A southern (hemispheric) Christmas

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I was going to title my latest blog entry “my first business trip” and cover the travel trip I co-lead up the central and north coasts of New South Wales with my fundraising team. But I got so fed up with being unable to publish most of the stories I most wanted to write about that I almost quit blogging for good. I got in enough trouble for mentioning -*gasp*- racial stereotypes last time. I can't imagine how my parents would react if I were to talk about ***** ********* and *** on the *****.

All I will just say it was an eventful trip. One English employee, to use the widespread AA euphemism, “fell off the wagon,” then got dumped by his finace, and had to leave after day 2 because he was too depressed to work. An 18-year-old Aussie kid who had scarcely left his home country town got caught in a rip current at Racecourse Beach and nearly drowned, and my co-leader, a Fijian fundraising veteran in his thirties dislocated his shoulder attempting a rescue. I returned to Sydney relatively unscathed and despite the casualties we, as a team, managed to hit our sign-up target for the week. Unfortunately I brought a dead camera battery, so no pictures =(

But back to the matter at hand, the birthday of baby Jesus. This has been my first Christmas away from home and, much like Thanksgiving, the holiday has had little resemblance to what I’m used to since I have no family around. Christmas dinner I ended up sharing with a group of Sri Lankans, one of whom I am friends with through work. We ate some traditional Sri Lankan food in the traditional way, with our hands, which was pretty awesome, and not nearly as messy as you might think given the fact that we were eating rice and curry. Apparently I’m “a natural” at Sri Lankan hand eating. Perhaps I was born in the wrong country.

I received one gift this year: a coffee table photography book of Sydney from the 30s and 40s. Not something that I would put at the top of my list and an item almost completely unusable for a typical backpacker/traveler. But the gesture was very sweet coming from friends of friends of my parents and I guess it will be good for the next seven or so weeks the duration of which I will at least have an actual coffee table for it to sit on. They also were sweet enough to have me over for Christmas Eve dinner for which they served seafood as Aussie tradition dictates: Sydney rock oysters and fish. Yum!

Today was Boxing Day, whatever the hell that means, so my flat mates and I took a ferry over to the entrance to the harbor (actually ‘harbour’ since we’re in Commonwealth territory) to see the sailing yachts take off for the annual Sydney to Hobart race. I'm tracking the race now one Google Earth and it looks like Wild Oats might take an unprecedented fourth straight victory. After the boats left sight around the corner en route to Tasmania we hopped a bus down to Bondi Beach, which was absolutely jam packed. I still managed to get in some decent body surfing in the less corpulent and supposedly much more dangerous section of the water. The lifeguards kept yelling at everybody through megaphones to move up the beach and swim between the red and yellow flags. But I don’t see how one can swim, let alone catch waves, when there are more people by volume than water.

Up next: I’m leaving Sunday for some music festival in the bush. I’m cooking for a band of 40 cabaret performers in exchange for free entry. It goes until New Years Day, but I’m going to dip back to Sydney to catch what is supposedly one of the most spectacular fireworks displays in the world. The morning of the new year I’m driving with my boss up to some idyllic beach/bay called Terrigal where we'll stay until we have to reopen the Wildos office on the 5^th. So the next week or so should be nice and hectic. Can’t wait!

Hope anyone who might happen to be following the blog out there has had some good holidays and will make it through to 2009 in one piece. Speak to you then!

Greetings from Asiatown

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The flat is on the 12^th floor and the view from the balcony is rather spectacular and a voyeur’s dream. Were I so inclined I could probably sit out in the sun with my bird-watching binoculars for hours of free entertainment peeping into the rear windows of hundreds of other flats and offices. It’s right in the heart of the city—wonderfully convenient for me since I can easily catch a train to any suburb in which I might happen to work. The majority of the immediately local residents are Asian immigrants who do most of the actual cardiac work of pumping nutrients of coffee, toast and muffins to the gray-matter suits who commute in for the city’s daytime cerebral tasks. Many cafes don’t even bother to open their doors on weekends.

To call the area Chinatown might seem superficially appropriate for an American such as me who cannot discern between different East Asian ethnic countenances, but it would really betray the true diversity. There are loads of Chinese, but also Koreans, Japanese, Indonesians and Thais (the restaurant below the flat is called ‘Thainatown’). The above nationalities have a terrible reputation among backpackers and flat-sharers for anti-social behavior: hiding in their rooms, not speaking English, emitting unpleasant aromas. I am lucky enough to share with a rainbow of foreign nationals: India, Germany, England, New Zealand, who all speak English and coexist well. As far as I can tell nobody born in Australia actually resides within the CBD. When somebody calls the flat on the intercom from downstairs the ring fittingly plays the tune of "It's a small world after all."

