Tag Archives: Sydney

From Woolloomooloo to the Mississippi

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My last day in Australia.  This was the weather Woolloomooloo, the area in which the Botanic Gardens are located.  And next to that, the weather in St. Paul today.

I’m sorry to be one of those people who whines about weather.  But every other day I get one of these notices.

There have been six snow emergencies so far this year, and March is the snowiest month in Minnesota, so it ain’t over.

What these notices mean—for those of you who don’t live around here—is that I have to move my car by 9pm, then move it again by 8am the next morning so the plows can clear the roads.

Try moving your car when it’s a foot deep in heavy, wet snow (as opposed to light, fluffy snow) and the wheels are encased in ice.  Yesterday, hacking away at wheel-well ice on my knees, my heavy-duty scraper broke in half.  I sent it flying into a snow bank with a primal scream. I then employed an ice chopper, tears, a shovel, swearing, a hammer, grunts and howls of anguish, and cat litter.  It took 45 minutes and I think I blew out a knee, but I got my car moved.  Thank god I’ve got a manual transmission so I can rock it back and forth.

And I will likely have to do it again in a few days.

—

People say the snow is pretty.  I know I should try to appreciate it more. These are some photos from inside my snug, warm house during and after a selection of blizzards.

And here are some snaps from the snowshoeing I did with my cousin and friends last weekend.

The dogs had at least as much fun as the people.  I love how she is covered in snow balls.

I’m aware that I am procrastinating on wrapping up my writing about Australia.  As long as I am still writing about it, it feels like part of me is still there.

—

Another day in the Botanic Gardens.  Heidi was on a mission to see some of the Invictus Games, and I was happy to go along.  Prince Harry was rumored to be making a speech just outside the gardens. Rumored.  We stopped and asked five people, and no one knew, not even the volunteers or employees.

“Sorry, love, we ran out of programs ages ago and none of us even know the schedule,” was one volunteer’s response.

In case you’re wondering if there were any interesting plants in the Royal Botanic Gardens, there were.  I kept lollygagging to take photos.

I wanted to stop at the gift shop again.

“Aw, Annie, I’m afraid we’ll miss Harry’s speech,” Heidi said.

But I insisted. It would only take a minute.  There was a card I had seen that I hadn’t bought and now as long as we were passing by … but we both became mesmerized by the beautiful botanical-themed items and spent 20 minutes there.

We then raced across a broad lawn to find we had just missed Harry’s speech opening the bicycle races.

Heidi’s shoulders sagged and she let out a sigh.  This is a woman who lived in London for 18 years, who had gone to every celebration of the Queen’s birthday, the Golden Jubilee, any and all flag-waving, Hail Britannia, crowds-in-the-street type celebration that came with an extra day off work.

“I’m sorry!  I made you miss Harry’s speech!”

“No drama!” Heidi shrugged as we moved with the crowds to view the races.

There were competitors from 18 nations, all of them physically or emotionally handicapped.  I was impressed that as much weight was given to veterans’ mental trauma as physical.  It made sense, since Harry and his brother William support mental health charities at home because of the trauma they endured when their mother, Princess Diana, died.

That said, the cyclists with only one leg were the most impressive.

Visitors were wearing their national colors.

Some were more gung-ho about representing their countries than others.

We verbally edited the “Taco’s and burito’s” menu, then moved on to order kimchee chicken burgers for lunch.

Lastly, I added to my collection of photos of myself with large furry animals.

Welcome

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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.

—

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.

—

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.

On The Rocks

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I’ve been sitting here for 10 minutes trying to write a pithy introduction to the carnivorous plant show at the Sydney Royal Botanic Gardens.  I guess I’ll just show, not tell.

The exhibit was a little bit of art, a bit of science, and a whole lot of Little Shop of Horrors kitsch.  It was fun. It was pretty. I learned some facts that I immediately forgot.

I took a gander in the gift shop and didn’t buy anything.  My plan was to find the trolley for which I’d seen signs directing me to the Opera House Gate.  The RBG is enormous, as are most botanic gardens, and I had visions of covering it all with the aid of wheels and a silver-tongued guide as we had in Melbourne.

After walking 20 minutes to the gate, I couldn’t find the trolley.  Construction was under way for the Invictus Games; more about that later.  Perhaps the trolley was under a tarp.  There were volunteers everywhere, bumping into each other, and none of them knew anything about a trolley.

