Author: tompepinsky

I’ve decided to take over the blog tonight after a long break to make sure that TP doesn’t monopolize this space with tales of rugby and silly cars. We’ve made it to Canberra and settled into our home for the next month. It’s actually a really homey 2 bedroom flat with a kitchen and laundry and enough room for EP to run around a bit. I guess places like this are just too expensive to maintain but it would be so nice if more American Universities offered something like this. We’re right on the ANU campus and even managed to find a decent sized grocery store nearby to load up on essentials. I keep being struck by how non-supersized things are here. We are used to our giant Wegmans with wide aisles and big shopping carts and the place we were at today was touted as a huge supermarket and really wasn’t. TP didn’t believe me when I told him I saw a menu at a fancy touristy restaurant in Sydney advertising a 500 gram streak- and that was the biggest one on the menu.
The drive here was interesting too. After the Sydney suburbs abruptly ended there was absolutely nothing around until about 5 minutes before we hit Canberra. We were trying to figure out if there are any major cities in the US where you leave the suburbs and are in the middle of absolutely nowhere. The best we could come up with was Kansas City. We also passed over the Great Dividing Range which was amusing. Had there not been a sign we would have had no idea we had gained any elevation at all. But it was cool to see that immediately after passing over it the trees no longer had any leaves and the landscape looked even drier.
Tomorrow will bring the start of our new routine, we’ll report more soon.