Like many people growing up in Northern Ireland my concept of Australia comes from watching bad Australian soaps and animal programs starring Rolf Harris.  To me Australia is all about beaches, barbecues, and strange animals.

During my trip to Perth I went on my first ever Australian BBQ.  There really are outdoor barbecues at picnic spots that are free to use.  It was a bit different than I was expecting.  I’m used to barbecues being a wire grill with charcoal but this ran on gas and had a hot plate.  It was spotlessly clean and worked perfectly.  I can’t imagine having these in Northern Ireland, if the vandals didn’t destroy them the rain certainly would.

I also got to see kookaburras.  This is something else that I associate with Australia because of the song I was taught as a child, “Kookaburra sits on the old gum tree…”.  That’s as far as my knowledge of the birds went.  It turns out that they are a type of kingfisher. They were tame and rather cute with little short legs.  There was a whole group of them on the trees and ground around the barbecues.  (I’ve been trying to find a collective noun for them and they may be called “a riot of kookaburras” which is fairly appropriate.) They also like meat, maybe more than I do.  I was warned that they might try to steal my food but I was wasn’t expecting an aerial assault.  I mean seriously, one bird swooped down and stole the chicken kebab I was eating, grabbing the wooden stick right out of my hand.

Once I got over that shock I had to try to eat while defending my food.  I didn’t see the nasty little bird that stole my last piece of sausage until it landed on me and scratched my hand.  I’m not sure that I still think these birds are cute but they are certainly photogenic.

I’ve been reading about problems in the Perl community.  Although I’m involved in the community it’s a hard thing for me to define.  I suppose it’s many communities that are linked by Perl.

I’m involved with administration and as a consequence deal with quite a small set of people on a daily basis.  This makes my main Perl community a small group of volunteers that I have a lot of respect for.

I travel to a variety of conferences and get to meet another section of the community.  I’m always going to prefer face-to-face interactions over electronic ones and I really enjoy talking to other community members. I try to meet up with Perl Mongers when I travel, even when on holiday, and I have met some amazing people.

I am involved with some virtual Perl communities.  I am trying to get used to IRC, but I’m not great at it.  I avoid mailing lists unless it’s really neccesary for me to be part of them.  I read lots of blog posts but rarely comment.

I love the diversity in the various Perl communities that I’m involved with.

I am aware that there are problems, problems to do with expectations.  When I deal with people in the community directly I’m expecting them to be polite.  And I imagine they are expecting me to be polite.  This is especially true when I’m dealing with people I don’t know.

Every community ends up with its own rules of conduct. When dealing with large groups of people, people who don’t know each other, the behaviour is picked up from the other members of the group.  It’s like walking into a room that’s incredibly clean and tidy.  It feels wrong to leave your things sitting around.  But if you walk into a messy environment you don’t think twice about throwing your bag on the floor. Our behaviour is affected by the environment.  If you lurk on a list for a while and every email message is polite, your first message will probably also be polite.

I meet many members of the Perl community who want the community to grow.  And for it to flourish I believe we need to treat each other with respect.  There are so many people in the community that I do respect that it’s not that hard a thing for me to do.  I don’t like them all, I don’t agree with them all, but I can be polite, and I can be civil.  I have found that by doing so that nearly every member of the community that I encounter is polite and civil to me.

I think the Perl community is great, but also that it can be greater.

Sometimes I ask stupid questions.  I couldn’t find a dish cloth in the kitchen and I asked Marty if we had one.  He told me that he didn’t think so.  I thought about this and then I asked the stupid question.  “What did you use to clean the worktops while I was away?”.  I’ve been married for 15 years, you’d think I’d know not to ask questions like that.  I did discover the answer today after two hours of cleaning in the kitchen.   I can now see the worktops and it’s obvious that no-one has cleaned them in the past month.  I’ve even discovered the source of the nasty smell that’s been annoying me since I got back.

My kitchen isn’t big and I still haven’t finished cleaning.  Now that I’ve almost washed all the dishes I can see that the stove top is filthy and that the worktops, as well as being dirty, have been stained with tea rings.  I’m really hoping that baking soda will remove those or I’m going to be annoyed.  Actually, since I took a break to write this I’m probably already annoyed.  But I suppose there isn’t much point in that and I should go do some more cleaning.

I arrived back in Tokyo last night.  I had a good time in Australia but I was more than ready to leave.  The flight home wasn’t great.  I had booked a direct flight from Perth but it was cancelled and I was re-routed via Hong Kong.  Even getting through immigration took longer than it ever has before.

Now I’m hoping that the city stops shaking and that I can stay in one place for a while.  At least until I leave for YAPC::NA in June.