I passed this sign about the Opera House being the site of Gadigal land.  I wonder if the Gadigal people are comforted by these signs and pronouncements of “sorry.”  Or do they say, “Yeh, sorry is nice, but you’ve still got our land.”

As long as I was in the general vicinity and it was a beautiful day for a walk, I headed over to the area called The Rocks.  This was where the original settlers … um, settled.  I guess it’s called The Rocks because it’s very hilly and there must be gigantic rocks in them thar hills.

I had been urged to visit The Rocks by my Lebanese friends on the dive boat on the reef, and by other strangers.  It seemed the main attractions were “interesting shops and restaurants.”  I never found any, even after much wandering.  Everything seemed closed, and there was lots of construction so I kept hitting dead ends.  There was some charming Victorian architecture, like the Mercantile Hotel, where I had a wonderful fresh, healthy salad.

This was in the toilet.

As I often do when I’m traveling on my own, I pulled out my notepad to jot down some notes.  I was pleasantly surprised to see a young woman at the table next doing the same.

I like the texture of pencil, or a roller-ball pen, on paper.

I was once mocked at work for using a pencil.  I was sharpening one in the copy room and a member of management who wears a perpetual frozen smile said in a syrupy but patronizing voice, “Anne, how old school—a pencil!”  She tried to pull it off as a joke so I smiled back, said nothing, and returned to my desk where I shot off a few lines with my razor sharp pencil, then returned to the copy room and shredded the sheet of paper.

—

Across the street was Susannah House, an original tenement where immigrants had lived up until the 1970s.

I got there just in time for the 3:00pm tour. This didn’t leave any time to check out the small selection of gift items, but they were all related to household cleaning in the 1980s—think lye soap and wooden scrub brushes—things I could live without.

A very thin man dressed in a period costume led us through the rooms.  He recited the usual types of dreary stories you hear in such places.  You know: ‘This is the bedroom where Mrs. Lopadopalous gave birth to her 14th child after her husband died of alcoholism.  Six of her children had died from smallpox or flu but little George grew up to be the first mayor of Greek ancestry of a medium-sized Australian city.”

I loved it.  In one of the kitchens he told the tale of old Mrs. McGillicuddy’s fight for tenants’ rights against the big-money interests who wanted to tear down the tenement and put up a shopping center.

Then he turned, pointed out the icebox in the corner and said, “That’s an original. The ice came all the way from a vast lake in some place called Mih-neh-soda, in the states.”

 

Explorers, Convicts, and National Sorry Day

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Are you familiar with the Morrissey song, “Throwing My Arms Around Paris?” I hear it in my head sometimes when I am throwing myself out into a city—joyfully embracing as much as humanly possible in however much time I have.  The actual song is a downer, obviously—it’s Morrissey after all, the miserablist. But I re-mix it in my head to be uplifting.

—

I visited the RBG every day for three days.  There’s that much to see and do, and it’s just a lovely, peaceful oasis in the middle of the big city.

On my first day I caught a walking tour.  The morning was fresh from a night rain and the sun had not yet burned the heavy dew off the leaves.

My group included some Canadians, Melbournians, and Germans.  The guide was giving her first tour and said she was nervous.  She was still getting used to holding laminated photos of flowers and referring to them; they were upside down for her.  She was doing her best but kept saying, “I’m not sure about that, I’ll have to check it later.”

She thought this astounding tree was from South Africa.

After 20 minutes I carved off into an inviting-looking dark path through thick trees.  Have I mentioned I was enamored with the trees?  I emerged to see this banyan with knobs drooping downward; they would become buttresses for the growing tree.

What I hadn’t expected to find in a garden were story lines about three important populations in Australia’s history—explorers, Aboriginals, and convicts.

There was a garden named for Daniel Solander, a Swede who sailed with Captain Cook on The Endeavor around the Pacific and collected 17,000 species of plants, 900 of them from Australia.  Most of those were found around Botany Bay, just five miles from where I was standing.

He did this 70 years before Charles Darwin made his famous voyage on The Beagle. Solander didn’t live to read Darwin’s Origin of the Species; he died suddenly of a brain hemorrhage at age 49.

Next I crossed what appeared to be a dinky, unremarkable bridge over a tiny stream.  But no!  It was built over culvert of “high cultural significance” built by convicts in 1816 so the Governor’s wife could cross the stream in her carriage.

