Bless the Beasts and the Children

            We have been getting to know a fair number of Australian animals, primarily at two superb nearby sites. The world-renowned Melbourne Zoo, nestled in Royal Park near the psychiatric hospital, is the oldest zoo in Australia.  It was also Australia’s most crowded zoo the day we were there because we had imprudently chosen to visit at the kick-off of children’s week.  Children were being admitted free of charge, whether or not they were domesticated, but never mind—they all headed immediately for the exotic, foreign animals, while Kathryn and I sought the native fauna and had much better viewing. 

In addition to other attractions, this zoo contained a magnificent, towering aviary—essentially a large, open cage that visitors could walk through, and which was spacious enough to contain several “environments,” including riverside and desert habitats.  The birds were astonishingly varied, colorful, and active.  We had the good luck to fall in with a birder who identified for us the various species and recommended a few good bird books as well, including Michael Morcombe’s famous Field Guide to Australian Birds.  For the other animals, Kathryn lost her heart to the wombat, probably because he resembled a guinea pig the size of a Mini, but to me he looked as if he should be placed on a suicide watch.  I meant to suggest to his keeper that he have a counselor step over from the psychiatric hospital for a consultation, but I forgot.

            The following week we had an even better time at the Healesville Sanctuary, which was an hour east of Melbourne.  Our new neighbor, Paula, kindly drove us out there, and we spent the day with her and her two young sons.  As a genuine sanctuary, Healesville is more than a spot for people to come and make idiotic faces at animals in an effort to get them to do something interesting.  It’s that too, of course, but this refuge “cares for over 1500 injured or orphaned wild animals each year,” according to their literature.  Visitors to the on-site animal hospital can view displays of microscopes, x-rays, and even a nursery (including an artificial pouch for orphan kangaroos).  One of the most intriguing items was a flat-screen TV providing a bird’s-eye view of an in-progress operation.  A window also gave views of the operating room, so we spent a queasy quarter-hour watching an echidna apparently getting a tummy tuck.

             Taken together, these displays did awaken in me a new respect for the sheer body of knowledge that vets must master simply to do a competent job.  To take a single but representative example, consider the matter of sedating an animal for surgery.  With human patients, how many variables are there?  Weight, of course, and sex, and age, and general physical condition.  I’m no expert and I’m certain there are other considerations, but these are the major ones, surely.  When an animal is the patient, you have all of these plus the differences of physiology, metabolism, and even species.  And, as I say, this is just one part of veterinary care:  putting an animal under for an operation. 

But it is an important part because, trust me, there are some Australian creatures that you don’t want to wake up prematurely.  A score or so snake species come immediately to mind.  Of the world’s ten deadliest snakes, the top—let me just check this—yes, the top 100% are found in Australia.  And of these, the grand champions are the fierce snake (Oxyuranus microlepidotus) and his cousin the taipan (Oxyuranus scuttelatus).  The fierce snake is also known as the inland taipan.  Bill Bryson met up with one or the other in Sydney’s Australian Museum, and describes it thus in his book, In a Sunburned Country.

Even from across the room, you could see at once which was the display case containing the stuffed taipan, for it had around it a clutch of small boys, held in rapt silence by the frozen gaze of its beady, lazily hateful eyes.  You can kill it, and stuff it, and put it in a case, but you can’t take away the menace.

You will note Bryson is pretty vague about describing them, apart from the lazily hateful eyes, and I believe this is a deliberate attempt on his part to preserve their mystique.  Because, really, taipans are not merely the deadliest snake on the planet, but the most ludicrously understated as well.  This serpent, mark you, is 50 times more lethal than a cobra (according to the card Bryson saw in Sydney—my Melbourne taipans claimed to be only 7 times more lethal, but possibly they were just being modest), and yet, to unprejudiced eyes they look about as deadly as a pair of Dockers slacks.  They are the right colors, anyway.  The ones I saw had beige undersides and were a bland, unvarying khaki everywhere else, the black, hateful eyes excepted. 

Which all strikes me as rather unsportsmanlike of the taipan, frankly.  I mean, if you routinely carry around enough venom to lay out a roomful of people, you might at least put on some garish colors to advertise the fact, colors that say, “Hey everyone, I’d just as soon kill you as look at you!  Keep the hell away from me!” Sea snakes have manners enough to do this, as do coral snakes; rattlesnakes have their rattles, and cobras their impressive hoods.  It just seems to me the taipan isn’t trying very hard here, nor taking its preeminent position seriously enough.

