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Nov 05 2011
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australia, books, music, travel

headphones bobbing silent in the night

The Rocks is the oldest part of Sydney. It’s out on the harbour and filled with old stone buildings from back when the colony was just starting. Now it’s all touristed up because hey, that’s where the cruise ships dock. Obviously that makes it a bit more expensive than you might like for daily shopping needs, but it’s a good special event type place. And a special event is happening there Friday nights for the next couple of weeks.

Last night we went and watched Christa Hughes belt out songs in a square and we danced at a silent disco. The silent disco was under a couple of umbrellas. There was a laptop DJ spinning tunes but instead of heading into loudspeakers they were beamed into wireless headphones. People stood around watching the dancers bob up and down to the sounds in their heads. The headphones hung on clotheslines when you were done so people could move in and out. Holly and I danced for a song then left in the middle of Hey Ya! so that others could enjoy it. It felt so selfish to dance to the music no one else could hear but as part of a project, it’s better. I like how art works sometimes.

We also wandered into an exhibit filled with elastic bands stretched around a room, but the curators/artists were too busy with their own conversation to make it at all accessible. Selah. A guy who made cufflinks out of old watches was my favourite. He had the salesmanship of selling prettied up discards down perfectly. I really wanted to buy a couple of cufflinks but I don’t have the right kind of shirts (though that’s remediable) and I’d already spent a chunk of money on myself earlier (I bought 1Q84 at Australian book prices). They’ll be back next week if I change my mind.

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Nov 03 2011
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australia, food, travel, vancouver

nigh, the way only ends can be

I’ve realized that our time in Oz is coming to an end. It was the placard-toting vigilantes that finally clued me in.

Right now the plan is that Holly goes travelling in Australia by herself for a while when she quits her job, and then heads over to New Zealand to visit Catherine, a friend we know from China. Because of my incessant and pitiful whining on the subject she’s shifted things around so I can come to NZ the day I finish work and go hiking with them on the Milford Track. I’ll only get a week in Middle Earth (and on the South Island so no trips to Hobbiton) but that’s way better than being down here and not going to visit the Canada of the south Pacific (a phrase which garners curiously few Google hits, and one of them referred to Australia).

One of the great pities of living here has been the lack of oven in our apartment. If you live with a baker, be very sure your dwelling has one. But last week, in order to make us not want to leave (or complain about the extra rooms and people being added to the place), our landlord finally gave us a small convection oven. This is what life with a baker should be. Last night we made pizza, real pizza without having to use the “covered frying pan” technique. Holly’s made biscuits and muffins and buns. She’s possibly baking cookies right now.

It’s good and inspiring, this whole “eating delicious food” thing (our whole time living together, really). It’d be difficult to go back to Vancouver and not cook better for myself, even without the prod of cooking for someone else. I’ve been thinking about that a bit because yeah, with less than a month left before I’m unemployed, my orientation is shifting back towards Vancouver. That’s how I roll, with great inertia. Things to prepare for even if you don’t know what they’ll look like. Amat Victoria Curam. I don’t know who that’d be a victory over.

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Sep 10 2011
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australia, books, food, school, travel

heading to victoria again

Tonight I get on the train to small-town Victoria again to do some training at a regional health library. Woo! Actually that’s not even a sarcastic woo, because Holly’s going to come too. She has to take an earlier train back than me so she can get to work on time (stupid-early-o-clock) but I’m going to be working anyway.

Maybe we won’t exhaust all the excitement Shepparton has to offer right away, but if we do, Holly’ll get to at least spice it up by driving. We’re renting a car and while she can legally drive here, I don’t have a license for Australia (apparently you can use your North American one for three months, which I have been here longer than).

This is sort of a warmup for December when we’re planning a bit more extensive roadtripping up to my friend Mel’s place and maybe inland a ways. I like deserts.

Other than this excitement, things are just ticking along. Holly made Chinese noodles last night that tasted very approximately like the noodles you get everywhere in Nanchong. She’s in charge of that kind of cooking – specific cooking. My technique is more “Let’s combine a bunch of stuff and see what happens” which isn’t untasty, but it’s hard to know how to make something happen.

I’m reading a bunch of SF&F books for the class I’m taking, which is a fun way to spend my time. Not that I didn’t enjoy my recent social media class, but reading about Vikings and faery and space travel and thinly veiled Christian allegories is a much nicer way to spend a Saturday.