I turned around to find about 15 placards about Aboriginal history.  I already knew about the 1967 vote in which white Australians decided to count Aboriginal people in the census for the first time.  I guess it took that long for them to decide that Aboriginals were actual humans.

I didn’t know there had been a Freedom Ride in Australia in 1965, similar to the ones in the US about five years earlier.

I was pleased to see that one of the leaders had a Jewish name—Spigelman.  When I Googled him I learned he had immigrated to Australia from Poland as a three-year old with his parents, who were Holocaust survivors.  His parents are featured in the graphic novel about the Holocaust called Maus, by his American cousin Art Spiegelman.

Spiegelman was born in Sweden after the war.  His five-year-old brother had been poisoned by their aunt, who then poisoned herself, in order to save them from being taken by the Nazis.  It gets worse, believe it or not.

I have Maus sitting on my bookshelf.  If everyone was required to read Maus, and Kurt Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse Five, I wonder if we would ever have another war.

Spigelman went on to become an Australian Supreme Court Justice and patron of many humanitarian and arts causes including the UN High Commissioner for Refugees.

It’s no surprise that Jews are overrepresented in human rights causes.  But why should it take something as horrific as surviving a Holocaust to motivate people?

Lastly, I was moved to tears to learn that Australia has a National Sorry Day, which “gives all Australians an opportunity to express their sorrow” about the stolen generations of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander children who were forcibly removed from their families “for their own good.”

Wow, who expected so much sad stuff in a botanical garden?

I hastened toward a more uplifting exhibit, about carnivorous plants.

On My Way

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I love it when I know a city well enough to not worry too much about getting lost, but not well enough that I feel I’ve seen it all.

I set out with no goal in mind except to stop at the dreaded Apple store to see if they could fix my phone, which was apparently confused about my whereabouts and wouldn’t let me check email or What’s App or any other useful thing.

I found the store easily enough—it was like a cathedral, with hordes scruffily-dressed but probably wealthy people lounging around and looking worshipfully at the goods.

I like to think I am not one of the Apple Zombies.  I happened to buy an iphone as my first smart phone.  I kept that one for five years, so I’m not exactly one to jump on every new passing model.  When Apple did that thing where it purposely slowed down all the older models to the point of forcing people to buy new ones, I did not want to go through a new learning curve by switching to an android, so I bought the cheapest iphone, the SE.

I can’t believe I just wrote that.  I think I paid $499 for my phone.  Five hundred dollars, for a phone!  Plus $53 a month for the privilege of being able to check Facebook in the middle of my workout at the Y or during a walk in the woods.

I realize it’s a computer as well as a phone, but still.

The few times I’ve gone to an Apple store in the states I have felt about two inches tall and dumb as a box of rocks.  The “geniuses” have been deficient in people skills, but at the Sydney store a very friendly young woman fixed my phone in 15 seconds and smiled as she handed it back to me.

“You just made my day!” I told her, and I meant it.

—

I passed a gritty photo exhibition that was mounted on the brick walls supporting the train tracks.  There was an Aboriginal theme.

A white trash theme.

And my favorite, the Sydney punk scene.

As I have from time to time in the past, I expressed silent gratitude that I’d not crossed paths with any punks back in the 80s.  I know I would have taken to the lifestyle with zeal, and probably would have ended up dead from a heroin overdose or infected nose piercing.

If you know Sydney well, you’ll know I couldn’t have walked past all the sights I’ve listed here without retracing my steps or walking in circles.  Ya caught me—they’re not in order. Just take it as a representation of my memories of those last four days, which are a jumble.

I loved this contrast between the Victorian architecture and stark modern high rises.

And this grand old department store, which sold corsets, gloves, “mourning” wear, and costumes.  Swimming costumes?  Halloween costumes?  Costumes for fancy galas?

I passed other buildings from bygone days—a police station and union HQ.

I gazed up at Sydney Tower from different angles in different weather.

I passed this art installation. Or was it another war memorial?

In Hyde Park, I admired this deco-era fountain.

I stepped inside St. Mary’s and felt “meh.”  It was gargantuan, but it felt stodgy and plain compared to some of the cathedrals I’ve seen in Malta, Italy, and Spain.  Of course when I was in Europe I complained that their cathedrals were too ornate.

