Danny's good news, 21-11-05

November 21, 2005

Danny Passed his final test
He is now a qualified commercial pilot!
we are sooo relieved and happy. i am so proud of him. He pretty much did the whole Commercial Pilot's License this year, 2005, and it was a lot of hard work. now we get to have some weeks of relaxation and holidays together! then next year he can start looking for jobs.
but for now, it is just a huge relief that it's over. he looks more relaxed than he has in months! thanks for all your good thoughts and prayers,
loveya,
licia & danny

School Activities and a Flight to the Outback, 17-8-05

Original email August 17, 2005

So how long has it been? Last time i wrote you all, Danny and I had just been married a year, and that was 4 months ago? Wow, time flies...... so does my husband :) he he he :) hmm... cheesy start was it? ok, give me another try, i haven't done this in a while.

So I'm nearly 3/4 of the way through the school year now. And i guess I'm about as attached to these kids as I've ever been to any kids I've ever met... probably moreso. Theyr'e generous and emotionally needy and and brilliant and beautiful...and many more big sweeping generalisations. Of course, take into account that when I say, "they" I'm referring to about 40 individuals that I work closely with between the two schools. So every day is different, and every group of kids is its own interesting story. so to give you a bit of a better picture, I've put heaps of photos of them on my website to accompany this letter...otherwise, i'd never finish writing!

There are a couple of really exciting things going on at both schools at the moment.
Last term at Junction Park (the school with the blue uniforms) we had a visit from "Farmer Joe." A bunch of trailors full of baby farm animals drove onto the school grounds one morning, and set up camp on the sports field for the day. Donna and I are the ESL teachers there, and together we took a group of about 30 of our students to see the animals. Well! What an adventure that was for them! One 6th grade student, Sarah, had grown up on a farm in Africa when she was much younger, so to her the animals were familiar. To all the rest of our 9-13 year olds, it was as if aliens had brought their pets to class to show off. They bounced from goat to chicken to calf in a noisy whirlwind of excitement and fear. I got a LOT of photos of that day .

So after the kids had gone home, Donna and I started dreaming....and after we'd managed to find some private fundraising (Donna's husband's company ), and done heaps of planning, we decided to take the animal experience to a higher level. On the 25th of August (next Thursday), we are taking our ESL students in grades 2-7 to the Australia Zoo. The Steve Irwin zoo. It's about an hour up the coast from our school, and it's going to be a major all day event. We are ALL excited! say a prayer for us.... i'll let you know how it goes. (Donna is the other ESL teacher I now work with at Junction Park. have i mentioned that? can't remember. She's fantastic.)

At Stafford, the school that's just around the corner from our home, I'm getting to know a lot of the teachers pretty well. We all live in the area, and we go walking together down by the creek. Well, one of those teachers I've been spending a bit of time with, she teaches the 7th grade. And she's the kind of over-achieving teacher who tends to plan extravagent productions for the kids to get involved in. so somehow, I've been talked into helping to put on the year 7 play. I'm in charge of costumes. This week, I'm in the midst of trying to organise spy hats, trench coats and all kinds of feather boas -- and the show must go on in about 3 weeks. so i'll let you know how that goes too :) i should be able to get some fun photos of that!

So that's teaching at the moment. It's always full-on. But I'm getting much more confident working with those middle-school aged kids. and i absolutely love my job. And now I have a group of 1st and 2nd grade Afghani students who recently transfered in, so i'm working with a bunch of littlies again. photos of all those guys on the website too :)

Back to my husband who flies...and he's been doing it a lot. lessons just about every weekend. He's passed the week-long medical exam (that was the most intense medical exam i've ever heard about and been so glad i did not have to go through :) -- and now he's on track to get his CPL (commercial pilot's license) by the end of this year. November we're hoping. Then we'll be on to the next set of unknowns -- finding a job where he can fly little planes and rack up an unimaginably large number of hours, so that in a few years time someone might want to train him how to fly really big jet planes. so where we'll be and what we'll be doing in 2006 is, at this point, quite literally up in the air :)

In the meantime, Danny's got to do a few Long Distance cross-country flights to get up hours. So a couple of months ago we packed up and flew out West to Roma - about 400 K's away. (you can figure that out in miles if you like. it was only about an hour and a half flight.) It was just the two of us -- my husband the pilot and myself the navigator and photographer of the trip. It was the first time I'd been further West than the Dividing Range, and I was really looking forward t getting a peek of the outback. I was not disappointed.
I loved watching the landscape change below us -- from green valleys to wide stretches of farmland in the strangest shapes and patterns I'd ever seen... in all the shades of red earthy colours.

That country is dry, flat bush. except when it rains. And when we arrived, it had been raining for 3 days straight -- unknown to us. We decided to land on the grass landing strip -- translation: ankle deep mud airstrip landing. We were immediately greeted by the chunks of earth flying up and landing all over the plane. We were a bit nervous that we wouldn't make it to the tarmac-- what would we do if we got stuck in a muddy runway on a sleepy saturday afternoon miles away from anyone? unfortunately, i haven't read that bit of the worst-case scenario guide! I was't going to have a push an aeroplane out of the mud, was i?? (by the way, if you happen to have that handy guide, and you do find any helpful advice on misfortunes involving small aircraft, please let me know. it's always good to know, just in case!) luckily, we didn't have to find out what that would be like this time. we made it to the paved runway with nothing worse than a completely mud-covered tail.

Roma is a biggish little town (about the size of Morris MN, maybe?). It was the perfect quiet getaway for us that weekend. There's not much there now I guess -- except history, cows, oil rigs, and pleanty of wide open space. We took some lazy strolls around the town. I loved the old buildings. (more photos on the website). What fascinated me most were the bottle tree memorials -- hundreds of trees planted all over the town. The trees grow well in the drier parts of the country, and they're shaped like bottles from the water that is stored in the trunks. Each of these trees in Roma is a memorial to a young soldier who died fighting in World War 1. They are beautiful reminders of the heart of the town and of a time when there were apparently quite a few more people too.

Now I'm going to come out of the past, and review some future events for a bit. You may already know about these things, but I really like to talk about them anyway!
First, as many of you know, my sister Loren is expecting her first baby -- a son they're going to call Noah -- late September/ early October. We're really happy for her, and I just wish that I could be there for the birth. But I WILL get to meet Noah in December when his uncle and auntie from Oz come up for a visit.

We're coming to Minnesota from December 9th to the 29th. 3 weeks. I'm SOOO excited!!! We would love to see as many of you as we can in that time. I'm already dreaming of all the time I can spend catching up with friends i miss, eating the yummy foods I miss, playing in the really cold snow I miss...sometimes :) we're really looking forward to it.

And before we leave for the Arctic North, we'll have another nephew to meet as well. (his name will be a surprise.) Dom and Dominika are having a baby boy in late October/early November. Nikita (the new baby's 7-year-old sister) is absolutely delighted. She walks around with science books, showing everybody pictures of what the baby inside her mum looks like now.

And I think that's about all the news from us at the moment. oh, -- i almost forgot the weather news. That's always an important tidbit: The last 2 weeks the weather has been unforgivably cold! It got right down to 40 degrees in the middle of the day once! i tell ya. One guy ACTUALLY said to me "Cold enough for ya?" I just stared at him. How did they get that Minnesota slogan all the way down here?! and then i thought, "yes, it is cold enough for me actually. This is about as cold as I want to be." (I'm going to be such a wuss when I visit in December! oh dear!) But, the August winds are here now and soon they should blow the warm weather and tropical flowers back, and all will seem right with the world again.

There are many photos to go along with this edition. WAY too many to attach. So have a look at the website. In the photos and captions, you might find more little stories that I didn't have the energy to tell the long way (If you're interested). Like a trip to sea world and a hail storm that rocked Brisbane and actually looked like Snow on the ground. And there's some shots of the Cross country races from back in April ... I couldn't remember if you'd seen those or not. Anyway, enjoy the photos :)

Hope you're having a beautiful end to the summer.

It's always so good to hear from you!!

with joy,
Alicia and Danny

Easter and Cross country race day, 3-4-05

Original email April 3, 2005

Hello and Happy April!

I'm sorry to say that if ever I was a truly warm-blooded and hearty Minnesotan, I am one no longer. I remember with some nostalgia the days i used to celebrate the freeing warmth of a 65 degree F Spring day. Now such mornings have me shivering in my sweater and fighting off colds and flu's all through my Easter week off. It was a quiet week. Mostly i slept and sniffled and sneezed my way through books and boxes of tissues. Danny and I have been tossing the germs and cold pills around like a silly game.
But at least there are no more spiders!!

And Easter weekend here was quite good. There was more chocolate than even I could eat... chunks of it are still in our fridge a week later. It’s still a surprise to me, to be able to celebrate Easter at school -- in any way at all. Of course, it's simply lots of chocolate eggs and a big outdoor Easter Hat Parade for all the Littlies (the 1st - 3rd graders). Co-workers sometimes give out Easter chocolates the way they give holiday cards at Christmastime in The States.

