but worth the trip.

P.S. Does the phrase "Picnic Time" make anyone else think of the closing sequence to Eureeka's Castle (starts around 1:09)?

Western Australia: The Good, the Bad, and the Deadly

Perth

G’day, mates! Time to talk Australia…

THE GOOD

When I visited WA, everyone I met was interested to know what I, the first-time visitor, thought of Australia. After some thought, I gave everyone the same answer: In a word, Australia is very civilized. Which is funny, because vast swaths of the continent are not only uncivilized, but entirely uninhabitable. Anyway, the places we visited were characterized by a notable cleanliness, gorgeous natural surroundings (cheers for the Aussies building their cities along water!), and an abundance of gourmet caffeine-delivery systems (short black, long black, flat white, chocolate-topped cappuccino…the list goes on). The air was fresh, the skies were clear, the food and wine were excellent.

One afternoon, Chris and I poked around the downtown area of Subiaco, ducking into artsy little shops. I was dwelling on all the perks of Australia—the schools, the health care, the cheery accents—and was just about ready to move when we nearly knocked over a shelf full of china. Luckily, nothing was harmed, but I don’t think we can move to Subi now.

A cute shop in Subiaco peddles "pre-loved" books, not "used"

The best part of our visit was, of course, seeing family. We made stops in both Perth and Albany, packing in lots of activities, from picnicking to an Aussie-themed movie night. We got in quality time with both grandmas (I met the lovely Grandma Gordon for the first time), and we spent Christmas with the extended family. Even though Christmas falls the Australian summer, the festivities still felt homey to me. There was table tennis and gingerbread, and there were new Aussie traditions like Christmas crackers and seafood.

Picnic with Grandma in Albany

Did I mention the food was excellent? Also, there was a lot of it. We didn’t throw any shrimp on the barbe, but we DID throw a lot of other stuff on there, and it was all delicious. Thank you, family and friends, for feeding us exceedingly well during our visit.

THE BAD

Unfortunately, I had an awful cold for part of our Australian adventure. But what a great place to be sick! Feeling stuffy? Look, there’s a pharmacy right around the corner, with a friendly pharmacist who, European-style, interviews you about your symptoms and helps you find the correct medication. “The bad” wasn’t that bad, after all.

THE DEADLY

OK, this was a tease. We didn’t actually meet any deadly creatures in Australia, but there are plenty of things there that can kill you. During the trip, I was reading this:

which catalogs a number of the continent’s dangerous critters, from the taipan to the redback spider to the infamous box jellyfish. Due to Bryson’s (understandable) fear of death Down Under, there isn’t terribly much space devoted to Australia’s gentler species, so here’s a peek at the ones I saw.

At Caversham Wildlife Park, I finally got to meet some marsupials. I got to pet and feed kangaroos and touch a koala.

Me feeding 'roos

Yup, I touched this koala

Later, in Albany, we got to see wild kangaroos, too. Chris’s uncle Ian took us to the perfect ‘roo-spotting point just before sundown one day. We pulled over to the side of the road and watched a group of Western Gray kangaroos munch grass. Kangaroos aren’t really novel to Australians (they’re kind of ordinary, like deer in America), but I couldn’t stop marveling at them and contemplating their evolution.

Wild 'roos

I also loved that even the everyday birds were really beautiful. Instead of pigeons hanging around the park, we’d see a flock of pink and gray galahs in the mornings.

Galahs (to see their vivid colors, go here)

Again, not deadly, but distinctly Australian and worth a mention.

THE END

Our time in Australia went by all too quickly. There’s so much I still want to see—namely Sydney and the Great Barrier Reef. The landscape changes so much from place to place, so we got just a small slice of all that Australia has to offer. Luckily for us, a large part of the family happens to live there, so we will be back. Hear that, Oz? We. Will. Be. Back. (…and that dishware shop in Subi is already locking its doors.)

Beautiful Bali

It's hard to put Bali into words. As we stepped out of the Denpasar airport, becoming wholly engulfed by the humidity, I immediately felt at ease. There is something gentle about Bali, even in the bustling traffic of Denpasar. In this place, you are permitted to be. Balance is an essential component of the Balinese belief system. In traditional lore, the deities Rangda and Barong (symbolizing good and evil, or white and black magic, respectively) struggle against one another, but their battle is perpetually a draw. The Balinese recognize the opposite extremes that are essential to life and cannot exist without each other: good and evil, day and night, dry and rainy, etc., and strive to maintain balance amid these opposing forces. Perhaps the best visual representation of the concept of balance is the black-and-white poleng cloth pattern.

The pattern is even mirrored in the alternating black-and-white curbstones along the roadside. Hard not to feel balanced surrounded by all that balance.

Bali is also very much in the details, meaning it is right up my alley. From the carefully handmade offerings of woven leaves and flowers to the faint sounds of a gamelan in the distance, it is a feast for the senses. Surrounded by all that art, none of my typical worries or stressors dug their way into my mind at all.