Making my way along a great boulevard and series of parks, I spied a statue of the Scottish poet Burns dwarfed by yet another giant Australian tree.

And across the street, a trumpet tree.  I don’t know it that’s what it’s called but that’s what I’m calling it.

And then, on into the Royal Botanic Garden or RBG, which I found amusing because a movie by that name about US Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg was about to be released and there were posts galore promoting it in my social media feeds.

Validated

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“You can’t bring electronics in here!” screamed the guards at the American consulate in Sydney as I tried to get through security to find out if my passport was valid or not.  I had paid $10 to check my laptop per instructions but now they were hyperventilating about something else in my suitcase that they could see on the scanner.

“Take it out and show us what it is!”

The one was verging on hysterical.  Would he pull a gun next and throw me to the floor? I kept my mouth shut and obeyed.

He tossed my suitcase onto the floor.  I didn’t know what the offending item could be; he already had my cell phone in a tray. But when I fished my power cord out from among my underwear in front of the whole room of people, they both yelled as if I had tried to conceal the fuse to an IED.

“Electronics!  She’s got electronics!”

I tried to talk, “I didn’t know a power cord counted as …”

“You can’t bring that inside!”

“…electronics,” I managed to finish.

“You have to check it!”

I handed it over and he dropped it into a plastic bag as though it was Exhibit A of my collaboration with ISIS.  I was shaking, but my objective was to get inside so I said no more.

At the service counter with the bullet-proof-glass, I was informed that my passport had not been cancelled.

—

On to the hotel, the cheapest one I could find on Expedia at the last minute.

I wasn’t going to inconvenience Auntie Margaret, who had already given up her flat for five or six nights so Heidi and I could stay there.  I would stay there on my last night.

What do you get for $169 per night in Sydney?

The room was a concrete cube of questionable cleanliness.  There was a foot-long black hair in the tub. Not that I have anything against black hair, but it sure does show up well against a white tub.  I was on the sixth floor and the views were a jumble of old and new Sydney.

I did not take a photo of the hair, but I did snap one of the toilet to show you a feature of Australian toilets—the number one or number two flush—such a commonsensical approach to water conservation. I see these from time to time in the US but they are far from standard as they are in Australia.

If you don’t understand how it works, I’m not explaining it to you.

I crawled into bed, checking first for hairs, and tried to reckon how much extra my lost/not lost passport had cost.

Expedia hadn’t charged me anything to change my flight.  Yeah!  I take back all the bad things I’ve said about them. I paid $30 for the 3am shuttle bus to Cairns airport—seeing all those wallabies was totally worth it.   The ugly passport photos cost $24.  At least they would not be employed in my passport for the next 10 years.  There was the hotel room, which also charged an arm and a leg for wireless.

Freedom isn’t free, as they say.  In fact your $10 will get you about two hours of wireless.  I hadn’t heard from Heidi but figured I’d find her somehow, eventually, in this city of five million people.  I fell asleep at noon, watching the TV weather.

—

I woke up at 7am the next day.  The previous day had been an exhausting and pointless. Now I was raring to go.

I had four full days in Sydney instead of two.  Heidi had encouraged me to stay up north.

“There’s not all that much to do in Sydney,” she said.  “You can tick the boxes in two days, easy.”

But I think she was suffering from familiarity syndrome.  She lived immersed in Sydney.  She had “done” the art institute as a high-school kid, and gone to special events in the botanical garden, which was full of (yawn) banksia.

I grabbed some brekky at The Bear, a local ye-olde British-style pub, then walked off to find the botanical garden or art institute, whichever came first.

Power Trippin’

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I am a morning person, but 3am?  I sprang out of bed, threw on my clothes, grabbed my bag, said a silent farewell to the Reef Retreat, and met the airport shuttle.

As I wrote at the time, if I hadn’t lost my passport and had to fly back early to Sydney, I wouldn’t have seen the World Wide Wallaby convention on the side of the road.  Those little hoppers made it all worth it.

At the airport I ate banana and a protein bar while waiting for to board.  It was me and about 50 retirement-age Chinese couples who were wide awake and yammering at full volume.  Thankfully the plane was half empty so I was able to lie down in the fetal position across three seats but it was so cold I kept waking up.  I flagged a passing flight attendant and said, “It’s freezing in this plane.”  She gave me a look that said, “You’re crazy,” and when I very politely asked if the heat could be turned up she replied with barely concealed rage, “Ma’am, it’s a plane,” as if that explained it.

