quicko: the ABC

The Australian Broadcasting Corporation.  I don't think it actually comes in at my place (the TV is a confusing machine, full of complexity and ambiguity.  I generally let it show me whatever it wants, but if it's not Big Bang Theory I turn it off.), but it's one of those channels I think I'd actually watch a bit of if I could find it.  It's kind of along the lines of PBS, but without such an emphasis on kids.  Or maybe it does cater to them during the day, I wouldn't really know ...

update: the fringe

The Sydney Fringe is just finishing up now and I went to see my second, yet final, show of the season.  It was a showcase of 8 stand-up comedians and was pretty funny.  There was the standard smattering of smut, but some pretty genuinely funny stuff, too.  I'd recommend it ... but I'm pretty sure it's over now.  Sorry.

(Oh, and incidentally:  there were 53 (53!!) different offerings on at the Fringe today.  Isn't that amazing?  On this one given day, I could literally have chosen from 53 different shows.  Not bad, Sydney.  Not bad at all.)

photos: manly jazz festival

quicko: help, i'm a tourist in sydney*

First off, this really isn't a problem.  In fact, it's a ridiculously good thing.  Let me help.

The most important stuff:
--the Opera House
--walk across the harbour bridge
--walk from Bondi to Coogee
--Watson's Bay
--ferry to Manly, then:
     --hang out in Manly (easy adventure)
     --walk to Shelly Beach (reasonable adventure)
     --walk to the Spit (harder adventure)

If you have enough time:
--add in a day trip to Palm Beach/the other northern beaches -- spectacularly beautiful beaches
--the Blue Mountains -- if you're a mountains person
--Featherdale Wildlife Park -- you can pet the koalas and let the kangaroos eat right out of your hand
--Taronga Zoo -- the most scenic zoo I've ever been too
--Royal National Park -- beautiful scenery
--Cremorne Point -- swim in the harbour pool!
--Cronulla Beach -- the Manly of the south side
--whatever current festival/event is on

*Again, this post is for my mother's friends.  Regular readers, please bear with us.  Mother's friends, please enjoy Sydney :)

update: bus bloopers

These are pretty much just par for the course, but they seem to be happening to me a bit lately, so just for the record:

--You can JUST miss the bus and know it.  For instance, you're walking up to the stand from the direction it's going to be going and it flies right past you.

--Alternatively, you can JUST miss the bus and not know it.  This one is a more devious option.  There you can be sitting, safe in the assurance that you're two minutes early, thinking that your bus is just running a few minutes late and will be here momentarily.  It's when it's been about 15 minutes, though, that you start thinking, actually, that bus must have been three minutes early.  And thus you wait a full half hour for the next scheduled one to come.  Cruel and unusual punishment!!  Particularly when you are transporting milk and in the afternoon sun.

quicko: peroxide

Growing up, peroxide was always my family's first line of defense against infection, but here no one seems to think twice of it.  Particularly the medical professionals I'm friends with.  I explain to them how I've sustained a minor injury and put peroxide on it (peroxide that I bought when I was home in America) and they go, oh, yeah, well, okay, if you feel like it I guess it won't hurt.  This is peroxide!  The mighty warrior of the medical cabinet!  It cures ... well, everything, right?  How the average bathroom here doesn't stock it is utterly beyond me -- what do people use??

quicko: hungry jack's

Mondays have been really tough lately ... tougher than usual Mondays, for various reasons.  It isn't exactly the fact that they're Mondays, more that the wrong things keep happening on them.  Plus they are Mondays.  They're rather wreaking havoc in my life, which is my best excuse for why I've been eating so utterly poorly on them.  Looking back, I meant to write this post three weeks ago now, which means I've had a succession of 4 pretty rotten Mondays.  Well, I mean, I suppose it's all relative, but rotten for me.

The first one was so bad, though, that I had Hungry Jack's.  I must point out, I've been in Australia for over four years and it was my first time.  Surely that's saying something.  It all came down to bad timing, really.  I had somewhere to be at 5:30 that was going to eat up my evening solidly through to 10.  Having just caught up with a friend earlier in the afternoon, I was persuaded to give it a try.  It's nothing I'll be inclined to try twice.

I can't really remember what happened on the Monday after that (it must have been a shocker though) and the next on I had had such a rough day (gosh, what is happening me?!) I split a KFC meal with another friend.  Today it was leftover pizza and a candy bar.

