Singing Frogs

Did you ever hear a frog sing? Well, it's not really a song but one way that frogs communicate, especially to find a mate. Last night in a friend's garden I heard the amazing music for the first time.

By the sound it made, I think that it was the Eastern Sedgefrog, a small green frog that lives around here. Here is a picture of it.

The way that my friend got the frogs to sing was to turn off the lights and water the branches of a tree with a garden hose. This makes the frogs think that it's raining and they begin to sing. It was a loud sound, much louder than I would have imagined coming from a frog that is only 1 inch long.

Imagine sitting in your garden and hearing this sound. Click on this link: Hear my mating call

Bye for now, mates.

I Have Landed in Australia

I am now in Australia and so far the only wildlife I've seen was a Butcher Bird on my friend's front porch. A Butcher Bird is interesting because it eats meat. They are mostly insect eaters, but will also feed on small lizards and other meat. There are no kangaroos or koalas on the streets. In this part of Australia, they are only in zoos and wildlife parks. I'll get to see these on the trip but not yet.

The thing that is most different from the US is that they drive on the opposite side of the road. This is very confusing when you first get here. On another trip I was almost hit by a car because I was looking for cars to come from the opposite direction and didn't see it coming. Luckily, my friend pulled me back onto the side walk in time. The steering wheel is on the opposite side of the car, too, like the one in the picture. I keep trying to climb into the driver's side.


See ya, mates.

Foodie Har! Har! Goes to Australia

What do Americans know about Australian food? Well, there's Paul Hogan's famous, "Put another shrimp on the barbie," or vegemite for the daring, or maybe meat pasties if you have a friend who lives there. Over the course of the next month, you and I are about to find out a whole lot more. And not just about the food, but also the weather, strange customs, and anything different and curious about Australia or the Australian way of life-- from the point of view of a 10-year old.


The reason is that I was convinced by an elementary school computer teacher to blog my trip so that the kids in his 4th and 5th grade classes can get a sense for this vast and far-away country. This may be a departure from the "mission statement" of Foodie Har! Har! but it just might be fun nevertheless. So, here goes.

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Today, Wednesday, November 26th, I will fly out at 10:30 at night for an overnight flight on Qantas, which is Australia's largest airline. The flight will take 20 hours and I will arrive in Australia on Friday, November 28th in the morning, or 37 hours later. No, I am not horrible at math. The missing piece of information is that the time zone I am going to in Australia is 17 hours ahead of our time zone on the West Coast of the United States, and I will cross the date line, which means that it's the next day there. If the trip wasn't hard enough already, I will also miss Thanksgiving altogether... that's probably why the flight was so cheap. Maybe they will have turkey dinner on the plane. I'll let you know next time I get to a computer when I land.


What do I plan to do on the plane all those hours? Watch movies, of course. Last trip I watched four movies each way... a good way to catch up on all the movies I've missed. Next in priority comes sleep. With my little half-doughnut pillow, I can sleep quite well and my neck won't hurt or get all twisted. Maybe I'll read. I'm bringing a couple of books to get me in the mood for the trip. One is In a Sunburned Country, which is about Australia and very funny, and the other is Julie and Julia about a woman who tries to cook all of the recipes in Julia Child's famous French food cookbook in one year. She was a blogger and an inspiration to me as a fellow "foodie," roughly defined as one who loves really good food.




I'm including a map of Australia at the top so you can see where I'm going. I will land in Sydney and stay there a couple of hours, and then fly on to Brisbane, about 600 miles away, which is a short flight compared to flying across the Pacific Ocean, but is still farther than going from San Diego to San Francisco. Will I see kangaroos on the street? Are there wild koalas in the trees? I can't wait to see what will happen. I'll post and tell you more about it when I land.



The Australian Outcast