Okay, enough on the Antipodes already!

Well, the last few days have been fairly uneventful, so although I have very little to say, I still feel impelled to write to somehow assist me in keeping my writerly skills intact (although I feel as though the nature of this blog has become more of a note-taking/observation space, and no place for the creation of art at all and yet, I press onward!) I have come to think a little more about what I said a few blogs ago about the strangeness of this place. And I think as far as what I have seen so far, the strangeness is more in the idea of Australia, and this distance of Australia from anything familiar, than anything truly bizarre about the place. So really, the antipodes has become just a concept in thinking about the place, not an experience that you go through in the actual place itself. But then...but then. There is this thing that Profe was telling us while we were studying in Mexico, and that is how difficult it is to cross cultures between two modern ones because on the surface they appear to be so similar, and yet, when you dig beneath the surface, there can be all kinds of differences. I think that is the true experience of Australia. It sounds so foreign that when you get here, you are surprised by how similar everything seems, and then when you start to know its quirks a little better, you realize how strange some things really are. And that is the true spirit of antipodes I think, that it sneaks up on you, catches you by surprise.
One other item of note, and then I will close out this rather pitiful entry...I was reflecting with Thryn last night on some of the things I had tried to blog about a few weeks ago when I was still in Omaha, about what a great group of friends I had in high school and how nostalgic I was for things to go back to the way they had been And she said something of what an amazing miracle that was, what a redeeming thing that God had put into my life. It is an amazing fact that even though I had all of this bad stuff going on in my life, I can still look back with nostalgia on that time because I had such an amazing bunch of people to laugh with me and keep me going. That really was my saving grace in those awful times. And it was like she was saying something that I had understood all along, but had never really put all the pieces together like that, so I really appreciated it. It really shows how God was working and sustaining me, even in those dark times.
So, those are my pithy thoughts for the day. Hopefully something remarkable will happen soon so that I can blog about that too...