Listening to 'Strine

Today was the first really hot day we’ve had, and of course I decided to try walking back from North Sydney, where our classroom is, to my posh digs out here on the other side of the North Shore.  Luckily, I had stashed my shorts in my backpack as I set off for my 9 AM “co-taught” class, designated “UWP 198: Special Topics in Australian Culture,” and after changing after class had also stashed my heavy pile of in-class-writing journals back at the office of CAPA, our institutional partners here.  Even now, as the evening deepens, it is still over 30C (high 80sF) with the mugginess I associate with Europe or the East Coast in summer.  For the man whose Lakota Sioux name is “Sweats Brushing His Teeth,” let’s just say a soaking wet shirt was a feature as I made my sprightly way back along the bus route for awhile and then charged off through ‘burbs when I got tired of the traffic and noise.  One reason I’d walked was that I’d wanted to rattle the cage of the folks from the apartment rental place (located halfway between this place and my workplace), as I’d been asking via e-mail for a second set of keys since the day I moved in.  But no, maybe Tuesday, and of course “Ryan” was going to be on his holidays for two weeks, but “Georgia” might be able to help... 

I’d spent the morning listening to Wendy,  who’ll be teaching the first two Fridays of the quarter filling in for another CAPA-hired local lecturer Lorraine (who was double booked running some arts festival during her son’s school holidays)(If you get the idea that teaching these programs abroad means lots of improvising and fast footwork, you’d be right--and even this morning, when Wendy handed out the syllabus, I had a surprise, as suddenly the class was supposedly meeting from 9-12:30 and not from 9 to 12 as every other version of it had said)(I nixed the extra half hour, much to my students’ relief).  I’d enjoyably had coffee with Lorraine soon after I’d arrived here, and she’d assured me Wendy was super high energy in a super small package, and she was right.  Maybe something about teaching styles will be the focus of another post, but I thought since I’d had so much to listen to, so idiomatically (not to say ultra-coherently), that I’d do a bit of linguistic analysis, some of which I did on the fly for my students, most of whom were far too polite to realize they had no clue what was being said.

We learned during the lecture that Wendy had done her graduate work (in sociology? anthropology?) on toys and their meanings, and though the reading for today’s topic of “Australian Identity” centered on how the Opening Ceremony of the 2000 Olympic Games illustrated ways in which nations selectively exploit and distort their own myths, much of her presentation was a string of mini-raves and tangents sparked by student questions or by her own questions or by her long reactions to a minimal student answer.  It was all a bit like listening to a smart, articulate, hypercaffeinated but slightly dotty aunt for an hour and a half, and then after a 10-minute break, coming back, watching a couple of video clips (the beginning of the Opening Ceremonies, and a couple of QANTAS commercials) and listening some more.  Not much writing, not much co-teaching.  But hey.

We learned of the “cultural cringe” that characterizes a lingering sense of Antipodean inferiority or ambivalence, at the same time Australians take pride that “we punch above our weight” in sports and other areas; as part of a riff about the educational system we heard that “bluestone universities” were at the top tier, and that of course there were people at Uni with her who were “just bludging off the system,” but that she felt an obligation to give back, to not take for granted that she had actually been paid to be educated back before the fees and privatization had radically changed the educational landscape here as well. 

As she spoke I was struck by the “two nations separated by a common language” truism, and gave up trying to serve as interpreter for my wide-eyed students: how many of them would get the boxing analogy of a flyweight with a punch like a middleweight, much less the analogy between “bluestone universities” in Oz and the whole Oxbridge / redbrick / steelglass hierarchy that used to hold in the UK?  Her passing clarification, “you have your ‘Ivy League’ schools” was technically correct but inadequate, and I’m sure none of the UCD students had an idea that “bludging” meant cadging or clumsily borrowing or being lazy long before J.K. Rowling’s co-opted “Bludger” as a menacing ball in the wizarding sport of Quidditch. 

It went on, and on, and on, and only occasionally did I interject. When she talked about making fun of someone, “taking the mickey out of them,” I stopped her and asked my students what it meant--was it making fun of the Irish (the Micks) or perhaps Cockney rhyming slang for “taking the Mickey Bliss / piss” out of someone?  More fun with words, and the exact etymology as I said is open to debate.  As she talked about how sports-mad Australians were, especially this weekend which features the equivalent of the Super Bowl of Aussie-Rules footie and that of Rugby League, there would be people “barracking for Hawthorn, or barracking for Sydney,” I realized I’d better warn my little ducklings about a potentially embarrassing linguistic difference they probably weren’t aware of: they’d better not use the verb “root” in reference to following a sports team (recall “For it’s root, root root for the home team” sung in the seventh inning stretch at baseball games), since in Oz the verb is literally a four-letter word referring to, well, intercourse. (This is a family blog.)  Years ago one friend from Down Under had been travelling on Super Bowl Sunday and his Yank seatmate asked him, “Who are you rooting for?” to which my friend replied, “That’s a mighty personal question, mate!”

