Land of Oz

Okay, it took me literally forever to post this one last entry, but here it is. My friend Steph sent me a picture she took of us on our last day together at the campus, and since I didn’t have any pictures of her posted here, I decided I would have to write just one more entry, because she was definitely a big part of my study experience in Australia. So, here we are.

As for how things are back home, well, it took us a while before we began missing Australia even a little bit, but now we’re already talking about how we’ll definitely go back one day, and every time I see a picture or read something about Oz, it brings the nostalgia back to the surface. Go figure

We’re home, and it feels really good. The trip went pretty much as well as could be expected, and the only delay was in Helsinki, because the Blue1 plane was some 15 minutes late. There was an amazing welcoming committee waiting for us at the Oulu airport, which made us feel pretty damn special. As an added bonus, our sweet friends had filled our fridge with all kinds of yummies (and cleaned the apartment!), so we don’t have to go grocery shopping just yet. It was so thoughtful and sweet of them that it almost brought tears to my eyes. Thank you!! Mom also brought us some of her special fish egg sauce and dad’s specialty salmon, which we filled our tummies with after everyone had left. The evening went by with us eating, showering and unpacking a little, after which we went to bed and slept like logs. We woke up this morning at around seven or so, unable to sleep anymore, and we both still feel somewhat fluish and tired, but other than that, everyhing’s great. We’ve both already unpacked our luggage and now we’re just putting stuff to its place and trying to get to know the apartment again

I added a picture of Clipse and Daniel to the earlier entry titled The end is nigh, and after this entry, I think it’s time to say goodbye to this blog. Our great adventure is pretty much over, and now it’s time to focus on the life back here in Finland. I called my landlord this morning, and made it official: Leke is now living here in this apartment as well, which makes us both very happy. Thank you to all of you who followed our time in Australia through this blog, we’ve enjoyed your comments very much.

Sydney airport

Sydney airport hasn’t really made a positive impression on us. First of all, in order to transfer from the domestic terminal to the international one, you actually have to pay 4.50 AUD per person, whether you take the train or the bus. That’s a first! I’ve never before been to an airport where they charge for traveling between the terminals.. Well, fortunately we weren’t in a hurry, because we had to wait quite a bit before the bus finally came. We bought the final prezzies from the airport, and now we’re waiting for the flight to Hong Kong, which should leave in an hour and 45 minutes. Unfortunately I won’t be able to actually publish this entry after I’m finished with it, because naturally, the Internet access at the airport isn’t free either. Figures.

Oh well, otherwise everything’s gone smoothly so far. The nice lady at the Newcastle airport booked our luggage all the way to Helsinki, so we don’t need to worry about it until then. The flight to Sydney was on time, and went quickly. The only amusing incident was at the immigration, where the dude behind the counter gave me a little personal information quiz because of my passport picture not looking very much like me anymore.. (The picture is of me almost ten years ago, heavily made up, while now I’m au naturelle and a whole lot less pretty ) Fortunately I passed, and he let us go without any further ado.

I went a little nuts at the bookshop, and ended up buying not one but three fantasy books for the trip Granted, one of them was the book I had to leave unfinished earlier this week because it was a loan from the library and I needed to return it already yesterday morning, only a couple of hundred pages before it was done. The second one is the sequel to the first one, and the third is the first book of Robin Hobb’s new trilogy, The Soldier Son. We’re pretty much all ready to go, and on a relatively good mood as well. We’ll see how we feel once we get to Hong Kong..

This is it then. In the morning we walked to the uni to pick up one of my assignments, pay the last bill, close our bank account, send the last package home and return a book to the library. After all that was done, we had a nice lunch with Clipse and Daniel, and did some last minute cleaning. I talked on the phone with Edith, and later with both grandpa and dad, and then the landlord came by to inspect the apartment and to give us back our deposit. I’ve made arrangements for a taxi to take us to the airport tomorrow morning, so now all we can do is wait. The day has been a little bittersweet, but it’s still great to start the trip tomorrow. We weighed our luggage earlier today, and both of them seem to be pretty close to the 20 kg limit, so there shouldn’t be any trouble waiting for us at the airport, at least luggage-wise. I really hope all the flights go smoothly without any delays, and even though I know it’s not going to happen, I still hope traveling for fourty hours wouldn’t feel as long as it is. Oh well. In any case, it’s great to go home!