One lady that I teach with gave me my favourite chocolate surprise -- an Easter Bilby!!! Rabbits are pretty generally considered the spawn of all evil in this country, so some Environmental group has created the adorably popular Chocolate Bilby -- an endangered Australian marsupial; a small, long-eared sort that conveniently resembles the bunny, but for its tail and long pointy snout. I loved it! I’d never been so delighted by a carved hollow piece of chocolate. Unfortunately i left it too long inside my school bag, in the backseat of my toasty car, and the Bilby I finally pulled out to show my husband looked like road kill. It was very sad. Still tasty, but that wasn't good enough for me. I had my mind made up to get a good photo to show you all. So when i found the Bilbies on sale on Easter Monday, I bought myself a nice healthy one. A delicious, dark chocolate, day-after-Easter Bilby. I’m still eating him bit by bit. And now you know the little story behind the pictures attached.

Easter for me was different than it ever had been. Of course -- there was no other way for it to be this year. Friday and Saturday were mostly quiet. Danny and i were together and reflective...as we tend to like to be on any kind of religious occasion. (Good Friday and Easter Monday are public holidays here. most everybody has them off.) I wondered what would become of our Sunday. You can imagine being utterly far away from most of your family on a holiday you've always associated with your mother's kitchen and siblings' noisy banter... and singing with the spiritual community that feels like home to you. You can imagine the emptiness that threatens to fill the space of that hopeful day. Maybe you've felt it too. So you can imagine being invited to spend the day with family that has adopted you as their own. In a sunny backyard surrounded by laughter and acceptance and plenty. And I’m really thankful that that's how we spent our Easter Sunday afternoon -- with family :)

After that, some more rains came and the temperature dropped a few degrees and that's when the sneezing really began...and I’ve already told you enough of that slimy story!

So this week I go back to teaching for the 2nd quarter of the school year. In the first term, before the break, I got to be a part of something I'd never imagined for an Elementary school -- Cross Country Running. One of the schools where I teach is called Stafford. Stafford has a lot of space. It's this beautiful massive old school building that was designed and upkept to hold upwards of about 1000 students. There are around 200 kids there now. So indoors and out, there is a lot of space, and it's all well used and wonderful. Every year the school community looks forward to the Cross-country day. For a whole morning, all the kids in pre-school (which is like Kindergarten here) through grade 7 have races by age groups. They run around The Oval, which is just a massive grass field, and the older kids run through the adjoining park.
On this exciting day, my job was to stand at the alleyway between the school and the park, stopping cars from running into children, and encouraging runners with glee. Oh, it was fun to be on the standing sidelines of a cross-country race. To coach and cheer my own students along. To bask in the glory of my beautiful African students who struggle in the classroom but completely steal the show in a long-distance run. I love my students; they continually amaze me. And now that I’m getting this cold out of my system, i think I’m about ready to get back to them.

And right at this moment I’m about to get out to a baby shower. There are lots of new babies joining our shared family at the moment. The one I’m going to celebrate today will be born to Danny's cousin. So.... what will that make me? a 2nd-cousin-in-law? Danny & I are going to be Auntie and Uncle soon as well -- twice, if you haven't heard. We should be seeing a little one from Dom (Dan's brother) & Dominica in November, and my sister Loren is due in October. So that's all very exciting

By the way -- How do you wrap a meter-and-a-half long, multi-coloured crocodile baby toy? It’s not a riddle... i seriously need to know! I’ve got about 2 hours to sort something out, or this baby gift is going to the shower in a black garbage bag tied with a ribbon. Wish me luck!

Hope you're all doing marvellously or at least tolerably well,
Hope to hear from you soon.

Lots of love,
Alicia and Danny

The one with the spider story, 10-2-05

Original email Feb. 10, 2005

Hello All! It’s been awhile i know. You may think it's because I’ve forgotten all about you, or because I’ve actually stumbled upon the farthest corner of the earth and managed to fall off it, but you'd be wrong. In fact, I just forget that I haven't actually written my stories down and sent them to people yet. I tell them to myself all the time, and once in a while I even tell them to other people :)...and then i forget that you may not have been able to hear that. So, here goes. I've had some requests for fewer words and for more photos, so.... well, there are photos anyway :)

It's hard to believe It's already the 3rd week of the school year- feels like forever. I had a nice long holiday for about 5 weeks (that was ages ago), and now I’m back into my favourite kind of intensity. It's the most challenging job I've had in a long time, but I’m enjoying it for the most part. I feel like I’m starting all over as a 1st year teacher again in so many ways, and the newly arrived refugee kids I work with are heartbreaking and frustrating and delightful all at the same time. The teachers I work with are fantastic.

It’s been hot and still and muggy in my paradise this week. It’s been that way for about 2 months i guess, with occasional breaks of incredible thunderstorms that bring some breezes. And going to school in the dead of summer, when most days (and evenings and even some nights) hover between 95 and 100 degrees F, is a completely new wonder for me. I wonder why the schools are not air-conditioned! Of course, my Sudanese students barely even notice. At home, we have an old, clumsy brown box in our living room that pretends to be an air conditioner. It makes all the loud noise, but it's not too convincing. I'm getting used to the semi-tropical summer though. My lizard-like skin just loves it.

Today i welcome the rain, but with a bit of trepidation :S Last time it rained for days, we had a very unwelcome surprise visitor in the kitchen.
I came home from work and was rinsing some dishes, when something big darted up the window just inches from my face. It was big and brown and hairy, it had 8 hairy legs and I could SEE its fangs. By the time I’d noted all this, i was on the other side of the room --way over in the living room -- and we stared at each other. Just days before, I'd read a pamphlet about the most common spiders in Queensland, and i recognized it as the ever-popular Huntsman spider. It was bigger than my shanking hands. I reminded myself that this is a jumping spider. It doesn't always make webs; it hides in corners and jumps and at its prey. I couldn't remember exactly how high it was on the list of "creepy poisonous things you want to stay away from in Australia," but at that moment, it was the scariest thing I'd ever been so close to.
It was crouching in the corner of my window, no doubt thinking, "when is she coming closer so i can jump on her and bite her?!!" and I, of course was silently screaming, "How the HECK did that monster get into my KITCHEN??!!"
Danny got home just then, greeted by a pale and trembling wife. All i managed to say was "...BIG SPIDER!" He had to handle it from there. It’s a very sad story really. If I’d been less fearful, i may have put up a fight for the spider's right to live and breathe fresh air outside again; but as it was, i didn't move until Dan had confused it with fly spray and trapped it in a disposable Tupperware. Then i got a closer peek. I did not take a photo. But while Dan took it outside to the bin, i googled Huntsman Spiders, and i did find an identical image of the spider in our home.

Danny's explanation for how it was in the apartment in the first place: heaps of spiders come out in the summer rains. They get inside when they are tiny babies, un-noticed, looking for moisture. (So they especially like bathrooms and kitchens.) They hang out there silently and hide. They grow insanely fast! Dan guessed that our little friend was about 4 days old.
(For anyone hoping to come visit us someday, you'll be happy to know that no one has actually died of a spider bite in Queensland since 19 eighty-something.)

And he's wonderful in other ways, my spider-killing husband. Last week was exceptionally stressful at my 2 schools. On Thursday i had a break-through with some students, and it was the first real success I’d noticed for a few days. I was happy but exhausted. I felt like going out for a drink and some hot Buffalo wings with friends. Sad-to-say, I’ve still never found Buffalo wings down under, and there were no new friends with a free Thursday evening for going out. I had a vague aching of homesickness for Minnesota.

And Danny immediately lit up with a solution; he took me out to "The Lone Star Bar and Grill." What a surprise! A little bit of my far-away home, just down the street. You know what the Outback Steakhouse is like in the U.S.-- This place was like that, with the South-West U.S. being the theme. The decor was mostly authentic, but hodge-podge and hilarious. There was a real Texas license plate, giant stuffed Bison and longhorn heads, and neon cactus. But there were also a handful of deer heads on the walls, and the biggest laugh of all - a massive Moose head! Who ever heard of a moose in Texas?!

The most wonderful surprise though, was just how happy it made me. That right here where i am feeling more and more at home, i could suddenly have so many of those things that I’ve been more and more often missing. There was real country music all night long, something i haven't heard in a long time. There was salad with ranch dressing! (something most Aussies have never heard of). And Bar-B-Q pork ribs!! Oh, they reminded me of mom's home cooking and going out with my family when we were kids.

Ok,
I’m winding down now.
(This is the equivalent of the Minnesotan hour-long goodbye. we have that here too :)
I think i wanted to tell you about some of the joys of a summer in the tropics... about mangos for breakfast and avocados for lunch. About the mango tree by our front steps that covers the ground with the smell of rotting fruit for months :S
And the bats! Oh there are whole tribes of fruit bats out every night. and they love our mango tree. But if they hear us walking up the stairs after dark, they get scared and come wildly flying out of the tree.... but they're not too bright. They always seem to come straight for my head. It takes them a while to get up and over the roof of our place. I haven't quite been hit by one yet- i get out of the way just in time. Good thing too - they're about half the size of me!

