Thought Chasm

Well… I’m back. Unfortunately. The snaps are in the usual place and I have some up on Flickr too. I’m groggy, ill-tempered and hating being at work right now. More on that in a minute. First, some finer points from the land down under, in no particular order. (Gets a bit long but I try to be brief.)

• Flight there… was great. It had all the amenities of home. (As long as you live in a small-seated movie theater with too-few-for-the-crowd portable toilets with used diapers and pools of urine.)
• Convenience stores… are surprisingly common. (Three within two blocks of where we stayed.) This may be because, despite being a massive metropolis, interweb is hard to come by. Most shops had computer kiosks for pay-per-minute use. (Culture shock!)
• Weather… was decent. It was cloudy the first few days but became sunny and hot the rest. Up to nearly 40°C (104°F) actually. (Honestly, down right uncomfortable.)
• Opera House and Harbour Bridge… are gorgeous. The House is oddly yellow but still stunning. We walked along the bridge and that was… um… exhausting. (Gorgeous views, though.)
• Sydney Tower… is nice. The views aren’t spectacular in the scenic tourist sense but they’re great nonetheless. They force you into a nauseating simulation ride afterward, touring the various parts of Australia via giant screen and hilariously bad effects, so that’s ridiculous.
• Tangora Zoo… is pretty standard. If it weren’t for the views of the harbor from a bunch of places, it’d be sort of mediocre. Tons of local animals and cool others but nothing super extraordinary.
• Sydney Aquarium… is unreal. Most of the animals are staples but they have two tanks that make it tops on my list. Both have tunnels that look into the tanks, allowing fish to swim over them. One held dugongs (hideous, endangered beasts of disgusting). The other was a sweet shark tank with manta rays, sea turtles and varied sharks and other fish. (Twas awesome.)
• Arena television… is tremendously vacuous. It’s branded the same as Bravo but has a strange mix of too much American television. (Reba, Ellen, Sex and the City, etc.) It also has a show where people are brought on and then vote off the ugliest existing cast member. (This, I imagine, goes on perpetually or until there’s a suicide.)
• Liquor pricing… is absurd. A liter of Bacardi cost almost $AU60 (≈ $38) or close to twice what it’d cost here. Also, the anti-binge-drinking ads are rough. Here’s one. (PDF)
• Obesity… is epidemic. I thought my sister was lying when she said Aussies passed us on the scale last year but it’s true. It’s probably because they’ve started to drive everywhere, watch more television and are more sedentary. (Glad that never happened in the US.)
• Oz-let… is my name for a bizarre hairstyle too many men have. In various forms, it’s basically a mullet with spikes and cropped, matted-down “bangs.” (Horrid, yet popular. Trying to understand it makes my eyes faint.) Some even buzz most their head, leaving just the partying-hard rear hair flap.
• Public transit… is fairly reliable (if not on time). But for one point where a bus, labeled as the one we wanted, took us through a couple neighborhoods west of where we wanted. The buses run on natural gas. So that’s… um… something.
• Bondi Beach, Coogee Beach… are great beaches with a path between that has more beaches and great views. Both are probably packed on weekends but we caught them on Wednesday. (Aside: Australia goes by the “topless optional” standard. Which, I assume, is one of many reasons they’re such a violent, war-hungry people, spreading their way of life across the globe through force.)
• “O’Shea”… is what I’ve named a pint of Kilkenny, topped off with a splash of Guinness. (Bonus: it was a screw up at the bar so it was free on top of being better than a standard Kilkenny.)
• Darling Harbour… is good times. It’s full of restaurants and attractions (Aquarium).
• Blue Mountains… are blue because of evaporating eucalyptus oil reflecting certain light frequencies. There are so many trees. Unbelievable really. I’d tell you how far we hiked but we’re stubbornly holding onto our useless in/ft/yd/mi system so even I don’t know.
• The Rocks… is a cool neighborhood under the Bridge. The buildings and feel seem from a different time. Because they are, probably.
• Kangaroo… is great for the environment, good for you and has a… livery? texture. Not bad but nothing I’m going to import. May be better in a steak or as a burger but the sausages went well enough with eggs and cheese.
• Flight back… was excruciating. Between 1p and 8p Saturday, we were on a plane or in an airport for twenty-five hours. We landed in LAX six hours before we left. That’s basically time travel and is havoc on the slumber system. (Still, it was better than the return from Cabo.)

All in all, there was a lot of flying, a lot of walking, a lot of fun and a lot of flying. Big thanks to the parents for their generous financial donation that made it possible. And thanks to our hosts (including my new self-appointed BFF) who tolerated double occupancy without complaint (to me).

As you may suspect after that last point, I’m exhausted and my nocturnals are tweaked. I slept eleven hours yesterday, waking at noon. Then I was awake until two-thirty before a short nap and back up again for an hour or so. Apparently, this is jet-lag.