According to a website (http://www.usyd.edu.au/anaes/venom/snakebite.html) sponsored by Abbott Laboratories for Australasian Anaesthetists, “In Australia there are about 3,000 snake bites per year, of which 200 to 500 receive antivenom; on average one or two will prove fatal.”  (Personally, I’d like to know what the story is with the 2500 to 2800 snakebite victims who don’t receive antivenom:  “What’s wrong with Jackie there?”  “Says a death adder bit ‘im.”  “Pah, it’s just his shout at the bar—that’s all’s bitin’ ‘im!”) 

But since only one or two bites, on average, prove fatal each year, Australians seem to enjoy having a laugh at newcomers and their allegedly overblown qualms about the gentle creatures of the bush.  Well, please consider the following.  Kathryn and I have booked a Christmas trip to Tasmania; we wanted to do some camping, and started looking online for used tents.  Below is a typical specimen of what Australians themselves prefer to sleep in when camping in their own country.  “The prosecution rests,” is all I can say.

 --originally posted 11/2008

First Impressions of Oz

“Nature’s first green is gold,” wrote Robert Frost, “her hardest hue to hold.  Her early leaf’s a flower; but only so an hour.”  Thus he describes, with his customary pithiness, the tendency of things new and tender to be superseded by the mundane and pedestrian:  “Then leaf subsides to leaf.  So Eden sank to grief, so dawn goes down to day.  Nothing gold can stay.”

First impressions of a new place likewise are made of this kind of ephemeral stuff.  If past experience is anything to go by, I will not be able to remember a year from now what ordinary things made me gawp during these first few days in Australia.  I think that’s reason enough to jot down a few first impressions after nearly two weeks.  These are in random order and are, of course, highly subjective observations.

First, nature:  although we have been in Melbourne and various suburbs (a word of explanation right away—Australians say “suburbs” where Americans would say “neighborhoods” or perhaps “boroughs.”  In Seattle, think of Queen Anne or Capitol Hill; in San Francisco, the Mission District or Chinatown; in New York, Queens or Brooklyn) the whole time, we have seen a fair bit of local fauna.  Birds in particular are everywhere, and with the exceptions of seagulls, crows, and pigeons, all of them are new to us.  Some have long and canorous songs, and others are brilliantly colored.  I wish I could say whether I had seen or heard a kookaburra, but regrettably cannot until I acquire a local bird book.

We spent the first five days at a hostel in the suburb of Richmond, and one night the owner brought several of us guests into the back courtyard to see a mother and baby possum devour part of his bottlebrush tree.  They were larger than American opossums, and had thick, brownish-grey fur.  Their tails were long and bushy, in place of the naked, ratlike tails of their American cousins.  Possums are nuisances here in Melbourne, and many trees in the larger parks have plastic sleeves partway up the trunks to prevent the possums from laying waste to the new foliage.  Strangely, they are still protected animals and so, though you are allowed to trap them, you can remove them no more than 50 meters before turning them loose again.  Of course, this achieves nothing in terms of dissuading the possums, unless you happen to live within 50 meters of a large and deep body of water, and so the battle remains pitched between the marsupials and people looking to protect their plants.

Melbourne is in the 11^th year of a drought, and everyone is extremely conscious of water usage.  All toilets have two buttons that I’ll call flush #1 and flush #2, the first using only half the water of a full flush.  Many, many homes have above- or below-ground storage tanks to collect rain runoff from their roofs, which is used to water gardens.  A sign in our hostel urged us to help conserve by taking short showers or by showering with a friend.  I could not find a friend willing to help me conserve, and so chose the short-shower option.

Sport looms large in the culture—a soccer or cricket match, or Australian-rules football seemed to be under way whenever we turned on our television at the hostel.  The newspapers cater to this fascination by churning out a steady supply of fat sporting sections, and I have been intrigued to see not just men, but women too on the commuter trains poring absorbedly over articles on personnel changes at various team franchises, post-mortems on matches won or lost, and strategy predictions for upcoming grudge contests.  Australia’s biggest horse-racing event, the Melbourne Cup, takes place at the beginning of November.  Reputedly, the whole country comes to a standstill to watch it—think of the first moon landing or the reading of the O.J. Simpson verdict, only with more alcohol—and you will have some idea of its universal appeal.  This will be something worth observing, as a disinterested newcomer.