And if you're interested in more photos, there are 3 albums that we added to the yahoo website in January-- lots of random stuff we did over the holidays: New Year's, Country drive, and Gold coast. If you want to see them, check out
http://photos.yahoo.com/dannyandaliciasmith

Yep. That’s really all for now. I’m sure I’ll come up with another letter just in time for you to finish reading this one. :)
How are you??? Thinking of you, and wishing you many bat-and-spider-free days
With lots of love,
Alicia and Danny

Christmas with the Smiths, 26-12-04

Original email December 26, 2004

Hope you all had a beautiful Christmas :)
we did. it was our first christmas together...and we loved it...and we just got a little carried away in spoiling each other with gifts. Danny gave me heaps of chocolate (as always), jewlery, and... if you haven't yet heard -- a digital camera. :D
it's the most technology i've ever owned. too much fun for words. so now you can see my first experimentings with it :)

I went to my first ever Midnight Mass for christmas-- it was beautiful! then We had a lovely and quiet christmas morning together. after sleeping in and giving each other gifts, we had breakky and listened to Garrison Keillor CD's that my sister Audra sent us. mmm... a little bit of Minnesota. such fun and funny stories!
we spent most of Christmas day at Geoff & Pam Smith's home. it was a really nice day, and good to be with family.
(These are some photos ... )

I suppose since i have your attention now, i should share a little more good news. I'm on break from school now-- for a total of about 5 weeks. The new school year will start on January 20, and I have a full time job for the whole year :)

I'll be an ESL teacher at 2 schools. My base school is called Junction Park. I was there for the last 3 weeks of this school year, helping out the other ESL teacher there who's got her hands full with over 100 students. Next year Denise and I will get to work together. Nearly all of the students there are refugees -- from the Sudan and from Afganistan. Being there for the end of the year was really intense-- they're incredibly needy kids in all kinds of ways. but it was one of the most meaningful and rewarding and fun things i'd done all year. I am SO looking forward to teaching there all of next year. Denise is an awesome teacher and really fun to work with. it's so good to be part of a team again.

The other school i'll be at for 2 days a week is just down the road from our home. There's lots of refugees there as well. i don't know much about it yet, so that will be another adventure soon to come.

so for the next few weeks i get to be on holiday and preparing to be a full-time teacher again. so glad to be done with all the subbing for now. so glad to be doing what i love.

Today we enjoy boxing day in Australia. which for us really means we look around at stacks of boxes and try to decide what to do with them...and then we try to stay cool and play with christmas toys. danny will spend most of the day here on the computer-- installing and playing with the new flight programs i gave him. and we will relax and enjoy having 4 days off together :) so this will be a fairly short holiday email. i will go make some boxing day pancakes now
and wish you all a very peaceful and happy holiday week.

and a happy new year :)
more soon and lots of love,
Alicia

Beach camping and pre-Christmas mania, 12-11-04

Original email November 12, 2004

Hello!
October is over?! unbelievable! and i've been living here a full 6 months now. and married nearly 7! To many of you that seems such a short time, but to us...that's more than all the time put together that we'd ever spent in the same place before we got married :) It’s very cool.

Sorry i'm getting this letter out a bit later than usual.... i'll have to catch you up as quickly as i can on the last month and a half or so.
Did i tell you that it finally started raining in October? Lately it's been most afternoons and/or nights. Yesterday it was all day long. I didn't know Australia ever got this green -- it's gorgeous! the jacaranda trees have spilled their soggy purple blossoms all over the ground, and they're all nearly bare now; but i've just started seeing new colours from other trees-- small trees bursting with deep red. Wide umbrella trees suddenly sprouting yellows and orangy-reds. and something else with fat, orange flowers. I have heard that Brisbane has been called the city with the most flowering trees in the world... i have no idea if it's true, but i'm happy to believe it today.

October brought many new things, including signs of Christmas. Halloween is barely noticed here, and there's no equivalent to Thanksgiving, so Christmas marketing gets started very early! (Our friends Wayne & Kate did have a Halloween costume party this year --that was good fun. i think i may have even impressed a few people with my jack-o-lantern carving skills. But in general it's not a holiday that's really done.)

So one evening, We were doing some last minute shopping for a camping trip. It was a very hot week, but the evening was pleasently warm with a bit of a breeze. So the garlands and christmas trees all over the grocery store were a bit surreal to me.

And then we went to the Hypermarket -- it's massive! something like a cross between a Sam's club and a Wal-Mart...inside a shopping mall. anyway, we were cruising along looking for beach chairs, when i saw it. Covering the length of an ailse, all along the top of the shelf, was a giant Christmas display. There was santa in his sleigh, and next to him a caroler-- bundled up completely with a scarf and a hat and everything. And this is the best part: Pulling Santa's sleigh were 2 massive white Kangaroos in santa hats! i stood still and laughed out loud. Only in Australia!

But then we finally got out of the city, and we actually got to go beach camping. It was the best weekend. We went up to sunshine coast -- the perfect name for it! -- just a couple hours north of Brisbane. Wayne & Kate and Danny & I all went up in their big pickup truck. the only way to get to the beaches up there is by 4-wheel drive. the roads are all sand. You have to know the tide times and be careful to get within two hours on either side of low tide, so that you don't lose your vehicle to the ocean. We took a ferry to an island just off the coast -- an island completely made of sand. We drove on the beach to find a campsite, in the blackest night i can remember. the ocean swallows up all light. Then we actually camped for 2 days on the beach. it was amazing! wildlife everywhere -- unexpected blue butterflies, sea hawks. the sound and power and peace of the ocean right there, every moment of day and night...nothing to do but eat, swim, walk,talk with friends, read, breathe :) it was just so good.
I actually did get photos this time!! You can see them now, in a new photo album at the website:

http://photos.yahoo.com/dannyandaliciasmith

But then we had to come back to the city and back to work. These 2 months i've had 2 different long-term sub jobs, both in ESL. (Both for teachers going on leave to get married and go on honeymoon :) It's very satisfying to be doing what i love again.

My first job was a travelling position -- i was a visiting teacher in 4 different schools. That gave me a very different perspective, and a very different role than i'd ever had before. i was seen as a sort of visiting specialist...an expert... much like the speech/language pathologist. I mostly worked one-on-one with kids or sometimes with pairs or threes. in tiny little closets and temporarily un-used staff rooms. I carted my instant-classroom around in a medium-sized suitcase on wheels.

I've started to find that I can connect with kids in a whole new way now too. Many of them have been in Australia just as long as, or a bit longer than, I have. A kind of trust and solidarity grows quickly, from some shared experiences and feelings of being so far from home...of discovering a new place... of learning about Australia together.
I work with very different populations here than in Minnesota. I haven't met any Hmong or Mexican or Somali students (as there were in St. Paul). But I've worked with students from all over Asia-- China, Taiwan, India, Japan, Korea, Indonesia and Malasia, Sri Lanka, and any number of South Pacific Islands. I've even had a couple of students from Brazil and Holland. More and more refugees from the Sudan are starting to find assylum here.

The job I have for November is at just one school. A beautiful old school, with beautiful shady trees, with a beautifully colourful multicultural community. it's just across the river from the downtown area. It's an old neighborhood -- as old as they get in Brisbane i suppose. (I'm constantly being reminded how newly-birthed this city really is. it's still just stretching out its limbs to find out how big it'll be, and there always seem to be 10 major NEW building construction sites on in the downtown at any given time.) Anyway, West End, where i'm teaching now, it's this fantastic collision of history and youth; of Asian and Greek and college students; of authentic ethic restaurants and every shop you'd never even thought of -- I saw a business there today that specializes in "Tropical Plants for Rent." so.... umm...if you'd like to rent a lovely banana tree for your next big event, just let me know, i'll hook ya up ;)

and if you're interested to see photos of the school where i'm teaching these days, there's an album on that same website called "West End. State School" just keep in mind, i got those off the school website...i know the place, but not the people in the pictures.

Where was I? oh yeah, teaching. it's all good. the more i teach, the more at home i feel. And
it's a refreshing surprise to find myself part of professional community again. The 30 or so ESL teachers in the area get together once a month for a department meeting. ESL teachers here tend to be pretty isolated -- we never see eachother in schools because a school with more than one is practically unheard of. (In fact it's very common for one full-time teacher to be shared with at LEAST 2 schools.) So when we get together, it's a great chance for passionate, language teachers to talk and connect...and talk some more :) I've found in this group of teachers a place where i am immediately accepted. a place where i speak the right language fluently; where my accent and foreign experiences are no kind of barrier. i feel like i belong, and i love what i do -- And i find that i'm more thankful for those things than i ever have been before.

