Damek.

Long ago in a distant time forgotten by even the elders of our current age, my mother took me to Australia to visit her penpal. It was her first time meeting her penpal after corresponding with her for about 30 years (then, over 40 now!). Her penpal originally lived in India, but moved to Australia later on. That was my first time out of the country. I was only a year or so into being a teenager, and it was a grand adventure to me. Australia, not teenagerhood. We met her penpal and her family, then took a bus trip up to Canberra, Sydney, Brisbane, Cairns, over to Alice Springs & Ayers Rock, down to Adelaide, and back to Melbourne and her penpal. I met my sister’s future husband, enjoyed a couple of beaches in Australia’s winter (we went in the northern hemisphere’s late summer), and won a root beer from the bus driver for knowing some small bit of Australian movie trivia. I actually won a beer, but for some reason he wouldn’t buy one for me.

But the point of all this is that this is when I first had Vegemite. Yes, that stuff mentioned in the Men At Work song. Vegemite is a byproduct of the healthy Australian beer industry. It’s a yeast extract redolent with the byproducts of brewing. and I loved it.

Sadly, you can’t just go buy it at your local grocery store in the USA. For some reason USians just don’t seem to care for it. It’s never quite caught on.

A year or so ago I bought some on the internet from one of those places that imports British & Aussie products for USians who like that sort of thing. I was in heaven for a few weeks. Alas, it’s kind of expensive to do that, so I didn’t get any more. However, prompted by political & economic beliefs, and the fact that Vegemite is made by Kraft which is now owned by Altria, which also owns cigarette giant Philip Morris (yeah, suck my fat one Michael! Wait, nevermind), I decided to look into Vegemite alternatives.

It turns out there are a few options. First, there’s Bovril, which is apparently some sort of cow-based extract, which is ruled out quickly by the fact that I tend to be vegetarian. Then, there’s Promite, which gets points for being made in Australia, but it seems to have more random ingredients than Vegemite, seems to be more expensive to order online (probably because fewer people want it), and is said to have a weaker flavor than Vegemite. Screw that.

And then there’s Marmite. For those Australian Vegemite fans who are scoffing at the moment, you may not know that there are three different Marmites. First, there’s a Marmite made by a company with the questionable name “Sanitarium” – they have Marmite made in New Zealand, and they have a different Marmite made in Australia. Word on the web is that they each taste a little different, and both are supposedly sweeter and weaker than Vegemite. I don’t know, I’ve never had either.

And then there’s the English Marmite. The web told me it was comparable to Vegemite. In fact, one informal survey suggested that most people who have tried both Vegemite and English Marmite prefer the Marmite. It quickly became my goal to obtain some Marmite, preferrably while I was in England this summer so I could get the complete Marmite-buying experience. Unfortunately, you’ll have to wait until I write a bit more about Oxford to learn how the hunt turned out, and the helpful info I’ve learned since…

OK, here’s the deal. I’ve promised a bunch of people (well, two) that I would tell of my experiences in Oxford here on the blog. I haven’t done it yet. Sorry. It’s now a month after I returned from my week vacation with Alex, and I’m going to have a go at it while I sit here sipping on a Rum and coke. Hopefully that’ll make writing about it a little easier. Why? No, there’s no scandal, no tales of woe and horror. And that’s the problem. The whole vacation can pretty much be summed up in the word, “meh.”

But I exaggerate. Let me bring you back with me a month ago today. Alex and I were packing for Oxford. She went last year, in 2003’s summer. She had a great time. It’s not just that she went to Oxford, she enrolled in “The Oxford Experience” through NYU. The “Oxford Experience” is a program run by Oxford which basically allows them to raise money by having some of their professors teach weekly classes in the summer to people (mostly over the age of 50, nothing wrong with that) who would like to come and have, well, the Oxford experience. You stay in the facilities at the college, take a class in the morning, and have the evenings to yourself.

OK, I can hear you saying “get on with it, so… yeah, where was I? Oh. She loved doing it last year – she has a thing for history to begin with, and Oxford is anything if not historic. And so she wanted to go again in 2004, and bring someone with. Her mother was indisposed, so I became the lucky candidate. I acted unenthusiastic (after all, I’ve already been to Australia – if you’ve been out of the country once, who cares?), but secretly I was quite excited. Why? It would give me a chance to get some Marmite straight from the source.

Finally July rolled around and we left on Virgin Airlines for ye merrie olde Englande. Virgin provides movies, video games, music, food, foot massages, hot baths, pottery lessons and daycare facilities.

Landing in England, we struggled to find the bus that would take us to the Sheraton. We arrived a day early so as to not rush ourselves trying to get to Oxford. It was a good idea – After a day of travel, it’s better, if you can, to relax in a hotel and regroup your senses. We woke up on Sunday and had a nice room service breakfast. Unfortunately, English scrambled eggs are apparently made from cardboard. They did not include Marmite with the breakfast.

The long busride to Oxford wasn’t without some excitement, if you call traffic exciting. Considering this was English traffic, and the bus driver dealt with it by taking us on some back roads, and I therefore got to see more of the English countryside and some nice small towns, it was exciting.

After that, we checked in at Oxford, went to our rooms, and that was that for big adventure. Tomorrow I’ll start giving a few general impressions and small memories from the trip, like the castles we visited, how I succeeded in finding Marmite, and how we unsuccessfully tried to recapture the party fun Alex had last year by shoehorning a couple of fellow Americans into going to a couple bars with us. Also, I should say that, though I also previously promised photos, you’re going to have to wait even longer to see them because I’m unsatisfied with my current gallery software and I’m trying to find a better way of putting up pictures.

After a birthday and going-away party in midtown for one of Alex’s coworkers, we elected to walk home through the park, and though I tried to take some pics with my camera phone, they all turned out crap. Alex took some regular pictures, though, of which these turned out great for desktop wallpaper. The two more abstract photos have had nothing done to them, that’s just how they turned out. [Click below to go see them in their gallery album.] [nope, now they're on flickr]

My old mobile phone of 3+ years finally conked out, and I had to buy a new one. Here are the first few pics I took with it… [over in a gallery album] [nope, now at flickr]

I’ve been wondering why, with real genocide occurring in Sudan, the world hasn’t acted. It’s no mystery why George W. Bush has turned a blind eye – Iraq was never really about saving Iraqis (and the real reasons for the Iraq war don’t apply in Sudan), and our forces are spread too thin to do anything in Sudan now anyway.

So here comes Howard Dean voicing some of these concerns, and a challenge to the world to deal with Sudan:

Now is the time for the world community to act if they are serious about encouraging an enlightened leadership role for the United States. My challenge to the U.N. and Europe is simple: if you don’t like American diplomacy under George Bush, then do something to show those of us in opposition here in the U.S. that you can behave in such a way that unilateralism is not necessary.