Marathons, Cows and Funny Old Ladies

Even since I was a kid, I’ve had the desire to get in a car with a full gas tank and then see how far it would go until it ran out of gas. I know that this would be an incredibly senseless, absolutely idiotic, and completely inappropriate act of ultimate stupidity. But it sure would be fun! However being the sensible person that I am, (ha ha) I doubt I would ever do anything to that extent without a qualified professional at my side (and I’m not talking about the type that says things like “hey hold my beer and watch this!”) Since I can’t safely do this, I have decided instead to run a marathon. Made the connection? Although we marathoners don’t really want to admit it, it’s basically the same type of idea. You start out with a full tank of “gas”, and you see how far that gets you. For me I hope that’s the full 26.2 (43.3K for all you Aussies) miles. I have decided to do the Great Ocean Road marathon in Australia which will take place in less than….. 2 days! I’ve done the training these past couple of months and will see if I have enough “gas” to finish it. So wish me luck!

Other than training for marathons’ I’ve been pretty busy. Since I’ve last written in here (it’s been ages) I’ve been back to Texas to visit. I knew immediately that I was home when I heard things like, Ma’m, Sir, Mr. and Mrs. It felt even more like home when I began to hear phrases like, “man you should really try these fried green beans because they’re amazing”, “now Hannah if this cow charges you don’t worry because you just run and I’ll put my hand on her head to stop her (my dad), and “I made bacon cookies!” It was great to hear the Texas accent again, shoot guns, ride 4-wheelers, go to my church, have Mexican food and buy things that were under $5. The most exciting and surprising was probably going to the nursing home. Seriously! I went to visit my lady nursing home friend back in my college town. But she wasn’t in her room and her name tag had been removed from the door. Uh oh. Seeing these types of things make one awfully nervous in a nursing home. However, I breathed a sigh of relief when I was told that she had switched rooms. When I found her sitting in her room I was surprised that her roommate was a man. Upon further inspection I realized that this man was my other nursing home friend I used to visit. Then I saw her give a big smile and utter the words “we done went and got married!” And she’s 93! Then she proceeded to show me photos of their wedding. It was the sweetest thing! I was incredibly happy for them and it was amazing to see the positive change in both of their moods. It was also slightly funny with phrases like “We don’t fight b/c I do what she tells me too and I’m scared of her” or “well he had another lover but…….she died!” It was great to see my family, friends and of course Stephen but it went incredibly fast. And I never saw one single person as much as I wanted to! I spent three weeks at home. This means that I was jest lagged a total of five weeks! As soon as I got used to being home, I got on an airplane (23+hours) and flew back to Australia where it took me another 2 weeks to recover. It was bearable due to the fact that I absolutely love flying. I love airports, layovers and the long 16+ hour flights. You meet so many neat people and what other time are you able to sit down for 16 hours with nothing required of you but to read a book or watch a movie? And you don’t even have to get up to get your food because people bring it to you. I love it! I had a 6 hour layover in L.A Airport but I loved every minute of it (except for whenever I almost tripped over my chair)

I’m still at “uni” and I enjoy what I’m learning. Uni is the name Australians call college because they call high school college so it can get quite confusing. On Wednesdays I have a 6 hour Christian theology class! 6 hours! When I first heard about having to sit in class for 6 hours I wasn’t exactly happy. However, over the weeks this class has become one of my favorite classes I’ve ever taken and I actually look forward to Wednesdays. The Christian theology here is so much more liberal than back home and I have some issues agreeing with the professors about particular things. But I still enjoy looking at different sides of an issue and it’s been great to learn about. I would be more at ease if the professor wasn’t always making negative comments about those “Southern Baptists from Texas”. He has no idea that this is where I come from. I also have one class that I find hilarious because when I look around I find that I’m an American, at an Australian college, surrounded by majority Asian students, listening to a Germen talk about British Christian Theology. Talk about culture exposure! By the time that I’m done with all my college courses I should have an Associate’s degree in ministry. I’m not too sure what I’ll do with that back in the states but who knows where God will lead?!

