I haven’t had time to blog much because I’ve had proposal deadlines galore.  As I wrote a while back, I left my full-time job but am still churning out funding proposals as a contractor.

As I write this, I am at my aunt’s house in small town Wisconsin, where it is snowing—again.  I just read 10 case studies of clients who had been tortured, which is always a sobering and gratitude-inducing experience.  I just submitted a proposal to the United Nations, and am emailing with colleagues in Addis Ababa, Johannesburg, Amman, and exotic south Minneapolis.  As someone who is old enough to remember when faxes and satellite phones were state-of-the-art technology, this is a marvel to me.

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Back to Sydney.  I showed up at Auntie Margaret’s apartment to meet Heidi and spend two days with her before returning to reality.  Auntie Margaret was spending the two nights with her sister Jan, and had left a bottle of wine for us and a hand-written note for me in that spidery handwriting that I know mine will resemble one day.

She wrote how happy she was to have met me, if even briefly, and how she hoped I had enjoyed Australia and would return.  I hope so, too.

Heidi and I watched the news; Prince Harry made a good speech to open the Invictus Games.  We could actually see the games in the distance, across the harbor, and I think we had the best view of the fireworks of anyone watching that night.

“He’s turned out okay, hasn’t he?” remarked Heidi about Harry.

“Yes, after a few wasted years—literally,” I replied.

It was nice to sleep in Auntie Margaret’s bed, where I slept my first two nights in Australia.  It felt comforting, almost like I was at my own aunt’s house.

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Heidi and I got a late start the next day.  Around noon, we took the ferry across the bay to good old Luna Park, which as you may recall looks like this:

By now, Luna felt familiar since I had stopped there a dozen times going from one place to another on the commuter ferry.  This was the first time I actually walked through it, and I was excited to see that one of its attractions was an outdoor Olympic sized swimming pool.  I gazed at it longingly as we hoofed it up the hill to the base of Sydney Harbor Bridge.

Yes, today we were going to cross it on foot, but not as Harry and Meghan had done—not paying a “stupid amount of money”—as Heidi put it, to wear orange jumpsuits and get harnessed up and walk on the actual arches.

We just took the free-to-all footpath, which had spectacular views.

On the other side we loped down into The Rocks again, just in time for lunch.  Heidi knew that the Mercantile Hotel had great views from the first floor (what we would call the second floor in the US, and we ended up climbing a bonus flight of stairs to find an open table.  The view was great, but what caught my attention as I washed down my chicken piri piri sandwich with cider was the TV show over Heidi’s head.

It was two Australian guys talking about American politics and other embarrassing shenanigans in my homeland.

“That’s the whole show?” I asked Heidi.  “Is it news or comedy?”

“Oh it’s both, I’d say. You lot certainly provide plenty of good material.”

Breaking News scrolled across the bottom of the screen: Man shoots six people in Tampa McDonalds, tells police his Egg McMuffin wasn’t hot enough.

Was that a real headline?  It certainly could have been but it was impossible to know.

We walked to the train station.

And caught a train to Darling Harbor, home of the Maritime Museum, just as it was about to close. We ran through the museum in half an hour, then admired the tall ships outside.

We spent time reading names on the Welcome Wall, which lists everyone who has ever migrated to Australia—Polish, Italian, Indian, Jewish, Chinese, Irish.

It went on and on.

That’s the kind of immigrant wall I wish my county would build.