by
evilhippy
@ 2008-07-23 - 12:37:23
Now I'm not irritated with Khrist Kiddies Klub any more, the real matter begins. Woo-yay-Sydney!!
Sydney is a lively and engaging place, with a friendly atmosphere for such a big city
(4 million people) and more than enough to occupy you at normal times, and actually a fair bit warmer than Melbourne and Canberra at this time of year which scored it major points straight away. Only a hundred or two kilometres North makes all the difference in these parts, and I even walked around in just a shirt once or twice. And some trousers, obviously. I saved most of the criminal behaviour for the evenings.
Of course I'm flying to Christchurch in New Zealand this evening (as you do) where I'll enjoy temperatures from about 1 - 8 degrees Celsius, so my joy has been somewhat short-lived. But joy it was! Technically still is. I'm at a hostel in Bondi beach right now. Yeah, sounds sexy, eh?
Okay trying to recall...first day stuff...yes! A train took me out of Canberra at 6:30 in the morning, got me into Sydney Central station around 11am leaving me to go do stuff on day one, which is always a nice feeling but which usually leads to a great first day of sightseeing and several days of useless inactivity afterwards. In this case I was either fortunate or far-sighted enough to remember all the times past when this was so, and I kept up the pace for five days, albeit with one notable exception.
About midday after arriving I found myself at large in a bustling city, having checked into an efficient new hostel right on George street, the main street running through the CBD and major tourist and activity areas (which most of the city centre qualifies as, it is a seriously well-filled place) so I walked off down George street to Hyde park, intrigued by the name. As I dodged fellow pedestrians on the city's tens of thousands of pelican crossings, I recalled reading the graphic novel The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen which was extremely good, unlike the film, and the events in that story leading up to the original Hyde Park being named after the heroic actions of the fearless though savagely brutal Mr. Hyde, and the necessary hapless accompaniment of his timid alter ego, Jekyll. Of course that was only after he had sodomised the invisble man to death, and an octegenarian Allain Quartermain had got the now-vampiric Mina Harker of Dracula fame into the sack. It was really quite an interesting read.
Sadly there appeared to be no gigantic kill-a-tron robots attacking the city and no Mr. Hyde to sacrifice himself, dancing Astaire-like across the park with a top hat and cane dodging plasmic blasts in order to save all humankind, so the park was slightly subdued by comparison as I played through this reverie in my head, wandering down the main avenues and paths through the city, seeing nothing more dangerous than a few thousand joggers, past a cathedral (St. Elizabeth's I think) to witness the large-scale preparations for the coming Christian flood.
Cathedral = good, a lovely chunk of gothic architecture in the middle of the city;
Disruption to everything, including half the park being fenced off = bad. See the previous post for details 
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Emerging through all that nonsense I went into the botanic gardens on a whim, and was rewarded with the most incredible scene up in the trees a half-mile or so into the parklands, where thousands, absolutely thousands of huge russet-coloured bats - presumably fruit bats - were nesting a couple of dozen feet above the pathway in overladen branches, and even better was that they were actively waking up to stretch and go back to their rest, showing off an amazing display of wide elegant wings, powerfully taut webbing and gracefuly arched limbs looking all very suitably gothic and sinister and interesting. It might be noted that I was at this point warming up to see the new Batman film The Dark Knight and was just in the mood for something like this.
They are amazing creatures outright but to see so many and may of them so huge - as so very close - was fantastic. In bright sunshine too, going against all stereotypes of bat-dom, which I suppose must be centred on vampire bats because they are the more fascinating to us, and I suppose vampire bats sleep in dark caves because they are native to (I hope I'm right here) South America, where they would be eaten by a large number of raptors (birds of prey) or tree-climbing carnivores.
Even if they're not South American it's probably much for that reason, Australia is after all the only continent with no large carnivores capable of very much. It's just a good job for the bats that most of the venomous spiders, snakes, jellyfish, insects, lizards, amphibians, plants, fish and invertebrates don't go into the treetops too often
And do you know, by the way, the difference between poisonous and venomous? I learned this in the Melbourne Museum so I'm gonna share; poisonous plants and animals are toxic when attacked; they evolve poisons for defence, whereas venomous means they use it when attacking and evolved it as a weapon. So now you know too, if you didn't already.