Gosh, I really hope the rest of the week is better.  Salads and celery here on out ...

photos: the races!

This afternoon Kiril and I went to the races at Randwick Racecourse.  We saw three races, though my highlight was two little girls coming up to me just to say, "you look so pretty!"  Aww, shucks.  Go ahead and make my day :)

 

photos: breakfast with the cockatoos

photos: balmoral beach

Slow news day, guys.  Here's some pictures of Balmoral to tide you over.

bard about town

I'm terribly sorry, but it seems I've forgotten to tell you that the Sydney Fringe Festival is now on.  In fact, it's been on for a couple weeks, but, thankfully, all is not lost:  it continues through the end of September, roughly.  (Oh, go google your own information for once!)

Anyway, I went to see an hour-long play called Bard to the Bone last night.  I'd had a pretty difficult time choosing something to see, mostly because the program is so amazingly, incredibly, ridiculously huge.  I'd go to the website and just be overwhelmed with the number of offerings.  Friday night, however, I managed to step up to the task and found things slightly more reasonable if I only looked at Friday's offerings, of which there were still about ... well, I never actually made it to the end of the page, but I'm going to guess about 20 or 30.

I was also, as per usual, getting a rather late start to the evening, so could pretty much only do things that came after 8:30 pm, which cut it down probably by half.  Then I needed a theatre in a reasonable location, prices that weren't outrageous and, ah yes, something that I was actually interested in seeing.  So when a Shakespearean comedy something-or-other popped up for 9 pm in Newtown at $10, I stopped looking.  It was also at that precise moment that my phone rang, but I suppose that's rather beside the point.

Anyway, in the time it had taken me to sort out the evening, my friend had taken it upon himself to come from the city to Neutral Bay to find me, in what would have been a very helpful gesture had I found a play in, say, Dee Why.  Unfortunately, the Fringe is not happening in Dee Why, but Newtown, which, if you're unfamiliar with Sydney's geography, would be sending him back precisely the way he came.

Feeling it would be inhospitable to mention this once he was already on the bus, I allowed myself to be persuaded to make a stop at the Oaks, Neutral Bay's landmark pub, where I discovered the (outrageously overpriced) pavlova is actually quite amazing.  When I'd finished the pavlova, I mentioned that, incidentally, there was this great show on tonight we could go to.  As the only other option on the table was a gay bar (I'll leave you to work out whose idea that was), I pushed quite hard for the whole cultured Shakespearean show, pointing out that, frankly, it would serve pretty much the same purpose.

In the end, he was persuaded, and, after calling to make sure it wasn't sold out an hour before the show, we (risking life and limb) tore across traffic to catch the last M30 of the evening that would take us all the way to Newtown.  Once at our theatre, we bought tickets and actually had half an hour to spare, during which time I found a hard copy of the fringe shows and spent ten minutes combing through crossing out the ones that had already finished for the season so that I could maybe, maybe find one or two others to go to before the end of the month.  The major failing, unfortunately, of the program is that no where does it categorize by day.  It's only topical, which is lovely in one regard, but a bit distressing as it leaves you, as I said, to do all the hard work of Xing out dates on your own.

Perhaps though you'd like to hear about the play itself?  I had a moment of panic before going in that potentially it was going to be a one-man show.  It suddenly dawned on me that for all the promotional material for this one I'd only seen one face, and I really dislike one-man shows.  Thankfully, though, it wasn't.  Seeing as I'd been in such a rush to find the show, I really hadn't paid very close attention to anything it said after "Bard" and "comedy," which left my friend and I both surprised to discover it really wasn't anything Shakespearean at all, but an improv comedy show of an hour that took one idea from the audience (zookeeper, in our case) and turned it into a huge, elaborate story improv-ed in Shakespearean style.  Sure, there was the odd throw back to Romeo and Juliet, but it was most definitely a new creation of a show.  I really did like it -- it was four actors and a pianist and they all did an excellent job.  It was funny, imaginative and full of memorable characters.  Not at all a bad night out for $10.

