Clash of the Titans

Australia is a country that loves its sports, especially if an Australian is involved. The World Cup of rugby league has just finished being played in Australia. Rugby League is one version of the game of rugby, it was invented one hundred years ago to speed up some elements of the game. The problem with the world cup of rugby league is that nobody else really plays it. The world cup roster reads like a who’s not who in international sport. Well, not really, but if you look at the countries that are represented, many of the bigger countries have very few players in the field. In fact so few people outside of Australia play rugby league that they have had to alter the rules of eligibility to allow Australians to play for countries in which they have their ancestry, even as far back as their grandparents. This world cup is designed for one purpose only, that is to extract more money out of rugby mad aussies. The field looked like this: the top tier included Australia, New Zealand, Papua New Guinea and England. The bottom tier was Fiji, Tonga, Samoa, France, Ireland and Scotland. The top team in the bottom tier got a chance to play in the semi-final against the top team in the top tier while the other semi final was the second place team against the third place team. The tournament was so lopsided that Australia went into the semi-final against Fiji and beat them 52-0. Afterwards the media were referring to the triumph of the Fiji side for only losing by this much, that they won a spiritual victory.

Problem is, Australia had beaten everybody so badly that nobody really cared anymore. This event went on for a month and the attendance and ratings just continually fell as the Aussies beat everybody they saw by huge margins. I can’t even think of a sport that we play at a professional level in Canada that nobody else really plays. I suppose the lasting images of Eddie the Eagle competing for Britain in the ski jump in Calgary is an appropriate analogy. You have an Olympics in which the best in the world compete and then for some reason you let in other folk just to round out the field. It is good for a novelty but in the end the lack of competition just sort of degrades everyone. I guess women’s hockey is an appropriate comparison. There are two good teams in the world, a few mediocre ones and then a bunch of really bad teams. If you held a tournament and called it a world cup, that would be like the rugby league world cup. In the semi-final, pitting Canada against China or some other non hockey power would be equivalent. The sports media were funny over the course of the tournament; in the same breath they would rave about the play of the Australian side while lamenting the lack of competition. One headline noted that the play of a particular individual was brilliant but in being brilliant he single handedly put the nail in the coffin for the respectability of the whole tournament.

Australian rules football is even more peculiar to the shores of Australia. There really isn’t anyone else who would be available to play even in a marginal world cup. As such, in order to have some sort of international competition, the all stars of the Australian Football League plays a couple of games against the best players in Gaelic football. The kicker is that these games are significantly different, so serious concessions have to be made. Originally the crossover games were played with one half played using Aussie rules and the other half with Gaelic rules, but this turned out to be not very fair, so they have come up with some sort of hybrid. Of course the balls are different shapes and so they had to choose one to use for this exhibition. Anyway, the game doesn’t really mean much to anybody since there is no particular title they are playing for, but tempers do flare. Apparently the games were cancelled last year because there were too many brawls the year previous. Since nobody really understands the rules and nobody really cares about the outcome, the one thing they can agree upon is the satisfying feeling of fist on cheek. A bizarre sport to watch to be sure.

As a footnote, after much ballyhoo, the final of the World Cup of Rugby League was played with the bookies calling for Australia to win by 30 points. Nobody watched on television, but it turned out to be an inspiring win for New Zealand, shocking and humiliating the national pride of Australia. I could have watched but didn’t because the semi final was so lop sided. Ah well, I shall learn from this and when the Canadian women’s hockey team plays Eddie the Eagle in a hybrid of hockey and ski jumping, I will tune in, just because you never know.

Sly Stone was right all along, we do got to live together

There is a furore on the other side of the globe caused by a bunch of foolish kids and the internet. Now cyberbullying is not new, or rather is not new this week, but this time for some reason a bunch of kids have targeted redheads. The news reports that students formed a facebook group nominating a particular day as Kick a Ginger Day. The thing I find surprising about this is not that kids can be cruel or that the internet can be used as a powerful tool for mobilizing a mob, just their use of the word ginger. I suppose this is could be a big misunderstanding and the kids had a beef with the movie star from Gilligan’s Island, or were advocating a new sport involving playing footie with spicy roots, but I doubt it. I had never heard it used as a term for a redheaded person until I came to Australia. I personally am sort of half ginger and half whatever root would be used to describe a brunette, maybe a breadfruit. My beard is reddish and my hair is brown, though that is becoming less prevalent. The hair, not the brownness. Anyway, I was blissfully ignorant of any sort of prejudice towards redheaded people, except for the prejudice the ultraviolet rays cause, or as I like to say ultraviolence rays. I was at a luncheon one day and this redheaded girl came up to me and said “oh, it is good to meet another gingie, we need to stick together.” While appeals for community and comradeship are always welcome, I was a little surprised by the comment. I actually had to get her to explain what a gingie was. I must note of course that as a member of this disadvantaged group, she wasn’t actually against me. I have heard of people being mean to albinos and in fact I recall there was a rise of complaint when the Da Vinci Code came out and the crazed monk was an albino, but I had never heard of or felt any negativity towards the redheaded crowd until I was speaking to someone about the famous Australian actress, Nicole Kidman. This woman proclaimed in a harsh voice “I hate her, she’s just a talentless ranga”. I didn’t understand what that meant, so I had to ask. Apparently it is short for orangutan. So I am now officially either a gingie or a Ranga, unless I am clean shaven in which case I am just a guy with a shiny head. Maybe it says something about my general state of empowerment, but this doesn’t bother me. I suppose if I did actually get kicked for something so arbitrary I would be upset, but the name calling doesn’t really affect me. In fact a zoo in Australia recently had a ranga day in which all redheads would get a free pass, sadly I never knew about it or myself and Ronald McDonald would have hit that zoo with a vengeance. I wonder if this Facebook incident is the first for many redheads or if they have felt much discrimination in the past? All I know is that the sun beats down on me pretty hard and so sometimes I do wish I had a darker complexion. I just hope that Reggie didn’t get the message, otherwise Archie would be looking for Big Ethel to protect him, and then Archie would feel that he owed Big Ethel so he would have to contrive some way for her to get some alone time with Jughead who would rather just be eating burgers at Pop Tate’s. Maybe Dilton can invent us out of this mess. The only question remaining is whose gag bag would it be? That’s sort of the perennial question though, isn’t it?

