P. Sherman, 42 Wallaby Way, Sydney

I spent the week after the road trip in Sydney.  I figured since I was already there I might as well skip a couple days of class (all the lectures are recorded online, anyway) and see what the city had to offer.  The simple answer: more rain.  But really, it was a pretty fun time.  Still, I like Melbourne better.

One of the ways people explain the differences between Sydney and Melbourne is by saying that Sydney is more like an American city, while Melbourne seems more European.  Sydney is bigger, for sure, but feels less diverse than Melbourne.  Being the financial and commercial capital of Australia, Sydney definitely has a more business-like personality.  But it's a pretty city, nonetheless.

Ben (and most other exchange students) lives in Coogee (pronounced kuh-jee), a suburb about 25 minutes east of the city center by bus.  He shares a 2-bedroom apartment with two other roommates.  His roommates were gone most of the time because, coincidentally, they spent the weekend in Melbourne.  The Sydney exchange experience (University of New South Wales, I should say) differs from UniMelb in that students tend to live farther away from both school and the city, which affords them a more beach-y suburban lifestyle.  In fact, Ben's apartment is only a one minute walk to the beach (Coogee beach)--the same beach that you can see from the great view out his living room window.  The drawback, of course, is that you have to take a bus pretty much everywhere if you don't want to hike many miles a day.  This is actually more typical of Australian university students in general, because many of them continue to live at home in the 'burbs throughout college.  So I guess Ben has a more Authentic location, but mine is certainly more convenient.  I should also add, and you'll hear more about this later, that the public transportation in Sydney is not great.  It works, yes, but its not very efficient.  And it's even more expensive than Melbourne.  In fact, the whole city is more expensive than Melbourne (I didn't know that was possible!).

We didn't do much on Tuesday.  I was way too tired, anyway.  I used a lot of this Sydney time to unwind and catch up on the sleep I didn't get on the road trip.


Wednesday
I slept in.  I mean, really, slept in.  Ben had class pretty much all day, so to balance things out I spent most of my day on the couch.  When I did muster up the effort to go out, it was about 3 or 4.  I hopped on the bus to the city with virtually no plan other than to walk around and see Sydney.  I like to think I have a very good sense of direction, but for some reason downtown Sydney was a little tricky to navigate, even though it's a grid.  It was hard to tell which direction I was walking.  Luckily they have information maps at the major intersections and in phone booths, so I managed.  By the time I got to the city rush hour was starting, and people were scrambling around everywhere trying to get home.  I walked through the park in the center of the city (sort of a very mini Central Park) and scoped out what things I might want to do over the next few days.

Anyways, I ended up walking all the way down to the harbor.  In fact, I ended up right in front of the Opera House, which is just as striking in person as in pictures.  Now that must have been a fun construction project!  There are a lot more cars in the Sydney CBD than in Melbourne (probably because the public transit sucks), which made walking around a bit slower.  The upside to there being more cars, though, is that there are more cars; this week I saw a Tesla Roadster, a Lamborghini, and countless other fancy rides.  I must give credit where credit is due, Australians really do like cars.

Australian Occupy movements don't seem to be making any impression--probably because the economy here is thriving

The park.

Sydney CBD at night.

Also the park...

And some more park...

It started to drizzle.  No issue, actually, because I like rain (in moderation).  I thought I would wait it out down by the harbor, or Circular Quay (pronounced key).  So I went to a little restaurant type place for happy hour specials and got this really delicious focaccia bread with olive oil and spices and sipped a beer (I was making up for lost chametz) under a canopy outside.  I watched the ferries and other boats coming in and out of the docks.  I also had a great view of the Sydney Harbor Bridge, which is lit up spectacularly at night.

My delicious happy-hour meal.

Well, I had no such luck with the rain letting up, and it started to pour.  I mean torrential rain, to the point where it wasn't even worth trying to stay dry.  I took that as my cue to head back to Coogee, and after walking around in circles for about an hour I found the right bus.