When I step onto the basketball court at the park by central station, typically as the only non-Asian, I’m greeted by awestruck faces as if nobody has ever seen anyone taller than 6 feet before (isn’t Yao Ming supposed to be Chinese?). The standard is always pretty terrible and the NBA jerseys most of the players wear rarely represent ball skills or game knowledge. I haven’t had any trouble at all meeting fascinating and friendly people; the climate and weather are great; and the city is exciting and busy. But the lack of a decent basketball game in town and the fact that I haven’t caught a single Duke game (more a problem with the time difference than a lack of potential venues) are what make me most homesick.

Actually the lack of decent grog is a rival problem. Like most warm-weather countries, the Aussie beer lacks diversity and flavor. It’s also extortionately expensive. A 6-pack of standard tasteless lager costs about 15 bucks and it’s tough to find a case for much less than 40. The popular alternative among backpackers is wine, which by comparison is essentially free. That is especially true of boxed wine which is referred to affectionately (or loathingly) by Aussies as ‘goon.’ Once the cask has been emptied, the Mylar sack within the box can be inflated like a balloon to make what supposedly in some aboriginal language is called a ‘goon,’ but what us Anglos would call a ‘pillow.’ Aboriginals have a reputation similar to Native Americans when it comes to drink. As they get decent government financial support, many make a profession out of public park alcoholism. You certainly can’t walk from central station to my flat with passing at least a dozen aboriginals that appear severely intoxicated. Anyway, all it takes to join them is $10, which buys a 4.4 liter box of dubious ‘wine.’ After finishing all that, especially if you’re in the park, you would certainly need a pillow, which just happens to be the prize at the bottom of the box. I guess I’m just spoiled by America’s craft beer revolution and the U.S. macro-brew economies of scale.

Do you drink beer? Then you could definitely afford to become a member of the wilderness society. All it takes is one beer a week (assuming you would have paid about $4.60 for it at a pub) to give us 1,000 lobbying points in parliament and save 150 hectares of wilderness per year!

Back in green

In my last entry I pronounced the end of my stomach illness and of glitches in travel plans. Turns out I was wrong on both counts.

We arrived in Katoomba, the biggest cutesy mountain town of the Blue Mountains. I would probably compare to Asheville, NC had I ever been there. A nice lady at the train station info booth gave us a map and directed to us to a national park information center where we could learn about various bush walks in the area. What looked like a very short walk on our map ended up being a 40 hike up and down hills through the length of town. We made it to the tourist center at Echo Point just before the 5 pm closing time. The elderly ladies working there who looked as if they had never been camping in their lives enthusiastically recommended some hikes to us. It turns out they were a bit off in their times estimations though. Each hike ended up being twice as lengthy as they had estimated when they checked their reference books. The same ended up being true of their claim that it would take 30 minutes to hike the cliff-side trail to Katoomba Falls and the campground at which we hoped to stay.

At this point I’ve eaten about one full meal in the past 3 days, the pasta dinner I had cooked the night before. All I have eaten for the day is a piece of toast and a croissant neither of which felt particularly good settling in. So I’m not exactly in top form, and two hours of walking around carrying my backpack is not exactly what I had hoped to do this evening. So by the time I arrive at our camp ground, I’m ‘knackered.’ When I open my backpack—surprise!—no tent. I’ve left it in Sydney.

This presents a couple issues. 1) We have to walk back into town to find a place to stay. 2) It throws a wrench into our backpacking plans. We don’t have much in the way of camping supplies, but a tent was one item we thought we had covered. Both actually ended up being resolved within the hour as we checked into the local YHA which happened to have a tent they were willing to let us borrow for $20.

It all ended up really being a moot point as dinner that night treated me poorly and Montezuma returned with a vengeance. A tent is no place to abode for one in such a condition, especially when it’s 38 degrees outside and the nearest toilet is 250 yards away and requires a key to open. As my Scottish friend would say, I had “an arse like the Japanese flag.” So leaving the tent in Sydney was really for the best.

‘Brenda’ of course is not so into the silver lining. She took the news of my leaving the tent in Sydney like she had just been told her boyfriend had been, for years, secretly sleeping with her best friend. At current rates, it will probably take her just as many years to forgive me.

Anyway, so while ‘Brenda’ spent the next day hiking and horseback riding, for me it was walking from doctor’s office to pharmacy to diagnostics and then lab laying flat on my back in the hostel.

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So at this point I will interject upon this narrative written one month and two days ago to inform the reader that having moved into a flat yesterday and regained possession of my laptop, which I had left at ‘Hank’s’ house for safe keeping, I can now resume blogging. And rather than continue the previous storey at the previous pace, I’ll pip the Tivo into fast forward a bit for the sake of your attention spans above all.

