New Zealand in retrospect, pictures to follow

Wish I could say it's been completely "no news is good news" on the blog front, although I have to say the past week has been ... unusual.  I am typing this in the lobby of the Radisson Blu Hotel near Nadi, Fiji, where we have been since Sunday night, when we caught the last flight in from Sydney.  Our frequent flier miles only allowed this routing, via Nadi to LAX, so we decided to extend the layover and make it a holiday at the end of our sojourn.  I haven't uploaded pix from the fun we had last week so I will do a skeletal of our New Zealand trip in hopes of filling in a little.

Last few days in Sydney were filled with some social engagements (thanking people who had helped us, dinners etc) and some grading (there was less of a sense of urgency than sometimes, in part because the program finished earlier than the Davis quarter) and lots of packing / organizing.  We went to Alex's school concert, again marveling at how easy it is to meet people late in the game when you have something in common--if we were here for more time we would have a lot more of a social life than we did, which is both a positive and a negative, given my work habits!

By Dec 5th we had split our bags into a leave-in-Sydney pile and a take-to-New-Zealand pile, and and thanks to an incredibly generous offer from our friend and colleague Lorraine we were able to dump the Sydney pile in her storeroom and not store in a hotel for 10 days.  Then it was off to Christchurch on Air New Zealand, complete with the new "Welcome Aboard Air Middle Earth" inflight briefing that you can view on YouTube.  Pretty cute how the whole country has tapped into the marketing swing this way--probably the biggest thing the country has ever had in that line.

Thankfully all the arrangements that my sister Kate had made for us turned out great--including the weather: we checked into our little airport motel on the outskirts, then had dinner with Am's old friend Dave who drove up from Timaru (that's loyalty for ya) so we at least took him out for dinner.  He finised by taking us on a tour of what remains of the Ch-Ch downtown, which is incredibly sobering: after the earthquakes there are giant scars where buildings used to be, lots of street work, and a general sense of rolling-up-sleeves or else this place will die.  Most impressive to me was a 10-story Rydges hotel still standing but eerily dark, not a light on anywhere: condemned to come down like so many others because of internal structural damage. 

Next morning back to the airport for a short flight to Queenstown, the adrenalin-sport capital of the world.  Alex was impressed that the plane only had four seats across, and that there was no security check-in.  That said, he was pretty gripped when we started bouncing around over the Southern Alps.  The plan was that we would meet Kate Rob and Kieran in the airport when they arrived from Palmerston North, the closest airport to their home in Wanganui, and sure enough we were all together in an hour or so. 

Though I had had a great visit from Kate in July, I hadn't seen Rob in 20 years, and hadn't seen Kieran since he was 3, so it was all quite amazing.  We picked up our Toyota Previa rental and mashed all the Stenzel-Mel gear in before heading for our palatial motel in Q.  There was a little drizzle but nothing like what the place often features--Am and I took a little walk up the hill trying to find a view after I had bailed out to a cafe for some grading for a couple of hours.  Once again I marvelled at the ways NZ was set up for different types of tourists, from campers to conventional motel-dwellers.  These holiday parks / motor hotels all featured a variety of modes from tents to RV pads to self-contained units like the ones we packed into, with better appointed kitchens in some cases than our "boutique apartment" in Mosman.

Next day we drove down to Te Anau, winding through lake country redolent of the Tolkien movies, slotting in a picnic by the far arm of Lake Wakatipu in between rain showers, before another motel just across the road from Lake Te Anau from whence weather willing we would take a bus to a boat to Milford Sound.  That's when Kate's weather karma really kicked in: unlike the other 300 days of the year, we had beautiful clearing skies, enough recent rain that the waterfalls were running, AND the road to Milford was open again after being closed for several days by a slide. 

More: our deadpan-delivery bus driver, the amazing boat journey, the stunning drive, the glow-worm caves, the return to Q complete with sunny swims, last night in Q, then John learns to drive on the left in a rental car, up to Wanaka and thence over Haast Pass and dow to the West Coast, etc.

Carping the diem

Interesting to try to write a few lines while my students tap away at their computers here in the bowels of Australian Catholic Uni in North Sydney, as we near the end of the southern sojourn: this is the first of the two final exams I am giving like a good little soldier of the University Writing Program, and as usual I kick myself for not having done X or Y or having done Z instead of W. 

One thing that is good of course is that I did squeaky-wheel enough to secure this computer classroom (hatefully Windows-ish though it might be) for my little end-of-term activities.  I think I have successfully parsed these last few days out well enough that the kidlets have enough to do but not too much at the very end.  I have never been less in the mood to hear their bellyaching, I must admit, especially since I am pretty sure I have done my very last 3-year merit review before retirement.  This means that I will have neat typescript to read, instead of Today's Students' Bad Penmanship, the successful deciphering of which has always been a source of perverse pride for me.

That said, I always like to feel decent about what I have done, and in many respects I do--to the point where I actually have mentioned the possibility of an Inverness reunion for this crew next quarter, something that I frankly have never felt like even entertaining with previous groups I've had abroad.  Sure, if I could select a subset I might well have a couple of dozen from 2009-10-11, but no way would I have wanted the whole group of any of those years.  But this cohort--I could see it.  With the adding-by-subtraction at midquarter, it's a pretty congenial bunch of people who mostly seem to like each other--in stark contrast to what I have seen from some of the other groups that this agency is hosting here in Sydney.

