pets

we booked our tickets back :( but also :D
will be in Rome on the 2nd of august, we booked from Darwin, so we gotta get there one way or the other. we are going to stay in italy for august and then england, sorry, no iceland for now, unless we win the lottery or something. we will keep playing. everyone is invited to visit us in england/italy though.
still doing our mandarine related things.
planning to leave here on the 7th of june or something like that.
bye to all

The legendary lungfish

Forget about the mandarins. We found out why Munduberra SHOULD actually be world famous: it's the only place in Australia where you can find a lungfish!! And what is a lungfish, you'll ask. It is a long "tampon shaped" fish, that during the summer heat and dryness is able to escape the mighty reaper of suffocation in the stagnant water ponds by swimming to the surface and breathing through its one lung!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
Yvonne now firmly believes in the evolutionary theory due to this damning piece of evidence (which pietro continues to tell her is not really evidence, just it makes the theory more likely) and would like to invite all the creationists in the world to come have a fishing weekend in mundubbera!!! (for all those that are worried about us fishing in the desert(apart from the fact that we still havnt touched either fishing rods or desert) it is highly illigal to catch lungfish).

The plan for war against normalness by making faces on oranges has long be contemplated and discussed between us (since pietro thought about it at the beginning - great minds think alike) but due to a huge lack of time (the oranges pass in about 0.3sec on the sorting line) this has been changed to a less time consuming letter in each box of oranges, descreetly placed there by pietro who gets payed to count the boxes and stand around and look pretty (which he is surprisingly good at!). The letters would consist in loving messages to the greengrocers of australia and the world, and would no doubt start a love wave that would change the world in say 4 to 6 weeks. We still haven't started, but the planning is underway. This to show to Dora that we still care about saving the world. Thank you for your support from home, donations to the mandarlove project are welcome.

We have both gone through many thoughts in the endless 12 hour shift where we are required to perform awesome and oh so many different tasks: Pietro can't help thinking how the fact that we start packing in the light, and then, at a certain point it becomes dark (this usually at around 5:30 everyday) makes our days so much less monotonous and more enjoyable.
Yvonne meanwhile (due to some serious difficulty in the connection between her eyes and her brain) has often contemplated how nice it is of our boss to occasionally send through small orange tomatoes and little baby pumpkins (that on second glances look very much like mandarines but still). We may be going slowly insane... but dont worry, at least we are enjoying it, making money, and getting to know many koreans, let's see it this way.

We also have a new pet. last night pietro awoke (at 2am, much to yvonnes frustration) to the sound of rustling in the car. After MUCH searching and silent vigilance in the dark, pietro found out that a little country mouse had moved into our humble abode, settling down in the food box. We dont really mind the idea of a pet, or sharing our food, but little dropping all over the car and sleep area do tend to worry us... but still there is very little we can do as the car is not that well organised, and the mouse is small and fast!

Per Silvana: in pratica in questo paese, unico posto in Australia, c'e' un pesce con un polmone che arriva direttamente dalla preistoria, poi mentre si lavora si pensa alle peggio torte: mettere lettere d'amore nelle scatole di mandarini per gli ortolani di tutto il mondo, oppure disegnare facce sui mandarini, come suggeriva la Dora. poi ci si annoia e ci vengono in mente pensieri strani: in pratica stiamo ammattendo. Inoltre l'altra notte abbiamo scoperto un simpatico topo in macchina, ma non si riesce a scacciare perche' in macchina ci sono troooppi nascondigli. Per i dettagli, costringi uno dei tuoi figli o mariti a tradurre, comunque sono solo ------ate.

Bye and much love to everyone
us

Mundubbera

short update (dawn, for the lovers of sophisticated translation humour):

-we are in Mundubbera, population 2500, north west of Brisbane ("just" 400 kms north west), citrus capital of Queensland (so they say here) and home of the Big Mandarin (click to see). The next town is 45 kms close, and it's home of the Big Orange. I think these facts are pretty descriptive of the environment we live in.

