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.