That reminds me... coming soon will be my first Thanksgiving spent outside of the US. hmmm. I doubt I'll attempt to roast a whole turkey in the 90 degree heat, but i may make some mashed potatoes. :) And i'll certainly think of you all, and wonder how you are, and say a prayer that you find many things to feel thankful for. and that you have much to laugh and smile about.

feel free to drop us a note anytime. I always love to hear news from home, and everywhere else in the world.

Airborne Observations, 26-10-04

Original email October 26, 2004

There is absolutely nothing in the world like an early morning flight in a small plane. and it's a good thing too, because there's probably nothing else that would have dragged us out of bed at 3AM on our sunday morning last week. and we are so glad we went!

Dawn patrol-- once in a while the fly-boys at the Redcliff aeroclub (where danny flies) plan a big early morning flying game, and they fill the Brisbane skies with a handful of their little planes, just after sunrise. Usually, it's a kind of scavanger hunt, where the pilots and passangers of each airplane make up a team and find clues and answers along their flight. But the weather played games with us too much this time, so we didn't get to play ours -- our routes got messed up.

at the last minute, the boys decided we'd still go flying, we'd just take some different routes-- away from the storms. so we flew up the sunshine coast -- just north of Brisbane. unfortunately, the camera i brought (hoping to capture some of it for you) broke just before we took off. So i'll do my best to paint some of it in words.

Any time you fly in a little plane like the Cessna 172, you can't help but devour the views. The ground spreads out before you like a giant 3-D map. But over the ocean, early in the morning, it's a whole different kind of amazing. You stare at the horizon with a sneaking suspicion that you can almost see the globe's curve, and you can't help but imagine what you might find if you followed it... The wide flatness of the sea is speckled by spotlights from the sun -- not just one or 2 rays peeking out from the clouds -- you can actually see entire families of clouds and every place the sun stretches out to settle in over the sea for the day. As if she's blessing everything with morning.

You watch as the scenery changes slowly and constantly. Every ordinary thing is part of a fascinating drama when you watch it from the air. You follow the elegant caligraphy of the river. you smile at the mosaic of scattered and ordered boxes where people live and play. All around them, soft purple bouquets spring up -- Jacaranda trees in full bloom. You laugh at the the tiny surf boards along the neverending beach, lines of miniature 4-wheel drive tracks, and the toy people walking their...ants? dogs that look exactly like insects.

Yesterday's rains greened everything in one big breath. The birds are the best; you fly over them and sometimes see thier expert shadows -- tiny and carefree. Diving, swooping, gliding...i wonder, do they laugh at the machines they've inspired, with wings that can't move?

You feel in one moment that you can see and understand so much -- you have this massive perspective. you see the order and the beauty; you can understand how communities and ecosystems live side by side. In that same moment you're aware of countless confusions-- there's more you can see that doesn't seem to make sense. So many more Whats and Whys than you had before you took off. All at once, you have a glimpse of wisdom, of freedom, and of humility. That's what flying is for me, anyway. i'm so lucky i married a pilot!

It even means I get to learn a new language -- and you know how much i love that! i like listening to the radio transmitions between the planes. They sound all smart and important... and then suddenly they say something really silly like "Bravo Echo Zulu" and i laugh. Each plane has its own 3-letter name for ID. Since pilots with different accents from all over the world share the same sky, they can't risk misunderstanding eachother on the radio. So when identifying any aircraft by name, they use this specific code -- one distinct word represents each letter. (and many of you probably knew all that already; just shows how much i knew about flying. everything's new and exciting!) the plane danny flies a lot is WLY -- Whiskey Lima Yankee. Danny got a kick out of teaching me the code -- for an hour after the flight on Sunday, he had me reading all the license plates we saw in code. Ours, incedentily, is Delta Kilo Uniform. :)

and now i'm off to prep for dinner. hope you're enjoying your October -- whatever season it may be where you are. love and good things, alicia

Linguistic and Educational Quirks, 5-10-04

Original email October 5, 2004

Hey, how ya going? welcome to a peek into our lives once again. you might want to comfy and put your feet up... this may be a long one :)

The spiders are out, the mozzies are biting (can't get away from them even here!)...but the good news is there haven't been any bird attacks as of yet. And even though it's still only Spring here, it feels much like Summer back home. 80-85 degrees F every day. yesterday we were at an airshow all day, oogling the gorgeous planes, and already we're experiencing our first ugly sunburn of the season :S. but once we're over that and remember how to wear piles of sunscreen, i'll be back to absolutely soaking up the sunshine and blue skies.

the wide flat spaces, the random rolling and jutting-up hills. the dry red earth. the explosions of colour that bunches of flowers give to all the tropical trees, making up for the grass that tries so hard to be green. i often feel like i was born for this place.

But i don't exactly Sound like it.

i was in a shop a few days ago, looking at some tops(...still trying to get used to the fashions. it seems there are so many more BRIGHTly coloured clothes here than i'm used to. i'm used to minnesotans generally wearing lots of natural, earthy colours. now i'm starting to get the feeling that people just wear more bright colours in this semi-tropical place where the sun's nearly always shining.it's just a theory. i've lots of theories. and now i have lots of short skirts and a yellow top as well.)
anyway, i was in one of these shops one day and i exchanged hello's with one of the girls working there. although, greetings here never actually have "hello" in them. they usually go something like this -- a very slight nod of recognition, eyebrows up, and "how ya going?" -"yeah, alright, you?" "good thanks" she got really excited. the very next thing she said to me-- "How long have you been here?! cause you sound American, but your accent's not very strong, sounds like you've been here awhile." i'd been living here nearly 5 months by then, and i told her that. "Yeah, because i can still hear a bit of american, but it's fading. the aussie's pushing it out. before you know it, you'll sound all aussie." i dont' know if that last bit is true, but it's the only time anyone's made a comment like that. i was surprised by her intuitive accuracy about my situation.

usually, if people i meet are interested in the story that my accent hints at, they sort of cock their head to one side, squint their eyes like they're trying to figure out a tricky math equation, and say: "where are you from?" unless of course, they're one of the bolder who just immediately "know" where i'm from. since you probably haven't heard me talking to aussies lately, you should understand something. the way i speak now, especailly when teaching or hanging out with a group of aussies, it sounds a bit strange. i reckon it's because i've been here for a while and i have a tendency to speak the way i hear people talking around me. yet at the same time, my minnesotan pronunciations of many sounds i still can't quite shake. if i want to sound normal to my ears, i have to really think hard to just speak like an american. But when i'm not thinking about how i talk, my sentences come out as this strange hybrid of noises that sound more foreign to me than either of my 2 homes and that no one quite knows what to do with. i would love to just sound australian when i talk to people here, but i can't do it. i wouldn't mind just sounding american either, but that's really hard work now too. so at the moment i'm stuck in this strange in-between place.

the linguist in me is fascinated by this, but the result is no doubt a quieter alicia than you've ever known. (then at home, my dear husband gets all the words and thoughts and ideas i'd kept in througout the day. ahh...he's a good man :) so, many of the teachers i've met at the school where i've been subbing were of the "i know where you're from" variety. and of those people, the closest to accurate guessed I was Canadian. from others i've been declared to be Irish, Scottish, British, and Swedish. (and i suppose they were all really only a few hundred years from being somewhat correct.)

I've been subbing quite a lot now at a school really nearby our home. Eagle Junction. School is great here. i have another theory-- that the kids are a bit happier and behaviour problems sometimes a bit less stressful than in MN, because these kids get to play outside SO much. They eat more at school too. Of course, they're not stuck inside out of the FREEZING cold for 5 months of the year, so that may have something to do with it! schools here all get 2 LUNCHES a day! Morning tea (AKA "Little Lunch") -- 30 minutes. "Big Lunch"-- 1 hour. Kids eat in their classrooms or under the buildings (depending on the school), and when they're done, they go play. it seems to break up the day really nicely for everyone, and you don't go through the day hungry either :)

There's no equivalent to hot lunch here, and no government-subsidised lunches, but nobody seems to mind..i guess they just expect it to be that way. they can bring their own lunch from home or buy food from the Tuckshop (those are under the buildings too-- in the shade). it's kindof like a canteen, but only because that's the closest thing to anything like it we have back in the states. Parent volunteers usually run them, and you can order little snacks or milk or juice or whole sandwiches and meals there. and some things that still seem a bit strange to me-- savoury biscuits with vegimite (biscuits=crackers), a hardboiled egg, or a large salad with all the goods, including of course, beetroot. Beets! the standard aussie canned veggie which makes its way into every picnic lunch, BBQ, and many unsuspecting salads and sandwiches. Burger King (which was re-named Hungry Jack's here) advertises its much loved "aussie burger" which includes cheese, salad (lettuce & tomato), tomato sauce (like catchup, but not), and most importantly -- beetroot !