It'll be interesting also to see how my exit interview goes with the people who organize on this side: what they get from me is likely not to be the most cheerful little earful, as I have found about five things that really have stuck in my craw and / or my students'.  Some of it may be style, but some of it most definitely is substance, and I am really hoping I can Keep My Temper when I do try to air some of these concerns.  In retrospect it is easy to see some of the shoulda-coulda-wouldas, but there are also some plain old mismanagement issues that I didn't realize would loom so large.  Very odd.

Of course, my temper has been frayed unexpectedly on the homefront by construction noise from the apartments upstairs, unthinkably loud and relentless, sort of like living inside an industrial blender filled with cement chunks.  I am not exaggerating here--the construction is steel-reinforced concrete, and there've been "Kangas" (smallish jackhammers) working from 8 to 5 for the last week, completely gutting the place, including the tiles on the floor and walls and balconies.  Today as I wrapped up the final exam prompt before skedaddling (I'd swum at Balmoral in the gray overcast, then retreated to a cafe to scribble after changing), the symphony was interleaved with gigantic sledgehammer blows as walls came down, and the balcony shook as debris was sent down the chute at the other end.  No matter how hot and muggy, our windows and screen doors are closed because of the dust--but there is good news: the rapacious folks at the rental agency are supposedly going to forgive our last three nights' rent that we otherwise would be paying for (there was a minimum 90 day stay requirement in the fine print, and we are leaving for New Zealand next Wednesday).  Not that anyone passed along to us the news that this construction was imminent, or that most of the inhabitants were finding alternative arrangements (like living in a steel mill, for the quiet).

So yeah--as if the 14-year-old punk isn't enough, we've had "tradies" to deal with starting at 7AM (though they are not allowed to "make noise" until 7:59).  Grim.  OK.  No pictures on this one (for some reason the ACU wifi has crapped out so I am typing on a Dell), but I will get more done tomorrow perhaps.  As soon as I collate all the chillun's e-mailed versions I will hustle my heinie back to Mosman High to catch Alex in another performance, this one without the high production values....

Entering the homestretch

Yes we are approaching the endgame here, as I try to figure out how to spend the last little bit of Activity Fund money (the agency alleges that it is use-or-lose, which I find hard to believe), and as with all endings this one is tinged with relief but also regret and pre-nostalgia (I think that was a Tom Lehrer coinage): there are aspects of this place and even this group that I am going to miss. 

Of course there are the obvious things, like the many many different ways in which the Opera House is on my list of the World's Coolest Buildings (this photo was taken on a warm evening when Amelie and I spontaneously decided to take in a Symphony concert in the big hall, and as I waited for her on the esplanade from the ferry terminal I was again struck by how casually wonderful this place is.  The sound was great by the way, even from where we were, up in a side area back of the orchestra where we could spy on the percussion section as they busied themselves with the Rachmaninoff 4th Piano Concerto and Tchaikowsky's Manfred.  Very cool.

   

But to the left here is another of the things I may find myself missing: Sydneysiders take their coffee pretty seriously, and even the little shop on the corner at the top of our street, which treated me to this casual masterpiece, seems to take pride in serving damned good stuff that looks great too.  Sure this "large flat white" (which is the size of a regular cap) costs 4 bucks easy, but hey, I'll support this barista artist in a heartbeat.  On the other hand, the patisserie a little further up the street has pretty good-looking croissants for sale, but I haven't had any yet--not for $5.50 to eat in, $4.80 to take away!

My ducklings are supposedly hard at work on their end of term projects--Friday is the last day of class, and they have to be out of their apartments and homestays on Saturday, and this picture here shows a recent class session where I had the groups of three reading and commenting on each others' draft reports using a web form I developed for my Business and Tech Writing classes back home.  I was able to wangle a computer classroom at Australian Catholic Uni, and was able to adapt my patented routine to the unfamiliar surroundings (a PC lab instead of Macs, a class that had been meeting in conventional classrooms all term, etc).  They did great after a slightly slow start, and I was able to give each group the other groups' comments anonymously within a couple of hours of the finish of the class, thanks to this cool method.

Here's a shot that shows what Alex has been up to, besides driving us slightly crazy.  Mostly on his own accord he volunteered for the Jazz Band at Mosman High--this required him taking the initiative since we had only asked that he attend regular band, and he had to ask the jazz band guy to join late.  His trombone section mates are both female as you see, and he actually learned a lot of music in a hurry.   This gig he was playing at deserves a full post of its own, but you can google the Schools Spectacular and find out about the biggest variety show in the universe.

Mosman's jazz band didn't make the main show, but they were selected to provide entertainment in the foyer both before the show and during intermission.  In this area of the hall they probably had an audience of several hundred, maybe more, and they were a LOT better than most of what we have heard back in Berkeley.

