I’ve been busy! The summer (winter… whatever that thing was that’s over now… you know, before I went to school, back when I did lots of laundry) was really lazy, but the past few months have been one thing after another. We ended up in New Zealand last month, and in a couple of weeks we’ll be heading to Singapore and Vietnam (T’s job is travel-intensive and I tag along when possible).
New Zealand was fun. It rained the five days we were there, except for the last day, when it only rained sometimes. But everything was extremely green, which was nice.
Auckland is pretty charming and stuff. It’s a small city, with painful to no public transportation, but if it wasn’t for those two things I think I would be pretty much smitten. When the plane landed, we came down out of the fog to see a bunch of cows munching on grass like that up there in the picture. It’s a very spread out city, much like Sydney, and it has a bunch of weird little grassy hills sticking up everywhere, which are dead volcanoes. The houses had clapboard siding and looked all 19th century and that sort of made me feel a little bit at home.
That picture up there and this next one are both of the crater at the top of Mount Eden, one of the more famous dead volcanoes. We walked up it one night after T got off work. Look at it! It looks like a unicorn is going to come floating up that hill. No wonder they shot Lord of the Rings in New Zealand.
I guess that muddy bit at the bottom is where the lava comes out.
They have a really great museum in Auckland, called the Auckland Museum. If you like museums as much as I do and you find yourself in Auckland, you should check it out. They have all kinds of stuff: natural history, Pacific islands cultural stuff, New Zealand design, history, and an interesting part about the wars that New Zealand has participated in. They also have a floor for kids that would be really awesome if you were a kid. I used the restroom on that floor and it was a train or airplane-style restroom, one stall with a sliding door to outside, and I got sort of worried that we were all going somewhere.
(You think the cars ruin the picture, but they don’t, because they left them there for all the pictures that became postcards. I think they just really love cars in Auckland.)
On Saturday, we had one day together to do something, because T didn’t have to work anymore and we had paid for an extra night in the hotel so that we could see something together. We rented a car and drove down to Rotorua, which is a tourist trap town about three hours south of Auckland. It’s a tourist trap because they are famous for having steam pools and geysers, and bubbling mud spring stuff. There are lots of things you can pay to do in Rotorua, and I kind of wanted to have a mud massage or go see the buried Maori village (a Maori village got destroyed by a volcano there in the 19th century) but in the end we spent all day walking around the town park, which is free and which has lots and lots of little steam holes and mud pools where water is boiling in the ground. It was really cool.
Most of the irregularities had fences around them, so you couldn’t fall in and scald yourself, but T’s favorite one did not. It was boiling so violently that we wondered whether we should tell someone.
There were some that boiled mud. Those ones smelled like bacon. Actually, T thought they smelled more like the steam from a hot dog cart, but we both had similar thoughts independently.
Yeah. Yeah I do think it looks alien.
They also have a couple of lakes of steam, with dead trees along the sides:
And basically there are little clumps of bushes all over the park with steam rising up out of them, so you can just walk around and find the steam clumps and see weird things. And hope that you don’t fall into a developing one, because apparently they just open up like that.
The town park also had some gorgeous flowers, and tons of giant bees that T kept trying to get a photo of. The nature we saw in New Zealand was cartoonishly pretty.
Flowers on a bridge
New Zealand - fun and pretty.
So T and I won these tickets to see a matinee of the Australian production of Avenue Q. Basically, the day we landed in Sydney from the US a couple of weeks ago, we found a copy of this free weekly magazine called The Brag and it had this thing in it like “Email us and win tickets to Avenue Q” and we were like, whatever, this magazine is like a week old, probably someone already did it, but we did it anyway and bam they gave us some tickets. I guess no one else reads that section.
Well I happened to have seen Avenue Q on Broadway and thought it was funny and that T would like it, so I was pretty happy. Plus he Googled it and found out that the cheapest tickets are like $79.
It reminded me of going to a show in New York in every way except that they didn’t give out programs, they sold them for $15 apiece. I asked the usher if they had regular programs, aside from the souvenir programs, and he was like “Um, no, theaters don’t do that.” I could have been like, “Actually, buttface, they do,” but I didn’t think that would make me any friends, so I just sat down and imagined information about the show.