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On from there on my super-productive first day, and I came across Macquarie point which turned out to be very revealing, or at least I thought so.
Now there is a figure very well-known in New South Wales because he was their most renowned governor, back in the early-ish days of the settlement (rather than the earlier days of it being a strict penal colony) which he presided over form 1810 to 1821. He is probably the most renowned of them all because he named just about everything he could after himself, so everywhere you turn in NSW you see Macquarie roads, towers, islands, rivers, mountains and much more, I suppose to be fair he got away with it because he was a good governor, but all the rest seem to have been bad or indifferent so he kind of wins by default, which isn't quite as impressive.
A case in point for this to me is not just Macquarie Street in Sydney, running alongside Circular Quay and up to the modern site of the Opera House, but rather the more specific Mrs. Macquarie's Road, leading North parallel to but far away from the edge of the CBD, up to the harbour waters running alongside the extanded gardens of government house, which leads on Northwards from the Botanic Gardens and ends a very agreeable stretch of inner-city greenery.
The history of this particular road is well documented for it ends with a carved rock face called Mrs. Macquarie's chair, where the lady of the household liked to come and sit, watching the ebbing and flowing of the waters, and so hubby Lachlan had a bunch of convict labourers carve a permanent chair into the rock face for her in 1810, at the start of his term in office.
What is revealing is that there is nothing else around that area and that the road was quite literally built for Mrs. Macquarie's own whims and fancies, at the expense of the colony's treasury, and the only meaningful facility even vaguely close is Government House, which wasn't even built until 1837. The roadway was constructed entirely for Macquarie's wife to saunter down to the seafront and sit on her arse. Only in Australia, I believe, could a man largely be famous for misappropriating official funds for his own ends, and get away with naming everything he could lay his hands on left, right and centre in his own honour. And here is where I made a vital connection with the Australian psyche: It is such a young country, after all, that it has to find its heroes where it can, and anyone who hasn't actually murdered people can be failry considered for a statue.
Even if they have killed folk, they still become revered, in which respect the most amazing Australian ever comes to the fore: Ned Kelly.
Kelly is famous the world over, the Aussies love the idea of him being a rebellious bushranger who defied authority and did things his own way. The cold, hard truth of it was that he was a vicious murderer and a total bloody idiot. His famous last stand; where he wore that famous home-made iron helmet with only an eye-slit to see through, thus protecting his head completely from bullets, and an iron breastplate and groin-plate thus securing those areas from the nasty policeman too; was one of the most moronic gestures in history. The police simply shot him in the leg and arrested him, oh he may have taken one or two of them down with him over the course of the fight but he was arrested, jailed, and hanged as the law required.
And the crimes of him and his gang were pretty inglorious; at one point they captured a policeman, dragged him off to the bush and shot him in the groin so that he would bleed to death in the most pain possible.
What a freakin' hero.
So it seems to me a bit of a sad thing that Aussies haven't had the chance for any great historical figures, simply because they only have couple of hundred years of history. For them there are no Nelsons, no Napoleons, no Caesars and not one Henry V. Which might be, in part, why they are so damned determined and almost supernaturally good in the world of sport.
To say Aussies are inclined towards sports is about the most underwhelming and inadequate thing you could say about them. They absolutely love exercising and competitive sport and even lone events, and are staggeringly good at it all.
At the 2004 Olympic Games in Athens, Australia entered its largest olympic team ever, at a whopping 530 athletes sent to Greece. Collectively, they brought home 49 medals including 17 Gold medals, an average of one medal for less than every 11 members of the team.
The United states brought home the biggest collection with 102 little discs of sporting glory, buy their olympic team numbered 1,418 members, an average of a medal for only every 14 participants. And we all know how competitive those damn yankees are.