The tellers at our new bank stand behind a pane of glass, but it is not bullet-proof, and there is a wide gap in the glass right between them and the customers.  Clearly, this does not afford much protection, but during one visit I spied a notice on the countertop on the teller’s side of the glass:  “Fly-up shield; keep clear at all times.”  This notice was stuck to a strip of metal, broad as a man’s hand, that apparently was the top edge of the aforementioned shield.  Plainly, it is a thick, protective plate that shoots upward in the event of a robbery.  I looked along the row of tellers and saw that none had put so much as a finger moistener on this strip.  I would love to see what happens when it is deployed.

Eggs at our local supermarket come in three varieties.  In ascending price order, they are cage-laid, barn-laid, and free-range.  We have so far taken the middle-high road with the barn-laid eggs (I’d like to see that, too, by the way).  Inside the carton lid is a blurb from the Royal SPCA about the working conditions of the production staff:  “…The hens have litter in which to dust bathe, space to flap their wings, stretch and socialise, nests in which to lay their eggs, and adequate perch space.”  Given these conditions for the barn hens, it seems probable the free-rangers may even be able to join unions, form bowling leagues, freely practice their chosen religion, and run for public office when they come of age.  For all I know, the extra profits from their ova are channeled directly into diversified retirement accounts for them.

Every morning the trains, trams, and streets are thronged with children in their school uniforms—they really do wear them here.  It actually is quite sweet to see young people mingling, laughing, text-messaging, flapping their wings, all while un-selfconsciously wearing outfits that no American teenager would be seen dead in.  The girls wear above-knee-length dresses and sun bonnets—matching cardigan sweaters appear to be optional.  The boys wear shorts or long pants, white shirt and tie, and blazers.  The school crest is often stitched on one pocket, along with the sometimes-excruciating official credo:  “Lead and Achieve,” and “Honor the Work” are actual examples.  Imagine Angus Young from AC/DC, and you have the visual image of the Australian school lad.  If you’re not familiar with Angus Young, imagine Mickey Rooney in knickerbockers, or the boy who used to deliver your groceries—a kid who would say “Gee whillikers,” if his bike got a flat.  That’s what they look like, anyway.  I haven’t heard any of them say “Gee whillikers,” but I bet they wouldn’t bat an eye if next year they were ordered to wear beanies with propellers on top, or even lederhosen.

And speaking of inadequate mottos, the state of Victoria, where we now reside, could use a lot of help in developing a new local slogan.  In the U.S. some states put their mottos on car licenses to tell you something about the place (The Evergreen State—Washington; The Golden State—California) or its people (“Live Free or Die”—New Hampshire; “Live Like Me or Die”—Colorado).  Compared to these, the messages on Victoria license plates are frankly vague and colorless.  The most common are “Victoria—On the Move,” and “Victoria—The Place to Be.”  I expect any day now to come across “Victoria—Well Why Not?” or something similarly bold and inspiring.  Actually, I have also seen “Victoria—Garden State,” which is an improvement over the other two, but still not as zippy as it might be.  Readers with a creative bent are therefore urged to send in their submissions for a new Victoria State slogan—there may actually be a prize awarded for the winning entry, but don’t count on it.

--first posted 10/2008

The Merry Old Land of Oz

            When does a plan cease to be a plan and become simply “the way things will be?”  Many of life’s Rubicons have clear delineations between this side and that, before and after—death, marriage, and childbirth come to mind—but many others do not.  Take this scheme to live and work abroad, for instance.  Is it going to happen at all?  If so, where will this experiment be conducted?  Is it even a certainty yet?

            Well, as of late July 2008, Kathryn and I have airline tickets, she has accepted a job offer, and someone with a baby-grand piano has signed on to rent our home in the coming months.  Taking these facts together, I here venture the opinion that we have indeed entered new territory.

            Early October looks to find us, then, in Australia—Melbourne, to be precise.  I thought it would be entertaining to relate a few little-known facts about Australia, but as I sat down to do it I realized that I didn’t know any:  everything I knew is known by everyone, and there wasn’t even much of that.  Kangaroos, Great Barrier Reef, good beer in blue oil cans—not a lot else came immediately to mind.  Moreover, in talking with others I found this to be a very common condition:  Oz (as it is known to its friends) apparently remains the terra australis incognita, as it was called by early European cartographers when they referred to the hypothetical place that they thought should down there somewhere.

