Sydney: All the Rest

I am a lazy blogger. This should come as a surprise to exactly no one. So in order to make the best use of our collective time, here is more or less everything that I learned about Sydney in my last 4 days there, organized as much as possible by general theme.

Lesson 1: Australia wants me dead

Well, not me personally, and maybe not dead exactly, but it certainly has come up with a myriad of fun and exciting ways to do you grievous bodily harm. All the hype is true, or at least, roughly based on the truth. For instance, and this isn’t one that they tell you about back in ‘Merica, you are taking a serious risk by walking under trees in Sydney. And no, it’s not because there’s some strange flesh-eating animal living in the trees (come to think of it, there might be, but no one told me about it and therefore I refuse to think about it) — it’s because of my old friends, the birds. They poop with the precision of an Air Force bomber, and the frequency of a rabbit with a broken sphincter. They shit everywhere. Walking under the trees is like a football drill, you dodge, you weave, you hop sideways like a manic kangaroo, and you generally feel like you’re under fire in the trenches of World War 1. I considered getting a helmet. All you hear as you walk along is the plop and splatter of steaming streams of bird dung hitting the ground. Needless to say, I quickly learned it’s better to not walk under the trees.

Then, there’s the ocean. Stunning, and deadly. One of my first days in Sydney, my friend asked me if I was one of those people who were afraid of going in the water because I might get eaten by a shark. I replied with a stout, “No,” assuring her that I knew that statistics, and it was absurd to be afraid of sharks. However, apparently my brain did not get this memo, because the first time I tried to swim out just a little ways into the incredibly calm, clear, and beautiful waters of a tiny little cove at Manly Beach, all I could hear was the “DA DUM DA DUM”  of the Jaws music playing in a loop in my head. It doesn’t help that there’s an unfortunate amount of seaweed in the water — unfortunate in that there isn’t very much, so you don’t just get used to it, but just enough that every few minutes something slimy brushes against your leg, or worse, tangles around your foot, and you leap out of the water like a seal (which is of course the worst thing you can do around an imaginary shark). Once you realize you are not, in fact, in any actual danger, you have to try to play your leaps and shouts off like you’re practicing for some new water sport, and hope none of the Australians look at you too funny. Needless to say, a 10 minute swim completely drained me, and I dragged myself back to shore like I had just finished an Iron Man. 

That night, back at the hostel, I was chatting with a new arrival in my room, an Australian woman from the middle of nowhere (at least, that’s how I understood it) , when I noticed that my feet had little red dots all over them, and were itching like crazy. I wondered aloud what it could be, and she helpfully pipe up “Sea lice.” What? Apparently, there are lice that live in the ocean, and like to take up residence in the exposed limbs of swimmers. She assured me that they couldn’t actually hurt me, but that they caused sort of an ugly rash and itched like crazy for a few days, before they died. Delightful. The next day, once the itching had subsided, I realized that it was actually just an awkward sunburn around the grains of sand that had clung to my feet. But still, I had something new to worry about, something I hadn’t even HEARD of before I came here.

The view from Taronga Zoo

That day, I went to Taronga Zoo, one of the more famous zoos around, and for good reason. It’s absolutely gorgeous, built on this steep hill across from central Sydney. It requires a peaceful and pretty ferry ride, and then legs like a mountain goat and the stamina of a Navy Seal to negotiate the hills. Taronga Zoo has taken great care to try to create natural habitats for almost all of its animals, so there are huge sweeping enclosures where if you are lucky and patient, you might see an animal. The whole thing feels rather like a safari. What I didn’t realize, however, was that in some of these enclosures, there is literally nothing between you and the animals. This seems to me somewhat overly trusting of both the animals, and the humans. I was delighted when, in the Australian Walk About section, a couple of wallabies bounced across my path. I was less delighted when I unknowingly entered an aviary and was dive bombed by some angry cockatoos. It felt like Hitchcock, and I am only slightly embarrassed to admit that I jogged hastily to the nearest exit. 

Lesson 2: Australia is weird

This can be broken down fairly easily into things I learned between the zoo, a walking tour of the city, and the Museum of Australia. 

- Platypuses (platypi?) are quite tiny, whereas wombats are enormous (and a group of them is called a wisdom, although they sort of look like hairy blocks with heads to me)

- Tasmanian devils are disappointingly small and sort of shamble around like drunken hobos

- There are didgeridoo performers all over the place, which is fantastic, don’t get me wrong, because it’s a bizarre but haunting instrument. But for some reason, they all feel the need to back their playing with these awful pre-recorded techno beats. Frequently, you’ll have two or three competing didgeridoo-ists playing in the same vicinity, which means that walking through these areas feels like walking around a very specific and confused club. 

- ‘Hotel’ in Australia can mean a hotel, as in a place where people sleep, or it can mean a bar, with absolutely no lodging other than an occasional bar stool, or, if you’re not too picky and not too sober, the floor. I feel this may be a little unnecessarily confusing.

The Demon Duck of Doom!

- Millions of years ago, after the dinosaurs but before humans, there was a 7 foot tall carnivorous bird walking around Australia, that used its sharp and lethal beak for tearing apart its prey. What did the Australians who discovered this fossil decide to name it? The Demon Duck of Doom. Absolutely brilliant.

- The first currency in the land was rum. I think this explains a lot.

- Fairly recently, some gents vandalized the Opera House with massive red graffiti protesting the war in Iraq. They were forced to pay for the cleanup, and then sentenced to some amount of prison time, but they only had to go on the weekend. They were sentenced to weekend jail. Bless you Australia.

- It is still legal to transfer livestock, on foot, over the Harbour Bridge between midnight and 5 am. No one has done it in 50 years, which makes me feel like I need some cattle and a couple volunteers to test it out. 

- There is a giant clock hanging from the ceiling of one of the busiest shopping centers/markets in downtown Sydney that every hour has a little animatronic puppet show take place inside of it, which you can see through glass windows. It’s like an attempt at recreating early-Disneyland. This animatronic show portrays scenes from British history, and culminates with a beheading, complete with bouncing puppet head and spurting animatronic blood. No one in Sydney seems to pay attention to this, or find it remarkable in any way. 

Lesson 3 - Australia is beautiful

There is just something about that harbor. Maybe I’m just a sucker for the ocean, but there’s this almost palpable magic about Sydney when you get close to the water. Myriad boats - ferries, yachts, sailboats, kayaks, ocean liners - move back and forth, the sun sparkles off the surface of the water, the hills rise green and lush above rocks and sandy beaches, the sky opens up above and it just feels like there couldn’t be a more beautiful place in the world. A few German girls and I were on the beach one day when a storm front started moving in. It was just this wall of roiling, bloated purple clouds that moved in over the hills and descended over the water. Across the bay, we could see other parts of Sydney dancing with sunlight. We hid inside a restaurant and watched as this clearly delineated mass of cloud swooped over our beach and rumbled toward the rest of the city, leaving sunshine and calm in its wake. It lasted all of 15 minutes and then the sun streamed back in, bringing back the technicolor world that seems to exist here, all the colors so impossibly bright that you feel like you’re living in a photograph.