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Aug 08 2011
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australia, food, travel, 中国

heterodoxies of the gut

Yesterday Holly and I hung out with Lee and Lisa, who you might remember from the wedding we attended in Nanchong last December (the one with all the roasted 羊肉). Part of hanging out involved heading down to the big vegetable market and buying our week’s supplies of food. Because we know how to show people a good time.

On our way back we also bought three bags of frozen jiaozi (饺子) for dinner, to go with our 豌豆 (it’s possible that’s the wrong character for wan). I love 饺子. Love them to pieces. But I’ve learned that when it comes to prepackaged 饺子 (ie ones that aren’t lovingly created by the hands of SchroederWiebeUnrauPankratzes at Xmas time) vegetarian ones are kind of lousy. So we got a variety of types, all containing meat. We fried them and they were delicious (though we need a better dipping sauce next time).

Peter was eating supper at the same time we were. He’s usually curious about what we’re cooking, asking about techniques and stuff. And he asked about the 饺子, not because he didn’t know what they were, but because “I thought you were vegetarians.” And so Holly explained my curiously arbitrary standards that aren’t very good at being standard at all.

Peter said it turned his image of me completely upside down. I guess that’s good to do sometimes, even if it means I’m not particularly orthodox a vegetarian. I’m not particularly orthodox in any of the rest of my definitions either.

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Jul 31 2011
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australia, travel, vancouver

gallivanting on train and bike

On Saturday I got to go on an adventure. Holly needs a bike to get to work. It’s a half-hour walk that’s really crappy at the end of a twelve-hour day running around a kitchen lifting 20kilos of butter at a time, smashing your fingers under said butter and getting yelled at/needing to dodge the occasional cupcake being thrown by the chef. (I’m leaving out the story about the panicky bike-borrowing that happened this week, because I’m not sure if she’s got it in her queue of blog posts.)

So she went on Gumtree and found a used bike for a decent price. You can get a new bike from KMart for less, but she wanted a bike that was actually going to be good to ride, that was light and fast. Having bought such a bike in Vancouver last fall, I know what she means.

Anyway, this bike was out in Woolooware, across Botany Bay from where we live (yes, that Botany Bay), so I took a couple hours from my Saturday to take the train out there. I like how these suburban trains work here. If you live in a little town like Woolooware you’re still only half an hour from downtown Sydney. I don’t know if that’s what it’s like on the Go Train in Toronto, but this feels even more extensive than Vancouver’s Skytrain network.

I got to Woolooware and phoned the guy to get directions through the town to his house. Now, we have trouble with Australian accents, Holly and I. I especially find it difficult when it comes to names, since you can’t necessarily just figure it out from the context when there’s a word you don’t get. Case in point: Woolooware is down the Illawara Line though Holly’s best guess was Yellow Wire. We just looked at a map until we could piece something sensible together and happily it worked. For getting to the guy’s house I knew his street had a F in the middle and vowel sounds on either side. Maybe an R in there somewhere. It took a bit of getting lost but eventually I made it to Alfred street and went “That makes sense!”

I brought the bike back to Central Station on the train and then rode it home from there. My first time riding on the left hand side of the street. I remembered to be in the left lane, but I kept on trying to hug the right hand side of it. It was a little hard on my nerves but I got the bike home safely, and missed my bike back in Van City (but not that hill up to UBC).

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Jun 28 2011
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australia, travel, vancouver, winnipeg

gippsland droogs

Bairnsdale is a small town. I didn’t mind it much, though it has its oddities. I suppose places without droogs on the prowl have Milk Bars, but I really liked how one of Bairnsdale’s (I saw two) had a sign twice as big as the name of the place saying “We Sell Milk.” Just so you didn’t think there was anything tricksy about the name.

After our first session one of the librarians took me out for a little drive down to Paynesville. That is not a cacophemism, but a retirement village for yachters.

I didn’t realize how close we are to the ocean here, but Gippsland has a bunch of lakes that are just barely separated from the ocean (I suppose it’s technically a strait of some kind between Victoria and Tasmania maybe – I don’t have a map accessible while I’m offline typing this) by a forested sandbar. The librarian said they used to be freshwater but when an opening was created to the sea it turned everything a bit more brackish throughout the floodplain.