They fill this giant auditorium for two shows--in the area of 10,000 spectators--and the quality of the numbers is stunning.  Some of these kids go on to win "Australia's Got Talent" and then come back to help guest-host, and from the look of it the dancers and drum corps spent half a year rehearsing.  Then the full show is broadcast on New Years Eve, which makes for some odd moments where the emcee asked us to count down and yell "Happy New Year" as if we mean it!  Am and I were able to sneak into the matinee by tagging along ("we're with the band"), watching from the side but surrounded by literally hundreds of chorus kids and so on.  The level of professionalism was ridiculously high, and though one wondered whether the thing had to go on for three hours, Amelie and I had a whole lot of those dropped-jaw moments as the best high schoolers from all over New South Wales did their thing.

That night late he volunteered that he wished that kids at home didn't talk back to teachers so much, because, in his unprompted words, "we get so much more done in band here, because Mr Hardy doesn't let anyone waste any time."  Wow. 

Cool things about Sydney: Maritime Museum

Replica of Cook's Endeavour

 Among the many things-to-do around here, I counted the Maritime Museum high on my list, and I was right to do so.  Last Sunday we enjoyed a sweet day down there, the day after Amelie and Alex had gone there (while I sat at home and worked) and been frustrated by a power outage in the main galleries.  This being Australia and not France, they were given chits to come back next day when everything would be open.  How cool is that?
     So down we went on a bus, then over on foot. This juxtaposition of old and new just struck me hard as I visited the destroyer and submarine--making me appreciate how gutsy these early mariners must have been, to set out for months and years with the kind of tools they had, far more vulnerable than just about anything we do today.  I guess for someone my size the other thing that gets you is just how cramped everything would have been--no headroom, and no privacy anywhere.  And of course, imagining the stench os such a space is hard to imagine as well.

Alex was fascinated by the armaments of course, but has no clue how scary it might have been to have been shot at, no matter how much armor plate there was around him.  I keep thinking back to my own reading back then, the breathless accounts of sub warfare and heroism on aircraft carriers, until it slowly dawned on me that those fighter pilots were literally shitting their pants in fear as they went up against better-trained and better-equipped enemies and saw their friends blown out of the sky...

It's interesting to see how risk-averse he is (something we are thankful for in some respects, except when he doesn't want to leave the bunny slope), given the lack of impulse control in so many other areas.

Of course it wasn't all war stuff, and I was fascinated by this display of rowing-related artifacts.  Here were two fours, one old and one new, arrestingly arranged vertically.  What an amazing effect, to look up forty or fifty feet like this and have this installation.  Then from a mezzanine you got a good look at the guts of the boats without being close enough to touch.

I ended up talking quite a bit with one of the docents at a rebuilt freight-carrying sailing vessel also moored at the docks, appreciating as always just how much care and love these restorers take in their work.  They are "foamers" in the same way that train foamers foam-at-the-mouth about all things related to rail, but somehow it was endearing to have a yarn with these people and catch a glimpse into their world.

Bloggus Interruptus R Us

I have no idea who if any would notice, but it hasn't been a fantastic two weeks for the Peregrinator, at least not in terms of the blog itself.  I suppose that is to be expected: when there are papers to grade, then if I am not doing that task, I feel I should be doing that task--the task of judging, coaching, chastising, coercing, criticizing, cajoling, all with the knowledge that too many of the recipients of these comments and judgments will be unable or unwilling to process them productively.  Moreover, much of the time when I am not teaching or commuting or dealing with logistics of teaching or field trips, I am trying to keep a lid on the domestic pressure cooker.

That last one is a biggie I am afraid.  We are having a tough time with Alex, and when I am feeling bleak (which is too often) I get the impression that I am either preparing for an argument, or arguing, or recovering from an argument.  No matter how Zen I or we try to be, there is conflict--from getting out of bed on school mornings and getting out the door (how much money does he get for lunch? should we check on his homework? does he walk or take the bus?), to waking up super early on weekends to watch cartoons and stupid TV, to screaming fits about not liking whatever food is in front of him, to perverse and inexplicable jags about wanting to sleep outside on the terrace, or absolutely needing to use the USB modem "for homework," to whining about when he can get his iPod Touch back from quarantine (when he puts two no-argument mornings together).

Much of the conflict revolves around screen time, a phenomenon noted by many another parent.  Yet the problems and solutions are never simple.  Remove the TV (or in our case, hide or take the power cable) and you implicitly frame TV as a reward and everything else as drudgery that has to be done to get that reward.  IUn-restrict TV and you have a couch potato whose capacity for mindless cartoons and junk is seemingly endless--and whose surliness increases with each hour of watching.  I recall my mom's adamant refusal to have TV dictate family schedules (at least when we were growing up--in their retirement I recall my parents choreographing all manner of meals according to when particular programs were on, picked up amid horrendously bad reception through an antenna rotor mounted on a hundred-foot pine tree on their property)(what would they have said about hundreds of channels, on demand movies, instantly programmable screen-within-screen DVR?).