The windows on the bus were all fogged up.  On top of this, the driver does not announce the stops or anything.  This makes the travel experience a bit difficult for a newcomer; needless to say, I got off at the wrong stop.  No big deal, I figured, I'd just wait for the next one and keep going.  But when I got on the next bus, the driver started giving me a load of crap.  Noticing that I did not swipe my ticket, he called back to me "do you have a ticket?"  I tried to swipe the soggy piece of paper, but it wouldn't go in.  I went up to him and explained how I was new here and got off at the wrong stop and just wanted to keep going to Coogee.  I showed him the timestamp on my ticket to try and show him I wasn't just trying to get a free ride, but apparently there's no such thing as a transfer (or courtesy, for that matter) on the Sydney busses, and he wanted me to buy a new ticket.  But I literally had no money.  He told me I was "wasting space," which was really confusing since the bus was practically empty.  I'm not sure why it made a difference to him at all, but I guess he just wasn't having a great day.  "You can't just go have a coffee with your mate and get back on the bus," he told me.  I was going to tell him I don't drink coffee, but there was no point arguing with an angry bus driver, so I told him to just point me towards an ATM so I could get cash to buy a ticket, and he finally just drove me to the next stop and I got off.  Soaking wet and quite frustrated, I decided to just walk the rest of the way to Ben's, which look longer than I thought.  Later, Ben's roommate assured me some of the drivers are actually really nice, and my snafu was not necessarily the norm.


Thursday
I made it out a bit earlier on Thursday so I could do things before they closed.  First I went to the Australia Museum, which is a natural history museum.  The ticket was only $10 for students, and it was definitely worth it.  Most of it was pretty standard museum stuff--rocks, minerals, bugs, animals, dinosaurs, etc.--both Australian and foreign.  But the really cool part was this aboriginal art exhibit called "The Canning Stock Route."

The Canning (that's a person) Stock Route was a trail built by the settlers to transport cattle from the grazing lands.  (See wikipedia.)  Along this route the settlers encountered the aboriginals, many of whom might have never seen white people before.  As you might expect, they didn't always get along.  The art in this exhibit is made to showcase what aboriginal life was like, and tell their stories of western encounters.

[Photos of my favorites to come...]

The art was really colorful.  Each piece had a description next to it that told about the aboriginal artist and explained the story he or she was telling in the painting.  I took my time to admire a lot of them, read the descriptions and historical comments, and watch the videos about the whole gallery project.  I stayed until the museum closed, and I would have stayed longer.  Australians deserve a lot of credit for really trying to connect with their displaced native people and the issues they face instead of shoving them onto reservations and gambling at their casinos.

My next stop was the Sydney Museum of Contemporary Art down in Circular Quay.  I had read online that Thursdays they are open really late, so I made it into a nighttime activity.  I bought a big baguette at the market so I could refuel while I walked.

Some old building... not really sure.

Lamborghini Gallardo, painted just for me!

Some of the works in the MCA were really cool and provocative.  Others I just didn't understand.  Some felt really creative and original.  Others felt like the artists were trying too hard to be creative and original.  Some was brilliant.  Some was downright creepy.  Some I could really relate to, and some I couldn't.  (I'm sorry, but a little red dot inside a big blue square is not art.  That's just a mistake.)  One of the ones I really liked was this moving installation of colored cards that would flip like rolodexes.  I watched it for a long time to try and figure out exactly how the mechanisms worked (nerd, I know), and what the pattern was.  See, that's an original idea.  The majority of the pieces, though, I really didn't get.

[I'll post MCA pictures soon; maybe someone can help me figure them out?]

One of the coolest things in the MCA is a 24-hour movie.  It's basically a collage about time, stitched together from a lot of different movies.  There isn't really a plot to it (not that I could tell, at least), but the movie represents real time.  In each scene, the camera either shows a clock or someone says what time it is, and if you look down at your watch or phone that's the actual time.  So the movie is always on.  All the seats were full, so I had to sit on the floor in the back.  It's cool that you can never forget what time it is while watching it.  Many of the newer movies I recognized.  Most of the older ones I didn't, especially the black and white ones.  I wonder how many different movies they got in there.

