I heart Melbourne

Tomorrow marks our one-year anniversary in Melbourne. It's been a busy year, an adventurous year, a very good year. I am, I would say, much happier and more secure than I was a year ago. Leslie's unwilling to compare years but says he's happy now.

I truly love Melbourne. I love the trees, the buildings, the people, the atmosphere, the diversity, the buzz, the location, the weather. I love my job, I'm making some good friends, and I love our apartment.

Here are some things I have learned in the last year:

What a huntsman spider looks like (big and ugly, and pretty scary when they're in your apartment block

What the words "arvo," "fair dinkum," "grouse" and "crook" mean ("afternoon", "genuine", "decent and hardworking" and "ill or sickly" in order)

When an Aussie asks you how you're traveling, he doesn't want to know the details of your commute. He's asking how you are

Complaining about the weather and real-estate prices is a human trait, even if you live in a place (like Melbourne) that has beautiful weather and prices that are not exorbitant

The MCG, Melbourne Cricket Ground, is where they play Aussie rules football. Go figure

Speaking of cricket, I have learned it is a looong game. But I now know the rules

Everything Americans say about Canadians and the Irish say about the Welsh, the Aussies say about the Kiwis

"He doesn't know me from a bar of soap" is a way better expression than "He doesn't know me from Adam"

One does not "root" for a team in Australia. This is a rude expression. One "barracks" for a team

George Bush isn't good enough to lick Kevin Rudd's boots, if Kevin Rudd wore boots, which I don't think he does

We're going to celebrate our one-year Melbourne anniversary by going to Sydney, funnily enough. We're going up there to visit Leslie's friend Emma for the weekend. We haven't yet made it to Sydney, so this will be a good chance to see the opera house and all those iconic images of Australia that we haven't visited. It should be a nice little break, but not nearly as adventurous as what we did a few weekends ago.

On Australia Day weekend (a three-day weekend) we went camping with a group of friends about 100km from Melbourne. Driving down (I had somehow managed to be the one driving) I was more than wary. My friends kept making allusions to horror movies, and I'm not good in the countryside at the best of times. I was fairly convinced, as we drove into the mountains in the pitch-black , that some sort of murderer was lurking in the darkness. We came upon a car with its bonnet up, clearly a car with some sort of car trouble. I sped by them. "I am not stopping this car for anyone or anything," I declared. I feel bad about it now, because they clearly needed help, but I was far too freaked out to stop, fearing it was a trap of some kind. I just have to think the RACV helped them out.

Once we got there I calmed a bit, though my role in the tent-pitching and fire-starting was mostly to hold a torch so my friends could see what they were doing as they worked. We sat around the campfire and chatted, and I was no longer afraid. Half a dozen curious kangaroos hopped around us, getting within a few feet and grazing on the grass in the clearing where our tents were pitched. We also saw two wombats, or maybe it was the same one - they're slow.

There were LOTS of bugs - tons of flies, some mosquitoes, and lots of huntsman spiders. On the third night, one climbed our friend Ruth's leg (she dealt with it really well, in my estimation - squinching up her eyes and kicking feebly. I would have passed out and fallen in the fire. Our friend Ryan came to her rescue and brushed it off her).

Despite the bugs, though, it was actually tons of fun. We built fires and roasted hot dogs and marshmallows and played campfire games. During the day we went swimming in a nearby lake and chilled out and read and played frisbee and cards and games, and at night we cooked our food and sat around the fire and laughed.