Is it Friday?

Ed. note: Dad and I wrote our own versions of the past two days in Port Douglas, Queensland. Below is his version, the previous post is mine. 

One of the real advantages of taking a long vacation in a foreign country is that I do not have a watch, my cell phone doesn't function as a phone or a clock (just a camera), my tablet is good only for reading pre downloaded books, not surfing the internet and best of all, I have Michelle to take care of knowing anything that might be necessary like time, directions and date.  If you do not need to be anywhere then you can never be late.  I have become so laid back that earlier today I asked Michelle, “Is it Friday?”

Which side are we on?

Dad and I just returned from two and a half days and at least 300 kilometers driven. Most recently, we had a late lunch in a restaurant on stilts, where I felt like a tree kanragoo while eating – we were so high up in the trees! Although they don’t normally eat Caesar salad from tables covered with white cloths, so there is a significant difference there.

Yes, a tree kangaroo is a real animal, and it is native to the rainforest in Far North Queensland, where we have spent the past few days driving around, sweating, getting rained on, and eating. Dad wanted to see the Great Barrier Reef during his visit, so I decided that we were going to visit the rainforest as a contrast to my earlier visit to the Outback.

Guest post: Climbing the Bridge

One of the activities that has been on my bucket list is climbing the Sydney Harbor Bridge.  Getting to Australia certainly made it easier to accomplish.  (Although until the Jack Nicholson, Morgan Freeman movie came out I am not sure I ever had a bucket list.)  We made reservations a week or two ago, although I have taken poetic license using the term we.  Thank you Michelle!!! 

The weather here in Sydney has left something to be desired.  That something that is missing is the big yellow thing in the sky of the northern hemisphere that is called the sun.  Since I arrived it has been cool, windy, cloudy and drizzly.   Our bridge climb was scheduled for twilight Sunday so we would be on top of the bridge both in daylight and at night when the city was all lit up. We awoke on Sunday and the drizzle had been replaced by rain.  We both wondered if the bridge climb would be spoiled or cancelled by the weather.  During the day we wandered over to the Glebe Street fair (not Glee.) Nice street and most of the time the rain abated.  Later in the afternoon we made our way to the Australian Museum of Contemporary Art.  The drawing card was the new Yoko Ono exhibition, “Stop the War.”:  Very interesting and moving.  The exhibit was virtually all in black and white.  Image a chess board only in white and with the pieces on both sides only in white.  Which bishop is mine?  Am I on the right square?

 At the appointed time, we made our way to the Bridge Climb entrance.  Our group of climbers was about 11 people.  About half Australian and half from the U.S. including a couple from Boston where the wife was the climber and the husband stayed with his feet firmly planted on the ground. (Fear of heights he claimed) We dressed in what I can only describe as space suits.  They were full length cloth suits in blue and gray that zipped from the back and had attachments and clips everywhere.  A clip for the gloves, one for the hat: another for the radio (communication not entertainment): clips for glasses, one for a wiping cloth (handkerchief).  Oh, and yes a harness to clip each climber to the bridge.  There was a practice area where we learned to climb stairs and ladders while keeping 3 points connected at all times. (2 hands and a foot or 2 feet and one hand.)  All this as you were tethered to the bridge.

Soon we were ready for the climb.  Climb is a misnomer.  Mostly there are steps, stairs and a couple of ladders.  You often were ducking under low hanging beams or stepping over a girder.  Remember, this is a bridge.  After about 30 minutes of “climbing,” we found ourselves on the exterior of the curved arch of the bridge overlooking the harbor and the city of Sydney.  Spectacular view even though it was dusk and overcast.  The leader kept up a running commentary through the radio system, although sometimes she would warn us of a low hanging beam when we were 50 yards behind.  Every now and again we would stop to catch our breath, let stragglers catch up, take photos (they took all photos, we were not allowed to have cameras on the climb) and just admire the beauty of the city.  Viewing the Opera House lit up a night from a height of 140 meters is a vision I will never forget.

And then the rains came.  Here we are atop the longest arch bridge in the world and it starts raining.  No shelter, no umbrella, just a steady downpour.  If we look like drowned birds in some of the photos, you know why.  You climb up one arch cross over the bridge to the other arch and then climb back down.  From start to finish the climbing takes about 2 hours.  OK climbing takes 1 ½ hours and photos take the other 30 minutes.

One bucket list item down, many more to go.

Guest Post: Dad's first impressions

Ed. note: Dad landed on Friday morning, and has been a true trooper (trust me, this is not the worst alliteration you will read in this post) and hasn't shown many signs of jet lag yet. Here are his first impressions, in his own words, unedited. 

Since Michelle has been remiss regarding her Blog from Australia, today you get the perspective of a guest blogger.  That’s right, dear old Dad, aka Stephen, aka Papa Brodes is in the land down under bringing you new perspectives and probably more really bad puns.

Meetings

I'm currently laying in an extremely fluffy bed in Melbourne, so if this post ends in a trail of zzzzzzzzzzs, it's because I've fallen asleep.