The youth ministry stuff at the church is going great! I finally feel completely at home with everyone at the church. They’re like my family away from home. The thing that really took off these past few months is something I started a while back called “girls group” (mainly because my creative juices weren’t flowing when I created the name). It is…. well you guessed it…. a group for girls! It started out 8 months ago as a failed attempt to get kids from a non church background to come to my meeting. I was in charge of it and expected over 20, maybe 30 youth to come to the initial get together. I had all this stuff set up and all these games prepared. I was pretty excited and nervous about it but only 2 girls from the church came. I did my best to stay positive although I was honestly a bit discouraged. Actually quite a bit. Something kept telling me to just continue with the group although there were only 2 people doing it. Well it wasn’t something but someone and more specifically God. Long story short I decided to just make it a group for girls where we cook, study the bible and have fun. Then they started inviting their friends and now it’s grown quite a bit but more importantly there have been some of the best relationships formed with myself, each other and most notably God. It’s been so great getting to know all the girls. Girls from a non-church background started to come and it’s been amazing to see their curiosity and growth. It’s awesome what God’s doing there and splendid the way it arose out of an apparent disappointment. I think that’s sometimes like life and the way God works. He has a lot of neat plans but a lot of times it isn’t exactly the way we think it’s going to go. In fact it hardly ever it. We just need to remember that and keep plodding along in the midst of seemingly obvious “set backs” to see what happens! If there’s any doubt over God’s power I think all you need to do is look at stuff like this, where you have ill-equipped leaders (speaking of myself. I’ve never even so much as led a mini small group before plus I typically burn all the food we cook), bad circumstances, and set backs all around. Anybody with a brain can see that it’s an obvious fail but somehow, and it still amazes me, it all works out and big things happen.

Funny thing of the week: The following is a conversation I had with a lady at the fruit shop I work in.

Mother: Oh you have such a different accent where are you from? (every other customer asks me this)
Me: Texas
Mother: Oh that’s nice. My son was born there.
Me: Oh really! Wow! And have you ever made it there yourself!

Epic fail. BTW this happening actually made it in the daily Australian newspaper in a section titled “Overheard” where people write in to report all the dumb funny stuff that they overheard people say that say. So I’m famous b/c I made it in a newspaper!

Falling out of planes and Australian sponge cake

If someone told me that exactly 6 months after entering the country of Australia I would be jumping out of a perfectly good airplane, plummeting to the earth at 150 mph, depending on a mere piece of material to open up at the right time and stop me from hitting the ground, then I would have probably said, “stop this planet now. I want off!” While, admittedly, this might have been my thoughts as the plane slowly gained the elevation that would take us to our so called “destination” of nothingness in the sky, it wasn’t my overall thought and most certainly not the summary of this experience. The best description of how I felt about my overall experience with skydiving is a bit less complex and is more like this: “ahhh ahhh Aaaaaahhhhhhhhahhahhah ah ha hah ha **** ahhhhh jfdkjfkdfj.” So in short it was amazing, terrifying, amazingly terrifying and extremely fun. However, after all these descriptions the only thing I could manage to think when I finally touched ground was “I’m glad my parachute opened”. The fact that I decided to skydive is showing me how much this whole experience of living in Australia is changing me (and hopefully for the better). The main thing that has happened during the course of this 6 month experience has been that I’m less afraid to try new things (within reason and morality of course). I’ve done a lot of things that I would have been too terrified to do before and it’s all worked out just fine. So when I decided to get my boyfriend Stephen a skydiving gift certificate for Christmas (it’s something he’s always wanted to do) I had no intention to join him by jumping out of a perfectly good plane. Yet the thought that I was going to sit on the sidelines and watch started to slowly creep in until I couldn’t take it anymore. Although the idea terrified me I wanted to go too! I couldn’t just stand around and watch while he had all the fun so I worked a few extra shifts and bought myself one too. But I have to admit that giving him the present was probably the best part. I made a “gift certificate” with a picture of us both jumping out of the plane but my little stick figure didn’t have a parachute and therefore wasn’t looking too happy. He had no idea and was like “is this for real?” “Yes Stephen but hopefully I’ll have a parachute in the real thing.” Probably the most fun I’ve ever had giving somebody a gift. Well…. I went skydiving but unfortunately didn’t go rocky mountain climbin’ or 2.7 seconds on a bull named “Phu Mon Shoe”.