All I will say is that ‘Brenda’ and I left the Blue Mountains without really giving it the full go we had planned. We returned to Sydney and then parted ways. ‘Brenda’ Hopped a train up the coast to Brisbane to collect, fill out, and overnight an absentee presidential ballot that ultimately would not be counted and then meet up with a high school classmate of hers living in a lazy beach town called Lennox Head. I stuck around to follow up on what would be the final of many contacts that did not lead to a “sweet job” as I had hoped.

I did end up finding a job, though I wouldn’t describe it as “sweet,” except for maybe the title “Wilderness Defender.” It sounds like I should be out in the rainforest chained to a tree shouting at lumberjacks through a bull horn. Actually it’s basically a street sales job, except instead of peddling credit cards or cell phones, I sell the idea of environmentalism in the form of memberships to The Wilderness Society, an Aussie non-profit NGO.

With just 2 minutes of sales training from my boss ‘Richard’ under my belt I managed to sign up two people for 30-dollar-per-month memberships within my first hour-and-a-half of work. ‘Richard’ was ecstatic and hinted at a promotion in store for me in the very near future. I found this a bit premature as I still had very little idea of what I was doing. I reckon I know more about climate change, global warming and general environmental issues than 99 out of 100 people I would speak to on the street (which says just as much about the people on the street who are willing to talk to me as much as my academic background), but I don’t have a lick of sales experience.

After some ups and downs in the ensuing weeks and much coaching from ‘Richard,’ who says he has, over the past four years, “sold everything under the sun,” that promotion came. Today was my first official day as ‘Wilderness Defender Coordinator’ which simply means I get paid a bit more, get to carry around a company phone for calling banks and checking in with my underlings (I can call them that now *evil laugh*) stationed in various suburbs around the city, and will in the next couple weeks get to drive a team in the company van on an expenses-paid travel trip down to Wollongong.

In other news my I’m pretty stoked about my new flat. I now share a room with two others as opposed to the nine I have been used to in the budget hostel I lived in for three weeks just a block away. I’m on the 12^th floor and have a balcony that has a decent view.

I’ll have to post an update soon with more about the job and living situation and some pretty humorous stories that I've left out, but I’ll leave it here for now since this is already overly long. Too many backorders and backlogs at the moment thanks to my paranoia about computer theft.

A tale of two cities and a case of the hiccups

If I were my older brother I’d have carefully crafted dystopic descriptions of Australia’s two premier cities, Melbourne and Sydney. Fortunately no aspirations of literary greatness have ever been a part of my ‘Brett Plan,’ so I have the luxury of using adjectives like ‘cool’ and ‘neat’ to vaguely describe the aesthetic beauty of each metropolis (and these words apply to both as I’m sure you were wondering).

Melbourne was the first of the two cities visited and the Greenhouse Backpacker, a cheap but friendly hostel, was home for ‘Brenda’ and me for three nights. As far as we could tell we were the only Americans, though everybody seemed to speak English among other languages, regardless of nationality. The city is probably the most tourist-friendly I have ever visited (for English-speaking tourists that is). There’s a free tram (that resembles a San Francisco street car) that makes a 12-block by 8-block rectangular loop around the heart of the city and plays a recording that describes nearby sights and landmarks as it goes. There’s also a separate free tourist bus that runs with the same concept only less frequently and takes a more circuitous route to cover different ground. Art galleries are free and we happened to be there during the Melbourne Arts Festival, a month-long string of high culture showings, performances, classy events and public displays. Quite a bit of it was free including the National Gallery of Victoria, and we were quick to take advantage. Melbourne also seems to have an abundance of public green space. They claim their Royal Botanical Gardens is one of the finest in world, though I was just happy to see some (to me) exotic ducks.

I was struck by the city’s newness. Every building so avant garde looked as if it were just unveiled last week, with an abundance of cranes ushering in the next cohort of angular steel and glass constructs. It makes American Cities (at least the east coast ones I’m familiar with) seem alarmingly old and dirty. And like the rest of Victoria, it seemed to contain well short the resident or tourist population it was designed to support. Sidewalks were rarely crowed and nearly all of the city’s approximately twenty-four-thousand restaurants were completely empty. ‘Brenda’ bemoaned the lack homeless people or a visible disenfranchised minority, presumably because when she moves to Melbourne she’ll have trouble finding clients as a public defender. Actually she got over Melbourne pretty quickly. Across Australia she has announced each new breathtaking vista as where she wants to be proposed to and each splendid looking apartment as the one for her to buy. But after a couple days in this city too modern, devoid of anything rooted in tradition or made of wood and with a relative emotional robot as her only companion, the romance had run its course.

