Okay, big news this week! We've actually been quite busy and productive on our dissertation research, but various other exciting things have happened.1 The biggest thing for us personally is that we are moving out of our share house in Ultimo in less than three weeks. A former student from D's department has a one-bedroom flat in Leichhardt2 that she needs someone to look after while she's living in Europe to the end of the year... So, on Friday she confirmed that we could be the ones to do that.
Yaaay! It's a little farther out from where we are now, but Leichhardt is a really nice, European-influenced area, (some call it Sydney's "little Italy") with lots of nice little shops, cafes, and restaurants. We've been out there already a number of times for the gelato3 and we're kind of excited about getting to know a different part of the city. And, it's a one-bedroom apartment so we'll have some privacy and quiet, which should increase our productivity even more. We'll even be able to have guests stay with us!
As an added bonus, we were able to time our moving out and our moving in to coincide with our departure and return dates of our trip to far north Queensland and the Great Barrier Reef... so we won't actually have to be paying rent for the two weeks we're out of town.
So that's our own news. Other exciting things happened this week, too-- like Chad's little4 brother Todd called us twice, both times in the middle of our night. We suppose we can forgive him the oversight, since he was calling to tell us that he got engaged... congratulations Kerri and Todd!
And speaking of weddings, D's friend Omar is getting married in just a few days, which, sadly, D will have to miss. Best wishes to you guys, too, Omar and Kate.
All right, that's enough shout-outs... for this week, at least. It's hard to have so many really good things happening to people you love back at home and not being able to celebrate with them in person. But, that's part of the experience of living overseas... and we are lucky to have communication as easily and as cheaply as we do. D attended a Fulbright dinner on Thursday night, and heard someone speak about a class of Fulbright scholars from the US to Australiain the 1950s. Their experience was quite different... they were the last class to spend four weeks together on a steamer ship crossing the ocean to Oz, and the next year Fulbrighters began flying. Difficult even to imagine what a year abroad must have been like in those days.
And speaking of things that are different now, we are in the midst of a last push for progress on our word processors, supercomputers, remote log-ins, and digital archives... less than three weeks to get all we can accomplished before we leave for the tropical north. So far, so good... the pages churn out, the runs run. What more can we ask?
;)
- D
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NOTES
1To have both these conditions filled in the same week is really the Fulbrighter's dream. Okay, some Fulbrighters' dream.
2Leichhardt is one of the suburbs in the "Inner West" of greater Sydney, a ten-minute bus ride on the other side of the University from where we are now, and a twenty-minute bus ride from downtown.
3Chad gave D a "gelato crawl" to four different gelato places in Leichhardt for her birthday, remember?
4"little" meaning, in this case, 6'5" and 27 years old
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