            So I have been doing some reading to mitigate my vast ignorance of the Commonwealth of Australia.  Bill Bryson’s In A Sunburned Country was a good place to start, since it is extremely amusing and quite informative.  Frank Welsh’s Australia : a New History of the Great Southern Land is even more informative, but it is also markedly less amusing.  I may also go as far as renting Mad Max as well, but probably that will be all I have time for prior to the Big Move.  Here, then, is a bit of what I have learned so far—a shamefully brief introduction to our soon-to-be new home.

            Though aboriginal peoples have inhabited this island continent for more than 40,000 years, it remained unknown to Europeans until the early 1600s, when Dutch explorers encountered a large land mass where they didn’t expect one.  Initial reports of the find did not kindle much enthusiasm, however:  the climate was withering, the land appeared infertile, and the aboriginals’ habit of showering would-be landing parties with spears all but ruled it out as a potential eco-tourism destination.

 

            Consequently, the west took virtually no notice of the place for another century and a half until, in 1770, Captain James Cook apparently decided “Oh, why not?” and claimed it for Great Britain.  Within 20 years, the British were shipping convicts to New South Wales (as the whole territory was then known) as a cost-effective solution to the problems of overcrowding in jails at home and recidivism among released convicts.  “Let ‘em recidivate several thousand shark-infested miles away,” seemed to be the era’s guiding philosophy regarding penal administration.  The first permanent European settlements, then, were established by prisoners and those sent to watch them.

            Today, of course, Australia is a modern, prosperous, democratic nation—the world’s sixth-largest country, after Brazil.  In area, it is 95% as large as the continental U.S., but with only 20.6 million inhabitants, it has less than 1/12^th the population of that region.  The vast majority of Australia’s people are concentrated along the eastern and southern seaboards (the boomerang coast). They cluster here because most of the rest of the country is covered by deserts, sweltering tropics, and other territory where nature seems intent on making things uncomfortable for anything but reptiles, kangaroos, and spinifex (genus Triodia, a grass with sharp, pointed leaves and almost no nutritive value for animals.  It is a plant whose chief uses are to provide a resin for spear-making, and as a superior fuel choice when one wishes to send up a good, visible smoke signal to distant correspondents).

            Melbourne, Australia’s second city after Sydney, is a modern and cultured metropolis of 3.8 million inhabitants, making it only slightly less populous than Los Angeles.  It is also Australia’s southernmost major city, at the “cold” edge of the continent.  That will probably take some getting used to—this reversal of directions and seasons:  Christmas is a good beach day; Easter is in the fall, and ads for apartments boast of “good northern exposure to catch the winter sun.”  A Melbourne winter, of course, means the short, bleak days of July and August, when the nighttime lows plunge to an average of 43º F (7º C), not counting any wind chill.  The city’s precipitation is remarkably consistent at about 2 inches (5 cm) per month, the whole year round.

 

            If Australia were transferred to the northern hemisphere, Melbourne would be at the same latitude as San Francisco, and the rest of the country would extend southward as far as the northern edge of Costa Rica.  The distance from Shark Bay on Australia’s west coast to Brisbane on the east is about the same as from Los Angeles to New York City.

            In other words, It’s a big place, and it looks terribly interesting from where we are now.  I can’t wait to see it for myself, and I expect future installments here will have proportionally more first-hand information and less hearsay.

      --originally posted 7/2008

You Do it Yourself and See How You Like It

Every failure teaches a man something, to wit, that he will probably fail again next time.

                                                                        ~~H. L. Mencken

            I had intended to fill this space with news of progress made toward our move to Vietnam and enrollment in a CELTA course, but I find I must digress somewhat.  In fact, the whole scheme to study and then teach in Vietnam has come seriously a cropper.  In consequence, my wife, Kathryn, and I now are looking at a different country altogether as a landing spot.  I am not naming it in case our plans change again before we go.  You see, we want to appear to know what we’re doing, and this façade is harder to maintain when we keep switching our intended destination every two weeks.

            So instead of a move update, I will use this space to dispel the myth that our preparations are just one long, joyful round of filling out training-course applications and researching exotic diseases we might contract.  No, there is a lot of actual work involved in this relocation lark as well.  We did some of it this past weekend, as a matter of fact.

            I have always loathed home-improvement projects (or DIY, as it is sometimes known) because mine almost never actually improve the home, they routinely cost three times our initial estimates (usually because I need to buy an essential tool halfway through), and I unfailingly acquire several small but painful wounds along the way.

