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.

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.

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.

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”.