Jamie makes a funny little purring noise when she’s happy and she’s been making it non-stop since we arrived in Australia.

After spending six weeks in places where English was sometimes rare, where American food was non-existant, and where the Big Bang Theory had subtitles, we feel at home here.

We got up this morning and had brekky (the Aussies abbreviate almost everything so breakfast is known as brekky), then jumped on the speedy, spotless train to Subiaco (abbreviated to Subi), our favorite Perth suburb. We walked around for hours and listened to the accents, had a coffee or two, and tried to figure out what had changed since the last time we were here.

We love Subi. We love Perth. We love Australia.

We love Australia. This is Jamie’s sixth trip and my millionth (give or take a few).

I didn’t just kiss the ground when I arrived, I made out with it. Like Kevin Costner in Bull Durham, I gave it a long, slow, deep, soft, wet kiss that lasted until airport security broke it up.

Jamie’s comment on this post was, “You always have to take it one step too far, don’t you?” My response was, “Duh.”

As you undoubtedly know, the seasons are reversed in the Northern and Southern Hemispheres. When it’s summer in California, it’s winter in Australia and vice versa.

In a very odd scheduling quirk, a quirk that was completely unplanned and only possible because our original flight was cancelled, we left Hong Kong on the evening of the last day of the Northern Hemisphere’s summer. Soon after we took off from the Philippines, somewhere in the air that last day of summer in the northern hemisphere turned to the first day of Fall. Then that same flight crossed the equator, the seasons flipped, and we suddenly found ourselves back on the last day of winter. Throw in a few extra time zones and by the time we landed in Oz, it had become the first day of Spring. It was so complex that I’m not even sure I explained it properly.

Four seasons in one day. All made possible by a cancelled flight, circuitous rerouting, the equator, odd Australia time zones, fortuitous scheduling, and kismet.

I would not have thought it was possible.

Yesterday I told Jamie how remarkable it is that this trip has gone off without a hitch so far. All our travel and hotel reservations have come off exactly as planned. Six weeks of international travel and we haven’t had a single problem.

She said, “Don’t say that. You’ll jinx it.”

Well, I guess I did, because this has been the worst day of our trip.

We had reservations on a flight from Hong Kong to Perth, but the airline cancelled our flight and we ended up taking a very roundabout path to get here: Hong Kong to Manila to Melbourne to Perth. We were in airports or in the air for exactly 24 hours.

Our flight from Hong Kong to Manila landed just ten minutes before the scheduled departure time of our Melbourne flight and making it from one to the other could have been a huge problem, but the airline kept that from happening.

A woman standing at the door of the plane was hollering, “Melbourne?” to all the disembarking passengers. When we said, “Yes,” she said, “Look for a woman holding a Melbourne sign at the end of the tunnel.” We found that woman and she ran interference for us as we sped through the airport.

Since she spoke in Tagalog to all the security people we don’t know what she said, but it worked. We bypassed long lines other people were standing in, went up several flights of stairs and down several others and finally ended up at security right at the gate for our Melbourne flight. They quickly looked through our carry-on bags, frisked us just as quickly, and sent us to our plane.

The rest of the trip was uneventful, but long. We had a two-and-a-half hour flight from Hong Kong to Manila, followed by a seven hour flight from Manila to Melbourne, followed by a four hour flight from Melbourne to Perth.

But we’re here. And much to our surprise, so is our luggage.

Before this trip most of what I knew about China was found in a book called Riding the Iron Rooster. It was written by Paul Theroux and tells the story of his travels through China in the 1980s, back when China was still mired in third world misery.

One of the things I remember most from the book is Theroux’ descriptions of the Chinese habit of spitting. He claimed that foreigners should carry umbrellas to protect themselves from the constant spitting they are sure to encounter everywhere in China. Men, women, children — they all spit everywhere all the time.

I read several years ago that the government was working hard to wipe out this epidemic of expectoration exhibitionism.

Well, let me be blunt. The campaign hasn’t worked. Everyone still spits. Men, women and children still hawk up big ol’ loogies and let ’em fly. The sidewalks are covered with glistening little puddles of spit.

Today I was waiting for Jamie in the lobby of Steve Wynn’s Hotel & Casino, a pretty spiffy place in Macao, when a very attractive young Chinese woman clad in fashionable, obviously expensive clothes began walking toward me. I, being the dreamer I am, assumed she had spotted me from across the room and felt compelled to approach me to express her intense desires.

No. Not quite.

Instead of approaching me to reveal the depth of her passion she stopped a few feet short of me, hawked up a big ol’ loogie and spit it into the trash can I was standing next to.