 

            This weekend it was hanging shower doors, and the project unfolded in typical fashion.  We bought the doors a few weeks ago at Home Depot, left phone messages for half a dozen alleged carpenters and handymen, waited whimsically for a call back, then said “to hell with it” and girded our loins to put the doors up ourselves.

            I can only guess that instructions are included with things like our shower doors because federal regulation says they must be there.  But really, they are worse than superfluous; they’re actually a kind of sarcasm.  People who already know how to install shower doors don’t need instructions, and the rest of us find little enlightenment or comfort in pamphlets that evidently are word-for-word translations from Tagalog.  For home-improvers like me, the instructions might as well say, “Look at you. Why, it’s obvious to Lincoln’s dead grandmother that you never held a Dremel tool in your life.  What a mess you’re going to make with that!  Be a sport and send us photos when you’re done.”

            But before I got my hands on the Dremel tool (lent to us by a neighbor, who meant well), I had a lot of time to think because I was using a hand file to shape the doors’ base plate to our tub.  At first, of course, I merely thought of how much I hate such projects, but then I slipped into a kind of filing-induced meditation and worked out exactly why I have such poor success with DIY and despise it so.

 

            When I was very young there was a particular toy that held me enthralled.  It was an H-shaped wooden structure with quarter-sized holes bored in the crosspiece.  There were fat round pegs that fit through the holes, but only just.  The fun was to use the small wooden mallet that came with the set to hammer the pegs through the holes over and over again.  The pieces all were painted bright colors; probably there was a similar hammering set in your own childhood.

            The point is that I took seriously my job of whacking the pegs through their holes; I kept at it for long periods, and I got pretty good at it.  This is precisely where DIY projects fall short of what our childhood activities led us to expect from a world we were told was rational:  in the kits you buy, there is one and only one copy of each essential part, and you get no practice swings at all before you have to put it to its intended use.  What folly!  You’ve never used or installed one of these things before, yet you must get it exactly right, or guests to your home will ever afterward be coming out of your bathroom shaking their heads sadly, and will whisper something to their spouses, after which the spouses will visit the bathroom.

 

            This one-to-a-kit rule means that once you have cut the part too short, or hammered it in crooked, or glued it in wrong-way round, or stripped its threads, you are, to use the technical term from the glossary of our shower-door instructions, “screwed.”  Believe me, I know this technical term, because I find myself in that situation several times in the course of every project I undertake.

            How refreshing it would have been to open our shower-door box and find this on the front page of the instructions:  “CONGRATULATIONS ON YOUR PURCHASE OF THESE OUTSTANDING SHOWER DOORS!  Installed properly, they will give you years of trouble-free service.  Of course, the fact that you are actually reading these instructions tells us that you are incapable of installing them properly.  Tough luck for you, pal!  And by now (we’ve been in this business a long time), your son probably has come in to watch you work, your spouse likely is hovering near the door, unsure whether to stay or go, and perhaps (God forbid), your father-in-law has stopped by ‘to see how you are getting on’ with the installation.  Believe us, we know just how you feel, which is why we have, wherever possible, included extra, stub-end parts for you to practice with, and commit your imbecile mistakes on, before you tackle the real thing and wind up “'screwed’ (see glossary of terms).”

            When I run the circus, that is how these kits will be put together, anyway.  Next weekend we are re-hanging the bathroom doorframe that the plumber, in his wisdom, removed before installing our new bathtub.  Kathryn is even now downloading instructions from the internet; please pray for us.
--originally posted 04/2008

CELTA Plan: The First Detour

           Across the globe, the Certificate of English Language Teaching to Adults (CELTA) is the gold standard for initial qualifications in the field of teaching English to foreign learners.  Developed in the 1960s by John Haycraft at International House, the famously rigorous CELTA course was later adopted by Cambridge University, England, which is why the certificate often is referred to as the Cambridge CELTA.  Cambridge is justly proud and fiercely protective of CELTA’s international reputation.  So much so, that today every CELTA course, no matter where in the world it is taught, is audited by a Cambridge representative to ensure that standards are being upheld.  The last thing Cambridge wants is a slew of certificate-mills giving out bogus CELTAs to semi-literate boobs whose most challenging language requirement for the course is writing out a check.

            The CELTA came to have significance for me a couple years ago, as my wife, Kathryn, and I pondered what to do when our children left home for college.  At some point we hit upon the idea of teaching English abroad as a means of adding some adventure—and perhaps a few debilitating diseases—to our lives; because of the CELTA’s international cachet, we soon concluded that it was just the ticket.  From there, the decision to do the course at International House was an easy step.  The nearest IH is in Portland, so we began making plans to apply there.  Last November we visited the school and had a very informative conference with the director, which confirmed us in our plans.