On Saturday we got to go to Edith and Andrew’s place for dinner and fun socialising. They are always a blast to be with and this time was no exception. We ate great food, including delicious chicken and irresistible caramel popcorn, and drank some nice red wine.

Topics of discussion ranged from serious to hilarious, not forgetting the occasional obscene but, ah, so funny tangents. What? You want examples? Well… Abu Ghraib, Captain Canuk and beavers eating their own poop, respectively, come to mind It seems strange that two couples can travel across the world, meet in an unfamiliar place and find that they get along so well. I guess there is some noble lesson to learn here, if you think about it.

We also heard that Edith might be able to apply for a transfer to a Canadian university as soon as this (northern hemisphere) autumn, which sounds wonderful. They too have been homesick and it would be great if Edith could continue her studies closer to home and family. We are certainly keeping our fingers crossed, or our thumbs up, as is customary in Finland when you are hoping for something good to happen.

As I said earlier, the evening was a success - despite an episode with the local taxi company and their rude customer service, which further sank the less than stellar opinion of Newcastle shared by all present. While waiting for the taxi to finally show up, we got to meet one of E & A’s neighbours, the jolly singing alcoholic, who was having a one-person party in his flat, so the time was not completely wasted (he was, though ).

It goes without saying that we will miss Edith and Andrew. I hope that they will come to Finland one day, so we can take them to sauna and inflict other cultural peculiarities on them. I would also like to go to Canada some time, if they will have us

We had a little going away party yesterday, as Christina left this morning to spend her holidays back home in Singapore. Her friend Richard (featured in the second photo) drove us to have dinner in the city, which turned out to be a bit of an adventure: we’d brought a bottle of red wine with us, and so we took a little walk looking for a suitable BYO (bring your own, referring to wine). However, none of the restaurants we passed were BYOs, so finally we just went into a regular one and hid the bottle of wine in my bag Fortunately we had already planned to have dessert back home, so after we ate, we drove back to the house, opened a bottle of bubbly and served the Pavlova cake you can see in front of us in the first photo. (Pavlova is supposedly a very traditional Australian dessert, and since it’s mostly made of meringue, I’d wanted to taste it ever since we first heard about it. However, none of the restaurants we’ve been to offered it as a dessert option, so finally I decided to buy one from the shop and just put the toppings on it myself. So, earlier this week we went and bought a huge Pavlova, topped it with slices of gold kiwis, and served it as dessert last night.)

Poor Clipse couldn’t make it to have dinner with us, because she had to work, but she came home before we finished having dessert, so in the end we had a nice party with all the housemates, and actually made plans to do something with Clipse on Sunday, when it’s her day off. Also, on Saturday we’re probably having yet another going away party with Edith and Andrew at their place, so we’re definitely set to have a good time on our last days here.

We took some video clips both from the zoo visit and the aquarium visit. Unfortunately, since the camera isn’t functioning as well as it used to, the quality is quite poor, but we thought we might still put a couple of them up here so you can have a look. Again, the files are pretty big, but bear with them. The first video is of a walking echidna (4.33 MB), and the second is of a swimming Grey Nurse Shark (3.86 MB). Note: the immobile echidna in the first video is sleeping, not dead. We checked it was breathing

Monday was a short one. We packed our stuff and checked out from the hotel, had breakfast and then went to look for a hairdresser who could finally give me a long needed haircut. Since the hotel we stayed in is close to Chinatown, all the hairdressers in the area are Asian, and I was a little worried they wouldn’t agree to cut my hair since I’m not, but that turned out to be just me being silly. The nice lady gave me the best haircut I’ve had in Australia, and we left happily towards the train station. Luckily enough, a train to Newcastle was leaving in some twenty minutes, so we bought the tickets and got on. This time, the only waiting took place outside our train stop in Newcastle, since we missed the bus that would’ve taken us the rest of the way home, but there was another one in half an hour, so we got home all safe and sound. Since there was nothing to eat back home, we just ordered pizza and took the rest of the day easy.

