Settling In

Making do

My first trip to the pharmacy began to answer one of my burning questions about Australia:  will they carry my products?  And after cruising up and down the pharmacy aisles, the answer appeared to be no, no they will not.  First off I looked at the hair products aisle, I found it, so then looked for the “good stuff,” but it did not look like they had one of those rows.  I really needed a little hairspray since I didn’t think you could travel abroad with aerosols, and couldn’t find a decent brand I recognized.  I strategized maybe I should just buy the most expensive brand and hope for the best.  In the end that was John Freida for $11.99, not exactly Kérastase but it would have to do.

Next I needed lotion.  Normally I use your basic drugstore Eucerin, which is ubiquitous in the U.S. and I just assumed was a global brand.  Unfortunately, the only brands I recognized were those cheap brands that leave your skin parched as desert sand three minutes after application.  If you have dry skin like I do you become a lotion snob by necessity, so while Nivea was better than nothing, I was regretting not bringing a supply from home. 

I also needed to get a humidifier for Julia, who was painfully coughing through the nights.  They basically had two options for $50 that looked like a milk jug on a heater.  I think it literally just boiled the water into the air.  It was strange to go into your basic chain drugstore in such a modern city and not have at least some kind of decent option, nevermind your filter/mold-control/ionizing/mentholizing/cold-hot switch/timer/humidity settings/with blender/cuisinart option that you can usually also find for about the same price.  So I bought what they had, brought it home, filled it with water, plugged it in, and it promptly blew a fuse in the entire apartment.  I called the concierge and they sent someone up.  He re-set the fuse, and we experimented plugging it in in different outlets, whereupon all the lights would go out again.  I returned it the next day, and we made do.

Oven hieroglyphics

I figured we’d bake some cookies to raise the kids’ spirits, as they were both under the weather – literally and figuratively – they were sick and it was raining.  I got the dough all ready to go, and then looked at the stove.  What the hell?

Should it be three or four squiggles, or a propeller with three triangles?  What oven designer decided these symbols would mean anything to anyone?  (They must go to the same school where they teach elevator designers how to label elevator buttons:  UG, L, AM, PM, 1A, 53XT7P, which occasionally you see as choices all on the same elevator.)  So I looked in our apartment guide under Appliances, Oven, and it said, “Ring 9 for reception.”  So a guy had to come up and tell me what they meant.  Incidentally, one fan means regular convection oven heating, and fan with three triangles means, according to the lovely Indian man who came up, “Cook faster.”  He couldn’t really explain the difference in cooking, he just said you know some people like to cook faster so they use that setting.  (Some people?)

Fearless (almost)

All those fears that had been weighing me down before the trip?  I’m happy to say, they have mostly dissipated, and I have been feeling like my old self again.  I have not missed my pillow one iota.  All the worrying actually seems kind of absurd now.  As soon as I walked into our 71^st floor apartment and I beheld our birds’ eye view of Sydney, I breathed a sigh of relief.  No vertigo, no anxiety about being up so high, it just felt fantastic to have such a vista.  Don’t know if I’d want to live this high permanently, but it is a pretty cool three-month perch.  It helped that the apartment was lovely, and the elevators were so fast I got down quicker than the ten-floor commute in my own New York apartment.  Furthermore, the travel was over.  I was safe and sound.  I wouldn’t go so far as to say the trip over was easy, but it was manageable, and it had lifted a lot of my apprehensions about traveling long distances with young children.  (Maybe there was something to what Nalini was saying after all…)  And, my family was (almost) together at last, for a good three months in a row.  And, exxxxxhaaaaallle……..