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| The only way to cross this river is by ferry! |
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| This building was one of the original inns on the Great Northern Highway |
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| This is the oldest church that has been in continuous use in Australia. |
The couple we went with are in Sydney as Family History missionaries and of course, my husband's middle name is 'family history', so we stopped at several little family cemeteries along the side roads. I was surprised at how old many of the people lived to be. It was not uncommon to find people who lived into their eighties. I find that remarkable since the country is to rough and hard. Having to clear the land and basically live off the land made for a pretty tough existence, so it was surprising to me to see how many people lived to a ripe old age.
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| Many of the graves had not only a headstone, but also a footstone. I'd never heard of a footstone before! |
The highlight of our weekend was the wedding we attended. Two Chinese people we met about six weeks ago invited us to their wedding. We met them at an evening church meeting we were speaking at. The missionaries had been teaching them at the church and we were coming in to the building just about the time they were getting ready to leave. Dave spoke some Chinese with them and they ended up staying and sitting in on our class. About a week later we invited them to our Chinese dinner with the students from our workshops. I posted pictures of the party a few weeks back. Andrew (his English name) has lived in Australia for about three years. He attended university here and then got a job. Juliet (obviously not her Chinese name, she was an English teacher in China and loved Romeo and Juliet, so when she had to choose an English name when she came to Australia, she chose Juliet) has only been in Australia for about three months. Andrew and Juliet had dated for quite a while in China, in fact their families are very good friends. They've been engaged for quite a while, but waited to get married until Andrew finished school and had a good job. Juliet left her teaching job in China to come to Australia to be married. She obviously can't teach here since her Chinese credentials don't count in Australia, so she will look for another job. A couple of weeks ago Andrew called and asked Dave if he would help out in the wedding. Since none of their family members could come over from China to attend the wedding, they had to rely on the people they knew in Australia. It is customary for an 'honored uncle' to give the bride away, and so since there was not an honored uncle available, they asked Dave if he would do the honors. The wedding was outside at the top of a hill overlooking the harbor. Unfortunately, it was a drizzly day and a little on the cold side, the bride was freezing!
After the ceremony we went to the restaurant where the wedding dinner was held. It was really cool because the restaurant was right on the water in Darling Harbor. Since there was a downtown festival going on out in the harbor, we got to watch the fireworks show while we waited for everyone to arrive for dinner.
We ended up waiting a long time before the dinner started because the bride had to have her hair done up for the dinner and both bride and groom changed clothes into traditional Chinese clothes for this part of the festivities.
It was worth the long wait though, because once the dinner started we had LOTS to eat, eleven courses to be exact! It was all traditional Chinese 'festival' day food, it included shrimp and lobster as well as other kinds of fish and different vegetable dishes. Dessert was red bean soup which was a real treat for the Chinese attending, but those of us non-Chinese decided that red bean soup is an acquired taste, because we weren't too impressed, the wedding cake was more suited to our taste buds.
Grandkids:
Grandpa and I went on a drive with our friends way out in the country away from the city. The countryside is really pretty and we had a good time looking at the sheep and cows that live on lots of the ranches. Imagine our surprise when we came upon a small pasture that didn't have any sheep or cows, it had a camel!!! He was a very friendly camel and he wasn't very big, maybe he was still a baby. I think he might have been lonely though because there were no other camels around anywhere.
I decided to do a little research and find out why I would see a camel in Australia. This is what I found out: Originally there were no camels in Australia, people brought them over from India and the Canary Islands in 1840. They used these camels to carry supplies when they were building the Overland Telegraph Line and used them to carried pipe sections for the goldfields water supply. Camels also pulled big wagons of wool from the sheep stations and pulled the big scoops when the big dams were being built. Camels also pulled plows when people farmed. Camels were better suited than horses or donkeys for these jobs because camels can carry a lot more weight on their backs and they are very strong and can pull heavier loads on wagons than horses or donkeys. The thing that really makes them a good fit for Australia though is that camels can go a long time without water. Since the outback doesn't have hardly any water, camels survive better than horses or donkeys do. However, by the 1920s cars and tractors were invented and camels weren't needed any more. Most of the people and businesses who owned camels just turned them loose out in the outback. They thought the camels would starve and die off, but they didn't, they lived just fine out in the outback without people to take care of them and now there are about 200,000 wild camels living in the outback!
Last weekend Grandpa and I and some of our friends went downtown to a wedding dinner. When we were walking to the restaurant I saw two aborigine men playing music to earn money. One man is playing a didgeridoo. A didgeridoo is a musical instrument that was invented about 1,500 years ago in Australia by the aborigines, it's the aborigine version of the trumpet! Didgeridoos are usually about four feet long, but some are as long as 10 feet. The longer the didgeridoo is, the lower the sound is. They are usually made of wood from a eucalyptus tree. The aborigines looked for a hollow live tree that has lots of termites around it. Termites eat the dead wood in the center of the tree branches, so the aborigines didn't have to do the work of trying to make the center of the wood hollow, they could just find where the termites were and then cut down the tree and take off the bark. This video won't show up if you are on an iPad, you have to be on a computer in order for this to work.
A didgeridoo is played by vibrating your lips to make the sound come out. The person playing it has to be able to breath in through their nose while blowing out air through their mouth using their tongue and cheeks. The aborigines used the didgeridoo at their religious ceremonies while people sang and danced. The sticks the other man is playing are called 'pair sticks'. The sticks carry the beat of the music. Mostly only men play the didgeridoo because originally that was how their religious ceremonies were set up. Nowadays some women play, but only for fun, not for religious ceremonies. You can watch a man playing his didgeredoo here. Watch how he breathes:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DC9w4KWEgJE
Grandpa and I stopped at a park on our way home from church yesterday to take a picture of the bats in the trees close to our house.
These bats, called flying foxes, are huge, their wing span is about three feet feet wide! In some places in Australia these bats grow so big their wing span is six feet, but the bats by us aren't that big. Flying foxes are the biggest bats in Australia. There are thousands of them hanging in the trees by the river by our house. They sleep all day and then wake up and fly around looking for food at night. Fruit farmers in Australia have to put giant nets over their fruit trees because the bats come and eat up the fruit at night. Here is a little video I took of the bats flying off, Grandpa clapped his hands and whistled to wake them up. Listen to them calling to each other as they take off.
Bats are not birds, they are mammals. When the babies are born they nurse and get milk from their moms. The moms hold the babies in their wings kind of like a cradle, sometimes they even fly with the babies. You can learn about the flying foxes here: http://video.nationalgeographic.com/video/bat_flyingfox
I'm sending you all a copy of the book Stellaluna. It's a story about a baby bat who fell out off her mom and landed in a birds nest. Some bats aren't as lucky as Stellaluna, sometimes they fall off of their moms or out of the tree and die, but if they are lucky, they end up getting rescued by humans. Look at these baby rescue bats:
Why do you think the baby bats are wrapped up? (Think about what I told you about how the mamma bats hold their babies.)
If you found a baby bat would you wrap it up and take care of it until it was big enough to fly away and live with other bats? Do you think the baby bat would think you were it's mom?
I hope you all have a great week. I think all of you, except Lydia, are out of school now and on summer vacation. Maybe you can get your moms to take you to the zoo this week. If you go, see if your zoo has a camel or some bats. Maybe your camel will be bigger than my camel was and maybe your bats will be smaller than my bats in Australia!! Remember, Grandpa and I love you and miss you.
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