By Sunday, I think we were getting a little travel weary already. We took the morning very slowly, had a late breakfast and then went to the Sydney Aquarium. It wasn’t that different from the aquariums we had already visited, but I think the displays were very well organised so that the viewer never got tired of all the different fish, corals and other sea creatures. Also, there were a few special ‘touch pools’, where we could go and touch different sea creatures, such as sea stars, sea urchins and even a baby shark! Other highlights included the huge seal sanctuary, where different seals swam in a big pool, and we could look at them both above and under water. One of the seals even came up on a rock right next to the glass, and seemed as interested in us as we were in it The open ocean oceanarium hosted all kinds of sharks, rays, turtles and different fish, all swimming together in perfect harmony. Some of the Grey Nurse Sharks were quite big, and we also saw a few adult Port Jackson Sharks. The aquarium also displayed two platypuses, a bunch of little penguins and some crocodiles. All in all, a very cool place to visit, and highly recommendable.

After the aquarium visit, we walked around and hunted down the last remaining gifts for people back home. We also had some sushi for lunch, after which we went for a cup of coffee, but then we both got tired, and decided to head back to the hotel to see if we could come up with a plan for the rest of the day. We had originally planned to see yet another Film Festival movie, but the one we were interested in was already sold out, so that pretty much left us stranded. In the end, I fell asleep at the hotel, and we only went out for dinner in the evening.

The morning of the much-awaited whale watching day dawned, and the weather looked just as beautiful as it had been all week. The breakfast was traditional, after which we proceeded to do some shopping since it was still early, and the boat wouldn’t leave until after a couple of hours. I ended up buying the new Mew album on a bit of a whim, since I’d heard a couple of songs on it and quite liked them, so I decided to risk it. After the sporadic shopping, we went to Darling Harbour, walked around, bought a cup of coffee and some raisin toasts, nibbled on them and laughed at the greedy seagulls hoping for some crumbs, and finally the time came to board the whale watching boat. The crew gave us these information pamphlets concerning the whales we’d most likely see, and so we sat down to wait for the cruise to start. Surprisingly enough, there were a couple of other Finns on board as well, but I’m not sure if they ever figured out we were Finnish, since we didn’t get to talk with them at any point. Anyway, once the boat left the harbour, we took a walk around it and decided to have a seat on the upper deck, facing the view behind the boat.

All was well at first. The view was lovely, the sun warmed us nicely despite the cool breeze, and good time was had by all. However, once we got past the harbour area, the sea became increasingly rough, and the waves got pretty big. Naturally, the smallish boat jumped and swayed quite a lot, and while that was fun too at first, soon it became obvious that people weren’t feeling as well anymore. Myself included. Now, I’ve been known to suffer from motion sickness, usually when reading in a car, but this was worse than anything in ages. At first I just kept staring at the horizon and hoping we’d bloody get there already, but when the trip just went on and on, and even after we slowed down to see the whales, the queasiness simply wouldn’t go away. And then, whales already in sight, they went and turned the boat so that we could see the whales better, and I reached my limit. Fortunately, Leke had already secured a plastic bag for me (they had them on the boat, and I wasn’t the first one by far to need one), so I managed not to make a mess, but it was still pretty awful. Well, at least I felt better afterwards, and could actually turn around a bit to see the gorgeous humpback whales next to the boat.

The trip back to the harbour wasn’t much easier, but at least the sea calmed down once we got closer, and so did my stomach. I think seeing the whales made it all worth it, but I wouldn’t want to test my poor tummy again any time soon. I guess water just isn’t my element. I’d surely make a lousy sailor.. In any case, the whole episode was amusing as hell, and once we got to shore, I was almost as good as new. After walking around for a while, we went to have dinner at a lovely Italian restaurant, and then proceeded to the movie theatre to check out our second Film Festival movie called A Side, B Side, Seaside. Unfortunately, the film was a disappointment, but then again, I don’t think we had any real expectations for it anyway. I was just happy for the day to be done