The main reason we wanted the program was to see if any of the actors were American, but it turned out to be more fun to guess based on whether they slipped up and sounded Australian. Most of them did once or twice, but it wasn’t really obvious. The funny part (to me) was the set. The show is set in Brooklyn, and this production seemed to be set in the part of Brooklyn where the housing stock is mainly Australian condos. It was way too clean, for one thing, and also way too pastel. Also the doorknobs were up high like Australian doorknobs and the tops of the buildings were infested with those old-fashioned TV antennae that I now associate largely with Australia (not many people here have cable).
I am kind of obsessed with the differences in building materials and styles of house between the two countries so I had fun picking out everything that I would change about the set, and then annoying T by telling him all about it. Halfway through the second act I was like “I’ve got it! The frames around the windows need to be black instead of white!” and T was like, “…What? I guess.” (Later I Googled the original NY set and was vindicated.)
Anyway it was a good show and we both had a great time - I recommend it if you’ve got 79 Australian dollars kicking around in your pocket.
On Saturday, T and I took the ferry up to Manly on the north shore of Sydney Harbour, with the vague idea of possibly doing a hike that’s in one of our guidebooks. First we walked around Manly itself, which is just a little “village” of shops next to a beach that had a bunch of surfers in it but that I would never want to go swimming in because of all of the “beware of poisonous waste” signs everywhere. It was weird.
Our guidebook was promising Aboriginal rock carvings and “abandoned 1930s sea shanties” over the course of the hike, so we decided just to start it and see how far we felt like going. Of course, at the point where it still would have been worth it to turn back, we were this close to the sea shanties so we had to keep going, and etc. etc. we did the entire 10 kilometers.
It was a really cool walk. It goes through this brushy national park, up a little mountain or hill to some views of the harbor, and back down again. It’s also pretty vigorous, in case you’re considering it. Lots of stairs. We came out muddy and sore and I hurt the next day. But some nice views from the top:
View out to sea from the top of the hill
Another view from the top - with ferry out there
Sydney CBD skyline from top of the hill
Those pics were all taken from different lookout stations along the walk. It feels really deserted up there - we did run into a few other hikers but it didn’t feel at all like the “city” park that it technically is. We heard a lot of birds, including this one called the whip bird that makes a sci-fi noise:
The sea shanties are at the bottom of the cliff in the second picture; unfortunately we couldn’t get right up on them and go in to look for ghosts, like I would have preferred. Here’s a zoomed in (blurry) shanty:
Shanty!
By the time we came across the Indigenous rock carvings, it was getting kind of late, and we were racing against time because we wanted to be out of the park before it got dark. The rock carvings are big outlines of different symbols like a kangaroo, boomerangs, and a fish, carved into the ground. The parks service has set up log structures around them on the ground so you know where not to step. (Still, they didn’t do a fantastic job of making that clear at the first symbol; we both stepped on it inadvertently trying to figure out where we were supposed to go!) We didn’t know if it was cool to take pictures of the rock carvings, but we figured it would be ok to take a picture of the sign.
Sign at rock carving site
We also took a picture of the general area:
Rock carving site
And we figured that the 1940s vandals wouldn’t mind if we took a picture of their own rock carving:
Oh, you guys.
According to our guidebook, the local council took the initiative to re-groove the carvings a few years back. Niiice. It was a pretty cool thing to see, though, and I wish there had been more information about the meaning or purpose behind the rock carvings (I don’t know if you can make out the sign above, but you’re not missing much).
Anyway, it was getting dark, and we had to skip the optional turnoff to the lighthouse. The last part of the map made it look like the end of the walk was along streets and beaches in a neighborhood, much like the beginning of the walk was. We came out on a beach in a little neighborhood and looked for the way to the “Spit,” the bridge back to the city, which we could see in the near distance.
But the maps lied! We had to follow the trail back into the woods, and continue going up and down stone stairs in the pitch dark. Um, there’s nothing quite so nerve-wracking as being in a pitch-black forest park thing that’s in the middle of nowhere but also technically in a city, at night. It seemed like exactly the kind of place for dumping bodies.
Eventually the trail spit us out onto the highway at the beginning of the bridge, with no indication of how to find the promised bus stop. We used our woodsman instincts, honed from a long day in nature, to walk across the bridge and find a cab.
I wonder if I should be concerned that almost all of my posts are about food. Hmm.