Similar tales are revealed for other countries, with France getting about one medal per 19 athletes; Germany a medal for every 14 and a half people; Japan getting close with one per 12 and a bit; we (the UK) got even closer with one medal per 11.8 competitors; and Italy received a mere medal for every 23 participating try-hards.
Poor old Canada had to throw 41.3 athletes into the games to get each one of their 12 medals. Yet Australia easily trounced us all by needing to send only 10.8 people to the games to win every one of their fourty-nine awards.
Whoever you are, whatever your sport, if there is an Australian in the same even then you stand a pretty good chance of losing.
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This is witnessed by the throngs of joggers on every street and path, and the exercise bars, benches and contraptions in just about every park and public space. In Australia you do not need a gym at all, you just have to go outdoors.
Another group seen everywhere on that first day were Japanese tourists, arriving by the coachload, spilling out in front of most attractions in the city, spending precisley 14.6 seconds taking photographs with what looked like a well-practised rota for maing sure everyone got their picture taken in front of whatever it was they had just pounced upon then all rushing back onto the coach and zooming down the road to the next point of interest. And there was me always thinking it was just a racist stereotype from Benny Hill sketches or something, but I learned the truth that day.
Now Australia has fairly recently become the cultural melting pot after the ignominous White Australia policy was abandoned in 1973, yet nevertheless the Asian world has been quick and effective in establishing much of its culture here (to wonderful effect in places as you'll see below).
In fact certain aspects of Asian culture have come to be fully accepted even despite the previously established conventions, and the most startling of these are the Vietnamese restaurants/knocking shops/`adult exchanges` seen on most major streets in the city. I do hope the pope noticed them as he was touring through in his little see-through box
The name of the last of these does lead one to think unsettling thoughts, especially with regard to what exactly it is people are looking to `exchange` inside the places, but coupling them (if you'll pardon the pun) with restaurants is, may I say, an inspired idea, if only because it gives one (i.e. me) a legitimate reason to go inside and try and work out what exactly goes on in there while having dinner.
Truth be told, I never did really work it out as I was engrossed in the menu, beer and some rather fine chillied beef and spring rolls, although I did note that a few men did wander through the doors and go straight through the bar to the `rear dining area` or whatever the suitable euphemism would be. I just hope that, whatever they're exchanging, they wash their hands afterwards.
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The second day in town, and I vowed to get the most out of that, too, so set off fairly early (early for travelling, about 9:30) cheerfully disturbing everyone else in the dormitory on my way out. I have noted with dismay that most people in hostels sleep in a worrying amount, although I often sleep worryingly little so maybe it is just dismaying to me by comparison and outright jealousy, but it does seem to be an awful waste.
Dormitories here are really just rooms with bunk beds and only 4, 6, or 8 occupants, but those beds are always cheap Chinese self-assembly rubbich and squeak and creak with the tiniest motion, so me getting up and doing things always partly disturbs at least a modest number of lazy bastards, which is nice 
It was fairly cold that morning, although not anywhere nearly as chilly as Melbourne or Canberra, so I set off in light clothing and good cheer in a direction, which one I wasn't sure of and couldn't tell you now because my intention was in fact to get lost. I have spent altogether too much of my life recently planning where to go and looking at maps (some of them even accurate and realistic representations of a place) and wanted simply to wander about, safe and secure in the knowledge that everyone, nearly, I saw on the street spoke the same language as me, and that I could never truly be lost when all I had to do was harass a stranger for help. In Australia of course harassing a stranger is more pleasant than anywhere else I can think of, as Aussies truly are the most warm and friendly people (NB: Now I have found myself in New Zealand, I have to retract this statement, but only just).
There was a park with the inevitable sit-up benches, push-up bars, weird-angled-jumpy-pole things and accompanying little display notices outlining a couple of daily exercise routines for people ranging from vegan couch-potatoes to steroid-chewing Supermen, and a few strange twisting streets beneath elevated train lines, skywalks and highway underpasses later I found the pungent bustling Sydney fish markets, ranging around the first of a great many inlets and recesses in that most splendidly convoluted harbour.