For an addictive personality, the screen is a drug with infinite possibilities.  High functioning as I am, I have experienced touches of this syndrome when I have zoned out in front of the big-screen here before A & A arrived, even without having discovered the channels beyond the broadcast ones.  But for Alex and his ilk, there seems to be no resistance.  Where is the drug that makes TV nauseating? Where is the operant conditioning modality that increases the electric shock with each passing quarter-hour? Almost everyone I know has gone through some phase of screen addiction, whether it was infantile Tetris binges that finally ended with the rain of shapes cascading your pre-sleep self-castigation, or solitaire on the sly, or borderline obsessive-compulsive Words With Friends--but there's usually an endpoint, a recovery, perhaps a realization that (just as my dad used to say about never having started smoking) "I don't want to try to prove I'm stronger than that."

I hear the same litany from so many other parents--at whatever stage of screen and game immersion thay happen to have landed.  We have so far held the line against xBoxes and Playstations and Nintendos, with only the infinitely-seductive Apple garden of iPod Touch to contend with at home.  And we are lucky to share basic values between both parents.  Pity those in post-nuclear families, where for example a feckless mom gives her eight-year-old an unlocked iPhone, just to spite the dad--it truly makes me wonder where we are headed.

Will there be a pendulum swing?  Or at least an equilibrium?  I truly don't know.  There's a toxicity of connectivity I see in other phases of Modern Life--witness the paucity of un-connected bus riders I see on my commute--but leave that aside and consider just the impact on youth like Alex.  Leave aside whether cartoons or reality TV are intrinsically degrading or merely insipid entertainment--I ask myself what are the opportunity costs of spending so much time that way.  Time in front of the screen is time not spent doing something else.  Time not reading.  Time not walking or exercising, time not building stuff, time not interacting meaningfully with others, time not getting practice dealing with anything except what a broadcaster wants to use to keep your face in front of commercials for a little while longer (until the remote is pushed with all the languid determination of the opium smoker).

Yet even here, a reversal suggests itself: we make his behaviors the pathology, yet we ourselves are increasingly in the minority, believing the way we do.  We are the abnormal, in the sense that we are resisting the dominant paradigm that every increase in screen connectivity is to be embraced.  I suppose that for parents like us the only response is to hold our own within a particular jurisdiction, to control what we can control, and not bemoan the rest.  Otherwise one goes mad.

So perhaps I can return to blogging about excursions and the vagaries of this three-ring circus they call study abroad.  But for a half hour I allowed myself to type without much editing, to reflect on a deep and distressing undercurrent in my life, and perhaps to help myself let go to focus on something else.

Cool things about Sydney: Sculpture by the Sea

There's actually a face inside that little hatch...

We had a great field class earlier this week, meeting at the southern end of the famous Bondi Beach and then enjoying a great Sydney tradition, the 16th annual Sculpture By The Sea competition / exhibition.  These installations ranged from quirky and whimsical to profound and disturbing, with a substantial smattering of pretentious art-speak in the creators’ commentary.  We totally lucked out with the weather, warm enough and not super windy, and then had a noisy dinner at the Coogee Bay Hotel, several beaches down the coast. 

You could own this 2-meter long pepper for $15,000

I found the artists’ sculptures quite entertaining and thought-provoking, but the sandstone cliffs themselves were beautifully sculpted, and the waves sending their foam over the rocks below the footpath were almost as dynamic and fascinating to me.  The whole thing was reminiscent of the in-situ installations we saw a few years back at Oliver Ranch near Geyserville, though without the scale or pomposity, mostly.  Sometimes the craftsmanship was impressive, sometimes it was carefully casual.  Mostly the commentary from the artists themselves was laughable, but Lorraine managed to make sense of things without being overbearing, and the crew hung in there long after the sculptures ended and the substantial walk to the next town of Coogee continued.

All in all, it was a great evening, though a late one getting home via bus ferry and bus, which unfortunately meant that Alex has been more than usually cranky.  Adding to his stress levels, his school’s big end of year exams have rendered everyone on edge, and even though he is not obliged to take them, he is probably feeding off the ambient angst levels.  I confess that the battles between him and Am have taken a toll on me, not just in themselves but because I feared they would occur, and they cost me in ways I feel I can’t afford.  Once things melt down completely they blow over for him pretty fast, but for us the effects are longer lasting. 

Things here have been a mixture: I’m typing this on Friday the 2nd on a coach ride to Canberra, the three hours-plus helping to show just how humongous this country truly is; we’ll tootle around the capital city for a few hours, guided by the ever-informative Lorraine (who used to live there), and then head home.  I’m pretty discouraged by a lot of things, not least of which is the chronic tardiness of a substantial fraction of the class--we departed from Central 25 minutes late.  It’s hard to put into words what goes through my mind at times like that, as I try to decide when or if to pull the trigger and just leave them.  I haven’t done that yet (except for the eejit who thought the Blue Mtns trip departed at 9 and not 8--at least she took enough initiative to find a train to Katoomba and joined us), but I should have today.  How do I get through to them?  Using the multiplier-effect that I explained on the very first day, they kept 23 others waiting--a total of more than 500 person-minutes.  So far, not a word of apology or explanation, even as I edit this in the evening as the DVD player butchers the video (the overblown epic “Australia”), flickering and rolling with dizzying frequency.  The landscape rolls by, pasture and bush punctuated by McDo’s and bizarre little roadside attractions...

