Disclaimer: The following is an email I sent to friends and family in February 2014, preserved here for posterity.

Subj: The Land of Oz

As many of you know, who graciously responded to my last email, I did not completely avoid the winter insanity that Maryland and much of the US suffered. The Global Weirding brought an unusual blizzard to Tokyo too and cut off all means of getting to the airport in time. Fortunately, there's a magical feature of the RTW ticket: you can call at any time and change the dates of any of your flights for free! Thus I stayed 10 more days in Kyoto. 

This was a great time, as the last week usually is, because the relationship is strongest and we celebrated my extra time by going to a real bamboo forest, a remote temple, a mountain onsen, and a huge antique market.  

Since I flew out on my birthday, we celebrated the night before with takoyaki, or "octopus balls" (chunks of octopus meat/tentacle in a sphere of batter, not like male octopus' ... never mind). It was a sad goodbye and much more could be said of those last 10 days, but I'm sure everybody is anxious to hear of Australia so I must press on. 

A few days before I left I got a timely Facebook message from a brother of my engineering fraternity, Theta Tau. He had just landed in Sydney for a semester abroad and I was just about to land.  How fortuitous! The offer of a place to sleep on his floor ended up going unused because we celebrated my birthday for the second time by partying at the rooftop pool of a Sydney club until the early hours of the next day when I had to catch my train to take me up the coast to my Australian hosts.

I grabbed a few winks on the train and arrived in the evening to meet Aniish, Arpita, and their adorable 1 year old daughter Sarala. Somehow I let it slip that I had just turned 23 and the next day Arpita surprised me with a raw carrot cake (no cooking, just some setting in the freezer, it was delicious). And thus ended the triple birthday in the year where I expected to have none. 

As you probably knew, those names are Sanskrit and they have some deep, layered meaning that's hard to explain (... or remember). They chose them when they chose their religion of Ananda Marga, which is some obscure derivation of Hinduism I think? They didn't force it on me obviously, but I was interested so I occasionally joined in meditation and the easier mantra songs. Some "Dadas" visited from India for a week, robed in bright orange.  The main tenet is to love everybody and everything, which seems like a pretty good idea for a religion, although others aren't as explicit about it. Unfortunately, they also believe that onions and garlic prevent you from meditating successfully, which severely impacts my cooking repertoire, so they won't convert me anytime soon. 

Their lifestyle is interesting. They have very little money, but are by no means poor. They have no debt, they have a lovely warm house which they built themselves, and they have plenty of food: fresh greens from a medium size garden and lots of dried goods (beans, grains, rice, honey, dried fruits, nuts) in 20L buckets in a cellar.  They have solar panels on the roof that produce more electricity than they consume, so they get a check from the power company, not a bill.  "Making lunch" was just 20 minutes of wandering the garden picking what looked nice out of the lettuce, rocket, eggplant, chili peppers, bell peppers (capsicum in their speech), basil, mint, and never ending cherry tomatoes. They can grow or make most things they need and just get a little supplemental income from a farmers market on the weekends where Arpita sells a few things:

Beeswax Wraps, which is just cloth dipped in beeswax which you can use as saran wrap but it lasts a year instead of a day, and:

Rosella Tonic which is a delicious drink she concocted made entirely out of ingredients on their farm, namely rosella (those red flowery things), ginger, lemongrass, and water. She also sold some not-as-photogenic teas and some of the peppers and cherry tomatoes from the garden. 

Another interesting habit of this lifestyle is the picking of public fruits. There are some mango trees in parks or parking lots in the closest city that nobody takes the fruit from. It falls and rots. Unless Aniish spots it, and so it was with the three boxes of mangoes on the front porch when I arrived. And the three boxes of guava I helped pick from trees planted by birds on the side of the road. So they work in gluts and have to quickly dry or freeze much of the latest free crop, and eat as much as they can bear of the fresh stuff. I admit that's opened my eyes and I scan the side of the road sometimes now, as I drive around New Zealand (spoiler alert!). 

Japan convinced me that I need heated toilet seats, and Australia convinced me that I need a breadmaker.  It takes 5 minutes to put the ingredients together, and then 3 hours later you have incredible bread. It's so thick and hearty it makes supermarket bread look like a spiderweb.  Peeps compared to duck confit. 

The work was varied, as always.  I added compost and mulch to the veggie garden, helped perfect the recipe for the Rosella Tonic, dried bananas, mangoes, guava paste, lemongrass, rosella, and ginger, watered the plants, dug a 20m ditch for another water spout, set up Arpita's website for the online business she's planning, helped Aniish put up a veranda on the future Wwoofers' quarters, and entertained an incredulous baby, to name a few. 

Eating wholesome food, showering daily, sleeping in warm beds, staying with beautiful families and using my skills to make meaningful contributions to their lives gets boring after a while though, so I decided to give it all up and try the opposite this month in New Zealand.  In the next chapter, you'll learn what meals can be made with one pan, the value of a hot shower, the best way to sleep in a car, and the splendor of Middle-earth countryside, er, New Zealand.

Cheers mate,

Colin

PS: Reading list:

The BFG by Roald Dahl

My First Animalia by Graeme Base

Where is the Green Sheep by Mem Fox

Ten Little Fingers and Ten Little Toes by Mem Fox

Don't worry, I make up for this in NZ