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• All good things must end
• Travels through Darwin, Zone 3

All good things must end
From Carol Shenkenberger
6:730/275

In 1988 I bought my first 'real machine' from ZEOS corporation. Steady and faithful, she stayed with me in one level or another for the next 6 years. Finally, after my 3 cats had a fight which caused a 'cat-as-trophy' of 'cat-scading-cards' inside, all but my trusty keyboard was dead.

Ah, but that keyboard! Memories! It's fingerworn to where most of the alphabet has worn off. It has 'clean spots' from when in San Diego, we held conventions and took our BBS machines offline for the day to demo them to the public. See, it was so old and decrepit by then, a q-tip got used and made clean spots <g>.

Years of messages of joy and of pain have traversed those old keys. Now I think, it sits in a spot of honor, having at last been replaced with a new one. sniff I miss her already.

xxcarol
Sasebo, Japan

Travels through Darwin, Zone 3
From Carol Shenkenberger
6:730/275

I'd like to tell you all how delightful Australia is! I didn't get to see much other than downtown Darwin and sadly did not get to meet any sysops while there, but I had a lively email exchange with Kevin Symons (most seen in the COOKING echo) and Greg (same echo) who both live in Adelaide. I spoke with Greg's daughter-in-law and we will meet up for lunch/dinner next trip.

The first thing you note as a traveller arriving, is the lovely blue water. Ok, it's not as 'grab your eyeballs and shake you blue' as Okinawa but it is notable! The pier is very clean and well situated for walking to town if you feel like taking a stroll vice the bus. The busses by the way are exceptionally clean and well run. Kudos to OZ for that one!

The town part I saw is mostly walking distance from the pier-side portion and being a sailor, I had to try 'pub crawling' (oh my head!). Pub crawling in OZ is an interesting experience. Beer comes in two sizes. Too small and too large (grin). The brands are ones the average American will never have tried for the most part. Fosters and Guiness were the only 2 familiar names. I tried all the other ones and found 'Victoria Bitters' (VB) to be the one I liked the best. I didn't try any bottled types, just draft.

Walking about you find many native Australians (Aborigonees?) who don't wear shoes (by choice). I talked with Bil for about 2 hours while lazing about the local shopping district and we had fun with our different accents. Good conversationalist and I caught a story hour with him and some kids.

Shopping is both familiar and strange at the same time. Walmart for example is a grocery store. They have Kmarts and McDonalds and such like plus some facinating OZ chain stores.

All in all, it was a good place to be and seemed an excellent place to live. Exchange rate was about 2$OZ for 1$USD. Works out the same though as everything costs almost twice as much. 20$ USD is still enough to go pub crawling although it becomes 40$OZ and change.

A difference is getting used to using coins to pay for things. Those of us from Japan are used to that but it's even more notable in OZ. Probably that's because of the denominations used there.

I saw one other place but only from a distance. East Timor, which is part of Indonesia geographically. We did a 'humanitarian assistance' visit there where the Dentist and Medical Doctor went ashore with teams to treat patients. I don't know if that's zone3 or zone6. Suai Beach area and the people are very poor.

Due to several local diseases which we have no immunity for (malaria for example), few got to get off the ship there and I lost the raffle for one of the slots. Those who did get to go, told us all about it.

War has been a constant in their lives and we were able to do little in the big scheme of things but we eased a few people. We also took a huge load of donated goods from Darwin up there for distribution. T-shirts, shoes, medicines, toys, and educational materials were the main lot of that. The schools had asked for pencils and notepads for example and we took up a ship collection of over 1,500$ then got lots of such wholesale from the Darwin stores and delivered it. 3,000$OZ goes a long way wholesale for those types of supplies.

xxcarol