Pricey produce provides plenty of pique

Since it has been a while since a fresh blog post, I thought it would be appropriate to talk about something close to my heart, fresh produce. I sort of feel like Kramer from Seinfeld in how much I like the fruit here in Australia. There is an ad on the television talking about general health and nutrition that advises that one consume two fruit and five veg in the course of a day. My ideal ratio is reversed though. I can easily consume five pieces of fruit in a day. The discerning fruit buyer however must keep careful watch of the prices due to constant fluctuation. This threw me off initially, as one can imagine stepping into a new country with no context for determining what you might feel to be a fair price. My experience in Canada is that we have fairly consistent prices and after you shop for a while you come to know what is reasonable. Now transplant that knowledge to a place where the prices can double overnight and you have the recipe for a rip off. Of course in Canada we have adopted the System Internationale for weights and measures but this hasn’t really permeated through the vernacular in every way. Our highway signs are all metric but we buy lumber imperially. Similarly, everyone in Canada knows their height and weight in feet and pounds, though officially we are full on metric. In Australia, they actually use the metric system officially as well as colloquially. In the grocery sense, this means that when you’re used to the price of a cantaloupe (actually poor example, here they’re called rock melons) in dollars per pound, the price per kilogram is a tad confusing. Naturally the conversion is fairly simple to do in your head, but that extra 0.2 kg/pound adds up. An interesting sidenote is that when all of your understandings about weights and measures are based on one system and somebody is bragging to you using a different measure, it doesn’t carry the same weight, if you will. For example, somebody gloating about the 220 kW engine in their Holden Commodore doesn’t invoke the grunting appreciation in me that a similarly testosteronically fuelled discussion of a 295 hp engine in their Ford Festiva would to someone in North America. But I digress.
I still don’t really understand the economics of fruit production. It has been explained to me that the low population here means that things are so expensive, but they grow stuff locally. So little fruit that is sold in Canada is produced locally, but still it is relatively cheap. Carrots and apples come from California but are sold very cheaply. In Australia, there is a lot of fruit grown all over the place, and in Sydney we are only a few hours’ drive from apple orchards and the like. Even so, it is quite expensive and the price seriously fluctuates. The price of an avocado probably fluctuates between $1 and $3 each in a two week period. Actually, now that I wrote that I couldn’t say with confidence that an avocado is a fruit, but the point is made nonetheless. It has also been suggested that weather patterns greatly affect the price of produce here. Apparently a few years ago there was some major weather situation that influenced the banana crop in Queensland. Bananas went up to $20 a kilogram or about $10 a pound. This may not sound bad except when it is normally around $2/kg. A tenfold increase in the cost of a banana. The story is told that in those heady days it became quite a status symbol to be seen consuming banana products. To show up your status conscious friends, you would merely take a banana out of your bag and jaws would drop. Oh, he eats bananas they would say. The local equivalent of Entertainment Tonight would have daily stories about rich people and their banana consumption. Hugh Jackman smiling with his gleaming teeth as he carries a bunch from the local fruit stand.
This extreme in the cost of fruit is not limited to bananas. I was at the grocery store the other day and I was examining a little packet of raspberries. I suppose they must not be grown very broadly, but they were a product of Australia. It was a small plastic container. I was rendered mute by the price: 6 dollars for the packet. This was a container about the size of your palm, holding 125 grams of the red berry gold. This is about $50 a pound. I have nothing more to say as I cannot comment beyond that...I mean, really, we have raspberry bushes that just won’t die at home. Everybody can grow raspberries. I just don’t get it. What’s next, rhubarb at $2 a stalk? You know how in the fall you’ll get a knock on the door and there will be no one there, just a zucchini? People with gardens can never get rid of their zucchini, so they have to resort to guerrilla tactics to get rid of them. Just imagine if there was a huge run on zucchini and the price went up to $50 a kilogram. Then on the riders that the rap stars had on their contracts to play would include zucchinis along with the bottles of Cristal and the beluga caviar.

Preparations pick up for papal presence

I love a throng. I have always enjoyed being swept along in a massive crowd of people. There is something really rewarding about being one of a crowd that has a common mood, how much more so if that common mood is celebratory. Going to sporting events is always fun because there are so many people coming to and fro. When the Calgary Flames were making their playoff run in 2004, people of all levels of interest in the game would gather and just celebrate. I didn’t go then, but in 2006 I made it to a post game celebration on the Red Mile, and had so much fun. It is a people watcher’s paradise, and the mood is so upbeat. Canada Day in Ottawa was a similar experience for me, a few hundred thousand people all celebrating together. Of course when the Blue Jays won the World Series in 1993, it was quite a to-do in Saskatoon. There were thousands of people on 8th Street running around having fun, and then all of a sudden it turned into a riot. In a classic chicken and egg scenario, I don’t know if the police in their riot gear caused it or if it was the revellers who necessitated the riot police. Anyway, it was very interesting and I quite enjoyed the spectacle. Ironically, there wasn’t any rioting anywhere else in Canada that night, only in Saskatoon which has a pretty marginal interest in baseball at the best of times.
It is currently World Youth Day in Sydney and there are many thousands of Catholics from all over the world in and around the city. The Pope is arriving by ferry to Darling Harbour today and then will drive around the downtown area. Streets are blocked off and excitement is mounting. Instantly a cold and impersonal city is transformed into a fun and welcoming city with impromptu conversations starting everywhere you turn, with people waving their flags and singing songs in the street. I walked down to the harbour yesterday and was amazed at how many people there were. I was swept along in the crowd of people who were just walking, singing, being friendly etc. You look around and you see all kinds of people, just with more monks, nuns and priests than you might normally expect to see. People are exchanging pins and flags and other mementoes of their country. I stepped into a pavilion on my way home from work yesterday and heard a boy band singing. They were called the Altar Boys; they were dressed entirely in white and had moves reminiscent of the Backstreet Boys. The one song I heard had them singing “We are the Altar Boys and we are going to alter your mind!” This was entertaining too, but not quite in the same way as the rest of the day. Very many pilgrims are walking around with huge flags draped around their necks. I find that my flag recognition is pretty poor beyond about 40 flags or so. I had to ask a guy where he was from when I couldn’t place his colours. Turns out I had never seen the Sri Lankan flag before. Other cues can be used to determine the nationalities of people in the street. I cast my gaze on a couple and tried to guess where they were from. They were both Caucasian with dirty blond hair. They could have been from nearly anywhere in Europe or North America or other select parts of the globe, but I guessed correctly that they were American. My clue was that the guy was wearing New Balance shoes. I suppose the marketing machine for New Balance would say it was a lucky guess, but I was pretty confident in it. I talked with a guy on the train last night who was from Brasilia. He was married 3 months ago, and his wife is about a month into her pregnancy. Due to the arrangements of their billets, they are staying at different places in Sydney, with the men in one residence and the women in another. He took the day off of the WYD celebrations to be with her as she was feeling pretty sick. All in all, it has been a great time in the city and promises to be more of the same. The final mass is expected to bring in 500,000 people to hear the Pope say the mass. In summary, I would like to turn a phrase made popular by a certain movie: “I love the smell of a throng in the morning”. Do with that what you will, I just thought it was funny.