In a fit of brilliance I managed to confuse train times and we arrived at Southern Cross Station with all our luggage 20 minutes after ours had departed. Continuing my streak, I blearily stumbled off our bus we rode as a substitute into Sydney the next day without my laptop (!spoiler alert! I’m typing on it right now). Fortunately we had my second “number one Aussie friend,” at the station to pick us up, show us around, lend us his iPhone so we could attempt to untangle all my blunders, and put us up for what we thought would be a night or two. ‘Hank’ was my predecessor at the resort ‘Brenda’ and I had just worked at together over the summer and lives in one Sydney’s prime suburbs, Manly with his girlfriend whom he had met at the same said resort. I’ll never go to India (Good luck out there ‘Brenda!’). I took the last train to Bombay and spent the better part of the next 48 hours ready to give birth to an acid-spitting alien on Hank’s living room floor. So, our stay with ‘Hank’ and ‘Lois’ was unnaturally prolonged, but I really couldn’t have picked a better infirmary.

As for Sydney, it’s like all of California combined into one metropolitan area, maybe less Hollywood, LA slums, and any other parts of California of which I am ignorant and accordingly of their dissimilarity to said City. The beauty of the harbor (I bet they spell it harbour here) is stunning—cliffs, trees, fleets of sailboats, oh yeah and then there’s the bridge and that opera house thing. The ferry ride into the city (Hank sometimes uses it to commute to work) should be a tourist attraction of its own, what costing only 6 dollars of monopoly money (you should see the currency here, I often catch myself asking for two houses on Marvin Gardens instead of a sandwich). The tour boat industry must be in dire straits. Something like seven of the ten best beaches in the world lie within city limits. This is really disappointing as Australia has all ten of the top ten most poisonous snakes.

I wouldn’t be surprised to find that many Sydneysiders never leave home. Here you’ve got the country’s biggest city along with all the beauty and recreation you could ever need right at your feet. And if you really want to get away from the crowds you can catch a train a couple hours inland to explore the Blue Mountains, as ‘Brenda’ and I are doing tomorrow.

No pictures this time around. Just go to www.google.com/images and type in “Sydney opera house.”

Oztralia

So here I am on the other side of the planet. The cars drive on the left side of the road. Everybody is extremely outgoing and friendly. The toilets actually flush the same way as in the U.S.

The Victorian coast seems to have a surplus of beauty and not really enough residents or tourists to appreciate it all. The shoreline alternates between gorgeous desert-red beaches and dramatic 200 foot cliffs. The chain of small beach towns seem to be quite community oriented despite a So. Cal. type real estate market. The prime beach front areas are typically devoted to public park space. Late at night in Lorne you can climb the fence and frolic in the trampoline park (or in the skate park if that’s your thing). The springs are super tight and with up to 8 rectangular launch pads lined up in a row you can really feel like a kangaroo traversing the lot. If you manage to break your leg you don’t even have to sue anybody since everyone has free health care.

Speaking of kangaroos though, I have seen a few, though they looked pretty sleepy since they’re nocturnal. The wallabies (at least the ones I’ve seen) have been a bit livelier and they look just like kangas only a bit smaller. I still wouldn’t want to be caught in the ring with one. Koalas are pretty sleepy as well but also itchy and into defecating. I’ve added about 60 birds to my life list so far including most of the stereotypical Aussies: just listen for laughter coming from the nearest gum tree to see a kookaburra; cockatoos, flaunting their sulphur mohawks wander around in some places as oblivious to people as pigeons; and many parrots are tame enough to be hand fed crackers. No emus yet.

Tonight I’m staying in only my second paid accommodation, a backpacker hostel in Melbourne. About three months ago the Aussie dollar was worth 98 US cents. According to a local radio host it is currently worth “3 buttons, but could drop down to a button and a half.” This is great news as I can scrap a few of my nicer shirts and annoying button-fly jeans in case money gets tight.

My number one Aussie friend, ‘Susan,’ has done an awesome job as tour guide/host, finding me and cousin and travel companion, ‘Brenda,’ free places to stay with her parents and friends, and driving us all over map. Unfortunately she had to go back to work today so our days of freeloading are at an end. Though the most innocuous events and people seem able to put ‘Brenda’ on emotional tilt, I’m happy to say she is doing quite well and thoroughly enjoying herself. She has only lost a few things and can carry all of her possessions for at least a block and a half without collapsing.

That’s it for now. I have got to go queue up for the free pasta dinner. Thanks for reading my long-overdue, first, and hopefully not last blog entry. Good on ya.