Ok, you may be wondering how the kids eat lunch and have tuckshop UNDER the school buildings...and before you start thinking that they're hanging out in the basements, i'll try to explain buildings here a little. first of all, no basements. i have fun trying to explain what they are to people. some people say they've heard of such a thing :) Secondly, many buildings here, especially schools, tend to be built up off the ground a bit. they're raised up on brick or concrete pillers, sometimes connected with latticework of wood, to let the wind blow right under the main floor. the shaded area underneath is perfect for kids at school to eat, and sometimes for cars to park at home. the design of these buildings is just beautiful to me, and wide, airy verandas seem the most important feature. since it's hard to visualize, i've attached some photos so you can see for yourself the kind of place where i live.

there's a photo of the main building of Greenslopes school -- where i did that long term sub job for the first 2 months i was here, and where i've subbed quite a lot. it's just one building though, the schools here are set up like mini-campuses, with clusters of classrooms in different buildings.

Then there's some photos of houses along our street. we live in a beautiful little neighboorhood, with many old, renovated, classic-styled homes called "Queenslanders." it's a gorgeous neighboorhood-- with lots of charm and variety, lots of dogs, pleanty of bus stops, and a good old-fashioned corner store just about 20 steps from our front door. So there's some photos of our neighborhood and our home.

ok, more thoughts about school i need to share... Turned out that i enjoyed subbing much more than i ever thought i would. it was great to get to know kids and teachers at all grade levels at just a couple of schools. i even got to dance with the kids at eagle junction :) for weeks, the whole school was preparing for a fantastic masquerade ball. so for their P.E. time (they don't have "gym" class, since they don't have gyms) they danced -- country line dances, the Mexican hatdance and the macarena, among others. they were adorable, and quite good. so i did that for a while... and then there was another 2-week holiday!

that's another reason the kids and teachers here seem a bit less stressed out-- the school year roughly goes like this: end of January-- school starts. there's 4 terms. each term is 10 or 11 weeks, and you get 2 weeks off in between each term. school year is over at the end of November, and you get two months of christmas holidays (summer vacation), before the next year. so it's a lot more spread out than the traditional U.S. system, but not quite the "year-round" model either. it seems to work out well here.

so at the moment, we've just finished a 2-week break, and next week begins term 4. for most of it i've got long-term sub jobs as ESL teacher. i'm so looking forward to that! starting tomorrow, i'll be a travelling teacher. i'm all ready with my little portable classroom, to work with kids accross all 7 grade levels at 4 different schools. yet another mini-adventure begins. and with it, the sorting out of teaching positions for 2005. if you're so inclined, you may want to breathe a small prayer on my behalf for some sort of permanent teaching work for next year.

and now as i get ready to leave you for this edition, if you're still reading this and you aren't bored out of your skull... i'd love to leave you with a book recommendation. just before i moved here, my very thoughtful danny bought me a book -- an anthology of short stories written by American women who moved overseas. it's called "EXPAT-- Women's true tales of life abroad", edited by Christina Henry de Tessan. it's been a beautiful companion in the last few weeks -- to see through the eyes of other women whose experiences are so same to mine, and so completely different. if you've ever lived far from your own home, or if you're doing so now or hoping to, or if you're interested in the topic at all, you will love this book. if you come visit me, i'll let you borrow it :)

and for your October, i wish you warmth, joy in the meaningful things, lots of laughter, and the impulse to write (or call) your friends who are distant only in miles and kilometres. :)

Spring with loud birds and Riverfire, 4-9-04

Original email September 4, 2004

September is Springtime in this land of opposites. And besides a bit more rain and blooming Jacaranda trees (big shady purple ones), Spring means noisy birds. Mating, fighting, nesting, LOUD birds. The noisiest is the common crow, but "common" here is big enough to carry me off to some really remote place where the ants could eat me alive (although that's really not too far away i think). They sound like whiny geese who are constantly annoyed and yelling and anything around that can hear them -- which even includes confused friends and family on the other end of a phone line in the US.

Then there are the Magpies. I've always thought they were quite funny-- with thier striking black and white patterns and their sudden, jerky little flights. They're noisy too, but now that it's Spring they're getting especially strange. One day last week, I was subbing in a year 7 class. For some reason, the kids were actually listening to me go on about something, when a Magpie crashed wildly into a window; it was the only one just cracked open, the rest were shut. I jumped and stared. The kids laughed. One kid jumped up to open all the windows, while the rest eagerly explained to me about magpies. They get really territorial this time of year, and when they see their reflection in a closed window, they think it's a trespasser and go after it. Danny likes to warn me that they'll start coming after me soon -- diving at my head if i walk under their trees, and maybe taking pieces of my blonde hair as souvenirs for thier nests. hmmm... i still haven't decided if i believe that yet, but i'm curious to see what spring will bring :)

So I'm subbing a lot now, and i enjoy it much more than i ever thought i would. the first 2 weeks after my long-term sub job at greenslopes ended, i didn't get any calls for daily subbing. i just drove all over the city, introducing myself to schools and hoping they might call me. i was a little nervous. but it really didn't take long to start getting calls. I've been back at greenslopes a lot in the past 3 weeks, and at a big school really close to home. and now i'm being requested back by specific teachers, and i'm working every day this week.

Yesterday i subbed in a 2nd grade class-- first time i've worked with little kids again since I got here. we had so much fun. i read them a favourite picture book of mine from Minnesota-- with great photos and a beautiful story about animals in a winter wood. most of them had never heard of such a thing as a porcupine, and squirrels were just fairy tale creatures. they were so excited.

Danny & I had a fun weekend. there was a festival in the city called Riverfire -- so we went to watch fireworks and F1-11's (airforce fighter jets) over the river. as you would do at the end of winter of course. the city was packed full of people. you could see several groups of fireworks being set off all along the river; they were amazingly well syncronized. Pyrotechnics went off the tops of several tall buildings and sparkled in all the windows along the river. it was spectacular! The planes were the best though. they dump fuel and it burns up behind them -- leaving a tail of bright red fire. and when they fly directly overhead, it's loud enough to shake you right down to your feet. i loved it. and my pilot husband said, "wow!.... i could so DO that!"

And now a new weekend is coming up, and i should end this here and get about the work of finding out what will become of it. content and curious...that's how i feel about life most of the time these days. and i miss you all. and i miss Auttumn. and French Silk Pie. and the Minnesota State fair with roasted sweet corn on a stick. mmmm.... enjoy your september! love and good things, Alicia

The one where we study Italian 2-8-04

Original email August 2, 2004

G'day all :)
Well it's the end of a monday and our apartment is full of the delicious smell of homemade chilli... just waiting in the crockpot till I pick up my husband, and we can curl up together with something spicy and warm.hard to believe July is over! it's getting into the last month of summer for you all. i wonder how you're doing-- what does the end of the summer hold for you?

NEWS ON THE JOB FRONT
For me, this will be my last week as a classroom teacher for 5th-7th graders at Greenslopes. Next week their teacher comes back, and me... well, August and September promise to be full of unknowns and surprises! (meaning they're currently empty). I continue applying for jobs and networking.... (and by the time this letter gets to you, i'm done at Greenslopes for that job.) The networking has led to some really good news actually. I have 2 ESL long-term sub positions lined up-- for all the way through October and most of November. I'll be travelling about to a couple of different schools. i havent' done any ESL teaching yet since i've been here, and i'm really excited! i've met with the coordinator for this district area, and she seems interested to get me jobs and experience wherever she can. i haven't been in this kind of place in my life in such a long time -- where i don't know what job i'll have from month to month, but it's all about networking and taking whatever opportunities arise and seeing what doors open... sometimes it's a bit scary, just not knowing how much money we're going to have each month. but when i just decide to trust and not worry about the money, it's kindof exciting to see where God might lead me.
during this time, i get to explore all kinds of different schools and get to know how things are done here all accross the city. it's forcing me to be flexible and stop worrying so much, and that's always good for me! hopefully by the beginning of the next school year-- in january-- i'll be at a different life stage and i'll be settled down into more like one place. but for now, this is where i am.

CLASSROOM STORIES
Anyway, I've just finished my final 3 weeks at this school and i haven't told you anything about it! On my last day at Greenslopes, a very thoughtful teacher asked me about my favourite moments &memories. i decided that one of them was our ritual in English class of reading aloud to the class everyday. my class was all 6th and 7th graders, and they still loved to be read to. There's this aussie author i was reading them, Paul Jennings. he writes well for that age group. His stories are full of vivid descriptions, impossible adventures, and pleanty of disgusting-sounding turns of events. keeps all the kids on the edge of their seats. they loved explaining all the aussie slang to me. there's no place to learn about a culture like in a room full of its adolecence! The unit we've been studying is inventions, and we spent a lot of time learning about Australian inventions & inventors. Did you know that both the Car Radio and the Airplane's famous little indestructable black box were both invented in Australia? now you know!