Two good guys, no one gets hurt

Happy Canada Day to all. I don’t know why I am writing this a week late, but the sentiment stands. I have a Canadian colleague who lives in Melbourne but was visiting Sydney for the week, so we decided to celebrate the glorious day. He showed up to work in a garish tie and the day was off to a rollicking start. The tie was red with white stripes and a little maple leaf in the centre. We spent about half an hour looking for celebrations online; we ended up with only one lead: the name of a pub on a street that runs many miles. Now it may seem obvious to the reader with experience in well planned cities that this would be easy to find, but I assure you that is not necessarily the case. Consider my first day of work: I woke up in plenty of time to walk to work, with the name of the street and the address in hand. As it went, I decided to progress along the numbers on a parallel street, and then cut over at the appropriate time. I realized after I had to backtrack for many blocks that the street address on one street is not necessarily the street address a block away. That is to say if you are at 122 Pitt Street and you go over one block, you may be at 220 Castlereagh Street. It gets worse though. There is actually no correlation between the number of the buildings on one side of the street and the numbers on the other side. That is to say you could be advancing along the odd numbers on the south side of a street, assuming that the numbers are advancing equally on the north side and you would be wrong. So 171 Clarence Street might be directly across 222 Clarence Street. The one hundreds might run for 10 blocks, or it might run for 2, just depending on the street. And to make matters even more confusing, streets frequently change names. For example you can be on College Street, walk two blocks without turning and be on Oxford Street, then another two blocks later be on Elizabeth Street. All this to say it can be tricky to navigate the streets here. Oh, and for those who find solace in the strict definitions of street and avenue running perpendicularly, there is no respite. Anyway, we went looking for this particular pub and had no success. It would have helped if I had actually looked up the address, and not just the name, but it wouldn’t have helped that much. We eventually went into an Irish pub that had some live music, a girl singing with her guitar. I asked her if she knew any Canadian songs, since it was Canada Day. She had no idea, but after some discussion of the finer points of Rush and Paul Anka eventually we settled on a Joni Mitchell song as being appropriate. A woman heard my request and identified herself as a reluctant Calgarian. A little while later a crew of youngsters came in wearing Canadian flags and face paint. We teamed up to sing O Canada a few times, and eventually the singer played another Canadian tune. We all closed our eyes and sang along to the Summer of ‘69, and there was nary a dry eye when Jimmy quit or when Jody got married. In the end we saw very few celebrants and didn’t really hear any definitively Canadian tunes, so as we walked home we sang out with hoarse voices a number that may not signify Canadiana to anybody from outside of that great prairie parallelogram , but we sang it anyway:

'An it's a heave-ho, high-ho, coming down the Plains
Stealing wheat and barley and all the other grains
And it's a ho-hey, high-hey, farmers bar your doors
When you see the Jolly Roger on Regina's mighty shores

If I knew it would form an important statement about my Canada Day, I might have chosen a different number, but at least we both knew the words. And pirates are always pretty fun (in mythical form at least, if not in practice). And so to all I wish a Happy Canada Day from down under.

My kingdom for a urinal

This time of year always reminds a former treeplanter of the strange environment that he was once a part of. The treeplanting world is full of entertaining jargon and archetypal stories and discussions. One principle that is universally understood is the planter’s bladder. When you’re working as a treeplanter, your office is a toilet. Now that isn’t to say that there are proximity sensors everywhere waiting to flush or start a drip of water (although some rainy days may feel that way) or even a quiet guy in a suit providing you with alcohol soaked combs. Rather, the entire field of work is available for excretion or elimination of any sort. It is actually very handy, and thus the concept of the treeplanter’s bladder is born. If at any time during your work day as a treeplanter you feel like expressing yourself, you are welcome to, no questions asked, no one to wait for, not even any acute smells to contend with. The end result of obeying this most basic bodily request is that by the end of the summer you have no faculty for holding it in with a mind to waiting until a more appropriate venue becomes available, because of course you have just spent 60 days with no sense of appropriateness in terms of urination. Bowel movements naturally tend to bias the results because people tend to be a tad more choosy in their spots (some opt for various leaning postures, some utilize the dual horizontal log technique, others the single log, etc), but the fundamental principle is the same. I have one friend who shall remain nameless because he is now a successful barrister whose practice would doubtless suffer if this story were accurately attributed. He had just finished a season of treeplanting, with all of the urinary options that entails, and had come to the city. He was getting cash out of an ATM, and wouldn’t you know it, he had to pee. He tried and tried, but couldn’t hold it in long enough to wait for his receipt to be printed and had to disappear into the nearby alley and take care of business. This is the basic risk of planter’s bladder. Not being able to go anywhere for fear of a bladder emergency that cannot be controlled.
Fast forward some years later and I am developing Sydney bladder. It is quite the opposite of planter’s bladder in that since there are no public toilets anywhere; I am stuck holding it until I get home. My first month in Sydney I could find no public toilet and was therefore limited in my range of travel. I thought there must be something out there, but for the life of me I couldn’t find it. Eventually I happened upon a public toilet. I was walking the route I took every day when I noticed a little kiosk had the word toilet written on it. I was very surprised because I had walked by it many times and had never realized that it was a toilet. It looks like a newsstand. I guess in order to keep a constant architectural theme, they have hidden the toilets in newsstand kiosks. Anyway, I filed that information for later, because it was inevitable that I would need it. Sure enough, a few days later, I was walking home from work and I had to pee. I thought, no problem, I will simply access this public toilet. Well, much to my chagrin and the increasing pressure on my abdomen, the toilet was out of order and the door wouldn’t open. I was now better acquainted with the decorative motif of the public toilet, so I looked for another. I found another and was fully intending to use it but it wouldn’t take my coin and therefore the door wouldn’t open. The opening bass line from a famous Queen song was rising in my mind. Vanilla Ice sampled the riff while I struggled to find an alternate venue. I went through a series of these kiosks and each had some reason it couldn’t be used: broken door, out of order, surrounded by quicksand, those sorts of things. In the end, I had to make like a treeplanter and pee in the park.
I was a little furtive in the process, thinking this was unheard of, or at least inappropriate, but since then, I have seen very many people peeing in the streets, in the parks, in the alleyways, etc. I was walking home past a park the other day and for some reason was watching my feet. I watched myself step up to a rivulet of flowing liquid. I looked up and about ten feet from me was a woman squatting on the sidewalk, peeing. It turns out this is a nation of treeplanters. I have yet to determine whether anyone else has planter’s toe. In a shameless plug for comments I will give a special mention to anyone who can relate a planter’s toe story or I suppose any part of the anatomy that is affiliated with treeplanting afflictions.

