Adelaide and Sydney
Sydney is a great place to read a Dickens novel: it’s rainy right now all the time, and if it’s not rainy it’s about to be rainy. It’s not always like this, but it certainly feels like London to me, without the black taxis.
But I’m getting ahead of myself.
I get into Adelaide at night and find a place to stay, then promptly leave it the next morning for more suitable accommodations. When I arrive around 8pm, I walk around the city trying to find a hostel. I pass about 2 people at the most and walk around 3 miles. I figure it’s just because it’s a Sunday night, but that’s wrong. Unless you’re downtown in Adelaide there’s just not much there. It’s very sprawling though, so there’s shops and such around, but not many people going into the shops.
Most backpackers go to the museums. I go to the Migration Museum and then to the South Australian Museum. They have an Egyptian exhibit from the Louvre showing right now, so I go to see it. They want $20 to get in, just to see the Egyptian stuff. at finding this out i almost turn to walk away, but the guy bumps the price down for me even though I don’t have student ID on me (he knew as well as i did that $20 is a scam. isn’t the Louvre free??) They also have modern art there, including a giant green rhinosaurus made out of fiberglass standing on a wall, a macabre painting of what looks like zombies eating people, and a carving of a little squat woman with Kama Sutra positions painted all over her. I know all this probably has some other meaning and metaphor, but I’ve seen a lot of art in the last few weeks…they’ve mostly just turned into pretty pictures for me.
I also go to Tandanya, an indigenous cultural institute. It’s $5 to get in, and while I usually stay away from anywhere that costs money (Australia has bitten hard into my budget) I didn’t feel as bad giving my money to an aboriginal place. I still feel swindled by that Egyptian exhibit.
There’s some aboriginal art and history to read about there, but you can tell that this place isn’t sponsored by the city or the state. Where other museums have fancy displays and mood lighting, Tandanya seems to have the cheapest materials possible while still looking decent. It’s not surprising. The history of Australia’s relationship to the aboriginals is an odd one. It’s much like African Americans and Native Americans in the states, where in the 60s Aboriginees received more rights and got better representation, but that’s all a moot point. The Aboriginees weren’t mad that they didn’t get to vote (well, at least not primarily). They were mad that their country was stolen from them, thus eliminating their way of life. They seem to have difficulty assimilating into such a Western culture as well, basically because they’ve been living differently for thousands of years and have been getting along just fine.
My last day in Adelaide I go down to Glenelg, the part of the city that’s on the beach, 30 minutes from the city. It’s nice but cold and windy, and it’s obviously a place you go in the summer. I’ve found this is true for several parts of Australia.
There’s a French guy and a Norwegian girl staying at the hostel. The girl works in the hostel and cleans, and the guy is working in the city. A lot of travelers are Europeans working in the country. They are allowed to work for one year here, while americans are only allowed as tourists. As I understand it this is because of the states’ strict laws against work in our country.
This guy and girl are usually hanging out in the kitchen so I talk to them often. While we are fixing dinner a British couple join us as well as a South Korean guy here to study who just arrived in the country. We hang out sharing food for a few hours. The Korean pulls out this tube of meat and chili paste. None of us have any idea what it is. We ask him what he puts it on and he says anything, so we ask how about sausage? He scrunches up his face and says oh no no, not sausage, but doesn’t attempt to describe exactly what he does put it on.
We tried to work get the information out of him for the next 30 minutes, off and on, and to the best of my knowledge it’s kind of like a sauce that you can mix into such things as noodles. However I don’t know what else you’d put it on, because when we questioned about different foods (nuts? bread? pizza?) we got emphatic NOs, followed by, “We put it on everything in Korea.”Bbut by this time we have already had a few drinks so the block in communication is more funny than anything. Then he brings out his Korean whiskey. It’s in a little green juice box, and you pop the top and drink it. It is the funniest thing I’ve seen, a little juice box carton of whiskey. More like sake than whiskey really.
We go out to some pubs since it’s my and the Brits’ last night in Adelaide. The Korean is a bit more tipsy than anyone else, so he goes and dances quite a bit. He is very very sad that I am leaving.
Then I finally get to Sydney. I fly in and take a shuttle to the Wood Duck Inn. It’s the most run down place I’ve stayed in to date. It’s mostly got 19-20 year olds and there’s a pub right underneath us so many people are usually drunk or at least drinking. The bed mostly feels like I’m lying on a piece of wood, it leaks when it rains (which is always right now), and the window right next to the busy street is unable to be completely closed. But in its favor, it’s cheap I suppose. It has four floors. You have to climb up a narrow set of stairs to the top floor to get to reception, up three floors to get to the rooms. On my way down last night, while I’m cooking my supper, I slip and fall in the stairwell, landing on my left elbow. The CRACK! sound reverberates through the space and my foot pops on the landing. I go down to the bathroom and find a small dime size crater in my elbow with blood pouring out of it. Well that’s nice. I ask the receptionist for a bandage and tell her what happened. She helps me put it on and doesn’t really say anything in the way of apologizing for her stairwell of death. On my way back down to the room I’m carefully holding onto the railing, but once again I fall! But I more or less held on to the railing. I start going down sideways and that seems to work. People look at me funny, but I’ll laugh when it’s them who’s falling.
Originally published 19 June 2007