As concerned as we'd been about getting tickets -- we needn't have worried.  My theory is that the Fringe has spread itself a bit too thin this year and Newtown is absolutely saturated with theatre, comedy, circus, burlesque and who knows what else.  There's just a few too many choices for people to actually get to as many as they might like to.  I don't think our house was even half full, which was disappointing for the actors, but did mean we got front-row seats, which was pretty fun.

All in all, it was a great night at the Fringe -- and, did I mention, there's still time.  Get out there and see something before it's over!  It's well worth the trip.  But yeah.  You're on your own to figure out the details this time.  Break a leg.

quicko: to u or not to u

It was recently pointed out to me that, while there are many words that require a superfluous "u" in British and Australian English (colour, honour, favourite, etc.), there is at least one (and probably various other) notable exception that does not:  author.  Why is it not authour here?

quicko: talk like a pirate day

Ahoy me hearties!!  Today be the day fer talkin' like pirates, ye scurvy scallywags.  Th' folk down under don't be so big on it as th' Yanks, but Cap'n Calico Bess 'ere did what she could to bring a bit o piracy to these parts.  Arrr!!

quicko: word map!

Whoa, guys, this is seriously cool:  an Australian language word map.  (It so pays to be an English teacher!  Not financially, obviously ...)

It's not the most user-friendly map on the internet, but it's pretty exciting -- it's all about the different regional vocabulary uses in Australia.  You can search alphabetically or by region.  To give you the first example that caught my eye -- in the Sydney region (helpfully labeled #1 on the map), "American" refers to a special, 3-colored marble.  Not that I've ever actually heard that here, but there you go.  Seeing as my grandpa collects such marbles, I'm prepared to say it's highly accurate in etymology.

And Garry, if you're reading -- not one, not two, but three definitions of your very name!  Four if you count GaryWithOneR (but who does that?!).

quicko: "the missus"

At first I thought this was a bit of an idiosyncratic language use by ... someone I was very glad to have absolutely no relation to whatsoever.  But I've heard it a few more times recently from various sources and, despite exhibiting absolutely no compunction over their use of the phrase, the other thing that I've learned from the guilty males is that (this just rubs salt in the wound!) it can refer not just to one's lawfully wedded wife, but also to, oh, yeah, that girl I've been hanging around with a bit lately.  Which pretty much appears a dead giveaway that she won't be hanging around much longer.

recommendations: eating out

It has been requested that I come up with a list of places to eat out in Sydney -- reasonably priced endeavors that American tourists would be interested in popping in to, in particular.  I must preempt this list with a few caveats.  First, I am a terrible judge of food.  I like what I like, but I think I have rather low-brow taste.  Fine dining is not my forte.  Second, I just eat wherever I happen to end up.  There could be an amazing place just around the corner, but if I never happen to make it around that corner, well, er, sorry.  You might want to explore yourself and see what you can find.  Third, I'm sure there should be another caveat along these lines, but I can't think of it at the moment.  Consider yourself forewarned though.  That being said, a few places that tend to spring to mind:

--City Extra.  Right at Circular Quay, perfect if you've just missed a ferry and need a place to lick your public transportation wounds.  Also 24 hours, which is a huge, huge rarity.  Reasonably priced for Sydney, which is saying absolutely nothing.  The menu's pretty big and comes like a newspaper, which is pretty cool.  Bathrooms tend to be clean, though the lighting drives me a little crazy.  Pretty fun to sit outside if it's warm enough.  Caters for three meals a day, being 24 hours.  A good default sort of place.

--Pretty much any Thai place.  Stir Crazy, Sam Thai, Chat Thai, etc, etc, etc.  Usually fast, big servings and delicious.  You'll feel incredibly full afterwards, plus it's a pretty Sydney experience because they're everywhere, especially in the Lower North Shore.  No, seriously.  Like three in one block.  They're not my favorite and I don't really want Thai more than once a month, but would be good to check out as a tourist.

--Doyle's at Watson's Bay is the one everyone talks about.  I think there's a nice restaurant that's really pricey, and then also a more takeaway place that's closer to reasonable.  I'd go the takeaway and make a picnic out of it for lunch.

--Jamie Oliver does have a restaurant in Sydney now too, at 107 Pitt Street.  (I'm in that neck of the woods a lot, okay?)  I went once and was pleasantly surprised.  Prices not out of control and the food was good ... though you definitely need to make a book any night of the week.