The Perl Foundation (TPF) is once again taking part in Google’s Summer of Code.  This is a great program but I always think that the timescales are quite tight.  Student applications need to be submitted by the 8th April which only gives the accepted organizations 3 weeks to find their students.  This year Florian Ragwitz is running the program for The Perl Foundation and Jonathan Leto is running the program for the Parrot Foundation.  Mark Keating has been working hard promoting this project and I’m hoping that we manage to at least match the number of students we had last year.

 

I went to my first ever sausage sizzle last night. I have been told that Australians like to barbecue but it never occurred to me that they thought that everyone else in the world cooked the same way.  When I told them it was my first time someone yelled, “bullshit!”.

I have certainly been to a barbecue in Northern Ireland but they have always involved burgers.  There will probably be sausages but they will be one type, and they’ll probably be little processed pork sausages.  In Holland the barbecues I’ve attended involved chicken and vegetable skewers as well as burgers.  But it would never occur to me to have a barbecue and cook only one type of meat.  I’m not a fan of sausages but the sausages last night were really good.  (Well, I only ate one and it was really good.)

The other factor is the weather.  I’m in Perth and it’s dry and hot.  It’s perfect weather for eating outside in the evening.  In Northern Ireland it will probably rain during a barbecue.  My memories of barbecues involve Marty standing by himself in the garden trying to protect our tiny disposable barbecue from the rain so that we can eat hamburgers.  A fairly silly thing to be doing when it was easy to cook hamburgers on the stove and it doesn’t rain inside.

 

My baby sister is 17 today.  Don’t want to think about how old that makes me.  Happy Birthday Sausage!

I have a friend who works at an office that’s built on reclaimed land out towards Tokyo Bay.  On the day of the Tohoku Earthquake the ground around his office cracked and shifted.

One week later and you can see that nature is filling in the crack.

 

It’s going to take me a while to adjust.  I no longer feel as if I am constantly swaying but I did have a lot of difficulty getting to sleep on the plane on the way here.  I kept waking up thinking that the turbulence was an earthquake.

I’ve read many criticisms about foreigners leaving Japan.  Odd that I hear almost nothing about the Japanese that have also left.   I was the only non-Japanese person in my cabin on the way to Australia.  The queues in the airport were also mainly made up of Japanese.

Australia is noisier than I remember.  Japan also has insects that scream at night but I wasn’t expecting the birds.  They start to make an almighty racket when the sun comes up and also when it starts to go down.  It can be hard to hear another person speak in the apartment.  Mind you, I’m on my own for a few days so for now it’s just me and the birds.

I’m currently at Narita airport.  I’ve said goodbye to my house guest and now I’m spending the rest of the day here as I’m leaving for Sydney this evening.

We left quite early this morning as we hadn’t been able to book train tickets to the airport in advance.  We didn’t have any problems getting a train but given the restricted schedule of the past week we thought it was prudent to give ourselves plenty of time.  Terminal 1 wasn’t overly full.  It had long queues but that’s mainly because everyone turned up before check-in opened.  We arrived 45 minutes before Virgin opened theirs.  I was speaking to one man who seemed to think that the queues weren’t normal and more people than usual had turned up.  But then I fly all the time and I have seen much longer queues than those, and the queues disappeared quite quickly once check-in actually opened.  I also noticed that the queues for security were the normal length.

I was surprised that the man I was talking to was so concerned.  He looked at the queue at said that he couldn’t imagine Virgin being able to handle it in the time-frame.  But there is only one Virgin flight a day and of course they can handle checking in the passengers for one flight in an hour and a half.  We are still in Japan.  It’s not as if they had one member of staff on or anything.  It was actually looking as if they would have everyone checked-in within 30 minutes.  I have waited nearly 90 minutes to be checked-in for a flight in America on a day when there weren’t considered to be any problems at all.  In that case it was caused by a shortage of staff.  It was almost as if they hadn’t realised that the people with tickets would be turning up for the flights.

I’m in Terminal 2 now and it is busier.  There are a couple of very long queues.  But I was still able to find a seat in Starbucks, so it’s not overly alarming out there.  Nothing like it would be during Golden Week, the big holiday during the year.

I have been asked if I’m fleeing the country but that’s not quite what I’m doing.  I have a Japanese friend who left for Perth on Thursday night and she would like me to join her.  She would also like to have someone to fly back to Japan with.  There is no doubt that if it wasn’t for the recent disaster that I would not be leaving.  There are issues with being in Tokyo at the minute, and I don’t mean fear of radiation, but rather the disruption of services and the possibility of another quake.  I also know that my family and friends are going to be happier if I am somewhere else.  Marty has no plans to leave at the minute, but I know that he will leave if he believes that Tokyo is unsafe.