Have you seen Sydney harbour from the sky? Here, allow me:
View Larger Map
Isn't that just great? The whole huge thing is varied and winding beautiful to look at, like a Norwegian fjord without the cliff heights or year-round impenetrably cold climate or death-metal fanatics still thinking they're vikings.
Norwegians of a certain age do tend to bellieve they are vikings, by the way. Greg and the Girls (sounds like a bad band/worse theatre troupe) found one amusing specimen in Thailand, and I overheard another guy in the hostel in Sydney: young Norwegians do rather believe they are vikings, which is a rather like the French still believing they are still children of the revolution (I think many of them might actually do) or the Lebanese telling everyone they are really Phoenicians.
Or we English claiming to be Arthurian knights. We may as well all pretend to be African hunter-gatherers
It was while roaming this part of the city and going over things in my head that I thought more of the Australian approach to life, and whether that chipper, confident attitude was the result or the cause of the way the country is today. It is hard to see whether the Aussies are broadly a little bit self-centred or a little bit self-conscious, or rather a little bit more so than people aready are.
Speaking to people for the first time I was always struck by how friendly and helfpul they are right off the bat, never did I get a curt answer to any reasonable question. Of course, me being me I wasn't always asking reasonable questions or at least not asking them in reasonable ways, and I learned an important lesson early on: they don't like a smart-arse, oh no.
You will have to forgive me here although I happen to know this from long experience, but I suspect that, as traditional `working class` people and societies generally dislike and scorn indirect ways of speaking about things today, perhaps some of this has been true for a long time and has filtered through the past couple of centuries to remain a fairly prominent opinion of modern Australians. After all, the overwhelming majority are descended from the alleged criminals Transported here from England, more specifically from the English underclasses as many were surely wrongly convicted and sent across the globe - and a great many perpetrators of crime from the `higher` classes would have been excused such punishment - as the whole idea was largely an exercise of the rich to protect their property and wealth, and get rid of much of the undesirability, as they saw it, amongst the poor.
I mean, when you are convicted and banished from your own country for such crimes as pinching a mere 5 shillings or someone else's underwear (a favourite crime of historians telling the tale of white Australia, a mild perversion known in those times as snowdropping) then really, there's something a bit wrong.
So wondering of this, and of the strangely nervy manner of many of these extremely friendly people once I had got talking to them, and factoring in especially later experiences of Sydney nightlife, I've gotta admit I still really don't know. It's probably something of both, only somewhat more so than most people from most places.
One thing I do know for sure is that Australian comedians on TV over the past two weeks have been disastrously lacking compared to English and Irish stand-ups on the same programs. There is, thankfully, at least one thing good on TV in Australia and that is the large number of stand-up comics ranging across every type of comedy. The Aussies were really nothing like as good as the others mentioned, but then again, it could all be down to that cultural perspective thing.
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I stopped all that pondering and found myself somewhere recognisable after an hour or so; another inlet of the harbour, an ornate public footbridge crossing the water including a section of the city monorail suspended 15 feet overhead, and alongside that the innercity dual carriageway demands another bridge, both crossing the water together and enclosing a miniature harbour that was later to be the scene of God TV out on the water on a floating jetty.
Stopping just before this and with the Maritime Museum just across the street, I went into a working man's bar for a bite and a pint. I just went into it as a bar, but it turns out the place was full of construction workers in hi-viz jackets and reassuringly muddy boots, and I felt quite at home. I waited for a Thai rare-beef salad with the help of a couple of pints, which when it arrived almost felled me from my stool. I think there was about half a cow there, and it was so spicy I had to swill down another beer to cope with it. It was, however, fantastic, and I suspect the best meal you can have in Australia for $9 (£4.50).
I wandered off through the city, missing the maritime museum completely in my tipsy beefy cheer, and after a little aimless meandering and crossing the same few streets a dozen or so times I found another place that called out to me (it was actually damn cold that day, so I needed to be warm and drunk) and I stepped in and obtained the necessary materials for a little something I picked up in Melbourne. You take a third of a glass of beer, gotta be fresh and fizzy or it wont work, a single shot of espresso, and a sachet or spoon of white sugar.