She did bring me a cup of very hot coffee a few minutes later, so maybe she felt bad about being a bitch.

Off the plane, and it was a good thing I had done this routine with Heidi a few weeks previous. I knew where to find the train station, which train to take, and where to get off.

On the street, I consulted the paper map I’d marked with red circles.  I found the photo shop and smiled for the camera.  “Don’t smile,” said the photog, so I didn’t, and I walked out with two passport-sized photos of me looking like I’d just been booked at the county jail after a night on the town.

On to the consulate, which was in the MCL Building.  Hooray, I spotted a tower with MCL in giant letters at the top.  But at ground level, there were no unlocked doors.  I walked around the building, dragging my suitcase behind me.  Finally I spotted a delivery man and asked him.

“Oh, you want the new MCL Building,” he said. He was super friendly and helpful, pointing out not only the new MCL Building but which entrance I should use.

I rode to the 10th floor, where a cheery Australian guard informed me I would have to check my laptop.  “There’s a photo shop just down that hall, with rental lockers.”

A photo shop.  I paid $10 to check my laptop, then got in the “American Citizens Services” line outside the consulate.  I was the only American.  The “All Others” line lived up to its name.

There was another elevator ride to the consulate’s floor, with an armed guard. I would have to go through security, fair enough.  As I entered the security hall, the Aussie guard at the baggage scanner was barking at a couple in front of me who were flustered and had lost whatever English they had had.

“Who speaks English here!?” he yelled jeeringly.  They appeared to originally be from India or Sri Lanka.  “Do you speak English?  Speak English!”

My blood boiled, and I also felt panic. I knew exactly what was happening.  I was being “triggered”—to use an overused word—by this bully. All the feelings associated with being bullied, leered at, and jerked around by prison guards while my son was inside came to the fore.

I was next.

“You can’t bring that suitcase in here!?” he screamed, as though it was the first time anyone had brought a suitcase to an embassy.

“You’re going to have to go leave that somewhere and come back,” he said.

“But I have a 10 o’clock appointment,” I said.

“Well it might fit through the scanner, but if it doesn’t, you can’t enter.”

I knew from eyeballing it that it would fit.  He probably did too, but he had to make his point—that he was in charge.

A second Aussie guard, who was manning the scanner yelled, “She’s got electronics in here!” as though he was seeing the outline of a bundle of TNT and a lighted fuse.

Alice to Sydney

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“That was weird,” Heidi remarked as we walked on after talking to her student for a few minutes.  He was in the Red Centre for his school holiday, just like Heidi.

“You were just saying you could bump into Mr. Right around the next corner and then BAM, there was Griffin.”

“Next time I’ll specify that when I mention dating younger men I don’t mean teenagers.”

At the airport, we ran into Griffin again with his mum, who was wearing faux eyelashes.  Heidi chatted with them while I hit the gift shops to make sure I wasn’t leaving behind some important souvenir.

Then it was all aboard Flight QF791 to Sydney.  I couldn’t get the scene from the movie Rainman out of my head.  Dustin Hoffman’s character says to Tom Cruise, “Quantas never crashed.”  I couldn’t help it, I had to say it aloud to get it out of my head.  Heidi smiled indulgently.

Heidi queued up a podcast for me on her Aussie phone (as opposed to her UK phone).  I had never listened to a podcast before. I know they’re extremely popular and that the cell phone zombies all around me with earbuds in are probably listening to them.  Heidi, who spends so much time commuting, says they’re a God send.

Lost in Larrimah is a about a town of 11 people in the Outback from which one person goes missing.  It was how I learned the phrase “hooning around,” (hanging out) one of my favorite Aussie slang terms.

—

Sydney was cold and rainy.  The train was packed; a couple from Melbourne who were touristing in Sydney struck up a conversation with Heidi while I pretended to be extremely interested in a mobile phone advert on the wall to their left.

When Heidi mentioned we’d be driving to Melbourne in a few days, they started rattling off sights we had to see.  “Aww, you have to go see the blah blah blah!” and “You have to go see the blipplity doo doo.”  They even began providing web site addresses and street directions.

