Australia 2010, Part 3: At James & Ali’s

And now for Part 3 of 4 of my Australia trip recap, closing out my time in Melbourne. Here are links to Part 1 and Part 2.
Wed 11 Aug
I said my farewells to Rob & Simone in the morning, and then took my gigantic suitcase with me on the tram down to The University of Melbourne, for the second of my research seminars. Several profs took me out to lunch at the University House (the same place that Ash, Tracy, Mike & I met with Malcolm and Sandy on our first day in Melbourne about ministry stuff). The seminar itself went well (though we had to wait for a class to clear out of the room that had been reserved for the seminar). I’d say there were about 20-25 people there, so I thought it was a good turnout, especially for not being in their usual Friday afternoon seminar slot. It seemed like my talk was well-received overall, and I was asked quite a few questions after the talk (someone later told me they thought it was a record for number of questions after one of their seminars). Following the talk I met with a couple of grad students, including a student named Muhammad who I knew from attending the WRF Tutorial at NCAR in Boulder back in January 2008, so it was great to see him again and catch up a bit. There were a couple other meetings with post-docs and profs, too. I was quite pleased with how my seminar and visit there went!
When I was all done with meetings and whatnot, I shuffled off, still toting my giant suitcase, taking the tram down to Flinders Street Station, and then the train over to Mount Waverley to go to my friend Jillian’s house for dinner — she’d invited several CU folks over for burritos. They weren’t quite Mexican burritos, but rather an Australian take on burritos. First, in addition to the usual marinated chicken, lettuce, tomatoes and onions, there also were sauteed mushrooms, pineapple chunks, and either sweet chili sauce or bbq sauce (there wasn’t any salsa). And the tortillas were lightly crisped in the oven before serving. They were still really good, but not quite like burritos I’m familiar with from, say, Qdoba. 😉 Anyway, it was great to have another evening hanging out with my Monash CU friends. Hopefully it’ll be fewer than six years before I see them all again, but it’s a long, long way between the U.S. and Australia. I’ll say this, though: Facebook has made keeping in touch with long-distance friends much, much easier!
My third hosts on this trip were my friends James & Alison, who live in the far southeastern suburb of Hampton Park, about a five minute walk from the Hallam railway station. Alison is a primary school teacher, and James currently is a chaplain in a local public high school (the relationship of the Australian government and schools with religion is worth another post by itself, if I get around to it), though until a year ago he was the national youth director for the Christian & Missionary Alliance church in Australia. I met them a few days before I went to Australia in 2004 because they were visiting the States, and Alison’s parents know my parents (her parents, who are Australian, spent a few years pastoring a small CMA church in western Minnesota), and they were pretty much my adoptive family while I was studying at Monash. They even stopped by Penn State for a quick visit last April when they were visiting some family and friends in Michigan and Pennsylvania (and yes that photo was taken at The Creamery at PSU).
Ali came to pick me up after the dinner with my CU friends in Mt Waverley, and it was great to be at their house. They have several pets, including a couple rabbits (Fudge and Bubbles), a sugar glider (Cookie), a shingleback lizard and a couple bearded dragons (they were in accidental hibernation for the time being because James forgot to plug in their heat lamps, hehe). I was told that if Bubbles woke me up during the night by making a racket in the next room that I should just say, “Bubbles, stop!” and he’d stop, haha. Fortunately I never had to yell at Bubbles any of the nights I was there. 🙂
Thu 12 Aug
I had to get up pretty early to take the hour-long train ride from Hallam to Southern Cross station, so that I could make it to the Bureau of Meteorology Building by 9:30am, in time for my 10am seminar at the Centre for Australian Weather & Climate Research. My host was Beth Ebert (I cited a couple of her papers in my 2009 journal article), and she commented that I had picked up a little bit of an Aussie accent. I took that as a big compliment. 😀 Anyway, that seminar went quite well too, with 20-some people in attendance (which was particularly impressive because it was the third seminar of the week), and once again lots of good questions afterward. I didn’t have any meetings set up afterward, but some scientists stuck around a few extra minutes to chat. I thought CAWCR seemed like quite a nice working environment. Beth told me that while they don’t have post-doc positions, they do sometimes hire people straight out of their PhD for three-year terms. So that’s definitely an option I’ll be on the lookout for when it comes time to apply for jobs.

The BoM Building is just west of the CBD in Docklands. I’d never been to that part of the city before, so I spent some time walking around there. It’s always fun to explore new areas. I also love taking photographs of marinas.

When I was in Point Park in the Docklands I also met and briefly chatted with an actress who had just moved to Melbourne from Adelaide. Her little dog didn’t much like me, though (which is actually how the conversation started), hehe. Who knows, maybe I’ll recognize her in a film someday too. That’d be pretty neat.
After grabbing lunch I got a seat in Southern Cross station from where I could see all the trains, and wrote quite a long summary of my three seminars to Sue. I knew that if I didn’t intentionally take time out to do that, it wouldn’t get done, and then I’d forget all the specific questions and issues that came up. It took longer than I thought to write it all down, too, so it was mid-afternoon before I met up with Ash & Tracy at Huntingdale railway station, as they’d been at Monash meeting with some people that day (because of my seminars it’d been basically two days since I’d seen Ash & Tracy).