Of course, after I got home I met my neighbor Clive from the apartment next door, and in five minutes I noted several more examples of this linguistic variety that I found inexplicably endearing: I was carrying out my trash and recycling, and he cautioned me that the rubbish bins hadn’t been picked up that day (“I’ve already had a word with the Council, mind you”) and that there was no room in the bins for my bag: “Look at that, they’re both chockers!”  Nowhere in the US would you hear that, maybe nowhere else in the world would a speaker take “they’re chock-a-block” or “chock-full,” clip it down to “chock” and add the “ers” ending. Listening to ‘Strine, indeed.

And now it’s pissing down rain, a welcome thundershower that’ll maybe end the mugginess.

Expanding List: Things I Love About Sydney

In amongst the course preparation and other anxieties (hey I did drop off my first course reader to be copied at Office Works this afternoon, coordinating it with a workout and feeling geeky as I ran with an envelope in my hand) I wanted to check in quickly with what may become a long list of cool stuff. 

1.  The Harbor.  Sure I’d read about 180 miles of shoreline or whatever, but I really wasn’t prepared for how beautiful the water is, how the bays and coves give neighborhoods their own identity, how much the water defines the city.

2. The public transport system.  I’m sure there’s plenty for Sydneysiders to piss and moan about, but for someone who is appalled at how un-friendly the “systems” are in the Bay Area--AC Transit, Golden Gate, Muni, BART, Amtrak--I am stunned at how well the various sub-units work, and work together.  I bought a 90-day MyMulti pass for A$452 at the airport, and I use this ticket on any ferry, bus, or train within a pretty huge zone.  On Sunday I blasted over to Watson’s Bay (such a nice day that a few thousand other folks had the same great idea), hiked around The Gap cliffs after taking a nap in the sun, then returned to the Circular Quay hub, then rode the little ferry back over to Mosman Bay--and hey, when the ferry arrives, the bus is waiting, not leaving (the way AC Transit does when I get to Berkeley on Amtrak).

3. Friendly locals and furriner-locals.  Far out of proportion to expected distributions in the population, I’m running into helpful, open, friendly people wherever I go, be it the library or on the bus or at bus stops or in the local grocery store.  Several times when I’ve heard an accent I’ve inquired where it’s from, and in a couple of cases been able to have a nice exchange in French or in German (or even, as this morning, in Dutch!). 

In a later post I want to add something about the hidden footpaths and running routes I’ve discovered, some interesting vocabulary I’ve been learning as I read newspapers and immerse myself in Ozzie culture, and even a bit on how good the coffee is.  But now I must sleep.  If I can post this now, it’ll mean I was once again able to make my furschlugginer USB stick modem work, after a mysterious “must be some kind of driver problem” diagnosed by the geek at Vodaphone (we tried to uninstall, got an error, restarted my MacBook, successfully uninstalled, reinstalled--and found the sumbitch was working, I had already gone through all the steps I needed to.  Grrrr).

Catching up on my first week

So we’re coming up on a week in Oz and I am still waking impossibly early.  They say one day of recovery for every hour of time-dislocation, so I guess I am still within the predicted circadian-rhythm adjustment curve. 

I’ve done a mixture of work and sightseeing all week, still skulking around cafes to download e-mail, because I can’t get my computer to work with the USB-stick cell modem I got from Vodaphone, and I haven’t been able to download the OS upgrade that might be the key to this problem.  At the best of times I can usually handle such techno hassles, but when there are obstacles (e.g., the upgrade is 769MB but the nice Mosman Library has a download limit of 500MB per session), I get into a strange paralysis.  On the positive side, not being omnipresent or 24/7 web-connected has its virtues too, as does the enforced time limitation posed by being a world apart from most of the folks who want to e-mail me. 

I'm immersing myself in reading early Australian history, thanks to the local library’s surprisingly excellent collection--I learned from a preternaturally friendly librarian that this is no accident, as the various branches have specializations, and I happened to have lucked into the correct one!  This has occupied a substantial number of my waking hours in midweek (time has taken on a strange blur for me, again one result of travel but also the obsessive-compulsive nature of my work habits I suppose), and I found myself deeply affected by this introduction to the city and its colonial history.  For better or worse I have mixed some straight-ahead works with some New Journalistic accounts, a combination that is unsettling in itself.  From the point of view of my purported course design (“Writing Australia”) this is perfect: I am constantly reading one account in light of others or in light of my travels around the city, aware of gaping holes or omissions that mask ideological or historiographical underpinnings in unexpected ways.  At the same time I ponder how or whether I can transmit this to my students, whether I can design the classes to cultivate this unsettling critical thinking about thinking. 