friends, yeomen and countrymen

One thing that has been remarkable to me during my stay in Sydney is the how multicultural the city is. It is not surprising to be walking down the street and hear no English being spoken. I would guess that of the people I have met the ratio of those who were born here to those who have recently arrived is around 1:4. Some highlights:

I met a guy named Kuda who is an accountant from Zimbabwe. We had an interesting conversation as he told me about what he has to go through in order to propose to his girlfriend. He has to go with an entourage to the home of his girlfriend and negotiate a dowry. Even in this day and age the dowry is based upon a herd of cattle, so once it is agreed that the dowry should be 10 cows, they then must negotiate the price of the cattle. Factors such as his job and the fact that he is working overseas comes into the price per head. Once the negotiating is done, they confer and agree and he has to pony up the cash. In one concession to modern times, he did say that he won’t have to go home for this to happen, he can wait for his entourage to do the haggling while he stays in Australia listening in on his mobile phone. He said he was budgeting for a few thousand dollars, or approximately $300 per head of cattle. It sounds like the actual negotiated price didn’t have much to do with actual beef prices, otherwise the global food shortage might translate into a national wedding shortage.

I was in a crowded place and I saw this guy who had a funny smile. He was wearing huge brown framed glasses and a moustache. He looked like Weird Al Yankovic but with short red hair. It occurred to me that he was either foreign or wearing the moustache ironically. It seems like at least North America and Australia these days, there is some transition point somewhere north of 35 that a man can wear a moustache without irony. He can wear it and feel like Magnum PI, or Clark Gable, depending on his growth pattern. Prior to this transition time however, any man wearing a mustache is laughed at until he gives them a knowing smirk revealing to all his ironic detachment from his facial hair. Anyway, this guy is in his early twenties. I met him on the bus and he introduced himself as Oscar. He is Swedish and just here to work and travel. His one task is to determine what to study the next year. Very pleasant fellow. Couldn’t figure out the attitude with which he was wearing a moustache, though.

I met Danilo, a Brazilian fellow who had a German accent. He sported a long goatee that was braided into a neat front pony tail. He works as an architect.

I met Carlos, a Mexican big wall climber whose goal is to set new routes in every continent of the globe. So far he has set up new big wall routes in Mexico, Brazil, Pakistan and Morocco. He was in Australia to look for his next big route. He works as a carpenter and saves his money to take the next trip. Currently he is staying in the Blue Mountains of New South Wales trading renovation work for lodging. He says that climbing in Mexico is quite safe for foreigners but a little dangerous for locals. He reckons the danger is greater from banditos than from falling while climbing.

I met Simba, a bond trader from Zimbabe. He trained as an electrical engineer and decided he didn’t like it so he went into finance.

I met Kate from South Africa, she trained as a lawyer and now deals with the legal implications of making a tonne of money for an investment bank.

Bill from Fiji is an IT consultant. He says he loves to surf, but is a warm weather surfer only. Once the wetsuits come out he stays home. He listened in amazement as I regaled him with stories of surfers from Nova Scotia who are out in the middle of winter. Wearing thick neoprene to keep out the -20 degree air temperature and the -2 degree water temperature, these folk are hardy.

The list goes on and there is always somebody new with a different story to tell. My exposure to people born in Australia is pretty limited, so much so that I had to attend the Australian Rules Football game with a Canadian who could explain what he knew of the rules. Many comparisons were drawn to hockey, dogsledding and biathlon.

Gratuitous scenery shot

I have been asked to add some photos of my time here in Australia. I am of course in constant deference to my legions of readers, so here is a snap of Wentworth Falls, in the Blue Mountains. The place is beautiful and smells like eucalyptus everywhere. The best part is that it is accessible by the train system from the city centre.

He ain’t heavy, he’s my brolly

I bought myself an umbrella a while back to replace my loaner. I was stuck in a logic problem in the research phase of the purchase though. I wondered just what makes an expensive umbrella worth the money. My intuition told me that an expensive umbrella would suffer from the same basic issues as a cheap one: breakage of ribs or struts or spars or whatever they’re called, ripping of the nylon, etc. I did a cursory internet search for umbrellas and discovered that I could purchase an Armani umbrella for $700. The fancy touches included a silver handle and mahogany shaft. It still had thin steel ribs and used nylon to block the rain. Anyway, I defaulted to a cheap one but not the cheapest. I spent $10 when I could have spent $5. I hoped that paying 100% more than the base model would yield a much better brolly. Of course you can never know in advance which straw will break the brolly’s back. As such, I felt that there was no way to really know how much benefit you would get from a more expensive model. I opted for a collapsible one that would fit into my bag easily and therefore be convenient enough to carry all the time. I had been stuck walking in the rain in the past due to a misreading of the weather, so I wanted to be able to keep one at all times. So I had a good stretch of time with the collapsible umbrella, and I carried it everywhere (insert montage of me and my umbrella in various scenic locales throughout Sydney). Until last night.

I walked home from work in the rain. The umbrella held up well for the first half of the walk, but as the rain increased and the wind increased, there was definitely a lot more stress on the parts of the umbrella. I trudged through the driving rain, and of course I was concerned for the health of the brolly, but I was wearing my dress pants so I didn’t want to put it away. I looked at other pedestrians and saw sorry looking umbrellas everywhere. The perfect dome shape was deformed all over the place. Forlorn looking umbrellas were the norm. I still had faith that a combination of savvy walking and well angled holding and just plain good will would save the day. Alas, in the end the wind won and one particular gust blew my umbrella inside out snapping some of the spars in the process. It was a violent end to a good umbrella. I made a show of trying to go on with the busted up nylon still protecting me, but in the end I just walked home in the pouring rain. I tossed my umbrella out upon my arrival at home. There is a silver lining to the story because sitting atop the rubbish bin when I threw out the umbrella was a suit jacket and vest, just sitting there, waiting to be adopted by a new owner. Or should I say silvery lining.

There is of course no way to know if a more expensive model would have survived the trip, but I prefer to think not. I choose to believe that my umbrella gave a valiant effort, and was the equal to any $700 Armani model. In other news, I hope that I won’t have to write the word umbrella again because I feel that I have hit my quota for the year.

Look at them yo yos, that’s the way you do it

Walking through the downtown of Sydney, I would have expected to see more street entertainers than you end up seeing. There is the usual cast of characters with very little variation. The lineup includes: an American tap dancer who works the corner outside the main grocery store, a Chinese teenager who plays saxophone on top of recorded music, kitty corner to the tap dancer. Down the road in a pedestrian shopping centre is where the competition is the fiercest. One guy wears a tuxedo as he plays the violin with backing tracks. There has been the odd Aboriginal group with didgeridoo players, a few guitarists here and there, but by far my favourite has been the other tap dancing guy. He wears an outfit that looks like he got it from James Brown, tight maroon velour pants with a built in corset, terminating just below the xiphoid process. I struggle to describe the pants, but I think everyone will know exactly what I am talking about. He also has billowy satin sleeves on his shirt. He looks just like the godfather of soul but without the conk. He sort of shuffles around and then asks people to pay him. I enjoyed him more for his commitment to costuming than for his skills. Speaking of mad skills, there was a guy who was playing his guitar the other day, just sitting on a stoop outside the movie theatre. His gimmick wasn’t really great guitar playing; rather while he played he balanced a guitar on his forehead. So he was sitting playing something particularly buskworthy and his second guitar was resting on his head from the headstock, big round end straight up in the air. I watched for a while to see if he would keep it up, and yes, as long as the song continued, he kept balancing his guitar. An unexpected skill to be sure, though judging by his outstretched hat not particularly lucrative. I guess like Bryan, he should have practiced until his fingers bled, not just his forehead.

I see London, I see France

Any newcomer to Australia can report that trying to pick up a new sport to watch can be very confusing. Watching on television with no one to explain the intricacies of the rules can be tricky at best. This in mind, I wanted to see some rugby in person, so I went to watch the footy this weekend. Here in New South Wales when you say footy you mean Australian Rugby League as opposed to Australian Rugby Union and Australian Rules Football. The rules are different for all of these games and in the case of ARL, the pitch is vastly different. Australian Rules Football is by far the wierdest of these sports from a North American standpoint. They say that watching on television doesn't do it justice because there's something like forty guys on the field all playing game of 500. You score by kicking the ball through some uprights, but in order to get close enough so that your punt will be close, they pass the ball by hitting it with a fist, then sometimes they run, sometimes they dribble it and sometimes they pass by kicking and catching. There seems to be no consistent rules as to when you're allowed to do what, so it is hard to appreciate the nuances. Of course any time a ball gets close, it becomes a big jump off for the ball, complete with a whole lot of mid-air violence. Just a few weeks back one of the biggest stars of the game was suspended because out of the blue he swung at an opponent with his fist and knocked him out. Apparently this is outside of the rules, but there wasn' t exactly a huge public outcry, so maybe maneuvres like that are merely out of style. But I digress, back to the footy. So this year marks the one hundredth anniversary of the Rugby League. To honour this they have been having celebrations all winter and had a big match on the weekend. It was Australia versus New Zealand, so presumably the best players in the sport from each nation. The Centenary Test Match as it was called was held at the Sydney Cricket Ground on Friday night. I saw a news report earlier in the week that was bemoaning the state of the game due to poor ticket sales. Apparently a similar game had taken in 80,000 fans in Victoria a few years back, but there were only 10,000 tickets sold at the writing of the article. I have watched a few games and can now recognize some of the players. The game is sort of an abbreviated version of the game that the world plays as rugby, and it sort of plays like a flowing game of American football, without the equipment or the forward passing or the stopping to set up new plays and the like. I assumed that I would be able to get in without advance notice, so I walked there to arrive just on time. I ended up having to wait in line for about twenty minutes when I got there, but I got my ticket and managed to get the whole game. I have to admit this was one of the most boring games I have ever seen live. There is no doubt that these are very athletic men and it is a tough sport, but the game was really boring. It didn't help that Australia was up 22-0 at the half, but it was even boring in the first half. The first play of the game was an exciting try, but the rest was pretty utilitarian footy. I was sitting with a guy who watches a lot of footy, and he admitted that the sport in general wasn't very exciting for spectators. He was a German who really enjoyed soccer, and sort of admitted that he watched Rugby League just cause it was there. I have seen games in the NFL and the CFL that are boring too I suppose, but it was really disappointing for this to be so lame. The crowd was only there in the second half because they paid so much for their ticket that they didn't want to leave early. Luckily there was a little excitement near the end of the game. With a minute left a guy went streaking through the arena. He ran from end to end, evading the security personnel until he slipped on the grass (should have worn the birthday suit cleats) and they piled on and beat him down. Immediately the big screen flashed a notification that anybody going onto the field of play would be fined $5500, but that didn't discourage the crowd who had waited for a long time for any excitement. The fans got really into it; they were cheering him on and when he raised his head to salute the crowd they gave him a standing ovation. The security staff were walking him towards the exit and one guy was trying to keep up and hold a towel around his crotch. Our hero figured this out and successfully thrusted his pelvis until he was free, free, free at last. He proceeded to gyrate as well as anyone could while surrounded by burly men and in handcuffs. The crowd let out a roar, but the security guys were embarrassed so they beat him some more. They then got a full body towel and duct tape to cover him up. One of the guards jobs seemed to be holding a hat on the guys head, presumably to reduce the likelihood of becoming a populist hero. Before leaving the field, our young champion bucked the hat off his head and saluted the crowd with a cocked eyebrow. The crowd ate it up and cheered until he was well out of sight. It was nice to see an engaged crowd in the end and the post game deconstruction was given some new material. Gave some fresh meaning to a naked bootleg.

Revenge of the Sandwich Artist

Last night I had to stay downtown for supper and I was really hungry so I decided to eat at a fast food place. For some reason, Burger King has had some significant problems with their trademarking, so here in Australia it is known as Hungry Jacks. The meal offerings are the same as in North America, the logo is the same, but the title is different. As in other big cities in the world, the service sector is dominated by recent arrivals to the country. Service personnel generally have a rather tenuous grasp on English, so that compounded with my funny accent results in pretty bad service. At Subway, the staff seem to be entirely Chinese while the Hungry Jacks seem to have mostly Persians, I don’t know why. At Subway, when the sandwich artist offers you salad, she is referring to lettuce. It took me a while to learn that I was the problem in the curious incident of the green pepper: I was trying to explain that I wanted green pepper on my sandwich and got a blank stare. Using my pantomiming skills I was able to simulate the planting, growth and harvest of the green pepper, including a particularly clever visual representation of photosynthesis, and I got my green pepper. I later looked at the menu documentation stuck to the wall and learned that they are called capsicums here, and not green pepper. I looked the rube then. Anyway, back to Hungry Jacks, I wanted a Whopper meal. The till person repeated, “a double Whopper meal?” I said, “no, I want just a single Whopper meal”. This quickly became a continuous loop with no feedback, only a time constraint. Eventually she ordered my hamburger; I was sure we had it right, but when I got it, sure enough it was a double Whopper. It may offend the beef farming contingent, but that was too much meat. I didn’t want to get back into a discussion over the distinction between double and single, so I ate quietly, silently considering the latest scandal in the Indian Cricket Premiership.

Bob’s Boomerang Boutique

As I was walking the other night, I happened upon a storefront that offered boomerangs. Nothing else. Not even novelty nerf or other foamy boomerangs, just hand carved and painted wooden boomerangs. I was surprised that somebody could earn enough to justify having a store serving only the boomerang market. Most souvenir shops pack a pile of junk into them, like cheap T-shirts that say “G’Day Mate”, or sunhats with hundreds of little corks hanging off them, or snow globes with a model of the Sydney Opera House, or a collector’s plate depicting the America’s Cup win of 1983, those sorts of things. At the very least I would expect a store selling boomerangs would also try to hit the dijeridoo crowd, capitalizing on the aboriginal artifact motif, but this one only sold boomerangs. I was looking to see if there were any boomerangs of the sharpened steel kind like in the Road Warrior when the guy’s fingers were chopped off trying to catch it, but no, only blunt wooden death sticks. Perhaps the proprietor tried some other product but he never got the return he was looking for.

Naval gazing and heroes amazing

So I went for a long walk in the city this weekend. I was checking out the new neighbourhood. Apparently it is a rarity in that it houses really rich people, very average people and some high falutin’ types. Apparently I am only a few blocks from Russell Crowe’s house, but one block from rent controlled low income folk. There’s also a bunch of areas where homeless people sleep at night. It is neat to see homeless walking step in step down the street with their well heeled neighbours, everyone ignoring each other cordially. So I had a pleasant walk around the wharf, and saw a huge naval frigate docked. Up in the cabins there were people partying, complete with loud screaming and music. On the main deck there was a poor schlub sailor who evidently wasn’t invited to the party. He looked a little glum, and of course had to spend his night watch listening to the sound of revelry from up in the officer’s areas. As I walked, this racing motorcycle came around a tight corner and lost his line, ended up sliding past me on his side. I don’t know what it’s called when your tire slips out from under you, but I know when you’re skiing and you lose your edge, it is pretty unpleasant Anyway, I looked on with horror and got ready to help the guy if his torso had turned into hamburger (actually here, it would be called minced beef), but he just got up and surveyed the damage, brushed himself off and tore away. He didn’t even look up to acknowledge my concern. I kept walking along these swanky looking pubs. I noticed that while the clientele all were wearing tight jeans with pointy white shoes, the bouncers had a little more concern for the functionality of their footwear. They were wearing pretty sensible looking boots and shoes, presumably the better for fighting. I know I have often considered the pickle I would be in if I were to find myself in a compromised situation having to fight my way out of a jam wearing flip flops. I walked past the Romanian consulate and then sat down on a bench intent on considering the bats flying overhead. Bats are so cool, and because they’re black, they are really hard to see well. Any bats that I’ve seen before Sydney have been small and frantic, kind of like sparrows, but the bats here are big and graceful, like hawks. They soar overhead silently and are just generally neat. The shadowy nature of the bat had me thinking about superheroes, and how the creators of Batman really hit the nail on the head having this guy clothed in mystery, able to hide in the shadows and soar through the sky (and when they pass the moon, their silhouette makes that cool shape). Although, I never quite understood how they managed to get the bat signal to show up on the sky as it was being projected onto a screen. It strikes me that without anything to terminate the light beam it would just beam into space and you would never really be able to make it out, and of course it could be stopped by hitting a cloud, but then it would only light up that cloud. And come to think of it, I would guess that diffraction effects would serve to blur the edges of the signal.
Anyway, I think bats are really neat to watch, especially because you can never really get a good image of them, sort of like knowing a person: you may watch them and think you see them; you may see glimpses of beauty and glimpses of ugliness but you’ll never see the whole picture. But I digress. Thinking about superheroes reminds me of when my friend Dave went to Manhattan and said it became clear to him how the creators of Spiderman could conceive of a guy making time by swinging on the skyscrapers overhead. If you don’t have a vast expanse of skyscrapers, it doesn’t make sense, but here of course it does. I don’t really see any easily observable crime though, so Spidey might have to resort to Head and Shoulders to get that tingling feeling.

Sticker shock and knicker drop

I was walking along a pretty industrial looking main drag in the evening last week when I started to notice the shops I was passing were car dealerships. I guess real estate is so dear that even high priced car dealerships can’t afford much in the way of space. Each of these only had three or four cars, but I walked by dealerships offering Bentleys, Ferraris, Lamborghinis, Maseratis and Lotus’. I was of course arrested by the fact that it would take twenty years to earn enough to buy a car like that. And naturally I would have to then live in said car for the rest of my life. But they look really nice. The new Ferrari looks a lot like the car in Ferris Bueller’s day off, so I am thinking about stealing it and playing hooky from work driving around Chicago. The street was basically empty as I walked past the cars heading east; an hour later I walked back. It was now about 11:30 at night. I was calmly walking by, minding my own business when this woman shouted out a hello. It is pretty rare that people speak to strangers here, so I was surprised. I turned to look and replied with a pleasant greeting. This woman was smiling at me in a suspicious way, and I noticed that she had garish makeup on: Super red cheeks, bright red lips, deep blue eyeshadow; even in the dark I could see her cosmetology. I thought to myself, she must be one of those tarts that everyone talks about. I kept on walking and noticed a series of women in very high heels and short skirts leaning nonchalantly against the walls of the buildings. I kept walking and one more woman approached me; she asked if I had any change, which I answered in the negative, then she asked if I needed anything. I thought for a moment, and concluded that she probably wasn’t offering a strong sense of vocation or inflation protection or even a nice pair of cufflinks. I kept on walking. Some thirty seconds later another woman stepped up to me and asked in a prim voice “would you like to have a go?” “No thank you,” I replied. It was a pretty innocuous exchange. I guess there’s no relation between the cars and the ladies of the night, except that they both surprised me. The cars because I didn’t think I was in a very posh area and the women because they seemed to have appeared out of nowhere, much like ninjas, except with stiletto heels instead of tabi boots.

