May 5, 2010
Back from Australia and my 10 hour bus ride from Christchurch to Invercargill is underway. I’m not particularly excited about the bus ride but I really want to get my van back.
My first experience with Australia was confined to Sydney so the impression was strong, but hardly indicative of the whole country. Despite their political, ethnic and geographic similarities the Sydney and NZ have nothing in common. Sydney was much more like Los Angeles than anything in New Zealand. It’s a sprawling metropolis stretching its suburban fingers around two bays. Jaime, my host for the week, lives in Coogee (pronounced “Cud-gee”) out in the Eastern Suburbs, a string of youthful and lively beach towns linked by a grid of tiny streets stretching from Maroubra to Bondi. From the beach towns it is a quick 30 minute bus ride to the Central Business District. Downtown is packed with mostly non-descript high rises that creep down to the water at Circular Quay. Scattered around downtown are a bunch of weak museums that failed to maintain any unifying theme. The maritime museum had displays on the early European settlers, the Australian Navy, East Timor’s battle for independence, mythological water creatures, rowing, and the old Australian beach culture. Walking through it was like reading a bad junior high English essay where the writer keeps saying “And also…”. The cityscape was nice but really if you put enough tall buildings with glass under a sunny sky and next to brilliant blue water, everything looks good. The Sydney Harbor Bridge and the Opera House were both beautiful and definitely the visual highlights of the city.
Unlike NZ, the population was much more diverse. Instead of just UK and Germanic Europeans and some Asians and Indians, there were tons of southern and eastern Europeans as well as people of Middle Eastern and Eurasian descent. Where Maori have a huge presence in NZ, Aboriginals in Australia are confined to wearing cloth diapers, decorating their bodies with gritty white paint handprints, and playing didgeridoos over a Peruvian panpipe back beat for the hordes of Japanese tourists at the harbor. More than the ethnic diversity, what stood out to me was the Sydneysider attitude. It was strange to see the posturing, preening and pea-cocking of Los Angeles. Actually, it made me uncomfortable. That was exactly what I am attempting to leave behind. Guys dressed in skinny jeans, tight shirts and those ridiculous elf-like dress shoes. Girls all wore short skirts and dresses with leggings. The good news is that the girls are really good looking. Tons of the fresh-faced, cute blondes in the Kate Bosworth mold. Not a lot of that going on in NZ, but that’s another post. Maybe it was because the girls were good looking, or because the guys spend too much time in the gym, but there was a combative and aggressive energy to the youth in Sydney. That’s not to say that I was intimidated. Being from California—having the speech patterns and the general look of a surfer—is pretty much de facto diplomatic immunity everywhere I’ve traveled (Europe included). As soon as people find out that I’m from California I immediately get elevated to the coolest guy in the room status even though there is nothing cool about me. I learned this from my friend Domo who gave me priceless advice before my first trip to Europe a few years back. To paraphrase, he said that when people ask where you’re from, say “California” not “America”. He said that “America” will get you comments about George Bush but “California” will get you questions about surfing. He was absolutely right and it was good for a few free beers almost everywhere I traveled.
I don’t mean to make Sydney sound bad because I certainly had a lot of fun during my week. Jaime was a great host and made sure I had access to anything I could want, even when she had to go to work. Her friends were a lot of fun, her roommate Megan was really hospitable and her boyfriend Dave was really cool. She has settled into a neighborhood that fits her social and festive lifestyle and seems really happy. The day I arrived was ANZAC Day (Australia and New Zealand Armed Forces Coalition) which is like Veterans Day but celebrated like Independence Day. We went to a local bar that was packed with a couple hundred kids and played an incredibly complicated game called “Two Up”. It’s a betting game where a tosser uses a stick to flip 3 coins in the air. Prior to the toss, people bet whether there will be more heads or tails showing. To bet, someone backing heads will hold cash above their head and wait for someone to accept their bet. The person betting heads holds the money. It’s a really fun and social game with fast action and a lot of screaming. The trick to the game is bet heads late in the afternoon when everyone is wasted because a lot of people forget who they bet with and win or lose there is no one to collect the money. I’m not exactly sure but I won something like $50 on the afternoon which was enough to pay for a couple rounds of beers and a pizza.
My favorite activity in Sydney was attending an Aussie Rules Football match. Also known as Footy, the game is played on a giant oval field (a converted cricket pitch) with 4 uprights in each end zone. The object of the game is to kick the oblong, rugby-type ball through your opponent’s uprights—6 points for the middle uprights and 1 point for the outer uprights. To advance the ball you can either run it or pass it by kicking or punching it (known as fisting). If you get tackled with the ball, it’s a turnover. If the ball goes out of bounds or there’s an infraction one of the dozens of referees tosses the ball in over his shoulder or slams it off the turf for a basketball style jump ball. The really exciting wrinkle is that if someone makes a clean catch off a kicked pass, they get the choice of a free kick from that spot or they can continue the play and run with it. Tackles are more dragging down than hitting but the aerial collisions are spectacular. When the ball is loose on the ground it looks like little kids playing beehive soccer. Elbows regularly fly and shoving matches happen constantly and are ignored. Within 30 seconds of the start of the game, two guys had a devastating collision and were both knocked out cold. The remaining 30 or so players played on around them without hesitation while the trainers worked to revive the fallen. The scoring was frenetic and ultimately the Sydney Swans beat the Brisbane Lions 107-87 despite only scoring 3 1-point goals in the 4th period. It was probably the most fan friendly game I have ever seen. 4 30-minute periods with a running clock and quick substitutions made for constant action. Spells of strategy, skill, speed and grace were offset with periods of crunching tackles, wild scrambles and melee. The prototypical rugby player would be a football linebacker—big and powerful—while the ideal footy player would be a wide receiver or tight end—fast, agile and tall enough to win battles in the air. I love this game and I hope to find a kiwi league wherever I end up settling down.
When I started writing this post, I was in transit. Now it’s 2 days later and I have my van back and my wallet is NZ$2750 lighter. But it runs. I’m excited to get back on the road. I have missed it. On the flight back to Christchurch, I was really looking forward to getting back to NZ. This is starting to feel like home. I’m comfortable here. That has to be a good sign.