--There's a pizza place on George Street in the Rocks that I've liked before but the most recent time I went the pizza wasn't all that great.  Think it might be hit and miss.  If you're ordering pizza, Crust is great.  Really worth doing for a picnic or something.  They're all over the place.

--Speaking of picnics, the chicken shops are awesome for salads -- really good salads, like salmon and lemongrass and chicken and lots more really good ones.  Char-grill Charlie's or its type are great.  Sydney's so photogenic, it makes lots more sense to grab food and eat it in a nice location than to find a good restaurant.

--For fast lunches, Guzman and Gomez or Mad Mex are great fast Mexican places, much like a Qdoba or Chipotle's.

--Baja Cantina on Glebe Point Road is my favorite Mexican for dinner.  It seems to be a bit love it or hate it.  Some of my friends have loved it, others hated it.

--Glebe Point Road in general is a good place to start looking for lots of different kinds of restaurants.  King Street in Newtown would also be a good place, as would Darlinghurst, Paddington or Surry Hills.  Whatever kind of food you like, you can pretty much find.

--I've heard that Jonas on Whale Beach (insert obligatory "HA" here) is the place to go for a super-duper snazzy meal.  It'd take ages to get there, but it'd be stunning in every way.

--Various cafes I've blogged about before would be good lunch or coffee stops -- Chaos in Neutral Bay, Sparrow in Crow's Nest, Two Good Eggs on Goulburn Street.

--Pubs!!  How could I forget the pubs?  Very Australian.  About as reasonable of prices as you'll find (which is still saying nothing).   Good experience.  Yeah, try a pub.

That's really all I've got.  For goodness' sake, just walk around and find something that looks good in the moment.  Like I said, I'm a bad one to come to for food advice.  Just beware that the late afternoon can be a very frustrating time to find anything -- anything! -- serving food, and the CBD in general is not a great spot for dining.  Otherwise -- have fun and happy munching!

quicko: it's a boomerang

Phrase used when loaning out an object and indicating that it is to be returned -- i.e., when you loan your co-worker your favorite pen.  You can use it for a minute, but don't forget it's MINE!

update: bus bloopers

Now this is a slightly complicated, but very real and practical problem.  Ahem.  Imagine if you will, a bus stop.  A reasonably sized bus stop where two buses can stop simultaneously.  Now also imagine a long line of people all running late on their way to work waiting impatiently in said line.  Now then.  Imagine that both buses open up their doors and people from the (very long) line (that stretches past both buses) immediately plunge themselves onto said buses.  Except some in the very long line realize they could run ahead and get on the first bus while others are waiting for the second.  So they do.  But alas!  The first bus gets full and does not let them board.  Now, though, they've moved up the pecking order.  And those who were patiently waiting for bus number two (which is also now full -- it was close, it was hard to tell which would fill up first) are actually in a worse off position than they were before because, instead of advancing forward in the line was their right, they are now stuck behind the hopefuls who dashed forward for bus one and (presumably inadvertently, but it's hard to be sure) stole their spot in line.

Like I said -- slightly complicated, but a very real and practical problem.  Particularly when you are already running late and have to wait an extra two minutes (you that's a small amount of time.  you're clearly a person who's always on time.) that means you're likely to have to catch the next bus in the city that's even later that means ... oh, draw your own conclusions.  I stand by it not being pleasant though.

quicko: the first fleet

After all I've blogged about the adorable Sydney ferries, somehow it utterly escaped my notice that they're named after the ships of the First Fleet (the aptly named set of ships that were the first to come to Sydney from England in terms of settlement).  If I've listed the ferries correctly, they represent 9 of the original 11 (missing The Lady Penrhyn and The Prince of Wales).

They include all my favorites*:
Sirius
Supply
Fishburn
Scarborough
Friendship
Borrowdale
Golden Grove
Alexander
Charlotte

*Listed in order of my favorites, at least today :)

quicko: voting

There was an election this last weekend, at least in Sydney.  I'm not sure if it was a national, state or local sort of thing, but I'd gotten plenty of junk mail in the lead-up.  Didn't see too much else going on, so I'm assuming it was a reasonably minor election.

In contrast, of course, is the upcoming American election in November.  Now, I'm probably the one blogger you meet who wants to say absolutely nothing about politics, but is interested in how the different countries view voting.