Mirroring my experiences in other countries I have found running to be an excellent way to ground myself in a place, to explore and get lost and get my bearings.  Padding along in my non-shoes now I want to avoid pavement when I can, and there are some amazingly wild trails around the various nearby headlands.  No doubt because of their value as naval-battery sites, these bluffs haven’t been subdivided as heavily as their choice views would dictate, I guess because they stayed military long enough for the Harbor Trust and the League of Sydney Walking Enthusiasts (or whoever) to have them set aside as parkland.  My radius has expanded, just as has happened with each new place I’ve lived: my first forays were a mile or two, each time late in the unexpectedly short day, whereas on Thursday I poked farther out, down and up and down and up, passing Balmoral Beach, Georges Head, Chowder Bay, Bradleys Head, and back around to my little corner of leafy yuppie heaven.  Actually the sunset view from the trail near Bradleys Head was so stunning I was surprised at how few other people there were: the Opera House and Harbor Bridge in the distance, the water that burnished gold, why was I almost alone?  Running almost barefoot has made me acutely conscious of keeping my stride smooth and absorbing shocks over my whole foot, not just striking my heels, and I’m glad I have worked up the distance slowly.

Yesterday was my first day with Davis students, with an orientation by CAPA (the international-education agency with whom we are working) followed by an afternoon bus tour.  I’d set out quite early for the 10 AM rendezvous in North Sydney, but stupidly waited for a bus nearby rather than blasting up the hill to the arterial that has more choices; with plenty of time I decided to join the conga line from this suburb to the city center (sorry, centre) and then get back across the bridge by train or ferry.  As usual the grain of the northside manifests itself, as the buses make this weird counterintuitive loop back over first east and then north and then west and then south; along Military Road (where cannons were laboriously dragged to the fortifications on the bluffs) one gets that bleak stream of phone shops, boutiques, estate agents, and nail salons that strikes you heavily when you are a newcomer.  All over the bus, just like at home, everyone is thumbcandying away--I am in the distinct minority having a stupid phone and not a smart one--but shoulder-surfing some of the inane texts and time-filling games quickly convinces me that never has so much technology served so little cognitive activity.  As I have at other times, for example when I commuted from the East Bay to a tech writing job in San Francisco back in 1986, I feel like an anthropologist, amongst a strange tribe but not really part of it; by contrast, on the train to Davis from Berkeley that I’ve ridden now for almost twenty years, I have no such sense of alienation but am myself part of a newbie’s study with my rituals and habits.

I’ve reflected many times that these study-abroad engagements demand improvisation and flexibility even more than planning, and yesterday morning was no exception: at about 8:45 I’d ensconced myself in a cafe a block or two away from Australian Catholic University’s Mackillop campus, where our classes will be held, and when I downloaded e-mail I had one of those “Gulp!” moments: there in my inbox was a note from the CAPA coordinator saying “We are on for 9 o’clock and....”   What the? I was sure things started at 10, but maybe I had airheaded something.  I pounded my coffee, hustled on over, found the classroom, and of course found out that she had mis-typed.  Only later did I think, “You know, you could’ve phoned her to double check.”  On the other hand, you don’t want to be a high-maintenance client, and who knows whether you’ve gotten into phone tree hell anyway?  But that’s the sort of wrongfooting that seems par for the course when you’re doing this sort of program. 

Actually a program like this is pretty different from Summer Abroad, where as faculty leader you are much more front and center on the logistical support.  Debbie had assured me that her office would take care of all the arrivals the day before, and so they had, with the notable exception of one benighted duckling who evidently had ... forgotten.  To buy her ticket, much less to notify us or CAPA that she was bailing!  [But as it turns out, she may or may not be bailing.  From what I gather as of this morning, she is due to arrive Sunday morning.  Money, apparently, is no object.  This is a new one on me.]  By contrast, my first Grand Tour was an absolute whirlwind of details, trying to get students situated in London and then Paris and then Les Houches and then Rome.  Even with an assistant it felt insane.  By contrast, here was this small but efficient little team, running a good and thorough orientation session with not-too-stupid powerpoints covering everything from money matters to culture shock to homesickness to safety, including an excellent video on rip currents that I will make sure Alex watches when he gets here. 