Pour the beer, and quickly throw in the sugar then quickly throw in the espresso - the sugar reacts with the carbonated lager and foams like crazy, rising up the glass and almost spilling over, but of course you have already begun to chug it down as soon as the coffee goes in. It's bloody great; makes a shot of strong coffee taste delicious and it hits you like a jolt of get-up-and-go, plus you also get beer into the bargain. Result!
I was knocking up the second of these on the roof of this place - the downstairs was like the other place, full of dirty work jackets and muddy drivers, bricklayers and site engineers, but then the next two floors are full of suits and overpriced silk ties - and a voice came floating through the city air "Whaddya making there, champ?" and I explained to the voice what the drink was and how to do it, and the voice was impressed. It belonged to the manager of the place, they had just had the roof garden refurbished and were arranging the furniture to best suit things and, as I had to be uprooted twice while they moved tables, the manager's voice offered me a free pint, as long as I left him and him alone with the secret of the magic coffee beer.
Not really, but he did seem to like it and if it becomes a famous drink in Sydney, despite the fact I ripped it off from a place in Melbourne, the world will always have me to thank
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Back that night and whether it was all that espresso or something I'm not sure, but I could not sleep. I just wasn't tired, despite having done something in the day, so I fretted and fussed around the hostel, going up to the top floor lounge then down to the basement again, trying to find something else to do with myself that didn't involve drinking yet more booze. I ended up sitting in the lobby of the hostel until about 5am, witnessed a lot of very drunk and aggressive young Australian men, and was given the duty of impromptu door-guard by the bloke at the reception counter, and $10 of free internet access in wages, which was very decent of him. My duties included telling everyone who came in looking lost where he was, and whether they could reasonably find a drink at that time of night.
Going back to the room at five unfortunately put me in one hell of a bad mood, because someone in the dorm had brought back `a friend` and this friend and he were having `relations`; not the best thing to subject a single bloke to at some ungodly hour before dawn, and I got into a huff after not being able to sleep despite suffocating myself with pillows, and buggered off for a very shameful day indeed.
I stalked through the city from 6am until 6pm, I walked all the way to the Sydney Harbour Bridge and yes, it does deserve the capitals as it is huge, and across it, caought the train back and idled away the time until 10:30 when the first pubs opened, and I went and got myself stupidly drunk. I know I came back via Hyde park but also the Domain; an attached expanse of greenery by the Botanic Gardens; and also saw something of the streets South of the hostel, but beyond that.... you would have to interrogate the CCTV network.
I do believe I got annoyed by everything else around me as well as the bastard sonofabitch back in the hostel who'd found hinmself some female company, and may have had an argument or two with strangers.
On the plus side, there's a very good chance they were only Christians
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After that strange day, having not slept at all in the night, I must have nodded off quite early and woke at a half-respectable hour, getting out of the place by 10:30 and needing to make up for the travesty of the day before I went straight out to the Sydney Tower, fighting my way through the hoards.
The Tower itself supplied its own hoard, and presented a 45 minute queue, but it's one of those things that even if I thought it was total crap I could never not do it, because the thing absolutely towers over the city.
Unlike the Eureka Tower in Melbourne which is slightly more subtle, being a regular rectangular skyscraper away from the actual CBD just across the Yarra river, the Sydney Tower is right in the centre of the business and tourist district and is provocatively shaped like a burlesque alien spaceship. If you see a photo of it you'll know what I mean; with a thin spire running up the centre and a bulging thickened disc 260 metres above the ground, it looks conspicuous enough already, but it also has its very own fishnet stocking in the form of a criss-crossed web of anchor cables wrapping around and about it all the way to the base building - and that's the other thing, it's a building built on top of another building.
So I couldn't really avoid it, and if nothing else I had a spiffing view, which was of course the whole point. It didn't really amount to much as I'd already done the Melbourne thing and what views I could have had of the harbour, bridge and opera house were mostly negated by all the other buildings that now crowd the skyline; what was an unexpected bonus though was that there were a great many other interesting chunks of architecture if you looked a little bit closer.