Well we went to a farmers’ market on Saturday that I’d been wanting to go to for a while. It’s called Eveleigh Markets and it’s in the Newtown/Chippendaleish area. It’s only open on Saturdays, and then only from 8am to 1pm (oh Australia, you so crazy!). Anyway they have a pretty sharp-looking website and I thought it would be fun to see the Australian equivalent of the Union Square greenmarkets, where producers from around the local area come into the city with their awesome seasonal produce and organic meat and dairy products (do I sound like a yuppie yet?) and also a few people with jam or baked goods or things like that. I get really alarmingly excited about farmers’ markets because I like to cook and (despite my self-deprecating knock about yuppies) I’m really obsessed with learning about food production and impact etc.
Well, the Eveleigh market was sort of the reverse of the Union Square market. They had a bunch of finished products like jams and whatnot, and a lot of what seemed like just regular cafes with booths doling out coffee and snacks, with a couple of actual farm booths interspersed. It was a place for people to take their dogs and kids on a Saturday morning and sit down and have breakfast, not really a mecca for buying and learning about fresh local ingredients. Well, they did have a lot of meat operations available, so I guess if you wanted eggs or meat, you’d be flying high. And they had a barbeque joint frying up meat which smelled delicious. So I guess I’d say, recommended for a fun brunch, less so for ingredient shopping (except meat). I’m still hoping to locate a knock-out farmers’ market in Sydney (and hopefully one that isn’t mystically open for one hour a month like some kind of Hogwart’s Express). I need to try out the Paddy’s Market one - although from what I’ve heard I’m worried that it’s not so much about local farmers - and possibly the Pyrmont one - although I’ve heard things that make it seem similar to the Eveleigh one. Maybe we’re just spoiled in New York?
We went for a long drive to visit T’s relatives in a town called Griffith, about an eight hour drive into the interior of NSW. I felt like it was weirdly exciting to go for a drive in such a remote place. Being really far away from everything, in a way that’s not possible to do on the East Coast of the US, felt sort of exotic. And just slightly scary, as we drove past scraggly handpainted signs saying things like “Dead Creek Farms” and I was convinced the guy from Wolf Creek was going to jump out from behind a sheep and start eating my organs.
As we were driving through one town, we took a look at the gas meter and decided we still had more than half a tank, which should get us the rest of the way with no problem. It also, stupidly, didn’t occur to us that there would be no more gas stations for the next four hours. Well, as soon as the meter got past half a tank, it started dropping pretty quickly, and we decided to fill up at the next town. When we got there, around 9pm, all the gas stations in town were closed. I am not that big of a driver and I guess I always figured that gas stations are just always open 24hrs, but apparently that is not the case, at least not once you get past a certain point into the countryside of Australia. Gah. We pulled into a Woolworth’s grocery store and found a security guard standing outside, and asked him where we could get gas. He pointed over our heads and said “Wagga’s about 80 kilometers that way.”
So we went back through the town and stopped at one of the “driver reviver” stations where they have a couple of guys sitting in a trailer handing out coffee and snacks, to see if they had any better ideas. I certainly felt like a foolish city slicker, pulling in in our marked Sydney rental car to ask a question that was beginning to seem sort of ridiculous. Thankfully, they pointed us back to one of the gas stations that had an (artfully hidden) 24hr card reader, and the day was saved.
On another note, T had been promising unending boring desert vistas on the drive, which I was sort of excited about because I wanted to see a desert, but it turned out not to be desert so much as unending flat treeless farm vistas. Extremely flat. We also saw lots of these signs:
"DISPOSE OF FRUIT NOW"
Hmm, why do the inhabitants of this area hate fruit so much? Maybe they are taking the Australian love of meat to the nth degree? No, T explained that in fact there are lots of fruit farms around, and they don’t want anyone carrying fruit flies in with their outsider fruit. Which also explains the graphic. Still, I enjoyed reading all the signs:
Why tomatoes and capsicums specifically? And who decided that $10,000 was not quite harsh enough?
This one made me sad.
We caught this friendly reminder as we were leaving.
We fell into their fruit-monopolizing trap and brought home some delicious local oranges. Those wily fruit farmers.