ADULT STUDENTS
Other news for us-- Dan and i are taking a class together. we've always wanted to learn italian together, just for the fun of it. at this point we've successfully made it through 2 Italian classes, and i really feel like a student again. it's so much fun! In so many ways, the language is so much like Spanish-- sometimes that helps and other times it completely throws me off. We have a great, funny italian prof, very nice teacher. We study together, my husband and i, and try to communicate all we can with our few words and limited understanding of this foreign language. it's such a good challenge for us; and really good for me as a teacher to remember what this feels like.

One thing i hadn't been expecting though, is the way it feels to be a beginning language student here- where my other classmates are Australian. It surprised me at first, but when i'm in italian class, it's as if i'm not a foreigner at all. When we try to speak italian, we all have the same accent...we're all bumbling and nervous and excited english speakers trying to imitate the voice sounds of our teacher. Since i never speak English in class, i think no one there even knows that i'm not an Aussie. the strangest part for me is when suddenly someone else speaks english! they ask a question or make a comment and it sounds so strange to me. normally, i'm so used to the australian accent now, it sounds and feel very comfortable. but in italian class, it jolts me back to reality and reminds me that i'm in this funny land of oz. i really forget until they speak English-- and their aussie accents sound so loud and strange. so i prefer to never ask questions or speak english at all in there....and i remain the undiscovered foreigner :)

QUEENSLAND
...Still, as time goes on, I continue to fall more and more in love with this Queensland. I do hope you can all come out and visit us someday -- there's so many places i'd love to show you! Morgan's-- our favourite Seafood Restaurant, where we had a date last weekend. it's got the perfect marriage of a relaxed & comfortable but also very classy, elegant restaurant, and the most amazing food. had the best dessert i've ever had in my life! and there's an ugly crustation that you can only find in this one bay--they're called Moreton Bay Bugs. delicious! and i want to show you the miles of strawberry farms up on the north coast where you can walk along and pick the biggest, sweetest strawberrries you've ever seen. and the botanical gardens up on Mount Cootha where we love to go walking in the late afternoons, and see all kinds of gardens from all over the world. and i'd love to show you our home-- it's small and happy ....and surrounded by all kinds of noisy birds :S but they're beautiful. the cotton-candy pink galahs i think are gorgeous...but everyone says they're rather stupid.there have been requests for pictures... unfortunately i've been fitting right in with the natives and not taking many :S i will try to get some online soon.

GOOD BOOK
What i can do in the meantime though is recommend the most wonderful book i've been reading lately. It's callled "The Floating Brothel," by Siam Rees. It's a very well- researched and well-told history about the 2nd fleet of ships that left England to bring convicts to Sydney cove in 1789.it's mostly about the stories of the ship full of female convicts -- their stories in England and aboard the ship. It's an absolutely fascinating corner of history that i knew almost nothing about before. i can't put it down. Well, ok, sometimes I do. It’s non-fiction, and can be a bit slow at times. Still, i highly recommend it!

WEEKEND
(now it's the next week. this is a very work-in-progress letter) Before i go, i'll just sum up this weekend, it was a good one.this weekend was full on: Dave and Nikki's wedding -- (that's wayne's brother for those of you who remember him) little outdoor wedding. beautiful day. so much fun to go to a wedding with my husband for the first time. Afterwards dan & i and two of our guy friends went bowling. in australia. it was the place i've felt most like i was back in the US. the whole place was exactly like all the ones back home, except a bit cleaner and newer and not so crowded on a saturday night. felt like i was back in high school or college, bowling with the boys. so in-my-element and so much fun!

and now i must be off to take care of still more paperwork and red-tape and documentation... ah, the immigrant's life seems to never be free of it!
Danny sends his love. we'd love to hear from you anytime and we hope this summer is treating you well.
ciao for now :)

Winter Break in July, 11-7-04

Original email July 11, 2004

how are things in the lands of summer? here, i have just finished two weeks of winter holidays, and tommorow i go back to school. i'm just about ready to go back too. it's been such a good break for me!

Besides applying for jobs and finishing up all kinds of un-interesting errands, there were also fascinating things that filled my days off this time. keen to keep learning new things, last week i taught myself how to make sushimi -- the kind of sushi that's a kind of sticky rice and whatever else you like wrapped up very artisitically in a stiff seaweed wrap. there weren't many casualties...excepting the rice that stuck to EVERYthing in our kitchen! but it was so worth it--my husband was so impressed! and he even ate it and liked it!

Another new joy to these weeks off was getting to spend lots of time with friends. It was so nice to just take off with a girl-friend into the city and shop for clothes! she showed me where the Marshalls and TJmaxx type stores of brisbane are. OOhhh that was dangerous! even more so was the HUGE Borders bookstore she helped me find. The only one here that's anything like the big B&N's and Borders that we have in the twin cities. ahh, it was like being at home-- spending hours getting lost among so many books!
Probably the most interesting place we went was to the Art Gallery and museum. I'd never known anything about Australian artists, and i discovered a few that i really like.

At the museum, Lydia spent a lot of time teaching the newcomer (that's me) about all the different varieties of Australian wildlife and things that can kill you. There's even more than i thought -- forget the snakes and spiders, did you know that there's a SEASHELL here that will KILL PEOPLE?! oh my goodness, it was the scariest thought. So a tourist is walking along one of the North Coast's serene, magical beaches, and they pick up a pretty, smooth Cone Shell. They hold it up to look at it, maybe try to listen to it... and slowly this tube comes out of the mouth of the shell. out of it and into the tourist's bloodstream shoots a venom so nasty that the unsuspecting victim is still screaming in pain After they're dead. aaggh. sounds like something out of a horror movie! and you don't even want to hear about the blue-ringed octopus. one word of advice...if you do decide to swim in the ocean here and you see something small and beautiful that turns brighter blue and more beautiful as you draw near -- DON'T touch it! swim away.
crazy, intoxicating, scary, incredible place!

This weekend Danny & i hung out with a bunch of friends at a hockey game. it was a trip! some people in Australia are trying to promote this strange game you play on ice. tickets were only $13, the game was played at a figure skating rink-- one of two in town. there were about 300 spectators, and they were about as funny to watch as the players. I had a ball! Sydney vrs. Brisbane. Brisbane had one player who could skate backwards-- he's Canadian. he wasn't playing goalie unfortunately... actually i'm not even sure the goalie was playing goalie for us. i'm pretty sure Danny could have done a better job. Sydney's team was a little more together, they looked like they knew how to handle the puck at least, but really all of them looked like a bunch of very excited and passionate players, who worked really hard at it, but really hadn't been ice skating or playing hockey very long. we were right up close to the action though, and we were quite cold...danny told me later that i looked so happy and comfortable, like i didn't seem to mind the cold. i suppose he was right -- it's ice, it's supposed to be cold! we had such a good time!

the "fans" were funny too. they were obviously interested in this exotic, foreign game, but they didn't really seem to know what was going on. not that i even completely understand, but come on-- the score keeper accidentily gave the opposing team an extra point, and nobody seemed to care! they didn't make a fuss at all; the general attitude seemed to be, "well, they could've got a point for something. but we don't really understand, so who knows?" Later, someone must've whispered to the scorekeeper, cause they took the point away. we still lost 3 to 7. still, WE-- the tropical queenslanders,who have never even SEEN ice except in a freezer. i was just proud they put on their skates and remembered what to do. :) and there was a really beautiful fight-- as any good hockey game should have. but instead of getting five-for-fighting, the instigators were thrown out for the rest of the game! harsh!

but that's enough about hockey. I actually spent a lot of my break reading, organizing, cleaning, cooking and dating my husband. yesterday we went flying together again. i love seeing him so happy. he loves showing me the North coast-- all stretched out below us like a giant, detailed 3-D map.
Oh and if anyone is looking for a good set of books to read -- i just devoured a book called "The No. 1 Ladie's Detective agency." it's a gem of a story-- beautiful and suspensful and honest and heartwarming. and africa. It's the first in a whole series by Alexander McCall Smith. and that's my book recommendation for this edition.
Movie recommendation -- Spiderman 2. Danny & i went to see it, i enjoyed it even more than the first one. nothing really earthshattering, Just good old-fashioned comic book fantasy fun.

And so tomorrow morning I'll get in our car, drop Danny at the train station, and go to school. The kids don't come back tomorrow, so we have a day of planning and meetings before teaching again. i'll probably listen to the Christian radio station on the way there and home. it's so different from the kinds in the states. It'll play Jars of Clay, then some new Aussie christian song, then Intuition by Jewel, and maybe "Girls Just wanna have fun." anything positive without swearing in it, they'll play. big eclectic mix, you never know what you'll get, but you know it won't be dirty. and randomly they'll share a bible verse. makes me think about how differently people here do things sometimes. they have no problem playing songs about dancing and love on the christian radio station - even if those songs don't mention God. they'll play the latest pop artist and then the Beach Boys.

and today i'll leave this here and get ready to go grocery shopping. Danny has already started the laundry, so i really should get started on something.
thanks for so many emails -- it's always good to hear from you. :) hope you're having a great summer.