So now you understand the reason for the photo accompanying this blog item. We saw this sign tonight posted in a position of great prominence at Hong Kong’s Harvest Moon Lantern Festival. I suppose it could mean that vendors cannot hawk their wares at the festival, but I choose to believe that it refers to spitting.

What do you think?

Jamie has been aching to taste some moon cake since the day we arrived in China. Time and circumstances kept us from sampling this seasonal delight until today.

She drooled over ’em in Beijing, craved ’em in Xi’ An, hankered for ’em in Chengdu, and yearned for ’em in Shanghai. But today was the day. She finally bought herself a Lotus Flower Seed Moon Cake.

Her opinion?

Mmmmm. As in Mmmmmoon cake.

Jamie was excited to see that the Mid-Autumn Harvest Moon Lantern Festival was being held while we’re Hong Kong. I was excited to find out why their Mid-Autumn festival was being held in late summer.

We took the subway out to Victoria Park in Hong Kong’s Causeway Bay district and took a look along with several thousand other people.

Then we cruised the adjacent shopping area, which seemed to have as many people as Times Square on New Year’s Eve.

We love Hong Kong.

Let’s make it official: That is the worst headline I’ve ever written. But the dim sum we had today at Steve Wynn’s casino in Macao was, perhaps, the best we’ve ever had.

Mmm (with the appropriate number of m’s).

This photo makes Macao look like a very nice place. Do not be fooled.

I’d be willing to bet that most people have never heard of Macao. It’s always been Hong Kong’s poor cousin, another former European colony that’s now been returned to China.

For some reason I cannot explain, I’ve always been far more fascinated by Macao than by Hong Kong. It seemed more exotic, maybe because it was a Portuguese colony instead of being a stolid, boring British colony.

And now Macao has gained some cachet because it’s Asia’s new gambling mecca. Steve Wynn and Sheldon Adelson have pretty much abandoned building new casinos in Las Vegas, but they’re building like crazy in Macao.

So I talked Jamie into taking a one hour hydrofoil ride from Hong Kong to Macao. “It’ll be cool,” I said. “We’ll go over in the morning, walk around and see the sights, grab some lunch and come home by mid-afternoon.”

Bear with me as I digress momentarily.

Most of you know that we’re leavng California and that we’ve been looking for somewhere cool to settle. We’ve visited Boise, Idaho, Fort Collins, Colorado and McKinney, Texas.

I work with a great young art director named Chris Sutton who lives in Las Vegas. One day he asked me in an email what cities we were looking at and I sent him a list that included Reno, Nevada. As a Vegas resident, he took umbrage at that so I asked, “What’s wrong with Reno?”

He sent back this reply:

You asked me what was wrong with Reno. The better question would be “What’s right with Reno?”. The answer is nothing.

It’s a small town with nothing to do besides the old, dirty hookers at the brothel, terrible food and lackluster, rundown casinos that are barely holding on by the $4.99 Prime rib buffet.

Well, having now visited Macao I can say that Reno is to Las Vegas as Macao is to Hong Kong.

Wynn and Adelson may be making billions of dollars here, but I can’t figure out how. Macao seems kind of tacky and run down, the casinos are empty, and there doesn’t appear to be any of the energy that Hong Kong’s so famous for.

Our lunch at Wynn’s Hotel & Casino was delicious, but we didn’t see any old, dirty hookers. In fact, as far as we know, we didn’t even see any young, clean ones.

So depending on how you feel about hookers, Macao probably tops Reno even if it doesn’t top Hong Kong.

I was doing a little online research last night when I ran across a blog in which a young woman raved about how great the Hong Kong subways are. We were doubtful after our fiasco with the Moscow subways.

The electric tram runs right past our hotel, so we climbed aboard this morning and took it to where we thought we were supposed to go to catch the subway. I pulled a city map out of my back pocket and had looked at it for no more than ten seconds when I heard a man behind me say, “Are you lost? Can I help you?”

That was our introduction to Jason, a Malaysian accountant who has now lived in Hong Kong for ten years. When I told him we were looking for the subway station he said, “I have some time this morning. Come with me and I’ll show you where you need to go and what you need to do.”

He lead us down into the subway station, told us how to buy tickets and took us over to a route map and showed us exactly which trains to take.

Unlike Moscow, the stations names are clearly marked in Chinese and English. The trains are also clearly marked in both languages. And they have electronic maps inside the cars showing you where you are and what the next stop is.

As an extra, added bonus, the trains are spotless. There’s no eating, drinking or smoking allowed. And, for god’s sake, they’re air conditioned.

By the way, if Jamie had taken this photo about 30 seconds earlier the car would have been packed with people cheek to jowl.