We were on our way to James & Ali’s to have dinner, but our journey there was a bit… interesting. First, I was unaware that Huntingdale was a station that express trains coming from the city would skip, so it was quite awhile before a train going past Hallam stopped. And then once we got on the train, it was hardly moving. It took forever to make it two stations down the line, at which point the train was evacuated. Apparently there were “overhead” problems a bit further down the line (meaning the overhead power lines were malfunctioning), so they had everyone board buses that stopped all stations to Dandenong (one station from Hallam). Apparently train disruptions aren’t that uncommon, because they had a dedicated bus stop for such occurrences. That both was and was not reassuring. Anyway, James came to pick us up in Dandenong, but because of the train disruption and all the extra buses (and cars to pick up passengers), traffic was very slow. Oh well, we tried to get there at a reasonable time for dinner!

Dinner was well worth the wait though. James went all-out on the grill: kangaroo steaks (which are apparently quite difficult to cook right, but James grilled them to perfection), porterhouse beef steaks, and fresh green prawns (huge ones — head, legs, shells and all). And then Ali had some salads and other sides, plus a sumptuous chocolate mousse dessert with fresh fruit. I’d have to say that was easily our best meal of the whole trip! We were most definitely sated, and I ate as much steak and as many prawns as I possibly could, but there was still heaps left over. 🙂 I should’ve taken a picture of the spread, but oh well. As Alex challenged me once though, I shouldn’t need to document every memory for posterity with a photograph. (I also failed to take any pictures at James & Ali’s, perhaps because I usually put my camera away when inside other people’s houses.)
Fri 13 Aug
I rode the train back into the city again to meet up with Ash & Tracy for one last day of ministry work at Uni Melb. We had been hoping to set up a table near the Union advertising that we had a postgrad (grad student) survey or something like that (basically using the survey Tracy & I brainstormed earlier in the week). We couldn’t get a table though, and so when I got there Ash said the new plan was to hang around in a little park on the edge of campus and ask passersby a) if they were postgrads, and b) if they had a few minutes to answer a few questions. Quite honestly, neither Tracy nor I were thrilled with this particular approach (both of us think random surveys like these aren’t usually used to collect data, but merely to start a spiritual conversation with a random person, which we think is deceptive), but we still decided to give it a shot — because we actually were interested in the data, and trying to find out information about many facets of postgrad life at Uni Melb.

Gathering data proved pretty difficult, as expected. We used Tracy’s two clicker counters to keep track of the number of people we asked if they happened to be a post-grad student (82) and how many said they were post-grads (8). Of those eight people, two agreed to take our survey. If we’d gotten a third data point, maybe we could’ve made some extrapolations. 🙂 Anyway, we think grad students are probably the toughest demographic to survey. Grad students don’t usually congregate in large groups anywhere on campus (unlike undergrads), and usually only emerge from their offices if they have to go to a class or a meeting somewhere, in which case they usually don’t have time to stop and take a 5-10-minute survey. Random surveys might work great for undergrads, but not grad students. Also, data from a survey would be most useful on a department-by-department basis, and it’d be tough to generalize the information gleaned to the whole campus. That’s what I think, anyway. This trip really reinforced, at least in my mind, that in order to reach grad students, there need to be people who are already in those departments (insiders).
Anyway, following the survey deal, Mike, Ash, Tracy & I went to Trinity College at Uni Melb (kind of like an exclusive fraternity, it has its own dorms, dining hall (think Hogwarts style), and church/chapel). Anyway, the new events coordinator at Trinity is friendly toward Student Life and Christian Union (unlike the previous events coordinator, who was rather hostile), so he hosted us for lunch, along with Malcolm, Sandy, and a few other grad students affiliated with CU. That was a good time to meet some other Christian grad students on the campus who are eager to see something happen there, and it also opened some previously-closed doors for Student Life and CU to get more involved at Trinity with their undergrad ministries.

After lunch we went down to the Melbourne Aquarium, where my friend Emily works (from Monash CU). She couldn’t get us in for free or a discount (though our Penn State student IDs got Tracy & I a very nice discount anyway), but she was able to give us a personal guided tour after she finished her normal shift, telling us all about the various fish and marine creatures in the tanks. The Melbourne Aquarium is really quite nice, and has been rated as the best tourist destination in Melbourne. They’re also home to the world’s largest species of stingray, and croikey were those massive! The penguins were also really fun to see and watch, but really, just about everything at the aquarium was neat to see. It was great to see her again and hang out a bit (she wasn’t able to make the Friday night reunion thing at Joel & Rosey’s, but was at the Wednesday night dinner at Jillian & Susannah’s).