Other than skydiving we were able to do many other neat things during his brief stay here. For one we got to experience Christmas Australia style. If somebody told me last Christmas that I would be spending next Christmas in Australia with my Texas boyfriend going to my South African friend’s house for lunch, then having Christmas dinner with New Zealanders, while only actually spending it with one Australian in the whole bunch then I would have laughed. But that’s what happened! Momma’s always said that life is stranger than fiction (as well as a box of chocolates. He he) and now I believe her. Life is weird.

The way Australians celebrate Christmas is a bit different than what I’m familiar to but if I were to describe it all on here then we’d be here all day. For one thing, on Christmas day in Australia, every member in the family isn’t compelled to bring 5 different dishes of food for everyone to eat just in case they run the risk of starving. As we all know Texas Christmas’s are a different story. I remember my dear great grandmother saying “do you think we need to open a can of spam” when she saw a centimeter of free space on the table. In Australia, we had some meat, a side or two, and a dessert. This is really all that you need and it most certainly keeps you from gaining 5 pounds (or kilos) during one single meal! However, the dessert we had was a bit interesting. Apparently, eating sponge cake that has been soaked in an overabundance of liquor overnight is quite a Christmas tradition in Australia. I have to admit it had quite an interesting taste but I don’t remember much after that. Just kidding :)

Other than our highly unusual but fun Christmas experience Stephen and I also had an interesting New Years experience. We went into the city to watch the big firework show. However, we ended up walking around the city in the pouring rain; cold, wet and lost. And having the best time! Absolutely nothing worked out according to plan but we were too busy laughing at the situation going from bad to kinda bad to worse that we didn’t even care. We just had fun. In a nut shell we got lost in a building and couldn’t find our way out for nearly 40 minutes amidst a crowd of crazy intoxicated people, got out and realized that it was pouring down rain, got lost outside and missed our tram stop by 100 miles, ate french fries under a tram stop in place of our planed nice dinner, missed the fireworks because the trains left right before the show, and witnessed a domestic on the streets (the man bit the women!). To make matters worse the streets were so crowded with crazy people we could hardly walk. New Years in Melbourne, Australia!

Honestly, Australia seems to be full of weird, scary people that tend to make themselves known around the holidays. Other than witnessing the domestic, Stephen and I encountered a seemingly high number of bizarre people who were a bit scary at times. This might be due to the fact that we used public transport almost everyday. However, it seemed like rarely a day went by that we didn’t witness something alarming or slightly disturbing. The biggest scare came when we decided to go hiking in the Australian mountain ranges. We got on the train to go home and noticed that aside from 2 other men, nobody else was on the train with us. We were still waiting on the train to leave the station when out of nowhere this big, scary looking man gets out and starts yelling at me and Stephen. All his attention was directed at us. He had the craziest eyes! I can’t remember everything he said but he kept telling us that we “were one person who split into 2 people”. I’m serious. Apparently he witnessed Stephen grow a beard out of nowhere. I thought he said something about us being the descendents of Cain and how God will judge us because we are evil. Oh and Jesus has come back and is sitting on Uluru rock in Australia. He just kept yelling at us until he finally walked off. Whew! Then he got back on and continued to yell at us while the other 2 men are just sitting there. He finally sat down and tried to have a nice friendly chat with one of the men on the train. It got completely silent until he looked at us and said “I don’t feel safe with these 2 evil people in here (meaning us!). I’m leaving.” Yeah it was a bit weird but I’m glad nothing happened. For the most part, Australians are nice, friendly, obliging down-to-earth folks who have welcomed me into their lives quite easily. However, you do get a few crazies here and there that have helped me decide that I’m not riding the trains at night anymore.

Many other exciting things have gone on since I’ve last written but if I tell it all then nobody would want to read this! I’ll try to update more often so I won’t have to cram it all in here. Thanks for all your support in reading this!