From the museum I took the bus to meet Ben at his school for some sort of Jewish Student Society mixer at one of the pubs on campus.  (There was free pizza.)  I met some of Ben's friends, who seemed to be quite an eclectic bunch, and did my share of shmoozing, but we didn't stay that late.  It's fair to say it wasn't the most thrilling social gathering of my life, but it was nice to see Ben in his local habitat.  On the way home I helped some kids change a flat tire, which earned us a ride home as thanks.  (It's funny, I end up fixing a lot of other people's flats.  I think changing a tire needs to be part of drivers ed.)


Friday
Friday followed a similar format to Wednesday except Ben did not have school.  We lazed around most of the day until we felt like total bums and needed to go outside.  Ben took me on a walk along the coast from Coogee to Bondi, a couple suburbs over (Bondi is a really Jewish neighborhood, and it was Shabbat so we saw plenty of Jews).  It's not far from Coogee to Bondi in a straight line, but since the coast weaves in an out with cliffs and beaches, it takes a while to walk.  The scenery makes up for that, though.  Ben showed me the cliff he likes to hang out at, but sitting there started to get a bit too romantic so we pressed on.  A lot of the way is along a boardwalk, which was nice.  The sun dropped out of the sky pretty quickly, so by the time we got to Bondi it was dark.  I gotta say, this is a pretty cool place to live.

This is a one-minute walk from Ben's apartmnet..

The cliffs by Coogee beach.

I guess they just skipped on the euphemisms.

En route to Bondi at sunset.

A note on graffiti...  Apparently Sydney is very anti graffiti.  In Melbourne it's everywhere.  Not the stupid name-tagging graffiti you see in slums, but legitimate artwork that just so happens to be made with spray paint on the sides of buildings.  (You might remember that alley I talked about from Melbourne Welcome).  But in Sydney they even have signs on the busses that tell you a hotline to call to expedite graffiti removal.  Apparently Bondi beach is an exception to this rule, though, and the wall at the back of the beach is covered with incredible artwork.  As usual, some of it is dark.  Some is realistic, some futuristic.  Some is really funny.  One of the things I like about graffiti is that artists know their works won't last forever.  It will get painted over, and someone new will come along and put something else up.  It's all part of a cycle, and there's something really cool about that.

The irony of swimming with sunscreen...

Saturday
On Saturday the weather was finally nice enough to go to the beach.  Ben and I met up with Jordan and Marina (friends from high school), who are also doing exchange at UNSW.  I guess Ben doesn't really hang out with them that much, but I wanted to see them so he was happy to come along.  We caught up about our breaks--Jordan and Marina had just been in Bali, which sounded incredible--and school and stuff.

Our plan was to meet up with Jordan and Marina at a club in Kings Cross (a very swanky club-filled red light district) later that night.  But Ben and I dilly dallied too much and missed our bus.  Since they only come once an hour on weekends, we hat to wait a while so that by the time we got to Kings cross we were late.  Not wanting to pay a ridiculous cover to go to a club that late, we sort of just walked around and never ended up meeting the girls.  Kings Cross was jam packed full of beautiful [scantily clad] members of the opposite sex, so walking around was not actually the biggest disappointment.  After a bit we took a taxi home and called it a night.  I could see myself really enjoying Kings Cross, so I'll have to go back there sometime.



Sunday and Monday
Ben had rehearsal all day Sunday for some performance he's in.  I took this as an opportunity to attempt to study for my controls test which would be the day after I got back to Melbourne.  Of course, since my study habits have been dissolved by the Australian atmosphere, I didn't last long.  I probably spent more time on youtube than actually studying.  Oh, well.

I flew home Monday afternoon.  After brunch I took a taxi to the airport.  Remember my remark about the lack of airport security?  Karma, people.  This time I got selected for my first ever random search.  But it was really a joke.  All the guy did was wipe that silly bomb detector cloth on me and look inside my backpack.  No pat down.  No questions.  No nothing.  I was on my way in a minute.  You could arrive at the airport ten minutes before takeoff in Australia and still make it through quickly enough to get on your plane.  So, at about 3 PM I was back in Melbourne, with enough time to make it to my lecture, and normal life started back up again.