Chinatown, commie bike helmets, custard apples, and cold

Many small things happened in the past couple days. Most of them were good.

On a search for cheap soy sauce, we went to Chinatown (or, at least, what looks like the Chinatown part of downtown).

We only had to go a couple blocks before we succeeded in finding not only cheap soy sauce, but a delicious chili oil (also infused with peanuts and MSG, which we found out upon closer inspection at home) and cheap sesame oil. Plus, we managed to make a whole round-trip on one public transit swipe (they last for two hours, rounded up from the nearest hour).

Even before getting here, Colin had been visualizing a bike. He's had one when he was in Portland and another in Berlin, and had been asking around. Tyke, a philosophy friend from Pittsburgh, had put him in touch with a ex-philosophy bike guy named Tris. Tris not only pointed us to a good place for recycled bikes, but helped pick one out.

Very, very exciting to roll up the right pant leg again. Today was Colin's first round trip from the apartment to the university. 0 collisions with cars, 0 collisions with trams, and only 0.2 turns down the wrong side of the street.

The helmet in the above photo is socialist. Take a closer look:

There's a law requiring all bikers to wear helmets, which is apparently quite strictly enforced. In connection with that (possibly funded by fines?), the city has a thing set up where subsidized helmets are easy to find. Colin got this helmet at a 7/11 for $5.
(There are about ten 7/11s per Melbournian. Far, far more than anywhere we've seen in the US.)

Naomi has been figuring out the market scene, in particular, the big Queen Victoria market. We'd heard about it before coming here, and had looked through the list of produce on their website. Most of it was familiar stuff, with a couple exceptions. This was one of the exceptions:

It's called a 'custard apple.' We're not entirely sure what we'll do with it, but at least we don't have to guess whether it's ready to eat.

So things are good. It's not all custard apples, flowers, and socialist helmets, though. The downside is that it's winter and (as various people told us), Australian houses aren't really built for heating. Of course by east coast standards this is quite warm -- the highs have been in the mid-upper 50s (lows at night into the 40s), but it still feels chilly! We could crank up the heat, but our cheapness means that instead, we often go around the house like this: