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.