Am I the only one who finds this irritating?  Heidi was nodding pleasantly but noncommittally.  Sometimes I think I need to go live in a mountaintop cave with no human contact for a couple months to reset my tolerance for strangers.

I had topped up my Oyster card with $35, but it was minus $2 by the time we reached MacMahon’s Point.  Now it was Heidi’s turn to be irritated. “I know Sydney transport is stupidly expensive, but that just can’t be right!  I’ll call them tomorrow and fight it.  There has to be some mistake.”  She did call them eventually and spent forever being transferred and kept on hold, but got the money back.  Bravo, Heidi!

Auntie Margaret had left a bottle of cab sav for us and we partook of it while Heidi made spag bol.  Then we watched the journos on ABC and went to bed.

—

In the morning Heidi had to do some very thoughtful packing—she would be here, in Blayney, then Melbourne, then Canberra and possibly back in Blayney, then back to Sydney but she wasn’t sure where she’d be staying for Sydney Part II and she needed clothes for work, home, and traveling—all in the smallest bag that was not a carry on.

“I’ll go for a walk to get out of your hair,” I said, and Heidi showed me something called Wendy’s Secret Garden in nearby Lavender Bay.  She handed me her Aussie phone with the place mapped on it.  “It’s a real jumble around here,” she said.  “It looks close but it’s easy to get lost.”

And I did get delightfully lost in the maze of alleys and dead-end streets below Auntie Margaret’s flat.  If I hadn’t, I would have missed views like this.

There were lots of renos and new construction going on, adding modern houses into gaps between older ones.

I passed a construction worker smoking a hookah.

The garden had been founded by Wendy Whiteley after her husband Brett, a famous artist, died.  It was all maintained by local volunteers.

Had I inhaled?  No, the garden really was magical.

 

 

Bondi Beach

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Day Two in Australia, and more experience of what it is like to get around Sydney.  We waited 20 minutes for a bus and were lucky to get the last two seats.  It was standing room only afterwards.  It took an hour to get to Bondi Beach.

Sydney is a very big, sprawling city.  Americans think of LA as the ultimate example of sprawl, at 503 square miles.  By comparison, London is 607 square miles.

Sydney covers 4,775 square miles, including dozens of bays and coves formed by the Paramatta River. It’s a wonder anyone gets anywhere at all.

We waited 20 minutes for a bus, got the last two seats, then rode for an hour. I’m not complaining.  Buses are a great way to see a city if you can get a window seat.

I had never heard of Bondi before planning my trip.  If you’re a surfer, it’s legendary.  When I’ve mentioned it, half a dozen people have said, “Oh Bondi—the famous beach!”

Bondi was populated by surfers, skateboarders, potheads, volleyball players, and graffiti artists. We took in the scene and then I said, “I’ve got the idea.  We can go now.”

It was cool and stormy—not a beach day anyway—our plan was to hike from Bondi to Bronte beach.

This was the first incidence where my photos, no thanks to me, turned out spectacular.

The storm came closer, whipping our hair and scarves around our faces.  Rain began to gently patter down.  It was so beautiful we didn’t want to stop.  “Let’s just walk around one more bend?” I kept saying.

Then the sky broke open and we made a run for it back to Bondi. There was nowhere to shelter except under the cliffs, where other tourists were already massed. So we kept on, and got soaked.

We dashed into the nearest building, which happened to be the place Heidi had wanted to eat anyway.  It was the Icebergs Club, Sydney’s winter swimming club, which runs a bar and restaurant that overlook the beach.

“So what’s with the clubs?” I asked her, looking around.  We had gone to the Skiff Club the previous day.  This place reminded me of a cross between an old-timey American supper club and a VFW hall.

“I don’t know,” replied Heidi.  “Does it seem unusual?”  You often learn new things about your own country when foreigners visit.

“The only similar thing I can think of in St. Paul is the Curling Club.  I think anyone can go in and watch the playing, and I think they serve cheap drinks in plastic cups.

“Maybe sports clubs like this are everywhere, and I just don’t know about them because I’m not sporty.”

You learn things about your own country by visiting others.

It was my first official day on vacation, so I had my traditional “I’m on vacation!” drink—a rum and Diet Coke.  Okay, I had two.  We sat and talked for a couple hours, catching up, watching the storm come and go, then we started the long journey back to the flat to get an early night.  Tomorrow we would fly to Ulara, in the Red Centre.

