A Trip Down Under

We had some vacation time to use, and since Lil' Bit will be making his/her appearance in a few months, thought that taking one big fling before that would be fun. And we were right! We had a blast!

We flew into Melbourne and spent 4 nights there.  We walked by the Yarra River.

This is the Exhibition Hall. This is where Melbourne signed some important document...look it up if you're curious. :)

I felt like we had found South Carolina again. Check out the tree!

At the Melbourne Museum, we saw the skeleton of a blue whale. Check out the size of this guy!

We visited the old prison where lots of hangings used to be done. One of the things we got to do was help reenact the trial of Ned Kelly, a famous criminal there whose trial is debated to have been unfair. I nudged Matt enough that he finally volunteered to play the prosecutor. Check out that hair! My, doesn't he look distinguished!

Outside the old prison...

And inside.

 We spent one day checking out the Melbourne Zoo. Gotta say that the penguins grabbed our attention the most. The King penguin has yellow, and the Gentoo penguin doesn't.

We also stood in a clear tunnel with water and creatures all around.

Don't we make a cute family?

We visited a museum based on the Holly Woodside, a ship. Matt steering correctly...

and me apparently steering from the back of the ship. Whoops!

Matt found a real replica of Crocodile Dundee's hat and knife.

DR. PEPPER!!!!!!!! 'nuff said

From one of our favorite comedians: "I want frosting all over it, and I want sprinkles, but not all over it."

 At the maritime museum we checked out more ships. Here we are before going below on a submarine (no, it wasn't moving).

Okay, so not a perfect shot. We're up on a lighthouse and it's supposed to look like I'm holding that tall tower like an ice cream cone. We tried!

After Melbourne, we flew to Sydney for about 4 nights. We took a tour of the Blue Mountains, where we got to do what I've been dreaming of doing since a kid: playing with koalas and kangaroos! But first, we saw a crazy scary bird with a bone out of the top of his head!

And some birds taking the opportunity to pose.

Hooray!!! It's a koala. And yes, she's happy...even if it looks like she's eyeing my hair as her new favorite type of leaf.

We bought a few ice cream cones filled with kangaroo food for these wallabies. They weren't as interested in the food as they were in the cone.

Matt messing with an actual kangaroo. This fellow was friend and liked to stand up near him.

So really, Mr. Emu, why do you give me the look of disgust?

Baby wallaby!!!

 Back in Sydney at Darling Harbour. We stayed just across the street from here, so spent several hours in this area just enjoying city life.

We found it amusing that in the mall at Darling Harbour, the USA Outlet was just across from...

Silk Road! It's like two familiar worlds colliding!

Sydney has their own monorail. That's just cool.

Name the iconic building in the background!

And this is me publicly being sad that my sister wasn't with us to visit there.

We took a whale watching tour. We saw one whale. Pour guy must have been left behind by his buddies. And he was shy, because we never got a good shot of him. And by we, I mean Matt, as I was too busy making sure that I wasn't dizzy on the boat.

From Sydney we flew out west. It was a shame on one hand to be in Australia and not visit the Great Barrier Reef, but we're so super glad that we chose to fly out to Perth then drive up to Exmouth instead. The time we spent out west was very relaxing after all the touristy things we had done in Melbourne and Sydney.

On the drive out of Perth, we stopped to see the Pinnacles. They are just bunches and bunches of limestone rock sprouting out of the ground really, really tall.

Yes, we did, in fact, have to watch out for kangaroos crossing the road during the drive.

Hard to tell, but you can kind of see me standing underneath. We stopped here and had fun looking at the Milky Way and remembering how to find the Southern Cross. Great moments under the stars like that remind us both of Africa (insert contented sigh here).

This is the view off one of the beaches in Exmouth where we stayed for 6 nights. It was peak season here, can't you tell? Pretty much all the beaches were like this: gorgeous and basically deserted.

Our conclusion: emus aren't pretty birds, though they try so hard to be by walking dignified.

