miscellaneous australia

i'm a bit behind in my recording of history so this is just a post with random things so i remember them later.

sydney has a 7 story tall screen in the imax.  and the crappiest movies playing.  i thought i had to go see something 7 stories tall but i got there and it was $31.  to see a movie that i had no interest in.  cross fingers that when i have a nite to kill before my flight to cambodia they will have found something decent to play.

i met pam's friend clare for drinks at the opera bar shortly before new years.  when she told me to meet her there i thought oh cool, an opera bar, thinking it would be like seattle and only people that worked in the opera or theater would go there.  totally wrong, hundreds of people.  they only call it the opera bar because of the proximity to the sydney opera house.  there's an indoor bar with about a dozen bartenders and an outdoor bar with a few more and dozens of tables outside, then when those are full there's a cement bench that runs along the water for about a quarter mile filled with people.  its an enormous bar.  its even bigger when you've never met the person you're supposed to meet and don't know where to begin to look.  i pulled up her facebook page and studied her face and watched every person that walked by, and that actually worked.

she took me on a tour of cool pubs, one of which had a very very old woman playing trumpet and singing with a band doing jazz standards.  possibly the coolest thing i'd seen in sydney.  and then we went to dinner and i ate a kangaroo.

i'd previously written about the minor nitemare of my sydney apartment and i can now understand why that happened.  the woman who rented me the room was in new york and left her roommate shelly to take care of my arrival.  what i found out later was that shelly didn't know that some random stranger would be living in her house for a week until a couple days before i got there.  i guess i would have been kinda cranky too if that had happened to me.  so she had thought that with an extra bedroom for the holidays she could invite her friends to stay and that's how i ended up with 5 other people in a 2 bedroom apartment.  not ideal, everyone was polite but it was awkward, and after they left shelly stayed with her boyfriend and i had the entire place to myself.  

new years fireworks were pretty spectacular, the entire skyline was going off.  i went to the park with about a thousand other people who had been camped there and drinking all day so it was fun.  there are so many parks in sydney and they were all filled by 10am when i was wandering the city.  they had children's fireworks at 9pm then the real ones at midnite.  it was great to see them but i don't think i need to go again.  check it off the list.

so now i'm in cairns.  my flight was ridiculously expensive, actually twice as much as it cost to fly to australia from kauai.  that's what i get for holiday travel and no pre-planning, i guess.  i won't go into details but don't fly jetstar.

cairns isn't a place i'd visit again unless i had a lot more money.  i don't know how this is a backpackers destination since all the hostels i looked at cost as much as my hotel room, minus free lobby wifi.  and that's another thing i don't understand, australia barely has any wifi.  you can go some places and get it for an hour if you buy something, or most hotels offer it for a fee.  its sorta like cricket, no one can explain exactly what's going on.

i did try one upscale restaurant yesterday, not really by choice though.  the swedish woman i met on the dive boat invited me out to dinner with a couple friends.  they found it recommended in lonely planet, sort of an australian fusion place.  when we got there i looked at the menu and couldn't believe the prices but it was too late to back out.  my companions were 2 swedish engineers and a lawyer from dc, apparently with very substantial incomes.  the food was not amazing (as nothing has been since mexico) but it killed my entire food budget for a good week.  which is why i'm sitting at home tonite instead of a bar.  

i found a gym with an $8 daily fee (off hours) so i went for more power yoga.  i loved the power yoga in brisbane and was hoping it was the same, but not even close.  i knew it the moment the instructor walked in with a headset.  who does yoga over a loudspeaker?  bootycamp, spinning, trx, yes, scream at me, not yoga.  the class was full of people with new years resolutions to try something new, apparently.  it turned out to be some sort of horrible combination of yoga and calisthenics.  but it was only $8 so i can't be too angry.

this town also has a healthy population of bats and crazy birds.  at dusk you can walk through the center of town and watch thousands of bats waking up and terrorizing people with phobias.  its beautiful, the entire sky is filled with them.  during the day you can see them all hanging upside down from their tree limbs.  i'm not sure if its them but i haven't gotten a single mosquito bite since i've been here.

i think the biggest disappointment is that i live a few feet from the ocean and there is nowhere to swim.  the water is only a foot or so deep for quite a ways and there are birds wading and picking at things in the mud.  there are also 'beware of crocodile' signs all along the esplanade.  but i haven't seen one yet.

i spent most of today planning my next few weeks and happily, i think its about done.  i have another day of diving tomorrow, then a rainforest trip, a liveaboard boat (which absurdly has better wifi out on the reef than my hotel does), 3 days in port douglas, back to cairns for a flight to brisbane, a greyhound to coolangatta, then kawika is picking me up and i refuse to think further than that.  at that point i'll have 2 weeks until cambodia and i think i'll be happy to just surf, its been too long.  

i'm watching the bats fly off towards the mountains right now.  i hadn't realized they did that since i haven't ever sat on my balcony at dusk.  there's at least a mile of them and they're still coming out of the park.  if i said thousands of bats earlier i possibly underestimated.  this is definitely on the list of coolest things i've seen.

funnier than the crocodile signs