Slang Teasers

I generally regard myself as one who uses slang carefully and does so with consideration. So you can imagine my surprise when I nearly caused an international incident at the office the other day. The boss was away at a meeting when one of his friends - let’s call him Paul - came by; Paul told the receptionist (Agnes) that he wanted to drop an item off at the boss’ desk. No one here knew this guy so we were all a little unsure about it. When the boss got back, he was informed, and replied that it is fine, Paul was a buddy. Everyone started joking around about how we didn’t know this guy, what if he had nefarious intentions? I chimed in and suggested he wanted to root around your desk to steal important trade secrets. Everyone laughed except for the boss and I didn’t know why. The next morning he called me into his office and wanted a serious talk. He said “I didn’t want to say anything in front of Agnes, but we really can’t have that sort of talk here, next thing I know we’ll be slapped with a harassment suit”. I was utterly baffled and I’m sure my face showed it. Now please note that this is an office full of construction management types who have spent a lot of time on-site, no shrinking violets in the foul mouth department, if you catch my meaning. So given this context, I really had no idea what he was saying. He repeated my comments as he heard them, “you said Paul was going to root around the desk with Agnes”. After a few more seconds I understood what he was saying. In the back of my mind I had a recollection that the word root (used as a verb) is some sort of derogatory term for sex in Australia, and in fact I remembered that the arrival of the Canadian Olympic team caused much mirth amongst Sydneysiders when the Canucks were outfitted head to toe in Roots athletic wear. Anyway, he thought I was being offensive, and I thought I was being mildly amusing in a safe and utterly appropriate context for an office. I guess he didn’t see my pantomime of shuffling papers as I said it, though I imagine if I had asked “but didn’t you see my actions?” he might have taken it the wrong way. In the end, the international incident was resolved by me confessing cultural ignorance, and we all had a big laugh about the misunderstanding. It sort of felt like an episode of Three’s Company, in which Mr. Furley eavesdrops and hears Jack say something to Janet. He then blusters for the rest of the episode until the final scene when they all chime in singsong voices “Mr Furley, Jack said Rogaine, not cocaine!!!” or something like that. Hilarity typically ensues as it did in Sydney that day, and we all headed off to the Regal Beagle to further discuss the incident. Of course that was the start of the day so there was no trip to the Australian version of the local watering hole and I had to sing the Three’s company theme for the rest of the work day in my head. So to all I say come and knock on my door, come and knock on my door.

I’m no entomologist, but…

Anybody remember the great Gordon Korman books with Bruno and Boots? There is this recurring theme where Elmer Drysdale says something nerdy followed by "I've always been interested in X" and then Bruno would reply "I've always thought you were a little Y". And X would relate to Y, like Elmer would say "I've always been into astronomy", and Bruno would reply, "I always thought you were a little out there", or something like that. Anyway, in this post Bruno would say "I always thought you were a little buggy Elmer". Preface is now complete.


There was a bump in the night as I slept in my hotel room this weekend. The room has a card access, so I was worried that someone had mis-programmed a card and had given my room to someone else. I got up and surveyed the scene. No human visitors. I was sort of expecting that a family of Germans would be arriving after a long day of travel and we would have to share the bed between the five of us - lederhosen and schnitzel everywhere - but my worry was for naught. I went to the bathroom while I was up and noticed a visitor of a different sort. This little guy was about the size of my thumb, was quite well behaved and really pretty quiet. An ideal roommate I suppose. We even played hide and seek (see attached photos). I thought this must be a cockroach but my internet searching has been in vain, so I don’t know what kind of cockroach it is. Looking at the list of possible species, I kind of hope it was the “Madagascar hissing cockroach”, just because it sounds scarier. Ironically enough, I just learned that inhabitants of New South Wales are called cockroaches, so by that definition there were two cockroaches in the room that night. In other interesting news, I remember reading that the guy who played Cockroach on the Cosby Show was fired because he refused to cut his hair. Talk about a dumb principle to rest your career on. Now nobody knows his name and Adam Sandler who was the other buddy of Theo's who didn't really have any lines at the time is a household name. I guess the hi-top fade was a battle that Cockroach was willing to fight. Anyway, I named the new roommate Friedrich, because I assumed he was a visitor from Munich. It was hard to get back to sleep after frolicking with Friedrich, but eventually I nodded off, one more mystery solved.

Where's Friedrich? Where's Friedrich?

Peekaboo, there's Friedrich.

Gold watch, diamond ring, I ain’t missing a single thing

So I have to wear dress clothes to work for the first time since 2001. The jobs I have had since then have all involved casual attire, and I never felt that my productivity was compromised by the lack of a collar on my shirt. I even had a disagreement with my boss those many years ago about professionalism. It is my contention that my ability to think and be a general computer drone is independent of the crease in my pants, or I suppose the material therein. Anyway, now that I am working downtown it is expected that I wear dress pants, shoes and shirts; though apparently no one wears ties here, because “it’s too hot for ties”. So I dusted off my various dressy items and am wearing them to work.

The fascinating thing that demands cultural adjustment is the subtleties of fashion. I have no idea if I am in fashion or out, or rather, it is clear that I am not at the pinnacle of the aesthete but I don’t know how far down the hill I am. In my life in Saskatoon I have a pretty clear understanding of where I conform to good style and more appropriately, where I don’t; but the point is that I know. The examples that I have before me are my colleagues in the office. They all wear tight pinstriped pants, flashy open necked shirts with French cuffs and long pointy shoes, sometimes in the form of boots. I have been to the shoe store but I still can’t get into the idea of wearing pointy toed shoes. I feel that I would look like the Iron Sheik, and being a Hulkamaniac, I can’t endorse that. Notwithstanding the fact that I would trip on the stairs everywhere I went. When I look at my coworker I can’t help but think he looks like a dandy. Sort of like a business version of Prince in Purple Rain (mostly the boots). Perhaps in time I will come to look at this style favourably, but for now it feels off. When my brother moved to Vancouver he left behind a shiny shirt from his days as a bartender doing the hippy hippy shake at the happening night spot, the Odeon. I once wore it in Saskatoon and felt that it was a little too shiny and took it off. Here though, I have adopted the shiny shirt and feel that most likely it is not unfashionable. My square toed dressy loafers are a little square, I’m sure, but I will stick with them until I feel I know the cultural terrain a little better. I am still on the lookout for a nice Gordon Gartrell though.

Me without my brolly

So as I was getting ready for work yesterday I looked out the window and noticed a terrible downpour. Now in my life in Saskatoon, I have never owned an umbrella, rather settling for the efficiency of a rain jacket, typically of the GoreTex variety. My MEC jacket I have owned for about 8 years and though I like it, it is starting to wear. Also it is heavy and bulky as GoreTex jackets go (3 ply, don’t you know), so I didn’t bring it with me to Australia. As such, I have no rain jacket to wear here. I had to entirely revamp my attire for the walk: I dressed in my normal trekking clothes, with a softshell jacket and my Tilley hat, with my dress up duds in my bag. The entire walk to work turned out to be a mild drizzle at best and when I got to work I was soaked with sweat rather than rain. I changed and the day was fine, but in a hurry to get back I didn’t change back into my trekking togs. Naturally I got soaked on the way home. Now I don’t know if I should bite the bullet and buy an umbrella or if I should buy a new rain slicker. I don’t know the first thing about them: in my memory cheap ones end up looking like a newborn giraffe fairly quickly, and expensive ones can get pretty darn expensive. As such I am in an umbrella dilemma. If only there was some popular song that I could reference to bring this point home. Alas. Luckily my boss walked by and asked if I owned a brolly. Only by context could I figure out that one. I am now the proud user of a loaner “shelta” brand brolly.

