A southern (hemispheric) Christmas

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Greetings from Asiatown

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

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

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

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

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

Back in green

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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