Touchdown!

I land in Sydney feeling relaxed, relieved, and very proud of Julia and Graham.  Other than a few times – like at JFK when they decided to see how loud they could yell “VAGINA,” and at LAX loudly discussing who had the biggest booger – they really did supercalifragilisticexpialidociously great!  My anxiety about how they would do, which had loomed large, was largely unfounded.  Sure they squirmed and moaned a little the night before trying to get comfortable sleeping on the airplane seats, but who doesn’t.  From start to finish, they seemed to sense how much I needed them, how much we needed to be a team.  They were insisting on helping me carry things and would pull my suitcases behind them on rollers that were about the same size as themselves, it was pretty adorable.  It was only at the very very end when we had a long line to wait in at Customs that their baser instincts took over.  They kept running away from me as I snaked through the line with the stroller and all the carry-ons, even running out of the area and back down the hallway.  Finally I started bribing them with candy if they would be good, which worked splendidly.  Whatever it takes at that point! 

It actually took a couple of hours to get out of the airport.  First we had to stop in Baggage Claim because, ugh, of course our checked luggage was lost in airport purgatory.  Then the Customs line was ultra-long, and then you have to go through “Quarantine,” which means they Xray your carry-ons and ask if you have anything like animal feces or farm equipment in your bags (we did not).  Although we were required to throw out the apple we had taken with us from the flight (??).  At long last, we teetered out of there and walked around the bend of the arrival section to a very happy-to-see-us husband.  My phone had run out of juice during the night so he’d had no idea what was going on and was starting to worry, watching all the people come around the corner who weren’t us.  The kids shrieked with glee as they ran toward Daddy, and we all embraced in a joyous family hug.  Gotta love those airport reunions!

Home base

We hop in our taxi at the airport to head into downtown Sydney.  As expected, there was the driver on the wrong side of the car, driving on the wrong side of the street – yikes!  It felt like at any moment we were going to be involved in a major car accident.  Fortunately all of the other cars continued to drive on the wrong side of the road as well.

It was heavenly arriving at our hotel/apartment. (Hard to know what to call it.  Technically it’s a serviced apartment, which means they stock your place like a hotel and have towel and maid service but just once a week rather than the daily maid service.  It’s the size of an apartment and has a full kitchen and laundry room, but it feels very hotelish, so I go back and forth.)  How nice to change clothes and freshen up after approximately 30 hours of travel. 

The apartment is great.  It’s a fairly new building that houses commercial space, owned apartments, and serviced apartments, with three separate entrances.  Our apartment is a three bedroom, very roomy and modern, clean spare lines with some warm touches like beige paint, floor and ceiling moldings and colorful pillows and ottoman.  (The ottoman is large, circular and flat, perfect for the kids as both a lounge and trampoline.)  Very bright with floor to ceiling windows and an expansive view of Sydney, the harbors and surrounding area.  I was euphoric as I flung open all the huge empty closets.  The contemporary art on the walls isn’t too bad, either, always a pet peeve of mine in hotels, but this actually resembles real art.

My husband gave us a quick tour of the gym and pool area (so nice to have in the building!) (I have visions of myself working out again and returning to the U.S. in great shape.) (We all need a dream!).  And then, since we had traveled half-way round the world, now that we were in a new country with so much to see and learn and experience, we headed to lunch, at McDonald’s.

Afterward, we make a valiant effort to do a little sightseeing and stay awake despite it being the wee hours of the morning New York time, but it didn’t last long.  I was pretty sure Julia was running a fever on the plane and had been giving her Motrin and Tylenol.  She’d been coughing also, but despite all this had been in good spirits.  Now all of her symptoms were worsening and she was starting to slow down.  We hopped on the Monorail for $5 per person to take us on a short loop around downtown Sydney, one of those types of things you see in your own city designed exclusively for tourist suckers and you wonder who would ever do that.  We’d barely started when Julia put her head down on my lap and closed her eyes.  Lucky for us the Monorail stops right at our building, so we got off when it got there.  We were done for the day.