—

I woke up at 3am to the sound of drunks yelling down by the point.  “Fuckin’ fuck, fuckity fuck fuck!” pretty much sums up their sparkling banter.  This went on for about 20 minutes.  A siren started up in the distance and slowly came closer.  When it got within a half mile, the loudmouths dispersed and I sunk down into a deep sleep again.

I remember this story because it was one of only three times I heard a siren in Australia.  Three times!  I hear sirens almost every day in St. Paul.

—

I withdrew some cash at Sydney airport.  Every ATM, even for the same bank, gave me a different amount.  Half charged no fees, half charged varying fees.  I had opened a second checking account before leaving home that doesn’t charge Foreign Transaction Fees.  I thought briefly about saving all my receipts and figuring out which banks or ATMs gave the best conversion rate, but I just didn’t care that much to know who ripped me off.

Sydney Reccy

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Reccy: Aussie slang for reconnaissance mission.

While I hung out waiting for Heidi to finish up at St. Pat’s, my eye fell on a list of rules for uniforms and grooming.

It’s very specific, especially with the haircuts.  I must be old because I don’t know what lines, steps, “under No. 2 in length,” or the other prohibitions even are.  I do know that “fringe” is what we call “bangs” in the US.  When you think about it, fringe is a lot more descriptive than bangs.

I wandered the halls a bit and learned from a display that St. Pat’s most famous “old boy,” as they call alumni, is Thomas Keneally, author of Schindler’s Ark, the novel upon which the movie Schindler’s List was based.  How did an Aussie come to write a book about the Holocaust?  Heidi Googled this later and read the story to me. On a visit to Los Anglese, Keneally went into a luggage store to buy a suitcase and happened to talk to the owner, Poldek Pfefferberg, a Holocaust survivor.  When Pfefferberg learned Keneally was an author, he told him about Oskar Schindler, a German businessman credited with saving the lives of 1,200 Jews, and urged him to write the story.  The rest, as they say, is history.

There were display cases featuring Cricket awards.

It reminded me of Eton, but spacious, bright, and new.

There was a physical acknowledgement of the Darug Aboriginal people, upon whose former land the school stands.

When Heidi was done with her year-end odds and ends, we walked across the street to the bus stop and waited.  And waited.  She consulted her transport app and reckoned it would take as long to wait for the bus as to walk, so we gave up and ambled toward the train station.  That was fine with me because it was a nice day and the neighborhood we walked through was lovely.

Houses in Australia tend to be one story (think about heat rising).  It was spring, and everything was in bloom.  These are some photos of Australian houses I took elsewhere, but they seem pretty typical of what I saw near the school—Victorian or Edwardian with beautiful gardens and massive trees.

We took the train into the CBD.  That’s Central Business District, for those of you who like to spell things out.  We headed for the QVB, or Queen Victoria Building, and here I will use the word massive again.  So many things in Australia are massive.  The QVB, constructed in 1893, fills an entire city block.

We wandered around inside and gawked at window displays of the high-end shops and the architectural features.

You can’t see it because of my lousy photo-taking abilities, but the clock is incredibly detailed with lots of—literally—bells and whistles and a train that runs around it at the lower level. Just think, this was the era when clocks used to be the proud main feature of buildings.

We sat down for lunch at a tea shop, and I noticed the tables adjacent to us had Chinese newspapers scattered on them.

I could say this over and over but I’ll just say it here—there is such a big Chinese presence in Australia that I sometimes had these weird moments where I had to check myself and ask, “Where am I?  Am I in China?  No, I’m in Australia.”

When you think of the geography, it makes sense.

 

There are Chinatowns in Sydney and Melbourne but also Thai towns and Japan towns and probably Korean and Vietnamese neighborhoods.  So if you like any of these types of foods, you’re in luck in Australia.

After lunch we hit a couple shops where Heidi returned some clothes, then she led me to Hyde Park, the “Central Park” of Sydney.  It is dominated by St. Mary’s Cathedral, which seemed to be the most massive church I had ever seen.  And I’ve seen a lot of churches.

It’s frustrating that photos cannot capture the scale of things.  I tried including Heidi, and a lamppost, in these two photos to give a sense of scale of the trees, but that didn’t really work.

This is the ANZAC (Australia New Zealand Army Corps) war memorial.

Next stop: Bondi Beach