Sara's Guest Blog

Hello! I apologize to any of you who have been waiting on my very special updates for a superbly chosen word on our adventures here. (Don't worry, I'm kidding!) As much as I would love to excuse myself by saying that I just haven’t been able to spare a single action-packed minute to write, our delightful koala-like laziness here (which I feel I must honestly report, by duty as chosen record keeper) doesn’t allow for such egregious lies.
To start: here is a post that I wrote while waiting for our flight out of the L.A. Airport.
I’m writing this post via Microsoft Word on a plastic waiting lounge chair that is the color of uncooked hotdogs. I should be walking around, I know that, because we will be sitting for another fourteen hours in just, oh, another three hours or so (it’s been a seven hour layover), but my mind and body have fallen into the insensible meditative trance of travel. I do not need to move. I do not need to eat. I do not need to sleep. (I think it is something that they put in the airplane peanuts.) Dad and I have determined that these airport terminals are all worm hole loops into the Twilight Zone. Here, we are in no country and in no time zone; it is simultaneously 8:31 p.m. in Minnesota and 6:31 p.m. in L.A. on Monday, and 4:31 a.m. in New Zealand on Tuesday. Taking an average of these, that means that the specific time zone of my own small country, The Nation of the Hot-Dog-Colored Chair, is it is approximately 10:31 p.m. on a warm and sunny Muesday night. I have heard nine languages spoken in the last forty-five minutes, and made countless six-second friends. There was an old man at the luggage gate who told me that I was beautiful, that I had one of the most beautiful smiles he had ever seen, and that I should just keep smiling forever. The woman across from us was reading a copy of Dan Brown’s /Angels and Demons/ with a misspelling on the cover: /Anges and Demons/. There was a lobster-like fellow I saw who had white sunglasses permanently sun-burnt atop his bald head. There was a boy my age, barefoot, sleeping in a dirty flannel under the benches near baggage claim; and a ten-year-old boy from D.C. who was flying to Honolulu alone.
I think people get stuck here. We get time-warped in. Reality is suspended. The whole surreal effect is not reduced by the fact that my brother is currently sitting on the floor in front of me performing slight-of-hand magic tricks.
Yes, indeed – there must be something in the peanuts.
For more practical details and less musing: a brief account of how we came to be laminated inside of this Sci-Fi bubble:
We had intended to leave at five this morning, but good intentions only got anybody as far the garden of Eden. My fellow-of-choice, Ryan, showed up around three to help our sleepless family pack and organize, then he dropped us off at the airport and returned the car back home. We took a short, half hour flight (complete with peanuts) to Minneapolis, rushed to catch a connection there, and spent four hours on a plain to L.A. during which time I wrote the following experimental impression (forgive me, for I have been reading too much of Virginia Woolf):
“Looking out the window, I can see the mountains – spiked like little more than the sand ridges on top of an ant hill. There are no cars or people – only thin metal strips carved into the land where roads might be, at the microscopic level. The cloud shadows trace one another, using the mountains to launch back into the sky. From here, there shapes are perfect replicas of the clouds they so long to rejoin, but on Earth, they are whole darkened hours of dimness. I want to jump down, to fall for a thousand years and land in an eternal embrace with the land. Not to die; just to become part of it again. The wild images of black-blue lakes with traceable depths; long stretches of fire-red sand; miles of farmland laid out in quilt patches of greenery; and the beetle-backed glimmer of housing complexes below. The beauty is so complex, so captivating, and so constant. I am almost happy when the cloud cover consumes us in white. It is a relief, then – an excuse not to feel guilty for growing accustomed to the fantastic. The beauty is so unattainable, unretainable, overwhelmingly incapturable, that it is forgettable. I view what humankind has dreamt of for thousands of years: flight. The Earth from God’s view. The smallest, hardest parts of my heart are resentful that I cannot look away, that I should not look away. And yet, it is just that: only a flight. And we have four hours to go before L.A. then fourteen after that, to Auckland.”
Not much happened on that trip, either. Great view. Watched an obscure chick-flick film called “He’s Just Not that Into You,” tried to read, tinkered with the air vents, listened in on other people’s conversations, silently warred with my brother over control of the arm rest; the basic hobbies of any flier attuned to proper travel etiquette. Ate more peanuts (I’m on my fifth pack today – inexplicably addictive).
Have since been hanging out in the New Zealand International Air section of the L.A. airport. I don’t even know which airport, actually – I’m just along for the ride. My family has sustained itself primarily on, yes, Delta Airlines Complimentary Peanuts and a bag of warm mozzarella cheese-sticks, as the cheapest thing on any menu here is an eight dollar Burger King Whopper Junior – an option which only served to reinforced my and Nick’s vegetarianism.
(Am currently overhearing a fantastic conversation by a round little man with a belly like a beach-ball and a thick Israeli accent saying, “Hey, babe; hey, babe, I know whatchu doing. I know. We… Now, now, I give you a call back from Israel. Yeah, babe. Now, now, you take care of yourself.”)
Dad has been reading a fantastic book about Buddhism and Christianity. He wants me to add that he has to duck behind it occasionally, as, being in L.A. – the land of superstars – he is repeatedly called out for his fame and fortune. There is no rest for his degree of celebrity. Mom is finishing some homework for her last online doctorate class this semester; Nick is still hard at work with his magic tricks; and I? I am reveling in the self-gratification of writing long-winded posts for my father’s blog. However, I have discovered the special balcony which leads to the first class Canada Air Maple Leaf Lounge, which apparently has free food, free facials, and tables full of women in expensive velvet sweat-suits with matching luggage. This may merit further investigation.