We hiked in a gorge. Great views, but some seriously steep inclines.

On the drive back down, we caught this sign during the day. Makes a much better picture.

We enjoyed a few down days back in Perth before flying back to Melbourne to catch our flight out of country. One of those days was my 30th birthday. Here's to celebrating another momentous birthday in a country that's not my home!

Australia, thanks for the fun memories you gave us. Glad we got to see you, but gotta say...glad we're going to back to a place we can call home and can have fun retelling stories of our weeks together.

Catch Up Time

Alright, so it has been waaaaaaaaaay too long since posting on here. On one hand, life has been same-o same-o, as my parents like to say. On the other hand, we have quite a few happenings going on. So, in an attempt to consolidate postings, here is a summary of life that should have been posted along the way, but wasn't:

• Meet Lil' Bit. Lil' Bit is the little child that God has growing inside my belly. I took the at home pregnancy test on Matt's 30th birthday (March 9 for those of you who like to keep up with this kind of thing). What a fun birthday present to "give" him! Since then, I've been able to see a British doctor in the capital (who also happens to work as a forensic medical examiner for Scotland Yard...random, but kind of cool!) for a checkup, ultrasound, and blood work. I've gotten a couple blood work tests done in our town, and am leaving on Monday to meet the doctor in Turkey who will be my doctor when we return there for delivery in the fall. To answer the basic questions: a) the due date is Nov. 3; b) we are not going to ask to find out the gender; c) yes, we are excited!! 

•  I have been a slacker with our camera for the last several packages that have arrived. Since Christmas, we have received another box of goodies from Matt's parents (as awesomely covered with stamps as the first one they sent here). In this box they included some cookies that I really liked while living in Zambia (and, consequently, had to take out coffee for Matt in order to fit them in...guess the pregnant lady gets special treatment, heehee), as well as some other baking goodies and ________. Thanks Dwayne and Betty!My

• We also received some wonderful goodies via a friend that was in the States for a bit. At a conference he was part of, one of the ladies there knew us because her niece and I have been classmates from childhood through college, and she was sooooo sweet to send some goodies our way. Thank you Mrs. Betsy Bailey! We've especially loved getting to try the new Buffalo flavored Tobasco! And of course you couldn't go wrong with hot chocolate and candy! Thank you again!

A few of the goodies that traveled with our friend.

• And along with those goodies came some from my parents and a super sweet lady. Mrs. Mobley crocheted a shawl for us that is just beautiful, and honestly is perfect to have around for those days where you just want a little something on your shoulders. Plus, she didn't know it when she was making it, but she picked colors that we'll be using for Lil' Bit, so it was a great start for our collection of goodies. Thanks Mrs. Mobley!

• My parents made sure to help us get some more boxed mac and cheese, which came in really handy a few times over the next couple of weeks when it was one of the only things that actually sounded appetizing as well as some cards that friends had mailed for us to their house and some magazines and language books (hooray for picture dictionaries!). Thanks Daddy and Momma!

•  My sister also sent us a package from Texas, including face wash, some cool socks for me and a nice scarf for Matt, and of course some more snacks. She also willingly and successfully played middle-man for getting Matt a replacement Kindle when his decided not to work anymore. The joy of a Kindle is that you can have soooo many books in one place and they take up virtually no weight or space. The down side is that if anything happens to said Kindle, well, you can read none of them. So thank you Vicky for all that you did to get Matt's nose back in his books and tossing in so many fun extras at the same time!

• We also have some very generous friends from working at REI who got together some goodies for us that we have a hard time getting our hands on here. Ken was the man behind the scheme to send stuff this way, and he did a marvelous job of putting stuff together! I generically said that spices would be great (because many of them, even if I can get them here, I didn't know what they were called in the language here or in Russian), and he sent a slew of them, including some fun spice blends that we've never tried before but are really enjoying! He also got a whole bunch of hot chocolate flavors together, and our other friends, Keith and Sarah, chipped in some of their favorite hot chocolate blends along with a handwritten letter (I may or may not have teared up when reading this...and again while typing about it). So now, as some have alcohol bars and others have coffee bars, we have a hot chocolate bar in our house. Though we don't drink them frequently now, as it gets colder those suckers are going to get downed! And we love the fact that they gave so generously to us that we get to easily share generously with our team mates. Thanks Ken, Keith, and Sarah!

