Had a wander around the Botanical Gardens in the sun - astonishing numbers of flying fox bats occupy the palms there.
The ferry to Manly was a great trip for getting views of the harbour; took my twenty-seventh photo of the Opera House on the way. Actually had a swim off Shelley Beach - rather chilly water but nice to swim in a clear blue sea. Back to the hostel for tea!
So we managed to survive the flight fine; it’s amazing how the time passes when you have a screen in front of you with on-demand movies…
Sydney is going well; we’re getting a feel for the city now. Unfortunately it absolutely lashed it down yesterday, hopefully topping up the city reservoirs as apparently NSW is in a drought at the moment. We still managed to get an intro to Aboriginal art at the Gallery, visited the aquarium and further developed our taste for Victoria Bitter.
Today is the ferry to Manly for nice harbour views and perhaps some fish and chips for tea!
The big holiday of this year is fast approaching: tomorrow I will be on a flight to Australia, where I will be not doing any work for at least three weeks. Hurrah!
We’re flying to Sydney (via Kuala Lumpur for a few hours), where we’re staying at the Wake Up! Hostel (exclamation marks required, apparently) for four nights. After that, we hire a car and start driving south down the coastline, calling at some, all, or none of the following locations:
* Kiama
* Berry
* Pebbly Beach
* Eden
* Mallacoota
* Lakes Entrance / Bainsdale / Sale
* Wilson’s Promontory
* Phillip Island
* Melbourne
* Great Ocean Road
* Port Fairy
* Adelaide
* Kangeroo Island
* Grampians National Park
* Blue Mountains
On the return to Sydney we’re having a night at the Intercontinental, to make up for staying in mud huts the rest of the way around.
Any feedback on these choices or anything else that is essential viewing between Sydney and Adelaide will probably be ignored, but hey, feel free to persuade me otherwise. If you’re all really lucky I may be able to find the time to type up the odd travel diary on the way.
If you would like to get in touch, please use my GMail account (my first name . my last name AT gmail.com), as I might (perhaps) be able to read it while abroad.
(Incidentally, if you are considering burglarizing my home, please note that there are house-sitters there for the entire holiday period and I would be extremely annoyed if you got broken glass on the carpet. Thank you.)
The UK: who needs civil liberties, anyway…
- How to be a terrorism suspect
- No Walking Allowed
- “Hacker” arrested despite a lack of malicious intent
It wasn’t a good start.
When your driver calls you and explains he can’t find a way of getting to your house, a certain sinking feeling tends to drag you down. Still, once I’d found his shiny black Mercedes at the wrong end of a one-way street round the corner, we were on our way to Heathrow. From getting out of the car to sitting down in the executive “but stressed businessmen need free beer” lounge took a mere fifteen minutes - quite impressive. The flight was relatively pleasant, the on-seat screen was quite neat, the selection of entertainment on said screen was resolutely uninspiring, the food was actually quite nice, and the stewardess was a miserable dried-up hag. Gotta love flying American Airlines. Found the car dispatcher chap, got the car into the City and arrived at The Carlyle. Room: fine, if not amazing - but the bathroom was a self-conscious person’s nightmare, being mirrored on all four walls from floor to ceiling. Very impressive, although I don’t like being able to see myself from multiple angles.
Got up early the next morning, got some breakfast at the hotel and headed to the office. Nine hours passed relatively quickly, my boss flew in by about 3pm NY time and we left about late for a dinner at a nearby Italian. I’m afraid I can’t remember the name, but there were two main features that stood out in my mind:
This was followed by a brief trip to Hooters, purely for the comedy value.
The one thing that hits you about New York is purely how much it is like your mental image of New York. It’s very “New York-y”. The yellow cabs, the smoke coming up out of the grills in the road, the skyscrapers, the street stalls grilling up everything from hot-dogs to halal; it’s all very much as you would imagine it to be. And it’s an exciting place to be; the place does seem to buzz with a certain energy and frenetic desire to move forward, to get ahead.
Wednesday passed quickly enough, with just enough time for me to get annoyed by the toilets in the office. Firstly, the cubicles have big gaps around the doors; I don’t like having an audience (see above). Secondly, everything is automatic. Which is fine, but things tend to happen before you want them to, or last shorter than would be helpful, and generally conspire to piss you off. When you’re spending five minutes trying to figure out how to get the fecking toilet to flush, you know that life could be made easier. USian bathroom designers: worried about hygiene? Either a) Get a grip, or b) install a floor switch. Sheesh.
Wednesday evening started at the Red-Eye Grill where I had a rather nice crispy duck salad followed by a half-rack of ribs, which I obviously didn’t finish, only having a regular-sized stomach.
Afterwards I had my camera, so decided to walk down 7th Avenue towards the glare of the screens of Times Square. The screens there are bright and more than numerous - you can’t help but feel slightly overwhelmed. The boundaries of taste are stretched some way past their snapping point, but that’s part of the gaudy fun; it’s way over the top but makes you laugh rather than be annoyed by the ludicrousness of it all.
My boss was more than happy to get a shot of me with the Naked Cowgirl, and also now has the picture of her on her own as the backdrop of his phone.
I wandered downtown past Bryant Park, where a huge group of natives were watching the Yankees game. It made me regret that there isn’t a single London team for football games that the entire capital could get behind (or more likely, complain about). I eventually found my way to the Empire State Building for some late-night tourism; it was quiet and the rows of velvet-roped lines made me think of Shrek as I bypassed them. The view is pretty incredible, and the accent of the “NY cabbie” character who narrates the audio tour was similarly impressive.
Thursday was enlivened by a sneak trip out of the office to Tiffany’s (the gf had made it clear that she didn’t expect a present, so I thought it would be nice to get her one), and finishing up the remaining space on my camera’s memory card.
The final evening was spent at a place on the Upper East Side called Maya, which does magnificent Margaritas (we were working our way through quite a lot of the Especials), although the food didn’t do anything for me; my primitive Londoner’s idea of Mexican is fahitas and tacos, not a Tamal al Chipotle. Afterwards to a bar called “Becky’s” which had an impressively large selection of beers and live “music” in the vein of Phoebe from Friends. Acoustic versions of Pink Floyd tracks are sometimes good, but mostly something to be avoided. Got a cab home very quickly…
Returning home from NY sucks, for a variety of reasons.
I’m generally a big fan of Neal Stephenson’s writing, and was interested to discover “Mother Earth Mother Board” which is a long but fascinating look at what is involved in getting continents linked together. Written in 1995/6, it is also a hopeful piece created at the beginning of the surge in popularity of the world wide web, which strangely makes me feel rather nostalgic.
Other writings include In the Beginning was the Command Line (for free download), Interface and the excellent Cryptonomicon (read a sample), which is an outstanding whirl through topics as diverse as cryptography, international finance, the internet, World War Two and techniques for eating breakfast cereal.