In Paynesville they’ve dug out canals through the poshest residential areas so that everyone can have backyard access to their boats. It was nicer than I expected, thinking of Dexter episodes (that takes place in some grubby part of Florida with those kinds of things right?).

We drove back into Bairnsdale as the sun was setting and the sky was just huge. I do kind of feel a bit of prairie nostalgia when I see a big sunset like that. Though the gum trees made different enough silhouettes to keep it foreign.

One of the librarians has a thirty-year-old nephew who’s going to Estonia on his first trip out of Australia next month. I think Estonia is an awesome first foreign country to visit. Way better than for him to just go to Canada or something boring and safe. She says her nephew’s bringing too much luggage. This came about because today I brought my bag to the library with me so I could go straight to the train station after we finished up our session.

I realized the other day that by the time we leave Australia I’ll have lived in Sydney longer than in Vancouver (and Holly’s going to live in three foreign-to-her countries between this June and next). I’d thought before coming here that I’d identify Vancouver as home when asked, but I tend to tell people I live in Vancouver and am from a place they haven’t heard of. I don’t have a depth of knowledge about Vancouver to pass on to curious people. And while my Winnipeg knowledge isn’t particularly deep it’s still an easier place to tell stories of and make it sound exotic.

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Jun 26 2011
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australia, travel

bairnsdale the first

I maintain my love of sleeper trains, but even the Melbourne-Bairnsdale bus today was pretty good. What the busride had over the trainride was its daylight hours, so I could actually expect the Australia rolling past me.

I keep having to remind myself that it’s winter here, since everything is so green. Rural Victoria (at least in the Gippsland direction) looks like a lot of dairy and sheep farms. It’s kind of hilly (in a way more bulbous than rolling) and off in the distance are mountainish looking things.

There was a weird stretch where there were these erratic dead, branchless tress studding the fields like bones in compound fractures. It was kind of ominous, but fairly localized.

I like how the trees are different from North American trees. You see a clump of trees in a field and that’s fine and then when you pass close by it’s like no northern tree you’d care to think of, all made of ropes entwined on itself. When I was out walking I thought about how knowing more about plants would probably get me amazed at the differences in the ground cover and grasses and all that too. But trees are big enough to be noticeable.

Bairnsdale is a small town and my motel is about a mile from the train station and town square. This is because of a mixup in the recommendation process wherein someone thought a restaurant was a hotel (well, it is called a hotel but that doesn’t seem to mean anything about lodging here) and quoted us the price of the motel with the one-letter-off name. When we couldn’t book a room at the restaurant we assumed the recommender had mistyped the name, rather than that she was recommending I sleep in a restaurant.

It’s not a bad little town. I had all of Sunday afternoon to wander around. There’s a village and a really tall-spired church and not much is open past 2pm on a Sunday afternoon.

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Jun 24 2011
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australia, games, library, travel, 中国

travel days ahead

I’m heading off to scenic Gippsland, Victoria tomorrow for some Koha training. I was talking to Sean the other day about how weird small businesses are. I mean, these librarians are paying for me to go out and teach them about this software I’ve only been using since April. I feel like at a lot of places I’d have needed more training than I have had (which is actually pretty extensive since I’m helping people with their Koha problems all day). Whatever works, I guess. And it means I get to see more of Oz while I’m here.

I’ve been pretty bad about going out to see stuff recently. A lot of hunkering down here in front of the internet. My friend Jamie is off to do his practicum in London (the real one) and got scolded by another of our classmates for solving internet puzzles while he’s supposed to be on vacation. But dude, I completely get that. I’ve been spending far too much time planning out Blood Bowl teams (speaking of which, I found an unofficial Blood Bowl client for playing online which almost works completely well apart from me not being able to simply stand up prone players – let me know if you’re interested in playing).

Of course, a week from today all of that will change since that’s when Holly arrives from China. I’ll engage in a tiny bit of understatement to say I’m looking forward to being in the same city as her, especially without an end-date.

Finally, if you miss my voice, you can now listen to me read Firing Squad, my Machine of Death story whenever you want. Though the magic of reading (and recording) it’s my voice without my innumerable hesitations, filler words and false starts that litter my real speech pattern, so it’s probably more pleasurable in every possible way. You can pump that story through your speakers and pity the poor shmucks who have to deal with me speaking without a script at them.