None of which I can accurately remember or say much about, but of course photos will be coming in the next decade or so 
What I know of the surrounding area though is mostly to do with the outrageous shopping that takes place nearby, so impressive and groovy it was it even drew me in, and I'm practically afraid of shopping. The Sydney Tower ticket also includes something called OzTrek in the price but when I got down from the Tower; having queued to get through the security check, queued again with everyone not carrying a sword who managed to get through for the lifts, and queued again to get back down; there was an hour's wait for the next `trip` so I went shopping.
Since getting to Australia and having to face the icy temperatures (and isn't that sentence just totally counterintuitive to everything we think we know) I have needed to buy warm clothes, and I've been strangely drawn towards white coats and jackets so far. I've even only covered one of them with splashes of red wine by now, a whole two weeks later, a fact that makes me disproportionately proud.
Aside from my stuff I noted some frighteningly priced items that were really of no better quality than any standard garment. Most shocking to me was a men's nightshirt - let me repeat: a very thin unfitted, untailored shirt to be worn at night, not even for any good reason - priced at $170.
I was appalled.
There are surely worse cases of outright theft and daylight stupidity, but I challenge you to think of one outside of Harrods. Oh I know some of you will be saying "But you get real quality at Harrods and just because this asshole's never had a shirt that good.." but actually you are insane. No little flimsy untailored nightshirt is worth £85 and if you think it is you should be taken away and examined under the microscope.
So a cruise through Chinatown for dinner, a mental note to get to the Chinese Gardens early in the morning.
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On the morning of the (checks...) 5th day I dragged myself out of the hostel and went to the Gardens as planned and wow, they were absolutely beautiful, calming, and the most peaceful and tranquil place I may have ever been to. There is a large winding lake and stream covering a large part of the enclosure, one side is largely a miniature bamboo forest, waterfalls flow down hills and into the stream, the pathways leading through all this cross small arched bridges past huge boulders, the borders are all realistically and sympathetically planted, and besides at least 5 small temples and pagodas, and a pavillion in the classical Chinese style, there is even a rocky mountain towards the rear of it, dominating the skyline of the Gardens.
The whole place was carefully sculpted to show the most amazing views and scenes in the garden, from so many angles you can see the same features but they line up in different ways, so the bamboo forest is viewed through the arched bridge with the mountain on one side looking out from the pavillion, or standing at the base of the mountain there is a waterfall rushing down on the left with a calm, glassy lake in front and a view across to three pagodas and pavillions lined up in the distance, with a vast willow tree draping its branches over the water and pathways.
The OzTrek next saw me in a seriously zen-like state, as I took the monorail across the city-centre and back into the base building of the Sydney Tower. I have to say I loved OzTrek for both its cheesy cheapness (a revolving seated display of tiny holographic projections, but an amazing cheapness of minature display) and its swish amusement-park ride technology, in the final movie theatre with dynamically moving seating that, best of all, moved and shook to the swooping camera in the final feature so that it really did, actually did feel like living one of those dreams where you can fly.
I loved it, and although I caused the shoulder bars to malfunction twice (by putting my hands in the way as they came down, almost breaking my wrist) we got going on the third try and I was cracking jokes with a Danish guy in the seat next to me as we rattled and rolled along to the film reel shooting across the Australian landscape, along rivers, up and over Uluru, and flying down canyons and ravines in the Nullabor desert.
After which I went, finally, to the Sydney Opera House and saw it in all its glory, up close. It's a seriously dramatic building, the arches and curves of that incredible roof I'm sure you're all familiar with, but from the ground it really does look amazing. Maybe not quite as big as I always imagined, but nonetheless an incredible display of swooping lines and graceful curves.
Pity the entire front area, the massive steps and the whole bay in front of it, and the surrounding paths for a quarter of mile were all swarming with Krazy Khristians. Oh well.
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After that I left Sydney city centre, and went to Bondi beach for a few days, and that, folks, is that
For now.