[placeholder post for Cairns]

The crazy mini-vacation to Cairns exceeded all expectations.  I have to say I was skeptical that everything could work out, especially since we were so late in getting the planning started, but the travel guide Tasha who’d done the great job on the Blue Mountains excursion responded to an e-mail plea by Amelie, and miraculously conjured a long-weekend itinerary including airplane reservations to and from Cairns, three nights’ accommodation at a medium-priced hotel on the Esplanade, a reef day on Friday, a rainforest minibus day Saturday, and a bunch of suggestions for the morning of Sunday.  All we had to do was heat up the credit card (after some maneuvering of funds because of the second installment of our rent) and print out the boarding passes! 

I’d never done anything quite like this before--just trusting someone else to make all the arrangements without knowing at all what to expect.  We made our way to the airport with our gear, picking up Alex at school (not wanting to risk another transition), cleared security easily, and then started waiting, and waiting,and waiting, for Virgin Australia to get us onto a plane.  Well, an hour and a half later, we were on our way.

What better place than the Art Gallery?

One perk of this program is that we get to study Australian Art with a great lecturer who knows the local galleries by heart.  Last night we visited the AGNSW (Art Gallery of New South Wales) with Lorraine, having rescheduled from our usual Friday morning slot (which means we have a three-day break to symbolize the midpoint of our quarter here).  Since Wednesdays are  late-opening days, with live jazz in one of the foyers, I thanked my lucky stars for having a collaborator as able and deft at Lorraine.

L in front of "On the wallaby trail"

I had the students meet an hour early to write and reflect on what they were expecting to see (and not see) based on Lorraine's lecture the previous week, and of course not everyone could manage to show up, despite having known about the schedule tweak for two weeks and despite my "Come ta Jayzus" peroration about timely attendance the previous class.  I should note that the person who had catalyzed the peroration was actually on time for only the fifth time in 12 class meetings... 

That said, the ducklings did a great job not only keeping up but actually paying attention and asking good questions.  We blazed through some of L's favorite places in the museum, and did plenty of connecting between what we had studied the week before and what we were seeing now.  Likewise, there were good connections to make with the biodiversity / climate readings we had been doing, and I was pleasantly surprised at some of the comments from people. 

This slightly spooky sculpture is part of an installation that used to be in someone's house / mansion, which engendered a certain amount of hilarity.  "Don't misbehave, or I'll send you to . . . the clown room."  OK, it seemed funny to me at the time, which goes to show how stressed out I have been with the QA drama. 

Here's hoping that little contretemps is finished and the rest of the trip goes swimmingly well.  A, A and I are are off to our long-weekend junket to Cairns and a brief taste of the Great Barrier Reef now--in fact this is being sent from the departure lounge, as I benefit from a flight delay and the free Internet connectivity...

And as a parting shot, here's some of the surprising local fauna spotted in our "boutique apartment," showing just how egalitarian a society Oz really is:

Just a quick 'un

Teacher, the blogger program just ate my post.  Well it wasn't much, but I sure hate seeing "an error occurred" and then a big fat nada where my post used to be.  But given the events of the last week, I shouldn't be surprised.  When I have more time, I'll chronicle some of the tastier tidbits of the wonderful Study Abroad Smorgasbord of Psychodrama that I've been living, along with its domestic bass line over which everything is rolling.

Vic Johnson finds "Vickie Johnson" on the Volunteer Poles

But the field trip to the Blue Mountains last Saturday--with stops at the Olympic Park and at the surprisingly OK Featherdale Wild Animal Park--was rated "Best.Fieldtrip.Ever" by some usually hard-to-please students....

 

 

 

Not quite her comfort zone, ya think?

Yep, pretty kayoot.

 

You could try on snakes, which I decided not to do.

And here's the fam at the Blue Mtns "tunnel view" equivalent

Why does Alex look unhappy?

Because he just started moving backward up something very steep...

OK there ARE frustrations

...such as when I attempted to "top up" my Ozzie mobile this afternoon after a successful day of teaching over in North Sydney.  So the thing is, you have a 30 day account with a certain number of dollars but you have to recharge.  They say you can do it online.  Easy-peasy.  And mine doesn't expire til tomorrow.  I know this because I've been getting text message from SysAlert to that effect for the last week.