Like the librarians in Gippsdale next week.

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Jun 20 2011
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australia, games, sports, travel

i have (a few, weakly-held) opinions about sports

One of the things that I enjoy about living in different places is the difference in sports people play/watch. I guess it’s because sports are kind of like games (which I love) except they require more physical effort than I’m willing to engage in most of the time. I can take a bit of an interest in what people do to satisfy their practical day to day needs, but what I get excited about is the pointless shit people pour themselves into like inventing people and having them converse, or painting little pieces of plastic and using other pieces of plastic to determine whether awesome or terrible stuff happened to the first pieces of plastic, or whether one group of people can get an object to a place while another group of people tries to prevent that. That shit is gold.

Rugby is big here. So far I missed game one of the big NSW vs Queensland Rugby Union grudge match (State of Origin) through my own forgetfulness. NSW, where I live, lost, so maybe the next one will have even more riding on it? That’s Rugby Union, which is actually less popular. Rugby League has the big pro league. There are a tonne of teams just from Sydney it seems. Technically I think I live in Rabbitohs territory but a case could be made for me being a Wests [sic] Tigers supporter.

When I turn on my TV every once in a while the game I see most though is Aussie Rules Football, which is kind of awesome. I’d tried to learn a bit about rugby many years ago for Tri-Nations (that’s union), so I had a bit of a grasp of how the game worked. Aussie Rules is crazy awesome. They’re allowed forward passes but you can’t throw the ball, only kick or hit it with your fist. If you catch the ball cleanly in the air you get a free kick from the spot you caught it. The point is to get the ball between two narrow uprights for 6(?) points or two wider ones for 1. It’s on a round field and they’re just running all the time. It reminds me more of something like Ultimate than football or rugby, really.

And then there’s netball. This is like basketball except there’s no dribbling: when you catch the ball you have to stay there and throw it. There’re also no backboards to the nets (which are a bit lower than basketball I think) so you’ve basically got to be right under it to score. It’s always women playing it on TV, so I imagine it’s not deemed the most masculine of sports.

There is a baseball league but it’s a summer sport so I haven’t seen it yet. I’ll probably drag Holly to a game in November so I can come home with a Sydney Blue Sox hat.

Woo. Sport in Australia. I thought about doing this half-assed summary because Sean (who got me into blogging so many years ago) is doing some great work with his Bastard Bomber Fans blog. It’s about CFL football, and the Blue Bombers in particular, and is exactly the kind of thing Sean should be writing. Dude knows his football, and cares about it too. And reading his analyses after the fact means I don’t have to feel bad about asking dumb questions or stating obvious things to try and appear like I know what’s going on during the game. As in all games throughout history, everybody wins!

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Jun 13 2011
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australia, food, travel

in the line of duty

On Friday I demonstrated how I am my mother’s son and managed to trip over nothing as I was crossing a street. The traffic was stopped at the light so everyone had a good view of me standing and then hitting the ground.

Unlike when my mom does these sorts of things I came out of it with only one injury, a knee that does not enjoy bending or being knelt on. It’s winter here so I was wearing my protective leathers, otherwise my elbows, shoulder and a good chunk of my back would be scraped all to hell through my dramatic rolling technique I perfected in grade 6 telling violent stories to kindergarteners.

The long-weekend here’s been pretty rainy and bleah, so I didn’t feel the need to go out putting stress on my tender knee until this morning when I went to wrok and discovered it is a long-weekend. I hung out, had coffee and wrote a book review at the office while I waited for it to stop raining.

I appreciate the fact that we have an espresso machine at work with company coffee so I don’t have to spend my own money on caffeination. When Holly arrives (in less than 3 weeks!) she might be bringing her fancy tea ceremony paraphernalia she’s been learning about. Which will be pretty cool, but we’ll still probably have to start buying coffee.

Possibly next week or the week after I might be sent out to the wilds of Victoria to teach some librarians about using Koha. I’ve never been on a business trip before, and I get to take the train! We were pricing it out on Friday and it’s all “First-Class sleeper” this and “hotel and food money” that, which is much more fun than the ordeal we went through getting Holly flights to Sydney and Vancouver.

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