Banking under the sun

I needed to get a bank account so that I could get paid. I asked around and there are a number of large national banks, and while some people have their preferences, I assume it’s a lot like in Canada where by my reckoning; they’re all kinda the same. Really a lot like political parties I suppose. Is there really that much difference between even an NDP and a PC government? Practically speaking, I doubt it, but ideologically speaking, I still vote and continue to vote NDP. In a similar fashion, I need to perform banking operations, and I doubt that it matters which large corporation sucks away my money in dribs and drabs. So I went to ANZ, which I was told was the best for students and new arrivals, but there was a sign at the door that said they would only see students and travelers for the sake of opening new accounts on Tuesdays from 9 until 11:30. This was at 11:40 on Tuesday so I would have to wait a full week (less the two hours), so I went to the bank across the street from the office, Westpac. The guy who worked with me was very pleasant and entertaining. When I showed him my passport he lit up and said “oh, you have a very famous name!” and when he looked at my birthday, he lit up again and said “oh, you have a very lucky birthday!” I assumed it was because my birthday was on the eighth of august (08/08), but I suppose it’s possible the year has something to do with it, who knows? Anyway, I got a bank account in a foreign land, and was assured that my name and birth were special. I’m sure some numerologist could demonstrate something impressive with my digits (or I suppose a rheumatologist), but for now I’ll be happy with rare appearances to easily impressed bank tellers.

Pike Lake swimming style

Last night after my walk I decided to take a shower since I was a little sweaty. The shower was uneventful, but after towelling off I applied my moisturizer, in an effort to help heal my sunburn. About a minute after applying the goop all over my chest the itches started. It was the worst itching I had ever felt. Like centipedes crawling all over under my skin. But really small centipedes, like nanopedes. When you think about it, a centipede is so named because it has something resembling 100 legs, and a millipede is so named because it seemed to have so many more legs than a centipede (ie a thousand) but of course in English using the SI system of measurement we use centi and milli to indicate small, rather than large. Anyway I was really itchy. It was so bad I was jumping around trying to get it to feel like anything other than itchy. I was really keen to get to bed in time for an 8 hour sleep so I was starting to get nervous that I would miss it. After twenty minutes it had subsided enough to merely be an annoyance. Now in the analysis of the event, I can’t figure out why this time the moisturizer reacted with my skin so badly. I had applied it before without incident. Now I am a little reluctant to try it again for fear of another nanopede attack. I just feel it would take too much work to do a proper experiment to reduce the variables and discover the problem, and it is possible there is some temporal effect due to my skin healing from the sunburn, so it may be impossible to replicate. Well I suppose this has nothing to do with Australia, or rather that it could’ve happened anywhere, but who knows, maybe the tea tree oil here is particularly hazardous to thirty something bald men who’ve grown up on a diet of hockey and fescue.

Rats and bats

Tonight I went walkabout in the mean streets of Sydney. After a supper of linguini I decided to go for a wander. I headed out down Liverpool and within a couple of blocks I found myself in Chinatown. The number of restaurants and sushi bars continue to amaze me. I had brought my pipe so that I could smoke a bowl on the walk. I lit up in the middle of the crowd of sushi eaters. What is amazing about the people of Sydney is that they are not fazed by anything. There is no consistent style or crowd of people. I could be engaged in any activity, dressed in any way possible and I still wouldn’t raise an eyebrow. I walked down seedy looking alleyways, passing adult bookstores, shoe stores, Taiwanese, Korean, Japanese restaurants, then passed by an English pub called the Edinburgh Castle. Despite it all, I felt safe the entire time.

Once I got back to Hyde Park I walked along past the skateboarders. There was a guy walking his boxer off leash in the middle of the city; the dog was racing all over the place. In the distance I saw a remote controlled car being run by a Chinese couple on the steps of the Anzac memorial. Along the way I saw some small rodent like creature dipping into the storm sewer. I wondered if this was something that I knew or some other kind of animal. I watched it come up again and became convinced that it was a pretty ordinary rat. The tail was definitely rat like and the body was at least the size of my fist. It snuck past me and went into another sewer grating. I was surprised to see a rat in such a clean city, but of course I also noted that this was the only rat I saw.

I went to the steps of the Anzac memorial to finish the pipe. I was reminded of my friend Randal. The last time we sat and smoked together was at the tail end of a visit to his house in Calgary. I had been there for a week and his wife Carla was feeling like she hadn’t had enough time with her family, and she told me this. Randal and I went to a local park and sat on a bench and smoked pipes. We smoked in silence for about five minutes, then Randal broke the silence and said, “Well, there’s not much to say” we smoked in silence for the rest of the evening and wandered home. I left the next morning.

As I sat on the steps, I looked up and saw large dark birds flying around the trees. They looked a little odd, but since everything natural is foreign to me, I thought it was just a funny bird. I walked up to the tree and looked up and could see about ten bats in the tree. They were definitely bats because I could see them crawling along the branches before flying to the next tree. They were brown with big black wings. The bodies were about the size of large cats and their wings were probably three feet from tip to tip. It was such a neat thing to see, I was amazed to see two different animals that I never get to see, and such typically vilified icons of grossness. The contrast between the clean city and the vermin was striking to say the least.

Starting ‘er out

Well, I have decided to publish a weblog, or blog as they are known colloquially. My intention is to record my observations about life in a new city, a new country and a new continent. Of course in the case of Australia, the country and continent are the same so the impact is lost a little bit, but it makes for better copy. So here I am. I have left my job as a mechanical engineer at the synchrotron in Saskatoon to become a fire safety engineer in Sydney. My last day of work in Saskatoon was Thursday the 20th of March and my first day in Sydney was the 31st, so there has been little time to rest or reflect or even genuflect.

I arrived in Sydney at 9:30 in the morning on Saturday the 29th. I suppose I was jetlagged but I didn’t feel too bad, I went for a walk in the city, I found my hotel and some groceries, had lunch with the new boss and went to bed pretty early.

OK, so if there are any readers ever, you will have to forgive me as I am just getting started, and I have yet to find my narrative voice. There will likely be more boring posts than entertaining, and possibly long gaps between them. With that, I give you “No, the other Thorpedo”.