In particular, Australians (like most of the rest of the world) tend to know way more about American politics than the average American.  I have friends who have been watching the national conventions and are mildly surprised to find that I haven't.

I guess I view the national conventions as something akin to the State of the Union address, but less important -- i.e., the sort of thing I would really only use as a fall-back plan if my other plans for the evening fell through and there wasn't a new episode of Big Bang Theory on.  At that point I might watch the State of the Union, but would be quite likely to read instead of watch the conventions.

Would you ever catch an American watching the equivalent of another country?  Okay, there's the odd politically-minded exception here and there, but by and large I've never heard of an American ever watching, say, the Russian equivalent (perhaps because it'd be in Russian?) or even the British or Canadian.

photos: a room with a view

A friend's just moved in over Paddy's Markets ... not a bad view, hey?

photos: when there's smoke ...

Driving north of Manly on the weekend ... I think it was an intentional fire??

sailing the terrible teas

Anyone who's ever lived in England has undoubtedly developing a knack for stomaching very foul cups of tea -- not because most tea in England is foul (it's not), but because you will inevitably find yourself in one of those unfortunate situations where some nice old lady with a great, big smile is offering you a lovely cup of tea in a lovely teacup with a lovely saucer and there is absolutely no way to fix the absolute mess she's made of the tea short of faking a grave sort of injury or fire or robbery or something, which unfortunately would tend to produce even greater problems to deal with than a disgustingly lukewarm cup of entirely underbrewed tea.

No, really, you'd be amazed how many times that happened to me.

The other thing that's happened to me was actually in America when I was at a friend's baby's christening and was a bit younger and a bit less exposed to tea in general (pre-Britain days).  For some reason, I got it into my head that that was the perfect situation in which to be adventurous with my tea and try all those funny things people did with it that I never quite understood.  Why precisely this desire took hold of me at this time I'm a bit hard pressed to say.  I suspect it may have had something to do with the fact that all the ingredients were sitting out and I had easy access to them and thought, well, gosh, Kim, it's now or never.

I honestly don't remember which order I experimented in -- or possibly even all of what I thought to throw in that particularly unfortunate cup of tea -- but I do know that at whichever point I added whichever came second of the the milk or the lemon juice, catastrophe on a scale you have rarely seen in a teacup ensued.

Being a guest, though, I determined it must be rude to throw out the new concoction, upsetting as it did taste, and set about drinking it slowly in as small of sips as I could manage and still be seen to be drinking it.  This went on for some time until the hostess' mother happened to catch a glimpse in my cup, nearly went into hysterics, the unfortunate tea got very firmly disposed of down the drain and I believe I was given another cup, along with an admonition never -- never -- to drink something that looked like that ever again.

And I haven't.  Really.  But moving on, all that's to say that, generally speaking, I have a pretty high tolerance for bad tea.

Let me tell you about what happened last night.

I was at church and it was tea break time, which, incidentally, is really up there in terms of my favorite elements of the service.  This particular tea break, though, did not go according to plan.

It started out well in that there weren't too many people at the tea table and I was very quickly poured a very generous cup of tea.  The only problem was, there was no room left at the top of the cup for milk.  I debated a bit with myself, but decided that on this particular occasion I was very much wanting milk in my tea and, since it was early on still, there'd be no trouble getting rid of the spare tea later.  So, I asked for a less full cup, which was very quickly, very obligingly made.  I steeped it for a bit, thinking it wasn't get quite as dark as the previous cup, but chalking that up to the amount of time the teabag had had or the dim lighting or both.  I poured milk, doused it all with sugar and went merrily along my way only to realize that --

Have you ever tasted milky peppermint tea with a kick of sugar?

I hadn't till last night, and I can assure you, you're not missing out.  In fact, you're doing much better than me.

Now one's immediate reaction might be to dump the tea and make another cup; however, remember that one has already requested a second cup, having found the first unsatisfactory, and, gosh, this is church, not an overpriced coffeeshop.  So what would one do?  One would keep one's milky, kicky peppermint tea and use the skills one has already mastered of slowly sipping until ... frankly, by this age one is old enough to give up halfway through and simply scrounge in one's bag for a water bottle.  Perhaps someday one will be old enough to throw it down and demand a third, but not yet.

