Change In Plans

Greetings from Sydney! When we arrived yesterday afternoon, we knew we only had one full day here.  Last night over dinner, we developed a detailed plan to pack in a long weekend’s worth of activity in the short time that we had. We are exhausted, but had a pretty tremendous day of sightseeing and resupply.  Sydney is really quite an awesome city.  We will be sad when we leave early tomorrow for New Zealand.

By skipping breakfast, we were out the door this morning as soon as India got back from her run. Zola and I discovered that having him do his on-line math work before he has had breakfast is more frustrating (for both of us) than it is worth. The good news on that front, though, is that he has completed the 3rd-grade math curriculum, and has started on 4th grade.  The EPGY program has been the saviour of our home-schooling efforts.

We took a taxi across Sydney to the western side of Darling Harbour, to the waterfront mall. Zola lost the battery charger to his Nintendo DS several weeks ago, and has been deprived of its electronic pleasures.  He has handled the deprivation relatively gracefully, but  under duress we promised that we would get a replacement charger as soon as we got back to Sydney.  We actually arrived at the Electronics Boutique before it opened, and went off to have breakfast.  At the stroke of 10 am, Zola charged into the store like a crazed December 26th bargain hunter.  At 10:02, mission accomplished. 

That particular mall seemed to be dominated by shops selling souvenirs and Australiana.  Under further duress, I agreed to get some souvenirs for family, and a pair of pink Ugg boots for Tallulah.  My resistance to boot acquisition notwithstanding, I have to admit that they are very cute.  She wore them out of the store, and has basically refused to take them off since.  The classiest souvenir we bought was a heavy bottle opener  -in a roughly triangular shape- made from a kangaroo’s scrotum.   It will make a nice gift for the Christmas Eve gift swop this year.  The souvenir-shop owner told me that it is the most popular item in his store by a long way.

Escaping from Souvenirland, we started to walk to the Sydney Aquarium.  We passed the Maritime Museum, and Zola got very excited about touring the submarine and Navy destroyer docked outside.  He is going through a “war is really cool” stage.  I just finished Antony Beevor’s book, “The Battle for Spain: The Spanish Civil War 1936-1939,” and am going through a “war is horrible and tremendously wasteful” stage.  Nevertheless, we decided to tour the old warships, as well as a replica of James Cook’s sailing vessel, the Endeavour.

The family-consensus takeaways from touring around the boats were:

1. it would be very unpleasant to live on a modern submarine or on an 18th-century warship
2. if you were only going to have one boat in your navy, you would want it to be a submarine
3. exploring the world with Captain Cook was probably pretty exciting, until they took on bad water in Batavia, and 40% of the people on board died of dysentery
4. we are incredibly spoiled and lucky

Good lessons from 90 minutes of stomping around on boats.  

A highlight for me was when our princess-obsessed 4-year old peeked into the Captain’s stateroom on the destroyer, saw a mid-1960s picture of the young Elizabeth II, sighed, and said, “Look Mummy, it’s the Queen!”

After searching all over Australia, we finally saw a duck-billed platypus.  The platypus siting was, unfortunately, in the Sydney Aquarium, but it was still cool.  They are weird-looking little fellows, and they spend a long time under water between breaths.  I understand better why it is difficult to see them in the wild.

Both kids loved the aquarium, and ran excitedly from tank to tank.  At least Zola did not shriek wildly when he saw a new fish, as he insisted on doing while we snorkeled on Lord Howe Island.  India and I were pleased to see that the Cape Town aquarium, which I helped a little in raising the money for in 1992-93, could hold its own against the famous Sydney version.  When we were planning Cape Town, it helped that we borrowed a lot of design ideas, and a technical advisor, from Sydney.

The best part of the Sydney Aquarium is its Oceanariums (Oceanaria?), which are glass walk-through tubes placed at the bottom of enormous fish tanks.  Standing in the tubes, looking up at 3-4 meters of water, and surrounded by huge sharks, is an amazing feeling.  There are signs which inform visitors that the glass distorts vision, and that the animals are actually about 33% larger than they appear.  This part of the aquarium is really well done.  Unfortunately, for some reason they pipe in very dippy sounding New Age music, which sort of diminishes the effect.  Fake scuba and breathing sounds, or silence, would have been better.

After lunch, we took a ride on Sydney’s famous monorail.  Because of its route, I thought the monorail was designed almost exclusively for tourists: it only makes a small, slow one-direction loop around the western part of the downtown area.  To my surprise, it was packed with real people using it for daily transport.  It was a good way for us to see part of the city.

The rest of the afternoon was consumed by our efforts to resupply shoes and clothes before we head off to rural New Zealand.  This allowed us to explore Sydney’s shopping district. I generally don’t like this kind of thing, but the Queen Victoria Building shopping center was good.  Zola and I spent most of our time looking at a huge cylindrical clock which hangs from the ceiling, and reflects important events in Australia’s history in diorama form.  One memorable scene is entitled “Arrival of Second Fleet of Prisoners”, and has two soldiers whipping a prisoner who is suspended from some kind of wooden rack on the beach.  The whippee’s shirt is ripped, and blood is pouring from his back.  History isn’t always pretty, but I’m not sure why they put that on a giant clock in a mall.

In a few short resupply hours, we bought:

• Our 5th and 6th pairs of Crocs for the kids
• A little black dress
• New Teva sandals (I disposed of my highly toxic old ones in a garbage can on the street)
• A pink princess dress
• New pajamas
• Running socks
• Lancome face cream
• Assorted jackets and sweaters, as everyone asks us whether we are “going to New Zealand for a ski holiday”

Midway through all of this, Citibank’s anti-fraud unit called me to check whether my credit card was in my possession, and whether I was aware of charges X, Y, and Z.  After much back and forth, and several periods of holding, the call-center person asked, “Are you in Australia?”  

Rosemary, our friend from Cape Town, and her husband, Francis, invited us to their house in the evening.  Our kids are so desperate to have some type of social interaction outside of Mom and Dad that they got very excited about this.  Tallulah kept talking about “the big party” and “all of the friends.”  She changed clothes three times, but kept the Pink Uggs on.   Zola was excited to play tennis and boxing on the Wii, and to tell Francis more about Pokemon.  Both kids rushed in, and appreciated Rosemary’s sparkling lights, candles, and special fairy drink.  What Zola really cared about was that Wii.  Francis gave Zola enthusiastic technical support, and exclusive use of his game while we were there.  Both kids were thrilled. 

Ashfield, their suburb, has a big Chinese population.  We walked up to the main drag, and had an excellent, truly authentic, Shanghainese dinner.  It was cool to see another part of Sydney life.  Lucky Francis still got to hear about Pokemon over dinner, while India, Rosemary and I talked about South Africa and her activist family.

On the taxi ride home, partying Sydney seems to have come to life on this Friday night.  For several successive traffic lights, we were next to a white stretch Hummer limousine, with house music blaring from the windows and sun roof.  A young woman was leaning out the window, champagne glass in hand, blowing kisses to pedestrians and motorists.  She shouted to India, “You have a beautiful son!”  We offered to toss him in through the sun roof, but they pulled away from the light.  Zola was embarrassed, but secretly thrilled.  Both reactions are sweet.

Everyone is sound asleep now.  It was a busy day.  Quality of life in Sydney is high.