Turns out there wasn’t much to investigate. To quote an exchange between F. Scott Fitzgerald and William Faulkner:
Fitzgerald:The rich are different than the rest of us.
Faulkner: Yes. They have more money.
I’m afraid I don’t have too much to report about the long flight, either. Being an author, I could spent 95 pages describing the patterns on the seats; or the individual screens on the backs of each of the seats with a singular selection of over 70 films, 120 CDs, 12 radio stations, and a second-by-second interactive map update on the status of our route; or the beautiful blonde British girl who sat next to me, or the food selections (Nick and I had the vegan option: soy milk, local organic fruit, turmeric vegetables with tofu – three meals? The list goes on. AND none of the drinks were served with ice. AND the pilot made a special request that we keep our same plastic cups through the duration of the flight to save the environment (!)). To summarize: we flew from L.A. to Auckland, New Zealand and skipped Tuesday, then had a two hour long sunrise as we flew backwards two hours into Sydney, Australia. Here, we had our second breakfasts. Then, after collecting our bags in a stupor and haze, we rushed to find the shuttle that would take us to Wollongong. As it turns out, we weren’t on the shuttle driver’s list because our bookings hadn’t gone through, but divine intervention allowed us to bumble into him, baggage and all, so out of the kindness of his heart, he took us in, and we figured out the situation while he drove.
We settled into our Youth Hostel apartments immediately upon arrival, then went out to explore the local area. Mom had the hardest time with jet lag, because she had been awake the week before doing presentations in Washington D.C. She slept while my dad, Nick, and I shopped around a local mall and picked up some basic groceries at the Woolworth’s Market. Even without the unusual change in sunlight (sunset here happens around 5:30 p.m.) we were all back in our beds and asleep by 7:00 p.m. Nick and I both slept for over fifteen hours, but Mom and Dad woke up around 2:00 a.m. our time, unable to adjust to the new pattern. Dad wasn’t feeling very well the next day, then, so Nick and I did a little exploring on our own while Mom was getting set up in her office at the University of Wollongong. We learned the city bus system and did some more necessary grocery shopping, before settling in for an early night of music and reading.
Yesterday, Dad was feeling much better, so the three of us took the city bus around and spent several hours exploring the beach and harbor. I, for one, absolutely fell in love with the ocean. Even though the last few days have been windy and rainy, the sea seemed impervious to weather changes. Determined surfers still rolled over the whitecaps, and seashells decorated the ever-shifting shorelines – still glittering, despite the cloudy sky above. With our luck, the sky cleared up just enough for us to enjoy a couple of warm afternoon hours wandering up and down the beach. For lunch, I experimented with some fried calamari, and was almost pecked to death by some French-fry enthusiast sea-gulls (I learned my lesson then! No sharing, here; the sea gulls are MUCH meaner). Dad ate an Australian beef hamburger that was literally as big in circumference as his head, and Nick had a lovely Greek salad. Afterwards, we toured the lighthouse hill, and I bought a whipped ice cream cone out of the back of an old 70’s VW-style bus in the parking lot. I whipped ice cream was almost like condensed cool whip, which we determined had a lower melting rate than normal ice cream cones, and therefore would be a popular seller in the hot Australian summer times.
In the evening, we all bought apples from a local market and listened to a street musician playing guitar in the outdoor mall court. I gave him a dollar for playing Bob Dylan, and he waved to us after he packed up to leave. We sat on our park bench eating our apples and people watching long after he left.
Today, we all went our separate directions. Mom stayed in and finished some homework, while Nick read and explored the beach by himself. I also spent some time at the beach, but mostly hung about the city library with my dad, and the two of us tried some Australian McDonalds food to see if we could taste any difference (not really, but it is supposed to be healthier). Then Dad went back to the apartments and I took the bus around about six times, people watching and reading my book.
All and all, thus far it has been a relaxing, slow-paced trip. I made spaghetti tonight, and our family has enjoyed the primarily organic and local food options available to us at through the local supermarket. The cultural differences here are surprisingly slim. Most of the music played here is American, and all of the movies advertised are American, too. The city is comprised of many very small local shops and restaurants, and is only about twice the size of Duluth, MN in population. Some of the main differences we have noticed are mainly environmental and dietary. For instance, there is no High-Fructose Corn Syrup in any of the foods (even the regular Coke and Pepsi use sucrose instead), toilets have two flush buttons for less water, outlets have off/on switches, and refrigerators are all required to have efficiency-rating stickers by the handle. The accent is a given difference, though, and it is fun to hear. So, too, at least half of the population here is Asian, so there is a separate Asian-Australian accent that we’ve also become attuned to. None of us has seen a kangaroo yet, but everyone says they are the Australian equivalent of our white-tailed deer. I was talking to a very friendly woman on the shuttle who had just come back from visiting North Carolina. She thought it was odd that we were all so excited to see kangaroos, when we had such unusual and funny creatures as squirrels living in our own backyards! I guess, as she said, you know that you are a tourist when the most common wildlife seems the most exotic.
Thanks again for everyone’s patience in waiting for my post. I hope it wasn’t too long for anyone. I’ll keep you gall updated with shorter posts from here on out, now that we have access to the internet. I love you all and miss you all very much. Take care, and you will hear from me soon.
Best regards,
Sara Ann