Grocery store excursion, or, Yes we are in a foreign country

I figured I would make a quick stop at the grocery story, conveniently located in the mini-mall on the basement floor of our building, and pick up some supplies and dinner for the kids.  What I didn’t know is that I actually needed a couple of hours to translate their versions of things, find brand substitutes, and learn the particular habits and mores of the way Australians ate.  Apparently Crocodile Dundee does have different dining preferences than we do in the States (insert cookin’ on the barbie joke here).

The first thing I needed to do was get my morning coffee situation taken care of.  We only had an electric tea kettle in the room and a jar of instant coffee, which would not do at all.  Until I found a way to brew some coffee, I at least needed some half-and-half or similar.  The dairy section turned out to be a mysteriously labeled array of exotic choices.  The milk had all sorts of names, none of which actually described what it was:

New Milk

Feel the Difference Milk

Light Start Milk

Shape Milk

Smarter White Milk

Full Cream Milk (which was not cream)

Kids’ Milk

Goat’s Milk (for this one that was actually enough information for me right there)

to name a few.
I decided to go for “Original Milk” and hope for the best.  

I finally asked someone if they had cream in Australia, as in cream for your coffee.  A nice Australian lady explained that they didn’t really have that here.  Sounds like “full cream milk” was the equivalent of whole milk.  Then she showed me their “cream,” which was thickened like custard and in plastic mayonnaise jars.  As a last resort, I bought Lite Thickened Cream, “suitable for cooking and pouring,” which turned out to be the consistency of Benjamin Moore paint with the taste of skim milk, not quite what I had in mind.

Also the butter was all either softened in tubs or rectangular blocks of butter, none of which I recognized.  Where were the standardized sticks with the little measuring lines?!  Perhaps once I figure it all out I’ll find it’s better than what we have, it looks artisanal and appetizing, I just have no idea what’s what.

And then there was:

Cold cuts – I like to have thin-sliced turkey to have around for sandwiches or to have a few bitefuls in place of a meal when on the run.  I located a large section with packaged cold cuts with relief, then realized that 90% of the choices were different kinds of hams, 9% were different kinds of salami, and then a couple of sliced chicken options (which I got).  Not one turkey!

Snacks – I’m not a big snacker, but my kids and husband are, so this was an important staple to find.  With dismay I learned that Pepperidge Farm did not seem to have made the leap over the big pond (a summer without Goldfish??  How would I break it to the kids!).  They did have one row entirely devoted to bags of snack-type foods.  The trouble is they were mostly all potato chips of various textures and flavors, many of them not so appetizing.  Honey Soy Chicken Chips anyone?  Yeah, me neither.

Pizza – Doesn’t anybody like your basic cheese pizza here?  Everything was covered with toppings:  ham and pineapple, barbecued chicken, lamb sausage, and so on.  (After a week or two I realized that Margherita pizza was their basic cheese pizza, but even still it’s not always offered and if so usually one kind).

Bread – Usually I go for multi-grain bread for our family.  In checking out their bread selection, Australians seemed to have gotten the memo that whole grains were good for you, but in my opinion they had taken it a little far.  They offered a white bread choice, a “wholemeal” choice that looked almost the same as white but an ever-so-pale shade of beige, and then it went straight to loaves covered in forty-seven varieties of seeds and chunks of grains.  I ended up going for the beige bread, as I didn’t think my kids’ intestines were up for the breads mixed with sawdust, twigs and pebbles (nor mine).

The Meat Department – Everything seemed to be packaged by the store.  I didn’t see pre-packaged recognizable brands like we have in the U.S.  I looked for a pack of your basic American hot dogs with a ten-year shelf life like we have, and someone handed me a store packaged pack of “BBQ sausages.”  Well, they were pink like our hot dogs.  I bought them and when I got home realized they were soft like breakfast sausages on the inside and all linked together.  I looked for the ingredients and the label just said enigmatically, "70% meat."  I did try cooking them up and they became more like the hot dogs we’re accustomed to, but my kids weren’t too into them.  Not that it will be the end of the world if we don’t have hot dogs here!