-actually, the environment we live in the most is a packing shed. We work with mandarins, loads of them.We have been packing em for a week, paid 0.004 dollars each mandarin, now we've been moved to more spiritually rewarding positions (and paid hourly), some say cause the manager has dreadlocks:I count boxes, yvonne separates good mandarins from bad ones.

-the second environment we live in the most is our rest area on the side of the road, where we park our house (car) every night, cook dinner, talk to other fruit workers, our neighbours (but they change everyday), go to sleep, and leave at dawn (update)(ok I'll stop it now).

Now I'm going, I have the afternoon off and I want to enjoy some sun before it goes down, we usually work til after dark, so...
Yvonne is still there, looking at mandarins rolling in front of her eyes and picking the worse ones.
The weather is great, I have a new concept of winter in my head, now.
Piero
P.S.I guess it must be way better than the danish concept of summer.

Comfortably Nimbin

Thank you all for your advice and thoughts... they are all noted, and thought about (giorgio's one is currently under much debate... we are thinking of calling off the whole thing).

This is what we wrote yesterday, just to find out that noone knew the internet password in that bar, so we had to wait one day, and here it is. We are now in Byron Bay, the surfer version of Nimbin (see below).

...............

A peace and love message to all the world through our blog from the rainbow heart of Australia! We made it to our first goal, Nimbin.
Our plan wasn't actually swiftly executed, but we made it. Our departure on wednesday failed due to our baby car who needed a bit of a fix. So we delayed everything to the day after, and as soon as the sun was up...well, as soon as we had the car at noon...well, as soon as we had the car loaded, the lunch eaten, the housemates saluted, we left. We then got lost in Sydney to try and find our favourite cheap supermarket, failing and going then to one of the most expensive ones, just in time to get stuck in the peak hour traffic.

At sunset, we were safe and happy 100 Km north of Sydney (which in australian distance is about 10 minutes out of Sydney: our first stop was planned 700 Km up), eating our dinner beside a very picturesque lighthouse (and shitting ourselves every time we heard a noise coming from the bush, picturing ourselves eaten by dingoes and found weeks later-we were actually just outside a town which I guess could be considered outskirts of Sydney)
"No worries, tomorrow night we'll be arriving anyway"

We then woke, said good morning, drank coffee and started driving, drove all day, drove far beyond the ipod battery, past the big banana (what a crushing disappointment that was), past tea time and the sunset, and our goal wasn't yet on the horizon.

We decided to stand out in the backpackers crowd driving up and down the coast by leaving the highway and venturing inland, thus exposing ourselves to the risk of kangaroos and koalas crossing the road in the dark and truck drivers driving within the speed limit (100Km/h) in the opposite direction, on a country road not even wide and straight, on the Wrong Side of the road.
The body count was not too bad: 1 possum (might have been a koala, but we like to hope it wasn't; after the kangaroo ragu we made the other day, we don't want to be responsible for any more national symbols slaughter), and 1 Unidentified Flying Object, who made a huge Donk but luckily didn't crack the windscreen.

We slept in a rest area in a town smaller than most of Sydney's supermarkets, admiring the milky way and the way you could hear a car arriving a couple of minutes before it passed the town, to find out the morning after that the outback we were picturing as the toughest desert looks actually like the hobbits' Shire. Maybe we have to go farther inland.

The next morning we arrived in Nimbin. In the 70's a bunch of hippies decided that they had had enough of war, consumerism and pollution, so they left their homes and set out for Nimbin where they created a community based on being auto sufficient in nearly every way, living in harmony with the aboriginals and learning to help each other out in every way, growing their own crops and sharing washing-machines.
They're still there today, and so are we, and every year thay have a hippie festival that we couldn't miss, could we?

From here we dont really know where we are going, we are thinking of harvesting mandarines close to brisbane, but we have to go there to see if they need any more people... we still have money (big plus) and are both very happy (periodically).

we'll write again as soon as we can.

Our new house, our new backyard (on the best days only)


Idillic countryside, Nimbin Rocks (most of the times)


The festival's final parade, people watching it


Hair


Unreal and real police