Thank goodness I don't plan to move back to England.

update: train bloopers

I take buses a whole lot, which is why you usually hear about the traumas of bus travel; however, today you get to hear about the traumas of train travel, which really alliterates much better anyway.  The same thing could happen on a bus, too (I'm sure I've mentioned it before), but it's one of those excruciating things that's really painful anew every single time it happens -- just missing a train.  And not only just missing a train, but just missing a train, waiting 15 minutes for the next one, and, upon its arrival, being so caught up in one's reading material that one doesn't notice the new train, reads right through it and missed train #2.  To add insult to injury, both trains 1 and 2 were the nice, clean, cushy kind.  Train 3 was not.

quicko: hide and go R

It shouldn't really be a surprise in English, but the R is a particular tell-tale letter in terms of where you learned to speak.  As in, do you use Rs or not?  Do you add extra ones before vowels, just because?  Australians do.  (For example, we stand in "awe-R" of God.)  But then sometimes they disappear in other places.  It's all very complicated.  And goodness, that's to say nothing of the mighty O!

photos: coco kirribilli

Melissa and I have found yet another chocolate shop!!  This one's in Kirribilli, and very ridiculously cute.

quicko: bath and body works?

Continuing my missing-the-mall trend -- I do really wish there were a Bath and Body Works around.  Plenty of The Body Shops, but just not the works.  How else am I supposed to get the waters to dance?!

update: stop the press, i spoke too soon!

Hold your horses, everyone, I've got a way better deal than yesterday's $7 calendars -- the newsagent is now selling its 2012 diaries for $5!!

quicko: the secret's not out

There is no Victoria Secret in Australia!  I really don't know why not, and I'm a bit distressed about it.

quicko: $7 for a calendar

I was in a bookstore and saw they had calendars on sale.  2012 calendars.  In September.  Of 2012.  Granted, the pictures will still be pretty, but you can buy pretty postcards for 40 cents.  More importantly, what is the market for calendars in September like if they can charge $7 for one?  Is there a sudden influx of people every first day of fall (or spring, whatever) who suddenly gasp and realize with a pang that they have been living this whole entire year without a calendar, and rush out to buy one, whatever the price, and then gratefully (gratefully!) find calendars reduced to a mere $7?

Or perhaps there are chronic calendar crises?  I tend to think I, as one who keeps my calendar on my desk and legitimately uses it as a placemat every morning for breakfast, am in the minority, but perhaps I am not.  And if spilling tea on it at least once a week doesn't render mine unfit for the job (it cleans up quite easily, I assure you), I can only imagine that these other calendar-placemat-ers are terribly pristine about their property.

The is one contingent I have neglected, though:  the annual Benjamin Buttons.  Those, of course, who don't live their entire lives backwards, but merely individual years.  For these, running headlong into September is much more akin to running headlong into April.  Late for calendars, to be sure, but these annual Buttons are odd characters anyway, and I suspect they may be so stingy they cannot stand the thought of paying full price for. a calendar and are able to suffer through three calendarless months with the promise that awaits them of a beautifully new, reasonably priced calendar come fall (or spring, whatever).

Whichever your case, do not fear.  2012 calendars are here, and they are only $7.  Better hurry, though, before time runs out!

quicko: fathers' day?

It's Fathers' Day here, which is a wonderful thing, of course, except that it's two and a half months  late and falls smack dab in the middle of an already entirely too busy weekend in my family.  Instead, I'll use this day to say happy birthday, Andrew, and happy anniversary, Mom and Dad!

And, man, I miss Labor Day.  Say hi to the ocean for me, family!

photos: god keeps his promises

Just when I needed a reminder -- God sent a great, big, beautiful double rainbow to remind me that, YES, He DOES keep His promises ... and is great and awesome and amazing and loves me ... wow!  Praise God!!

quicko: spring!!!

There is a little bit of spring in my room and I'm so thrilled!

(And THANK YOU, Katie!!!)

As I'm sure I've mentioned before, the Australian seasons shift on the 1st of the month (a pinch and a punch, etc.) instead of the 21st, so it is officially spring here now.

Australians by and large tend to really despise winter (unless visiting real winter overseas, which they find a pretty awesome novelty), so the change in the air is palpable in terms of mood when it goes from winter to spring.  Everyone is happy and cheerful and optimistic -- and looking forward to a much better summer (ask them about it) than last year's.