4:00 I'm on the terrace, comfy with computer and USB modem and credit card info and strong decaf  and a way-delayed lunch sandwich, having shared the 230 toward Mosman Wharf with at least four separate gaggles of oh-so-cutely-uniformed school students mosh-pitting amongst the other riders
4:03 Logged in to Vodaphone's recharge interface
4:06 Successfully entered all the numbers and my name and pressed "continue"
4:07 Get an error message "There seems to be a problem, call 1555 for assistance"
4:14 After some serious chirpy robo-voicemail ("I'm not following. I'll transfer you") I get said-such human being, in Bangalore.
4:15 I learn that the Vodaphone billing system ONLY WORKS WITH AUSSIE CREDIT CARDS
4:16 I gently and courteously inform Bangalore person that this might possibly be something that could be put in writing ON THE [EXPLETIVE DELETED] WEBPAGE!
4:20 I decide to try the PPoD (Pink Phone of Doom) itself and use the handset method, expecting the worst
4:21 The PPoD, being a Motorola acquired three years ago, is Much Too Antiquated to have its numbers actually recognized by Vodaphone, once a phone number has been dialed (as in, "press 1" I press 1. "press 1" I press 1.  etc.  Dozens of 1s are appearing on my screen but I am typing into a void)
4:25 I decide to walk up the street to pay a visit to smooth old Sam the Vodaphone man, away up near Spit Junction.
4:28 I leave for SJ, admonishing Alex to turn the TV off and do a bit of reading and the last seven problems from his stateside Algebra 'cause he says he has no Ozzie-math homework.  I'm an optimist.
4:38 I arrive only slightly sweaty at the tiny store, proud of having discovered and executed my shortcut without getting killed crossing any of the streets
4:40 I begin getting confused by the array of options outlined by Sam, both for my phone and for recharging the now-working-fine USB modem
4:44 Sam sells me the $30 voucher, for the phone and another USB starter kit, minus the modem dongle, for $29, which gives me an extra GB of data for less money because this is a special, though this means I will have to swap out the SIM card and reinitialize.  He offers to do it next time I pop round with my computer.  My heart sinks as I remember the gyrations it took to register / activate / change temporary password etc.  And at the moment I do know the new password and can ascertain how much or how little data I have used
 4:48 Sam offers to do the voucher thing right there.  But then we both remember the PPoD and its keypad impotence.  He assures me I can do it online
4:54 I spend a few minutes jawing with Sam about the American economy and its prospects.  He remembers to ask about Alex.  Smart businessman.  He tells me Amelie has been in that morning to recharge her card, after only two weeks, because there isn't a lot of data on that original plan and she is iPhoning it now, not using a crank-the-handle PPoD stone-age relic.  She's changed her plan, he hopes.
5:00 I depart, wondering do I stop at the IGA market to buy hot dogs for Alex or offload the chore onto Amelie.  I opt for stopping, figuring this may curry favor with the boy, and besides, Amelie isn't answering her phone as I walk.
5:10 I successfully drop $20 on staggeringly few items in my basket
5:16 Arrive home after my fast walk down Raglan Street.  I peek in the window from the sidewalk and am stunned not to see the TV on
5:18 I congratulate Alex on having a bash at the problems.  A quick glance reveals only four of the 7 have signs reversed or arithmetic errors
5:23 I log in to vodaphone's site
5:25 I log in again, thinking there must be some mistake.  No, I'm right.  You can't  use a voucher online, you have to use the phone's keypad.
5:28 I attempt one more time with PPoD (as I said, I'm an optimist)
5:29 I begin a 4 minute process of learning I cannot enter the voucher numbers orally/
5:34 Alex pulls off his headphones and stops watching Top Gearand asks me if I am OK.  What a sweetie. 
5:35 Incredibly, Alex sets down headphones, gets up, gets his phone, pops the back, removes the battery, pops his SIM, puts in my SIM, re-places his battery and closes it up.  And gives me a lesson in his bizarro LG keypad.
5:40 After only two attempts resulting in start-overs (too much delay in finding the microscopic # key after double-checking the 12-digit voucher number) I am successful in using keypad method to recharge.  Hosannas.
5:55 all phones back together with their proper SIMs.

No worries, mate.  Yeah right.

Update II: Classes and a field trip

My group itself seems to be settling in to the regular rhythm of classes on Mondays, Wednesday evenings, and Friday mornings, and we’ll have that normal schedule for these two middle weeks of October before throwing a three-day-weekend opportunity in there at the end, with some adjustments the way we did at the beginning of the term.  Even so, this past Friday we held our class as a field trip, walking around the old part of the city with our charismatic and much more coherent regular instructor Lorraine, whose regular gig is at the Art College. 

It’s strange to try to do some of the same things I always do, in a new setting: for example, for my first short assignment I always have students bring in hardcopies and then tape these to the walls so that everyone can look at each others’ submissions and reflect on what they see in others’ work that they didn’t do themselves, and what they’d do differently on revision, and why.  I don’t have them write anything on their colleagues’ work, just their initials, and then after they’ve had a chance to read at least ten others’ pieces, they take their own down and write out comments on the back--these comments can become the bases for my own critique, as in “You’re right, Jacob--you can include X and Y, and bump that other paragraph down a little,” so that the whole process becomes less completely directed by me.  The classroom is not ideally laid out, as the chairs don’t have tops, but there are half a dozen small tables that the early arrivals lay claim to so they have a writing surface.

 "A gift from Florence" for those of you who remember...

We’ve had some unseasonably cold and rainy weather of late, just in time for our first outdoor class of the term on Friday, a walking tour starting out at the cathedral downtown and taking in some of the earliest buildings constructed after the convicts arrived.  Amelie joined us after making sure Alex was safely at school, and mercifully the rain had stopped by the time we were actually underway.  About four students were late, something that is always a little hair-raising for me as a trip leader, and unfortunately it was the usual suspects with whom I will have to have one of those Difficult Conversations with.   

