On the way to Cairns

  Townsville, Australia 
Tuesday, June 21, 2005 

Last night was a little get-together at the Trebonne hotel, which I took plenty of pictures of. It's like an old-style pub, with rooms up above. Very colorful and very Italian. In fact, North Queensland has a lot of Italians. Like the Basques who came here, the Italians came to work on the sugar plantations and to work the mills. There's some photos in the album of those pictures. Next to the Trebonne Hotel in Ingham is a fronton, constructed, I presume, by Basques who missed the sports of their homeland. Bianka Balanzetegui did a presentation on it, and a lot of her research and photos came from Albert Urberuaga, who lived in Ingham. I guess he had a family here, with children named Javier and Amaia. Pedro Monasterio, a local guy, said that those Urberuagas are related to him, and also related to the Uberuagas that owned the Cyrus Jacobs-Uberuaga boarding house in Boise. So, I guess I'm related to him! Small world, eh? I got some pictures of the fronton as well. 


Gari and I danced outside, after everyone had formed a big circle around us. I think people were really happy to see dancing, especially the oldies from Euskal Herria that hadn't seen their homeland's culture in maybe 30 or 40 years. Gari did Agurra and the CD player quit working in the middle, but obviously he had it memorized so he kept dancing. Then he did another dance from Gipuzkoa using similar steps, then we did a fandango and arin-arin. I think for our next presentation, we'll do some steps from Godalet (without the wine glass), and Gari is going to teach me the Arratiako Jota (woo hoo!) We may also do a binako, even though I'll have a skirt on. I'll do girly kicks, I guess. 

Anyway, we danced a few dances, then had a steak BBQ dinner (no "shrimp on the barbie" yet) and I gave my presentation. I think next time I'll ask Gari to talk more, b/c he knows a lot about dancing that I have no idea about. I mean, I do my research, but he's innately more knowledgable about that sort of thing. He's a really intelligent guy, actually, but a lot of times he can't get his point across b/c we're all English speakers. 

After the presentation and the night was over, we went to Joan Aranas' house in Lucinda, a beach town a little farther from Ingham. They live literally 100m away from the beach. We had breakfast on their front deck this morning and were looking at the beach during breakfast. When I went down to the water, I saw this little thing that looked like a Jello jiggler. I touched it and it didn't move or bite me (it didn't have a head or anything) so I picked it up and carried it back to the house. Joan said "Oh yeah, that's a jellyfish." Ahh! I almost dropped it. She told me it was alive, but didn't bite or anything. I'll attach a picture in this entry. It was really weird b/c it didn't move.

Then Dolores picked us up and we started on our way. We stopped in Cardwell and had a traditional Australian meat pie (photo in album.) So now we're on the way to Cairns. My camera battery is low, so I don't know how many more pictures I'll take on the way there, but I'll take plenty while I'm there. Gday!

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