Seven of the 21 students (or is it 22?) are in an apartment situation (paying extra) while the rest are in homestays, and I heard little complaining about anything besides the challenges of making sure iPhones are well and truly unlocked.  As an icebreaker we had to introduce the person next to us (tell us name, major and one thing from the States that that person can’t live without), and a substantial fraction did name their mobile device as that essential thing.  I was pleased at how many names I did remember from the Davis orientation, and I was also pleased to see how friendly everyone seemed.  That said, a part of me was scanning for future trouble--Is this the person who will be chronically late to meet-ups? Is this the human-limpet who will pillory me on the evals for not being more of a buddy? Is this the core of Golden Children whose clothing budgets exceed my per diem total? Is this the Toxic Social Media Schmuck who will be hatching plots and ranting pretentiously until shut down?  I remember decades ago on a mixed snow ice and rock climb in the North Cascades with an experienced Outward Bound instructor, seeing him gauging the entire party’s comfort level early in the trip so that he could head potential problems off before the going got rough--here I was doing a version of the same thing.

After turning us loose for lunch the very capable Rachel and Sarah joined us for the half-day bus tour ranging from the harbor out to Bondi Beach and some places I certainly had not seen yet, with a driver who struck the right balance between blather and get-on-with-it.  I sort of gave myself up to being a passenger and not a trip leader (though I did set up the count-off to make sure we were all accounted for at each stop) and reveled in getting a better sense of the geography of this chunk of the city.  The weather was beautiful--it had drizzled in the morning but cleared up to one of those jaw-droppingly nice days where you can’t believe people actually live here full time.  Very weird to look over world-famous Bondi Beach in slacks and shirt, the full mass of humanity not nearly in full summer mode but still enough people to make you hope to hit less crowded beaches.  At one hilltop overlook I cracked up inordinately when the group-photo gathered and an immaculately turned-out sister laughingly called “sorority lean!” and Assumed the Position (hands on bent knees, head inclined just so, dazzling fake smile saying that this group of Greek letters was absolutely the best of all), a gratifying bit of self-awareness and good humor, but my sensors are on high alert still.

Unfortunately the tour dribbled out into a morass of downtown traffic at the end, which was a slight bummer as it had felt just-the-right-length a half-hour earlier as we traipsed down the path from the wildly sculpted sandstone cliffs of The Gap.  Again I was thankful that someone else took the initiative, steering groups back toward their homestays--I didn’t even think more than twice about whether I was expected to tip the driver and how much, a decision always fraught with peril back in Europe as one supposedly bought future cooperation with bus companies by not ignoring the outstretched palms.  Here I would play dumb and trust to Australian tipping habits and my coordinating team.

Then I decided to walk from the drop-off at Central Station to the ferries, which got more than a little purgatorial: just a hint of the Asian-urban crowded-canyon feeling, with a continuing frisson of "is this really north that I am walking?" until in a confirmation of faith I did end up at Circular Quay and was able to get the Mosman ferry through the gorgeous dusk and finish in darkness on the bus, trusting I knew where to get off.  I am totally a fan of the ferry system here, I have to say, and I am a long ways from taking the water-level views for granted like the bulk of the commuters.  The skyline against the sunset light, the strange jungle-y growth on some of the points, the yachts bobbing in the wake--you can’t quite hear the self-satisfied clink of glasses on the terraces of those lucky enough and wealthy enough to have that drop-dead view on Cremorne Point or Old Mosman, but you can definitely imagine it as the ferry rumbles up.

It was a little strange to be returning home at night, I have to say--I’ve been pretty much a homebody except for my evening runs, so joining the end of the commute was a little different.  I’ll be teaching an evening class on Wednesdays, the first of them next week, so I will have a fair number of these to make, although I suppose they’ll do Daylight Savings soon.  I ducked my head into the dark back entrance of the same cafe I’d spent an enjoyable hour earlier in the week, and punked off their non-password-protected wifi just to be sure there were no mission-critical e-mails, before I headed down the hill, made my leftovers, and watched a little too much TV thing.  I suppose I can call it Research, watching with some perplexity as the Manly-Warringah Sea Eagles lost ignominiously to the Melbourne Storm in the Rugby League semifinals; having played Rugby Union back in grad school I had never actually watched League, which is a totally different rhythm, and it definitely fed my anthropologist’s thirst for Cultcha to hear the announcers’ plainspoken (not to say ruthless) analysis of Manly’s futility and the incompetence of the referees.

So I will head up to the Library and post this catch-up of the blog, with or without photos, and check out a couple more DVD’s.  If I have the energy I’ll blast through some more of another long deferred writing task (some analysis for the Federation of non-senate academics at UCD), and organize my photocopying for next week.  The other item on the agenda is to take another good long run like the one I did on Thursday. 

Thanks for reading!