But Lorraine’s approach was informed, lively, well-paced, and thoughtful, and I was heartened to overhear so many students saying “I want to come back here later and see more.” That's not always a given with these things, and I appreciated how well paced the whole tour was--none of that overstaying one's welcome or feeling you were being yanked away, and even with some street crossings we kept the group together pretty effectively.  That said, every field trip or other excursion is for me a stressful occasion, and my sleep has been affected by the anticipated problems, the need to remember lists of phone numbers, etc.  

Of course at the end of the afternoon, after a pleasant lunch with Lorraine and Amelie at the cafe atop the Museum of Contemporary Art, I saw this vision of an alternate reality as I waited for the ferry home at Circular Quay--those are sort of normal sized boats in front:

Update I: Alex is in school!

Things on the domestic front have proceeded well since last posting as well: thanks to some pretty breathtakingly efficient playing of the school bureaucracy, we were able to get Alex enrolled in the local high school (the only one in the state that is both coed and doesn’t require uniforms) such that he could start class on Thursday!  Stunning actually, that with Amelie going in on Monday morning (after their two weeks of spring break) and with a multitude of little details to take care of including verification of visas and pro-rated fees and actual placement interview with the principal on Wednesday morning, he could start the next day, being shepherded around the new surroundings by “buddies” assigned to him, meeting most of his teachers, and getting squared away. 

Several clutch performances were necessary for this to happen, not least Amelie’s determination to get things done, but also incredibly friendly front-office people at the school itself, at the main office of education (Amelie started referring to this person as “Saint Peta,” she was so helpful and can-do about everything), back home (with our friend Michele securing a transcript from Alex’s old school--you can’t get the full previous year online, only the truncated present year--and scanning it and e-mailing it) and again Wednesday at the school (getting the application forms we’d filled out the previous hour faxed over to the central office right then, rather than forcing us to go to Office Works or wherever to get it done).  Yet with our MasterCard heated up (this is unsurprisingly more expensive than public school in the states, but a lot cheaper than private school tuition), we got the call that afternoon that he could start the next morning.  Amazing.

We couldn’t help reflecting with some sadness at how different this experience was than what would probably have transpired the other way: our experiences with Berkeley city bureaucrats and educrats have been so fraught with “No, not for two weeks” and “No, that person is away from her desk doing her nails” and “No, that’s not in my job description” and “No of course you won’t have a direct phone line to call to get your queries answered, instead you’ll be in voice-mail menu hell” that we couldn’t imagine getting a positive result in three weeks, much less three days.  Perhaps this is another side benefit of having ended up in an apartment in such a chi-chi postcode as Mosman: the wheels might well not have turned so smoothly somewhere else.

There are a couple of curve balls--the only language option available is Mandarin, which may be semi tough to catch up in (though the standard does not appear to be very high)--but the cafeteria meets Alex's specifications, there are people to play hoops with, and (if we can persuade him to do it) there is the option to take Learn To Surf as his PE.  He may end up with tennis just for the familiarity...   So we hope for the best.  The math isn't out of range, and he and I are continuing to do our almost-daily sessions keeping up with the homework grids sent from Berkeley.  Stay tuned.

Getting ready for the paper flow...

Here's a niche job for ya.

Funny to have done this teaching thing for so long that the rhythms of the quarter are permanently imprinted on my brain and my sense of self: tomorrow I get the first batch of papers to mark, and my life will change as it always does when I these little bundles of love stack up like a string of aircraft waiting to land at O'Hare International.  I'm having my students write a progress report on their internships, with the fictitious audience being the director of Quarter Abroad and the director of the Internships and Career Center back home--a nice two-fer, since I want to get a status report from everyone anyway, so why not have it count?  I put in a couple of late nights organizing the last chunks of the readers I have pit together, and creating primitive class websites with cobbled-together schedules that reflect the maze of weird alterations due to field trips or holidays or other deviations from routine (the coming two weeks will be the set schedule, bracketed by oddities that make syllabus planning a nightmare: students want to know what they'll be doing, and will ream you for being unorganized if you don't commit--but if you commit and then announce changes then you get reamed for being unorganized as well!), but there are still lots of little bits of administrivia like filing dates for seniors graduating in December that a certain type of student wants to frame as somehow my problem!

On the domestic side, we did eventually get the eedjits at The Apartment Service to get us another actual full set of keys, so I didn't have to try my next options of taping over or grind off the "do not duplicate" admonition that had discouraged the last timid locksmith / key-grinder.  Amelie also seems to have convinced the stand-in for our now-vacationing agent that we will be reimbursed for the cheapo knives, cheese grater, garlic press, and other essentials that were missing from the sogenannte Boutique Apartment.  Sort of nickel and dime given the ridiculous cost of housing in this part of Synny, but I suppose it's the gesture that counts.  I'm afraid I am already resigned to the fact that this is completely funny-money, that we will survive no matter what the outlay is, and we should not get too anal-retentive about relatively inconsequential amounts.

