Negotiation Phase

When you move to a new country, there are different phases of adjustment that you go through. First, the honeymoon phase when everything is new and wonderful. Next the negotiation phase, where you start to get annoyed about the differences between your old country and your new country. "This phase is often marked by mood swings caused by minor issues or without apparent reason." This perfectly describes my mood last week.

It was hot, hot, hot. We had to open the windows at night to cool down the apartment. The problem is that there are NO SCREENS ON ANY OF THE WINDOWS!??! What is up with that? In a country with poisonous spiders and huge cockroaches, screens should be mandatory, a legal requirement. But strangely they are not. For two nights in a row, I was eaten alive by mosquitoes. Aargh, I was a huge itchy mess, got very little school or paid work done, and grumbled the whole week about the lack of screens.

To top it off, a big-ish spider has taken up residence in our shower.

When we first moved into this apartment, we found a huntsman spider in the shower. It was pretty threatening-looking to our untrained eyes, and Vic quickly killed it. When we told our Australian co-workers and classmates about how we killed the spider, we got horrified reactions: "What, you killed it?" "They're harmless." "You should let them live, they eat the cockroaches" were the responses we got. After that experience, we resolved to let the spiders be. But, I'm getting really tired of keeping one eye on the spider while I shower, and I'm pretty sure the spider is getting bigger every day. If not euthanized, he may need to be relocated soon...to somewhere outside of our apartment.

Here's some pictures of the wildlife we see every day. A lizard in our apartment building entrance.



A spider that hangs out outside our apartment.


And on a totally different subject, we went to Harry's Cafe de Wheels over the weekend, for meat pie with peas, mashed potatoes and gravy. Harry's is a Sydney institution and the pies are traditional Australian comfort food. It was tasty as far as comfort food goes, but kinda gross at the same time, leaving me with the same feeling I get after a big plate of poutine.