As we drove away from the city and into the hills of Ubud, the effect was only magnified. It doesn't hurt, of course, that a day at Villa Kirana looks something like this:

Our first visit was only for 1 night (basically to catch a connecting flight), but we got to spend a glorious 4 days at the Villa after Christmas.

So this is how we rung in 2012; on the edge of a sacred valley to the sounds of local music and fireworks.

Mind-boggling: Indo and Oz

Dear readers, how do I explain the mental gymnastics associated with flying clear to the other side of the globe and back?

Some things to consider:

*Note: Do not ponder any of these items for too long. It will mess you up.

-We flew in a metal tube over the Pacific Ocean

-A whole day disappeared while we were on the plane. It just never happened to us.

-I sat still in a seat for a combined total of about 20 - 22 hours each way. (Well, I did take a few stretch/bathroom breaks)

-First, we disembarked in a country where I did not speak the language and we could hear a muezzin calling people to prayer every day

-Then, in one quick flight, we ended up on a Hindu island

-A matter of hours later, we arrived in not-America, also known as Australia. All of a sudden, everyone was speaking English and you could get a delicious Eurpoean-style cappuccino on practically every corner.

Then we pretty much did the whole thing again in reverse, and we even got a day back when we left Jakarta and arrived in LA on the same date.

I’ll admit, my brain was a bit bummed-out when we got back to America, which I have put down to several things:

1. My body thought it was the middle of the night when it was the middle of the day, and it was angry that it was not asleep.

2. My brain was no longer processing tons of new things every instant. No new language input for the ears, no new taste input for the tongue (soto ayam, I’m lookin’ at you), no new marsupials or blue Australian waters for the eyes.

3. Bali is beautiful and Western Australia is probably the cleanest place I’ve ever seen in my life. Adjusting back to a gritty U.S. city took a couple of days.

Also, I’ll let you in on my pitiful geography/spatial reasoning skills: It was so difficult for me to visualize my Western-centric flat map (think: North America on the left, Asia on the right) as a round globe. I sketched it on a piece of paper and kept moving my hand behind the paper, trying to convince myself that, yes, I went AROUND there. To help me, Chris drew an opposite flat map (Australia on the left, North America on the right, Pacific in the middle). It blew my mind.

Anyway, now that you know what things looked like inside my head, here’s a sneak peek at what things looked like outside my head:

Bali

Western Australia

More to come!

Great grilled cheese

Happy New Year! I know, I know, we owe you an update about traveling around the world. And it shall come, but the photos must first be culled. In the meantime, you all know I'm a sucker for interesting grilled cheese sandwiches. Here's my latest creation:

-Whole grain bread

-Sharp cheddar cheese (we are currently obsessed with Trader Joe's New Zealand grass-fed cheddar)

-Thinly sliced apple (I used Fuji)

-Dash of allspice

-Dash of cinnamon

Just butter up the bread and prepare like a regular grilled cheese. Mouth-watering goodness.

Venice at Twilight

A moment of Zen.

La Brea Tar Pits

Hi, all! Beth here, with another overdue update. Here's a bit about my visit to the La Brea Tar Pits, possibly one of the coolest things I've seen in LA so far. I went here with my East Coast visitors on an unseasonably hot day.

This was a glimpse at the largest tar pit...they have a fake mammoth stuck in the tar for dramatic effect. They also have statues of the mammoth's panicked family standing at the edge of the pit.

I was so surprised to see and hear the tar slowly and intermittently bubbling, like a boiling pot of really thick, sticky stew. You can also smell the tar. It smells a bit like gasoline.

Inside the George C. Page Museum, there's a real working laboratory. No one was working while we were there, but normally you would be able to watch real-live scientists at work, brushing off teeny-tiny fossils, cataloging finds, and generally being awesome. (I can tell I would love their nerdiness—see the license plate that says "I DIG91"?)

While weaving our way through Hancock Park and among the pits, we came across some giant wooden crates. These are a part of Project 23, an endeavor to explore the contents of—you guessed it—twenty-three blocks of excavated material ("asphaltic deposits") from the grounds. This stuff was dug up to create a parking area, and the team has uncovered more than 700 fossils from it so far.
As I learned from the educational museum videos, the La Brea Tar Pits have yielded one of the world's richest collections of Ice Age fossils. That's why the folks at the Page Museum can display an entire wall's worth of dire wolf skulls (there are more displays like the one above; 400 skulls in all, I believe)—they have plenty to spare (1600 or so found to date). (P.S. Yes, this was a real animal, which I had never heard of. Possibly the inspiration for the one-word direwolves from Game of Thrones.) These animals are the most common found at this site. Scientists suspect that the wolves, being pack hunters, would team up to attack prey stuck in the tar...and get stuck themselves.

I somehow left this adventure with a tiny splotch of tar on my pants. I really have no idea how this happened. The pits are fenced in, so you're not really all that close to the tar. Leave it to me to accomplish something like this. Well, now I can say firsthand that modern-day laundry chemicals are no match for Pleistocene tar.