First Fourth Downunder 4-7-04

Original email Fourth of July, 2004

Happy Independence day to all my fellow Americans!
it's the end of the day here, and Danny & I had a very different 4th than i've ever had before. of course it's an unheard-of holiday here.
we went to a boatclub for lunch-- with some friends for Kate's birthday. so nice to sit outside and listen to Beatles' songs butchered by the amature guitarist onstage. ahh...goodtimes.

When we left, we went to the Smith parents' house for afternoon tea, (which doesn't mean we necessarily drink tea at all -- only if you like. it simply means a very light meal or collection of snacks around 3 in the afternoon.) Was I in for a surprise! Pam & Geoff (Danny's mum & dad) -- they really wanted to make me feel at home and celebrate the 4th of July for me. So a Large American Flag hung over the window and a home-made apple pie with stars punched into the top sat on the table! Pam had heard how much my family enjoys eating artichokes together, so she cooked three of them for us. I had to explain to everyone how to eat them...kept them mildly interested for a few minutes, but Danny & I ate nearly all 3 of the mysterious vegetables just between the 2 of us.
Later at night, Geoff brought out the sparklers and little noisemakers, and a bunch of us played with them in the front yard, just like kids.
of course, it was nothing like the crowded streets and lit-up skies and the smell of tons of bugspray on the air that i'm used to on this patriotic holiday. But it was the sweetest gesture, and it made me smile a lot.

Danny and I hope your fourth is fun, and that this week is full of unexpected kindnesses and joys for you.

Adjusting in June 26-7-04

Original email June 26, 2004


So i've been in Australia now officially longer than i ever was before. long enough to know which side of the stairs to walk up and how to hail and ride a council bus. buses in this city are strange to me. they're massive and slow and they stop to let people get on and give them money, but here ends the similarities to all buses i ever knew. these buses are all painted with yellow kites and blue stripes. the kites signify that the bus runs completely on natural gas. the people who ride them-- day and night -- are of many ages, but mostly young,well-dressed people going to and from work. couples and friends catching rides into the cities (at this point my husband would like to point out that actually there is only 1 city here not cities pural like St Paul/Minneapolis) on friday and saturday nights so they can party and not drive home. on saturday afternoons, there's heaps of pre-teens and small families riding into southbank in the city, to swim in a questionable, little man-made lake beside the river. of course, there are people of all walks and ages of life, but these buses are not merely the place for the poor that they are in Minnesota.

All public transport here is interesting to me... especially the city cat -- the ferry that goes back and forth along the brisbane river. danny & i and our friends wayne & kate were out last weekend with very little money and lots of want to play...so $3 and we went for a ferry ride. under the stars, the wind rushing at us, arms around each other, riding on a fast boat. (ok, a fast-ish boat). perfect cheap date!

but our favourite mode of transport at the moment is our new old car. (stellar compared to our old old OLD pile-of-something-that-was-still-trying-to-be-a-car!) This one is a beautiful Subaru -- silver and shiny. we like driving up and down long and windy roads now...getting out of the city a bit, just driving together. it's good to be in a real car again! she drives smoothly, accelerates quickly, and doesn't make terrifying noises. :)

our car also has heat -- something i didn't know i would covet so much of you minnesotans...

turns out this place i'm learning to call home is becoming both more strange and more comfortable all the time -- predictable one minute and mysterious the next.

it's june and it feels like october...october in a little aparment built for perpetual tropical summer with no heating system. october with sunny blue skies in the day time and a fresh dewy cold outside in the morning. it even smells like october -- warm homemade apple crisp at mum's house and wood fires on the crisp breeze at night. even i am wearing jumpers (sweaters) and jackets, some days even my gloves. (but i can't wear scarves like so many girls. i just think it's so funny -- there's no snow! there's bearly even any wind at all, why would you want a huge fluffy scarf?! oh well. fashion.) The only problem is that everything outside is still very very green. not even a hint of gold, much less orange or red. it feels like october and looks like july. how does that work??!

and other things are so contradictory too -- i now go to the car and have a moment of inner conflict as my brain sorts out which side of the car i sit in to drive. you'd think i'd have it down by now! but i think, like with so many other little things here, i now have two ways to do something, and both feel completely right and normal...so i have to sort out which one is the right one to use where i am at the moment.

The same thing happens with language all the time. half the time i talk about the boot, the carpark, the arvo, and maths class. the other half, i still say the trunk, the parkinglot, the afternoon, and math. it's a very strange transition time. most of my dreams at night take place both in brisbane and st. paul at the same time-- we all just seem to go between both cities all the time. how i wish it was that easy!

So now i'm finally beginning to feel something that i've explained to so many people about immigrants .... how you have 2 homes and you sometimes feel torn with one foot on two continents....ah yes, and now that's me.
and just to keep reminding me of my other home, The U.S. is still around me-- in movies and music and the ice cream truck that hangs around our neighborhood every evening playing "home home on the range" :)

And now this letter is nearly long enough for this chapter methinks. But for those of you who've been wondering about my job situation, i'll fill you in on that quick too. I've now finished 3 weeks of teaching the big kids at greenslopes. it is intense, and i'm learning things all the time. remember back in those days of being 12 -- when you wanted to be at school, but not at all to do the schoolwork. you had important social business to attend to! it's so funny to watch them. they still pass notes just as we did, and as their teacher i take them away...but i haven't had the heart to read them out loud yet! i'm still getting a little tougher each week, and a little better at the humour that's so important to them. and we're getting on and having so much more fun than i thought it would be.

one thing i've learned is that, though 11 and 12 year olds haven't changed much since i was that age, their methods have updated with the times. their excuses for not getting homework done now have nothing to do with the hunger of the dog, and everything to do with harddrives crashing and losing thier files, with and with a broken down printer. they've even discovered how to post their "who-loves-who" messages by changing the screen savers on the computer when i'm not looking. ahh..adolescence!

and now i'm on break again. this week ended the 1st half of the school year, and now everyone has 2 weeks off. I do have the certainty of knowing that i'll still be in this position for 3 weeks after break. then, the teacher i'm filling in for comes back.

it looks like there won't be a permanent place for me in a school for a long while yet, but that's ok. we'll see what comes, and along the way i'll write and we'll keep seeing what we can learn and enjoy.

Danny says hello to all of you. We would love to hear from you. we wonder how you are, and wish you all kinds hope and joy and beautiful insights.

To Begin Teaching Again 3-6-04

Original email June 3, 2004

It's Thursday night here, and my husband and i are soon going to the library. for right now i relax and listen to Enya sing out of the speakers on our computer. and I thought i'd tell some stories to those of you who might be interested in the details.

The last 2 weeks have been like the tale of two cities -- you know, the best of times and the worst of times. happier than i'd ever been in this growing & exciting marriage; but getting lonlier all the time in many ways too. i've been really missing teaching. working so hard applying for jobs and trying to make connections with different schools...and then just waiting. felt like so much waiting.

Finally, yesterday i was offered a job to start immediately. the school i was at before, Greenslopes. i don't know if i told you before, but there's a teacher there who needs to go on leave. Megan is one of the upper grades teachers. She's one of a team of three who works with the 5th-7th graders. she thought she'd go in july, at the term break. but her dad's in a bad way, and she's got to go this weekend. i'll have a contract starting this monday that will last through the next term (2 to 3 months).

so today i went in to hang out with Megan and her class. it was a really good day. heaps of the kids remembered me from working with them last year, and they seemed excited that i was coming to teach. she's an excellent teacher. it seems like she's already got a good management system in place, and her philosophies and styles of teaching seem very like mine. We see eye to eye on so much, that it looks to be a fairly natural transition.

Of course, it does mean learning how to deal with 11 and 12 year olds... you know, i've been working with little kids for so long now, that's going to be a pretty steep learning curve for me! but i like the kids and know some of them a bit already, and that's a good place to start i think. i've also got a good book on developmental stages for teachers -- it's recommended by Responsive Classrooms, called Yardsticks. at least that'll help me get thinking in the right direction for where these kids are at and what their needs and abilities might be.
I really like this school too, and the team of 3 teachers that work with all the upper grade kids. they teach thematically through big, interesting units and get into lots of higher-level thinking, lots of writing, lots of arts, everything incorporates together. and the whole school is big into the multiple intelligences. and working with small groups-- differentiating instruction. it's a little chaotic and a lot of discovery and a lot of learning going on...and you can probably tell, i'm all excited!

The unit we're working on to finish up the term for the next 3 weeks-- Aboriginal studies :) dreamtime stories and biographies of interesting & important Aboriginal men and women. i'm going to be learning right along with the kids. i may even bring in a story or 2 from Native American groups, and do some compare/ contrast. if there's time. i find it all fascinating, and i'm looking forward to getting deeper into things that you can't go as far with with 1st & 2nd graders :)

I also like the school because it has quite a high percentage of ESL students and kids who've exited ESL. very diverse school. and lots of really good teachers. not a whole lot of teachers my age; most are much older. but they're good; i learned a lot from them the last time i was here, and i'm sure i will learn all the more now.