Tonight T and I went to this Trivia Night that we have been frequenting on Tuesdays since we moved here, at a pub down the street. The pub itself is sort of a nondescript Australian pub, and the crowd for trivia tends to be laid-back and friendly - usually no more than 20 people total, of ages from 25-70ish, and most of them (other than us) seem to know each other. T handles the technology/movies/Australian interest questions and I take the American/literature/history stuff. Or we try to; we’ve only won once so far, unless you count the time the quizmaster felt sorry for us and gave us a bottle of pity wine.
There is always a Play-Dough round at the end of the game, and tonight T created a very expert duck to beat out all the other teams’ ducks. A guy we didn’t know came up to us and said “If you were from a place like… if you had never seen a duck before, you would still point at that and go, ‘Duck.’” It was true.
A few weeks ago, on the other hand, I did the Play-Dough round and he told us to make a cricket bat. I basically just laughed, because the quizmaster had come up with the only version of the Australian interest question that translates into Play-Dough form. I thought of what I think cricket bats look like and I made a baseball bat, then squished it. I was worried that people would think I was obviously incredibly dumb, so I tried to make a point of saying things like “Oh, I think that looks like a cricket bat,” and “What do cricket bats look like?” in a big American accent. I was done way before everybody else and my cartoon-steamrolled baseball bat looked like a big departure from what the others had done, but no one actually had the heart to make fun of it.
Yesterday was Sunday so we mobilized ourselves and went to the Museum of Sydney. It’s basically a local history museum, and I found it to be pretty interesting. For one thing, I learned that the First Fleet involved like 11 ships. I’ve heard about the First Fleet (being the first colonization of Australia by the British) and although I obviously realize that a fleet involves more than one boat, in my mind it was sort of like a little Mayflower, just with convicts.
I didn’t want to take a picture since usually museums frown on that, but someone else on the Internet was much braver than I am.
These colonizers did not mess around.
Then we went walking around the Rocks (historical/touristy neighborhood near Circular Quay) looking for a pub to have dinner in. The markets were on, although we didn’t really browse since we did that a few weeks ago and our real mission was to find a suitable pub. But I did take a picture to capture the atmosphere - I don’t like taking pictures of crowds because I don’t want to be weird, but only two or three guys appear to be staring at me wondering why I’m taking their picture. Next time I’ll get T to pretend to stick his head in there.
Markets, the Rocks
Anyway this story has a terribly sad ending because we never found a suitable pub. Everything was either closed or else the menu didn’t really get beyond steak, sausages, hamburgers, meat pies, and fourteen other things involving meat. I’ve decided I have to put my foot down because I generally don’t enjoy eating meat and I’ve been just happening to eat a ton of it since we got here since that is about what there is to eat in a lot of situations. And I’m getting a bit “meh” about the usual alternative option at pubs, which is fish and chips. I do like fried fish, but I feel like eating a big pile of deep-fry on a regular basis is probably not the best idea.
The good thing is that occasionally, the rare place that offers veggie burgers will have this awesome kind of veggie burger that I hadn’t experienced before we got here. They are breaded and crunchy on the outside, which I suspect is probably not any healthier for you, but they are yummy. They seem to be referring to those when they say veggie burger and they always call the other kind lentil burgers (and in restaurants they weirdly always serve them with some kind of yogurt).
So we came home and ordered pizza. Pizzas here are much smaller, more like a pizza for one or two people than an entire family type thing. Everyone here always wants to talk about how hilariously huge the pizzas are in North America (people, you’re not supposed to eat the whole thing by yourself!). Also, you can’t just be like “Can I get half pepperoni half cheese” - they like to glam up the idea of pizza by only offering set combos with names, such as the “Godfather” or the “Mamma Mia” or whatever and each one has like ten things on it. Then they chop all of those things really small. At first I was not that excited about pizza here because I resented the glamorous gourmet treatment and I just wanted a plain piece of Sicilian with maybe some vegetables on it (I sacreligiously do not like the flat NY style pizza), but I’m ok with it now and ordering pizza is my new guilty pleasure. Although when I compare this pizza in my mind to even chain pizza from the US… well. Wait a minute… since when did I even care that much about pizza? Hmm.
Btw the Australian version of Domino’s hilariously offers a “7 Meats” pizza. I’m sure if they were really trying, they could have gone to Wikipedia and discovered at least three more meats to throw in there.