That night Ash, Tracy & I had dinner at Mike & Bec’s house, sort of a “team dinner.” I forget how we even got onto the topic, but Mike, being a PSU alum, wound up recounting a funny story of how he saw Penn State President Graham Spanier scooting around campus one day on a Segway, and other stories basically poking fun at Spanier (and to join in, I found a photo of his ridiculous washboard instrument that he plays with the Deacons of Dixieland band, so that Bec could gain a better picture of why so many people make fun of him). It’s always fun to meet other Penn Staters on the other side of the world. 🙂
Sat 14 Aug
James got us a deal with Hertz for a rental car for a day, so we rented a car and took a day trip down the Great Ocean Road. Apparently we were lucky to get a car; the Hertz in Dandenong was sold out, and the one in Clayton was very nearly sold out, with lots of people renting cars to go up to the snow in the Australian Alps east of the city, to places like Lake Mountain and Mt Buller. I guess Aussies don’t trust their snow driving enough to take their own car to the snow, but they’ll sure take a rental car!
First up: Bells Beach, which is just past Torquay, the town where the Great Ocean Road starts. Bells Beach is world-famous for surfing.

And then of course some obligatory road sign photos:

Next stop: Anglesea. We stopped for lunch at a fish and chips shop, where I got a burger with “the lot.” What’s on a lot burger, you ask? Bacon, tomato, lettuce, beetroot (as beets are known in Aus), fried egg, and pineapple. DELICIOUS. We got our lunch takeaway (to-go) and went to the city beach to enjoy it (it was still a nice day at this point). I don’t think we each needed to get an order of chips though, they give you heaps!

Split Point Lighthouse at Aireys Inlet, and a Wicked Camper that we saw parked there (each Wicked van has a very unique paint job and pithy saying on the back):

Coalmine Creek:

It was fantastic to get a chance to drive along the Great Ocean Road again. I think I can safely say that’s a place I’d like to visit every time I come to Melbourne. Here’s a short video that Tracy took with my camera while I was driving, for just a little sample of what the road is like:

And then it started raining, so our photo-taking dropped off precipitously. That, and we needed to MOVE if we were to make it to the Twelve Apostles before sundown. Unfortunately that meant we didn’t have enough time to drive down to Cape Otway Lighthouse. With the murky, grey, rainy weather we wouldn’t have seen a lot anyway. There are so many cool vistas and other things to see along and near the Great Ocean Road, you could easily take a few days poking along in order to soak it all in. But when you only have a winter’s afternoon, you do the best you can!

We arrived at the Twelve Apostles at Port Campbell NP just before sunset. Not that we could see the sun, of course. It was rainy, windy, and cold. I think Tracy lasted about 5 minutes before going back to the car, Ash about 20 minutes, and I was out there for maybe 45 minutes or an hour, because I at least had a rain jacket along. I wound up chatting with a family on holiday from Melbourne for a bit. They were there with binoculars to try to spot some of the colony of penguins that come ashore every evening in twilight on the beach far below. Anyway, I was out there until it was almost pitch black, which got Ash & Tracy worried that I fell off a cliff or something, hehe (our mobile phones were as good as paperweights out there too). Anyway, we had driven all that way, and I was determined to see what of the Twelve Apostles I could, even if the rain, wind and fading light made it extremely difficult to take pictures of even half-decent quality. The last time I was at the Twelve Apostles, there was one more standing (note the rubble from one of the Apostles that collapsed in 2006). I wonder if any more will collapse before I see them next.

By that point night had fallen and we were very ready for dinner in nearby Port Campbell. After dinner Tracy decided to try her hand at left-side-of-the-road driving, at least until we got close to Melbourne, at which point she yielded the wheel to me to navigate the city. I honestly had some white knuckles for the first few k’s while sitting in the passenger seat as she got used to everything, hehe. 🙂
It still wasn’t quite like my mom’s reaction from the passenger seat while I drove my parents down the Great Ocean Road in 2004 — suddenly gripping my arm and yelling “JARED!!” as a car rounded a bend on the other side of the road (cliffs on one side, ocean on the other). I had to tell her, “Mom, you HAVE to stop doing that, or else you WILL cause an accident.” 🙂
Anyway, when I dropped off Ash & Tracy at their respective hosts, I said my farewells to them until I was back on U.S. soil. We still had another full day in Melbourne, but were planning just to chill and not meet up or anything. I was tired from spending so many hours in a car that day, but still had a little energy to play with James & Ali’s sugar glider. When he leapt at me it definitely woke me up a bit, lol.
Sun 15 Aug
My last full day in Melbourne was a very relaxing one. I went to church with James in the morning (Ali wasn’t feeling well that morning), and then for lunch afterward, Ali had prepared a nice meal, and invited their friend Hernon and Hernon’s dad over (Hernon’s dad is also named Hernon). I had met Hernon a few times back in 2004 when spending time with James & Ali (Phillip Island, surf fishing, etc.), so it was good to see him again. We just spent most of the afternoon and even evening chatting with them. Like I said, it was quite a relaxing day, and a good way to wrap up my stay in Melbourne, and get ready for a lot of traveling in Western Australia.
Stay tuned for Part 4 in a few days, about my travels in a place I’d never been to before: Western Australia!