Danny...he's so excited and happy for me. he's so interested seeing me happy. he just beams as i tell him all kinds of stories about the school and the kids and the teachers... :) ahhh. he's not a teacher, and doesn't know all the jargon, but he loves to listen. he asks questions about the kids and about what i do and he encourages me whenever i feel a little unsure or stressed. we're thrilled with the idea that i can have both important things i love so much in my life at same time-- us being together and teaching! now we just need to get him flying again. when we've paid off our debts and we're getting 2 regular incomes, he can start taking lessons regularly and flying again. i think i'm just about as eager for him to start that as he is. it's so wonderful to see the one you love happily doing something they love.

Other than that, we're still just so enjoying settling into our home and our neighborhood. there's a fluffy black cat who follows us around and rolls on its back looking silly and wanting a pat. almost makes me wish i wasn't allergic...
There's an ice cream truck that drives around every evening playing "Oh give me a home, where the buffalo roam, where the deer and the antelope play..." What country am I in again? it's very funny :)

and i think that's all the stories i've got for tonight. We should go to the library soon, so we can make it back home in time for our dinner & ER date.

The First One 17-5-04

Email sent Monday, May 17, 2004

Hello friends :) Many of you have been asking for stories about our lives recently, and i thought i'd just take a moment to catch you up on some of the highlights of life since we disappeared to other side of the planet! i can't remember what all i've told to whom at this point, so this massive email is like a little book -- with subheadings and everything. you can choose the bits you're interested in reading, and skip the bits you already know... or the bits where i get babbling and stop making sense. just read whatever you like :)

WEDDING
Some of you weren't able to make it to the wedding back in April, so i'll start the stories way back there. April 17, 2004. it was a gorgeous day and all of it was more perfect than we'd ever even imagined. by that point, we were so done with planning and managing, and we were just extremely happy to be getting married. We didn't care if something went wrong. We didn't expect it to be perfect. but it was amazing! Truly, cliche and all, the happiest day of my life :) So many friends and family just completely took over on the day and made sure everything went smoothly. We felt so loved. Kim Bible took the photos -- she did a great job!

HONEYMOON
After the wedding, we stayed around in St. paul just 3 more days, then we went to New Zealand for our honeymoon. We did that for about 2 weeks -- and it's absolutely incredible. everything you've heard about New Zealand -- it's even better. it's amazing! and we had such a good time just being together and exploring the islands together. we learned all kinds of new things every day -- about the places we were in and about each other. We've just put up some photos on the website; from our travels around the South Island. We spent most of our time there in Queenstown -- a picturesque little town nestled in mountains. From there we did lots of day trips. we went walking in forests and jetboating through canyons and took a wine tour through lots of LOTR countryside and took back with us some yummy wines. One of the most incredible days was when we went to Milford Sound, which is actually not a Sound, but a Fjord --a deep inlet off the Tasman Sea cut right into huge mountain cliffs by glaciers. We got to fly there in a little plane over the most indescribably breathtaking mountains and valleys, until we got to the Fjord, then we cruised on that for about 2 hours. we saw fur seals playing and waterfalls that were 50 stories high, but looked just dwarfed on the face of the mountain jutting right out of the sea. But the sights were only part of it-- the feelings of the wind and spray and sunlight, the smells of sea and all kinds of delicious plantlife, the rugged steep faces of the mountains, the good fortune of experiencing it all with the man i love so much -- it puts everything into a kind of reverent and appreciative perspective. there are still more honeymoon photos in my camera that haven’t been developed yet - from riding in a helicopter and landing on a glacier, and from tubing down a river in a cave and climbing around inside it-- that was AWESOME! unlike anything we'd ever done before! but those photos are still to come in later editions :) The website with photos from both the wedding and the honeymoon now is http://photos.yahoo.com/dannyandaliciasmith

SETTLING IN
So now I have been home for about 2 weeks, and we are doing well. i'm settling into the apartment -- so glad that i'm coming back to a place i've been before. everything was familiar and it didn't take long for this to start feeling like home. I've looked forward to being here and being married to Danny for so long, but little did i know just how right and satisfying married life would be! Our love for each other now seems to be growing bigger and stronger than it ever was before. i can't even put into words how good and peaceful and exciting that feels. strangely enough, i do miss teaching. it's been over a month now since i was in a classroom with kids; and i REALLY needed the break then, but now i'm starting to miss it a bit. in aus, it's the middle of the school term, and getting hooked into the system is a whole different process than it was back home. fortunately, i have some very helpful contacts from the school that i visited when i was here last summer. they're helping me to get some short term work for this term. just a little more paperwork and talking to different people, and i should start some interesting temporary teaching jobs very soon. and then, after i've had some experience with that, i'll be eligable for a full time position for next year. i'll keep you posted.

THIS WEEKEND
This weekend I got to start hanging out with some of Danny's friends and getting to know people. it was a lot of fun. it'll be good to start having friends around to do stuff with again. On friday night, we went out after Danny got off work. it was a good night. first we hung out at a bar with a bunch of his friends from work. Most of which is outside of course, cause who would want to go to a bar or cafe and sit indoors? :) (i love it!) the hilarious thing was that it was just like a summer evening in my mind -- it had been sunny and warm all day, and in the evening there was a really gentle breeze so it wasn't so hot anymore, but still between 65 and 70 degrees. i was quite happy and comfy in long pants & a tee-shirt and shoes with no socks. and THE CRAZY AUSSIES WERE ALL WEARING JACKETS! Seriously -- some of the girls even had lightish-weight coats with fake fur lined HOODS! so funny. i was greatful that i noticed this interesting difference though-- it turned out to be a great conversation starter. Being Minnesotan, i've become quite skilled at talking about the weather :)

So, sport is a really big deal in Australia, and there's a massive new stadium near where Danny works. after we'd hung out at the bar for awhile, a bunch of people were going to watch "the footy." so far, i've figured out that in australia, "footy" can refer to any one of at least three different games -- rugby league, rugby union, or aussie rules. (it may also refer to soccer, but that's more of a kids' game, like it is in the US, so i'm not really sure.) I've never seen any one of the three sports, and i really had no idea how they were played. so when one of danny's good friends had 2 extra tickets and asked us to go, i was keen to join the mob of crazy drunk people filling the stands. it was really fun. the game we watched was rugby league, but i'm sure i wouldnt' be able to tell its difference from the other kind of rugby. and at first glance all three games just look like a slight variation of American football. only unlike our game (which i USED to think was fairly agressive), rugby involves much more brutal tackling for longer periods of time, and they don't have to stop & re-start after each tackle, they just keep goiing-- and all in shorts and a jersy. no padding or helmet or anything. it was bloodsport. the only game aggressive enough to compare, in my mind, is hockey. there's no hockey here of course, and when the guys i was talking to asked me if i follow any sports back home, i told them i loved hockey and dropped a few little stories about it. the boys were hanging on my every word about helmets coming off and sticks being broken and power plays! they were impressed. i think that's the moment i was accepted into the group. thank God for hockey!

On sunday, Danny & i were delighted to get to do the first couples thing we've gotten to do since we left Minnesota. We spent the whole day with Lydia and her boyfriend. She's traveled a lot and spent 3 months in North Saint Paul, Minnesota; she's super nice and easy to talk to, so it was really fun to have a woman to hang out and talk with again. and The boyfriend's from ireland, so i wasn't the only token foreigner :) we drove up to the north coast, just a bit out of Brisbane, and on the way we stopped at an airshow. danny loved that of course, but i was surprised how much i enjoyed it too. air acrobatics and old fighter planes and all kinds of stuff. and of course it was a gorgeous day. you know how in Minnesota we have this slogan about the weather: "We have 2 seasons-- winter, and road construction." well, their slogan here is "Beautiful one day and Perfect the next!" (but we haven't got into summer yet. from what i hear, that can be nasty hot. so i'll let you know when we get there :)

When we got to the beach, I got to experience my first real Aussie bar-B-Q -- complete with pleanty of alcoholic refreshment, "steaks, and Shrimp on the Barbie" -- only they're not Shrimp here -- they're MASSIVE, and they're called Prawns. and cooked in beer and eaten right off the barbie, they're really yummy! We were at the beach where Danny first took me nearly 4 years ago, where we'd watched the ocean and decided we wanted to take this risky step of this long distance relationship and see where it led...and on Sunday, it had led us right back to that very spot; we wandered around the rocks and waves at sunset, hand in hand and completely content. it was a good day. So that's all the stories i can think of to tell you now. the sun is setting here and my husband will be home from work soon.

This Saturday we'll have our celebration at Kedron Church and reception with Aussies. I miss you all and hope to hear from you soon. (Teachers at Linwood, please pass on my hello's to the students and any photos you'd like to share with them from the website. I think of them and miss them. Thanks!)

much love from danny & me,
alicia smith