Wow, really didn't realize that there had been that many packages that had come since Christmas...and therefore that it would take that many bullet points to get through them all.  We'll do some more catching up in another post, to share more about what's been going on in life in the little things and giving some more glimpses into our town.

Nav Ruz

Nav Ruz is Persian New Year, a major holiday for any people of Persian descent (Afghans, Tajiks, Iranians). Our little town had a big party in front of the government building, sort of town hall, with stalls, dancing, and displays, sort of a little county fair. It did take place in March, so our timing is a bit late, but with internet this is when we could post pictures. 

Nav Ruz partiers at the line of stalls, showing off and selling wares

Demonstrations from the local martial arts classes.

Traditional dances.

Cooking Osh in big pots. This is a traditional meal, cooked the traditional way. Basically it's flavored rice.

Traditional instruments and dress. The couples in the back are wearing traditional wedding dress.

At several points in the festivities, all the little kids just got up to dance. I think we need more holidays where unsupervised children dance randomly in public.

Everyone carries around plates of grass. I think it symbolizes new life in the new year.

And the dutch aren't the only ones with wooden shoes.

Food types on display.

Traditional dress, bride and her dad.

Wooden and metal handicrafts.

Pictures from Down the Road

Much later than hoped or anticipated, I am finally publishing some more pictures for your viewing pleasure, these from a trip in march to a disaster sight.

Clearing an avalanche the covered the road on the other side of the border.

Driving through a partially cleared avalanche.

This particular one was blocked by a truck stuck in the snow. This was the first delay of the trip.

Yep, the bulldozer is pushing the truck out.

And the second delay. You can catch the size of the rocks by the guys standing next to them.

Blowing the rocks with dynamite, that just happened to be in our car.

Then the bulldozer comes in to push rocks.

Oh yeah, we don't exactly have to stand clear in this process. Yeah, that guy is standing in front of the bulldozer.

Caves in the hills. People used to use them to hide out from the raiders in the 4th Century.

Another avalanche, this one that crossed the river.

Mudslide up to a school wall.

Damage to the inside of a local house we are helping to rebuild. It simply filled with mud.

This is the outside of the houses. They are almost buried.

A more open stretch of land that is on both sides of the border.

Travel

 

So I think we have established by now that we live in a pretty remote and interesting part of the world. One of the interesting things we get to experience is a different kind of travel from anything we have really done before. By comparison to the US, it is never boring. It is sometimes dangerous, often tedious, but never boring. Take this last trip for example.

For work I (Matt for those keeping track) got to go at the end of the week on a trip to a remote valley high up in the mountains here. It’s about an eight hour drive, there and back, under normal conditions. Ok, so maybe not under normal conditions, but under good conditions. This is not the time of year one can expect good conditions, but hope springs eternal so we hoped to go up and do our work, turn around and come back in the same day.

About 40km out of town, not a quarter of the drive yet, that plan was revealed to be slightly flawed. There was an avalanche that was causing us a delay. Now, we had already passed more avalanches on the road than I could count (you really stop trying after the first couple dozen) but most were small (only a few yards wide and maybe 10 feet of snow or less) and were pretty easily cleared. Bulldozers work up and down the road all winter cutting through them, so you just zoom on by. This one was different. About half a mile of the road was covered, enough to take a lot of work to clear, and some rather large trucks had tried to cross too early and got stuck. The bulldozer (left behind with the fall of the Soviet Union, I kid you not) was clearing snow and pushing the trucks out from behind. After two trucks got pushed out we were able to work our way through without getting stuck and stopped on the other side of the avalanche.