Alex is whistling the tune to Pirates of the Caribbean in the next room as he plays on the iPod Touch (sans wifi) and Amelie is off on a well-earned walkabout to the ferry and thence to the Botanical Gardens with its fine view of the Opera House and the harbour.  For a kid with no volume control, this apartment living may be a struggle (for us, not for Alex).  Tomorrow we discover whether the local high school will or will not accept a visiting Yank with Learning Issues and generally good humor, or whether we will be doing a kluged-together home-school and tutor thing for the next seven weeks.  So far at least the pre-Algebra review that Alex and I have been doing together most mornings has gone better than it ever did back home, and he has actually done more writing on his own proto blog (highly encouraged by his teachers back in Berkeley) in the last week than we have seen him write in multiple months.  Of course, Alex has deftly hacked the TV to receive ten times as many channels as I could coax out of it in my desultory way (actually only looking at the six on-air channels was bad enough), and we have had to lobotomize the TV once already by taking an essential cord away because of surly behavior.  At least we were able to do this in good Kaiser parent-group fashion, not by threatening consequences or anything, but by having the TV disabled the day after the outburst, with Alex understanding what had happened and why....

With Julie near Curl Curl Beach

As advertised, the climate here is so variable it makes your head spin.  Yesterday after a hot and muggy Friday the weather turned cloudy-misty again, last night we had window-rattling winds and thunder and lightning, and today it is gorgeous--though I need to knuckle down and mark some journal entries before tomorrow, the first of our big Mondays stacked with classes.  Yesterday we met our Berkeley friend Julie again in the beachy suburb of Manly, and with her daughter (whose space Alex probably dropped into when he transferred to public schools five years ago and Julie's family moved here) we had lunch, did a long coast walk & talk, and then had coffee in a town several beaches farther North. 

As I've remarked before, I am totally chuffed at the ways this city has preserved beach access, sometimes with headlands cut across by trails, but usually one can walk above waterline but below houses.  After pretty decent Thai food in a restaurant along the not-nearly-as-crowded-as-on-a-sunny-day pedestrian mall, we ambled off through the wind and mist, up Manly Beach, North Steyne Beach, Freshwater Beach, Curl Curl Beach, and up to Dee Why, probably 10 km of pleasant walking later.  Along the way Julie and Lulu helped orient us to the school situation, and Alex alternated between shyness about the possibility to hostility to acceptance and almost enthusiasm and then began the cycle again.  Then after a welcome coffee / pastry at a cafe (and I will take some pictures of the gorgeous foamed-milk art that seems to be more common here--if you're going to pay $4 for a small latte you may as well get a beautiful leaf-or-heart-shaped design tattooed artistically into your drink), we we bused back across the Spit and home in the deepening twilight.  I should add that last night the clocks changed, so we will have slightly darker mornings (yes! no more 5 AM birdsong waking us?) and longer evenings (yes!).

Now to attack some journal-commenting and see if I can get Alex to do a little reading. 

Signs of progress

I've been a pretty busy hombre here trying to settle a bunch of odd little schedule and syllabus problems that are to be expected in any new program.  Some of these involved multiple back and forth e-mails and some right-on-the-border-of-testy exchanges as I try to figure out who is really in charge and who is doing the Aussie version of the French functionary's "Yes, ziss ees a problem, m'sieur, but it ees your problem." 

If the academic side of that is bad enough we've killed some serious hours just trying to get a second (and preferably third) set of keys for the sogenannte "Boutique Apartment" we have so expensively rented--what a comedy of errors that has been.  We haven't found a key-grinder clueless enough to ignore the "Do Not Duplicate" warning on the vital gets-you-in-the-actual-building one, and even Ryan the Haphazard from the agency struck out--but his brilliant "solution" seems to be to give us another set of mailbox key and inside-door key, so that--get this--we can lock the outside-door key in the mailbox as we leave, and then have everyone use that key!  Brilliant!  All it takes is one time for somebody to forget, and we are climbing the trellis and breaking in through the clapped-out screen door!

The use of the plural pronoun should clue readers in that we are now a trio of happy warriors and worriers: Am and Alex arrived yesterday morning, having missed their connector from Brisbane and having enjoyed a long layover in / near LAX with the cousins, and because it was Labour Day Bank Holiday and I wasn't teaching as I ordinarily would on a Monday, I was able to head in and meet them at the gate.  So nice to see them, and I can't believe it but Alex seems even taller than he was two weeks before.  Crazy.  We taxied home and then did some ferry riding--like an idiot I didn't take group photos yet.  But soon.  Right now they are hashing out their own phone saga (turns out the iPhone that Amelie thought she'd had unlocked in Berkeley wasn't), and performing a major shopping.

 In the airport with a little time to kill and some caffeinating to fuel a binge of course planning and list making (dodging the slew of purple-clad supporters of the Melbourne Storm, newly crowned champions of the National Rugby League competition the night before), I found this strategically placed advertisement.  I am not sure you'd find this Stateside. 

And what do you make of this, outside a Thai restaurant in Manly, a beautiful ferry ride's north of the central ferry terminal?  It just goes to show something, but I'm not clear what. 

Tomorrow is a killer day with the first meeting of the "Learning Through Internships" course-ette that is supposedly going to help my students be successful Antipodean interns (in my exhortation to them I have invoked my friend Dr. Gene's hospital dictum, "Show me an intern who only doubles my workload and I will kiss her feet"), but which has provided some serious hair-pulling that I alluded to earlier.  After that I teach "my" class into the evening, and then return to Fam Sweet Fam. 

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!