On Sunday Katrina and I flew in together. I so rarely take plane rides with other people these days that it was a treat to have a buddy on the ride. We flew Virgin, and entered through the back door up the steps, which is not strange. What I did find strange, though, was that passengers entering through the front door accessed the door through the jetway, rather than the tarmac/stairs combo. I'd never seen one entrance through the jetway and one on the tarmac before.

Sunday night part of the team went out to dinner at Tax, a restaurant overlooking the train station. I had some delicious rabbit and then headed to bed - I have pictures of both the rabbit and the view out over the city but I am too lazy to upload them right now.

This morning I went for a run. I forgot my sneakers in Sydney, but luckily the Westin offers shoes to guests through a partnership with New Balance. I left my camera at the hotel, but I took a beautiful route along the water. The bridges all had sculptures and the architecture here is just beautiful, so I will probably have to do it again with my camera before I return the shoes.

For dinner tonight we took a taxi out to a beach suburb and ate dinner at this beautiful oceanfront restaurant. For some reasons the bathrooms in Australia don't make sense to me - I walked into the men's toilet tonight and have done that multiple times since being here. They just don't seem to be clearly marked. For example, tonight's bathroom didn't have any words or pictures depicting men or women. The men's was blue and the women's was pink, I found out. Thankfully nothing embarrassing has happened yet, although one guy did say to me, "um, this is the men's." If that's the case, where's the sign?

Desk views

I've finally been home long enough that I've set up and organized my desk, and it's no longer a mess of cords and filled up by my printer. It still has a few too many cords and stuff, but I don't have a good way yet to get rid of them. I also don't really have a good filing system because the desk doesn't have any drawers. It was free, though, so that's a major plus and kind of outweighs the fact that I lack drawers.

Drumroll please.

Haircuts and Bushfires and Noodles and Mishaps

To clarify, I did not receive a haircut from the bushfire. And thankfully I've not really been affected, although you can feel the smoke in the air. There have been quite a few other mishaps this week, though.

Yesterday I did get a haircut (or all of them cut, if you want to make a dad joke) from a local place by my house. It'd been a while since my last one and after traveling for three straight weeks I decided it was time to clean up a bit. There's a shopping centre not too far from where I live, so I wandered over and made an appointment for lunch time yesterday.

Bright spots

Today has actually sucked: my water's been turned off so I couldn't do all my smelly laundry from the trip, Australia Post jacked up their postcard prices on me, and a whole host of other things happened. However, there was a huge bright spot in my day... it's the sun! Yesterday rained but today it's bright and sunny.

Just kidding. I mean, it is sunny, but that wasn't the bright spot today. It came in my mailbox.

I absolutely love the mail and it sometimes going to the mailbox is my favorite part of my day. Today was special because it marked the first mail I received in Australia.*

Check out this sweet stamp? How much does one of these cost?

Outback

The Northern Territory, where I spent the past five days, covers a huge amount of land, much of which is dry, dusty, and sparsely populated – the Outback.

Did you know the outback has trees? 

To get there, you either drive a long, long, long time, or you take the one train that runs north to south through the middle of Australia along the telegraph route, which was the original reason Alice Springs got started as a town. It sits almost directly between Darwin at the Top End of Australia and Adelaide in the south (now is the time where you find Alice Springs on google earth and see that is in the middle of the country). The telegraph line went up through Indonesia and across Asia and the Middle East to Europe, cutting the time needed to send a message to or from London to about three days, compared with mailing a letter on a ship and waiting months for news.

An Outback Sneak Peek

Full report coming soon - I am planning to write it up on the plane back to Sydney. Thank you for the support you've shown: it's lovely to get emails saying, "Hey, I really missed your blog and I'm excited to read about the things you do," because it serves as motivation to write more. Even when my mother leaves me voicemails in the middle of the nights to the effect of, "I really encourage you to write about your trip!"

In the meantime, here is a photo of Kata Tjuta, where you can see the effect of the sun's movement on the color of the rocks. Click to enlarge.

Back in action

It’s been an inexcusably long time between posts. In fact, it’s been so long that my grandparents have emailed me to shame me into writing again. When my grandparents use the computer, they mean business.

I’m happy to report I’ve done too many thing in the past month for a full rundown. Here are some of the highlights:

Costumes and electric adventures

I think I missed the memo somewhere that 18th September is Halloween in Australia*. On my morning run I stumbled upon this:

The Weekend

It's officially Tuesday night, which means I have time to write about the weekend! It absolutely poured here which was been great for my productivity - I didn't left the house, or want to, at all. Today the sun came out again so I went out to run a few errands (read: get a smoothie. And then run some errands. Sample errand: buy tape)

The Jewish day of atonement, Yom Kippur, occurred on Friday night and Saturday, so I had a relatively low key weekend. I'd been introduced to some extended family friends who graciously hosted me for services on Saturday and the break fast that evening, and I ended up spending quite a bit of time with them over the weekend.