The reason we stopped on the other side is that another couple kilometers up the road a rock slide blocked any further progress. This wasn’t a couple basketball sized boulders in the middle of the road, this was pickup sized boulders in a really big pile where the road used to be. This turned out to be more of a challenge. Luckily the local government/army official riding with us had dynamite (a fact I was blissfully unaware of until that moment. How was I supposed to know that the guy in the back seat with a bundle wrapped up in newspaper was carrying high and unstable explosives? I guess that’s way the other cars didn’t want to take him) so they set a couple of charges and cracked some of the bigger boulders. Now I don’t know much about dynamite (I do know how it smells after it blows now though) but it seems to me that setting it off in an area already prone to rock slides and avalanches is maybe not the safest undertaking, but you do what you have to do. They only had enough for two explosions, so again we turned to a Soviet-era bulldozer.

In she comes and starts pushing rocks up to the edge of the cliff (did I mention all of this was taking place on the edge of a rather steep cliff that ended in a rather cold and fast river?) and then moving back to push more over. Very slowly we watched it move rocks around while a large crew of road workers and well wishers stood right around the bulldozer giving advice and directions. This is one major difference in road repair here. There weren’t any hard hats, orange cones, or people keeping you away. We just stood around (on the very rocks they were trying to move) and jumped in when we wanted to help. It was very much a different experience from the US where they won’t let you within a mile of explosives or bulldozers in rock slide areas.

Nine hours later, we were through both the avalanche and the rock slide. We did get delayed one more time that evening with an avalanche that a bulldozer was working on, but this one was just about 15 minutes of sitting. We did the work we needed to do up the valley and came back the next day. This time we hoped the road would be clear. No, this time we came upon a new avalanche with a new complication. A bulldozer was at work here too, but the transmission went out as it was in the middle of the road. So, now we can’t get around the bulldozer or over the pile of snow until we fix the transmission and move the bulldozer and try to get over the pile of snow, in the dark, on an avalanche. Sure enough, the resourceful and talented people on the road fixed the bulldozer in the dark (I don’t even know where to find the transmission on a bulldozer, I wasn’t even sure they had one) and shovel enough snow out that the cars could pass. Our wonderful Russian van jumped right over the pile and got out of the snow with no problem and only a couple hour delay. About 45 minutes from the end of our journey, wouldn’t you know it, a flat tire. We didn’t just get a hole, we busted the tire on a rock or something and then had to repair the fan in the engine. We got home around 11 at night, making the day long trip into a full two-day journey.

It’s rather interesting to travel here. Most of the road is always in imminent danger of rock slides and avalanches at any given moment, and seeing big rocks just sitting in the middle of the road is common. At any given time one could hit your car and there really isn’t any way to deal with that danger. I was talking to our driver looking at a major avalanche across the river and said it’s dangerous here, you have to be careful. He answered, no you don’t. Being careful doesn’t help. You just pray. Yes, yes we do. 

With our internet speed I won't try for pictures, check back in a week for pictures of road work you can't get in the US.

Excited about Life after Death

Someone that I have known since a youth just passed away this last week, and I had a potentially strange emotion immediately upon finding out: JOY!

This man is now no longer in pain and no longer worrying. He is sitting at the feet of His Maker, enjoying the place prepared for him, and basking in the beauty of JC's radiance and light, along with all kinds of other wonderful things that are possible. Our Dad is sooooo good, there's no way we could limit thoughts about Heaven to looking brainwashed, playing harps, and getting angels' wings (plus there's absolutely no foundation for those conclusions). What we get to look forward to, in part, is finally getting to enjoy the life that the Garden of Eden was supposed to provide...stupid sin!

My heart goes out to his family as they learn to walk through life with their earthly father and husband now enjoying their heavenly Father. What a road they have ahead while still here on earth...but what a joyous reunion when they get together with him again in the future and together get to experience Dad fully.