            Then, in early January, I came across an ad for the CELTA course at a different school for roughly two thirds the price.  I didn’t mention previously, but will here, that the fee for this four-week course is approximately $2,200 per person here in the U.S.  The school I found was not in the U.S., of course; it was in Hanoi, Vietnam, which meant that in addition to a lower tuition fee, our other costs would be commensurately lower as well.  For example, a furnished two-bedroom apartment in a good area of Hanoi goes for $243 per month; a gallon of milk is $1.88; a can of local beer is $0.41; a three-course dinner in a restaurant is $9.35; and a doctor’s visit is $39.90.  Please note that last figure is not merely the co-pay, but is the whole fee for a half-hour consultation with an MD.  Or these, at least, are some of the prices we found on TEFL.com, an independent website giving nuts-and-bolts living costs for scores of cities around the world.

            Needless to say, these facts prompted a quick but thorough reassessment of our plans.  We now expect to do the course in Hanoi, starting in November, and will be seeking employment there immediately afterwards.  But this all requires us to complete a long list of tasks in the intervening nine months.  A small sampling from the list:  refinance home; find a property manager and tenants for it;  remodel downstairs bathroom; erect Rubbermaid storage shed in the back yard.  And no, I am not joking about that last item, though I wish I were.

            I admit this entry is more information-intensive than I like to make them, but I think this is important background if any of the rest is to make sense.  As Mark Twain put it, “Get your facts first, and then you can distort them as much as you please.”  I’m afraid the flow of facts will continue awhile in the next installment, but that entry will at least include information on some of the more exciting diseases Vietnam has to offer.  There is no shortage, believe me.
--originally posted 02/2008

When We Leave and What We Leave For

So here’s the plan, as of November, 2007.  In about a year’s time Kathryn and I will take a CELTA course at International House, Portland; in early 2009 we will move abroad, and teach English for several years; while we are away I will write periodic installments in this online diary as a way of storing up experiences against the day when our memories really begin to give out.  It’s my determination (in this context a determination is stronger than an intention, but not as strong as a promise) to make some sort of meaningful entry every week or two, perhaps including photos as appropriate.

I should say a brief word here concerning the scope of topics I intend to address.  Simply put, I will here record things that would tickle me to read about if a friend of mine were living in an interesting country while I was still stuck at home on Bainbridge Island.  I will try to pick out those unique phenomena that really give a sense of place and make it clear that one isn’t in Kansas anymore, so to speak.  As much as possible, I will avoid things that can be found in travel books, though this intention may strain me some—good travel writers, after all, are also looking for evocative and unique phenomena.  But let me give an example of the type of thing I would write about.

            When I was in the army in the early 1990s we lived in Johannesberg, a tidy and attractive German village of perhaps 200 souls.  During our tenure there, a white caterer’s truck would pull up beside the farm across the road every Wednesday and Saturday morning and give two short toots on its horn.  At this signal, ladies would emerge from the various houses in our neighborhood, and would stroll out and congregate near the rear of the truck, smiling and swapping idle theories on the latest blood-curdling murder/suicide in the village.  Just kidding, of course, but they could have been saying such things—my German never was very good. 

 

In any event, the driver would soon lift the panel on the back flank of his truck and behold—here was a well-stocked bakery, warm and fragrant, with fresh, chewy breads and sweet, sticky buns right there at our sidewalk!  It was an ice-cream truck for grown-ups.  During our two years in that village the toot-toot of the bakery truck never failed to thrill me and cause me to think, “How amazing—fresh bread brought to my front door.  What a wonderful idea!  But why can’t they take the next logical step and start bringing around some of that superb beer they brew throughout the land?”

            So that’s the type of thing I hope to record.  What I hope not to record is the mundane events of day-to-day living that make most diaries such dull reading, e.g. “Rain today. Chicken curry for supper again last night, though not as hot and cumin-heavy as the curry we had last Wednesday.  Mr. Truong continues to make good progress with his participles—almost none are dangling anymore.”  Trust me: I shall have shot myself long before I begin inflicting that sort of thing on anyone.

            I don’t know that there will be much to post here before our departure in 2009—perhaps a few notes on our preparations to clear out, especially if something takes a turn for the disastrous.  But look for things to become considerably more lively in this space thereafter!
--originally posted 11/2007