Yankees/Sox

In honor of the late season, Sunday night Yankees-Red Sox game I'm currently missing (since it's Monday morning and I'm working), I thought this would be a good time to reveal my cap count.

Australian Slang

In the first of what I anticipate to be at least a few posts on Australian slang, I wanted to introduce you all to a some words and phrases I've learned since coming down under. These are all things that real Australians say.

G'day mate = we're starting with the easy ones here. This translates to "hello, friend!"

Oz = Australia

big unit = this means a large, stocky, or otherwise solidly built person. Normally it's a man but it can also refer to a woman.

"Cold"

I'd planned on going on an adventure tonight, or at least leaving my apartment to get some dinner. Then at some point this evening a wind storm started. I'm not quite sure when it started, and it's beautiful to watch the treetops sway, but it's also pretty loud and it's making my room quite cold. It's killing my motivation a bit to get outside, so I made some tea instead and decided to write this. Sadly, "cold" here is 59 degrees F. I think my blood thinned somewhere along the way.

Up until whenever this started, today was beautiful. I was up for a 7 am call with DC, and surprised the person on the other end of the phone by letting him know it was already Thursday here.

Great Ocean Road

I just got back from a delicious "modern Australian" dinner with a few colleagues, which is my excuse for why this post might have more pictures than words. As far as I can tell, "mod oz" cuisine basically means "Western food with a lot more Asian influence than normal," or "pretty similar to everything served in San Francisco except without the delicious tacos." But on to the road.

Like I mentioned in an earlier post, Katrina picked me up at my hostel and we set out for the Great Ocean Road. This is a stretch of highway that hugs the coast and gets somewhere eventually, but mostly is just fun to drive and is on a cliff overlooking an ocean, meaning that it's a tiny winding strip of land with a guard rail to prevent you from plowing into the water. In other words, the perfect place to start learning how to drive on the left side of the road!

She drove most of the way from Melbourne to Lorne, a sleepy beach town that was pretty dead in the middle of winter. Just before we got on the beginning of the Great Ocean Road we stopped the car to take a few pictures and generally bask in the road, the water, and the light. Then we switched and I drove the last hour to Lorne up gently curving roads.

We had some dinner on Lorne's one road with commercial activity, and turned in early in anticipation of this sunrise:

I don't think seeing the sun come up over the Pacific is going to get old any time soon.

Sneak peak: the Great Ocean Road

 Spoiler alert: I drove on the left side of the road and didn't crash. Wish me luck tomorrow when it continues to get curvier.

Not a half bad view.

First Impressions: Melbourne

Before I left, a lovely Canadian told me "Sydney is like LA, and Melbourne is the San Francisco of Australia." So far this description, or at least the latter half, has proven accurate.

The approach over Melbourne is pretty fantastic - not as breathtaking as the descent over Sydney, but also not directly comparable since this was as night. The cab ride to the city started the art show - the bridges have a uniquely artistic quality to them, and everything seemed to be lit up like an exhibit. The highway also had a huge tunnel-like structure that reminded me of the Bird's Nest stadium from the Beijing Olympics. I couldn't figure out the purpose, so chalked it up, again, to art.

It's got a bunch of buildings with funky architecture, like this.

Flying in Australia

Quick Qantas focused post before I hop on a plane and jet to Melbourne - my first trip here!

I was delirious and bleary eyed the last time I came to the airport, so the only things I saw in the international terminal were the face scanners to get you into the country. I saw them twice (refer to this post if you're confused) but they weren't really cool enough to warrant mentioning.

I knocked off work at five, after a busy, stressful, but very productive week. After my 15 minute ride in rush hour traffic to the airport (during which my cabbie asked me who I was going to vote for in the prime minister election tomorrow - did you voting is compulsory in Australia? Now you do. I actually had a whole post planned about the strangeness of being in another country during an election season and not having any of the background to decipher the press reports, but it looks like I couldn't pull it together in time to be relevant), I breezed into the domestic terminal and checked in for my flight.

To find my reservation I had a choice of using a bunch of traditional methods (card, booking number, passport) but I chose "use your name" because it was such a novel concept. Apparently with only 24 million people, airlines aren't worries about passengers with the same name traveling on the same day. I'd booked a 7:30 departure, but the computer asked me if I'd like to change my flight to the 6:30 departure. Why not? It was 5:15.

I then checked my rolling bag because I just didn't want to deal with it, so the lovely computer printed out a baggage tag, then spit out my boarding pass (after warning me my new flight might not have a catered dinner for me because I was a "late change"). I walked over to the baggage drop point, scanned my boarding pass and sent my luggage into the dark tunnel.

Security took exactly one minute (no one looked at my ID the entire time), so I was left with a lot of time to explore Sydney's Terminal 3. Qantas has a museum here, but unfortunately it was closed. I settled for trying "cheese and bacon balls" and tasting some wine. I also bought a new mini-notebook and chatted with the saleslady - we have the same wallet.

Time to board!