Good Morning Vietnam

            I hate to say it, but a pattern seems to be emerging of giving less-than-full accounts of our doings.  We’ve done it again, you see—scooted to a different country without advance warning.  No warning on this site, I mean; I don’t want to give the impression that we absconded from Melbourne in a whirlwind of unpaid bills.

            Kathryn and I left Australia in mid-December and spent a lively five weeks in New Zealand, which I won’t even attempt to describe here because I didn’t keep a holiday diary.  I will simply say that it was a brilliant trip, and there’s a lot more to New Zealand  than Lord of the Rings filming sites and bungy jumping.  Our hearts go out to the Kiwis as they struggle to rebuild Christchurch, following the terrible 6.3-magnitude earthquake there on 22 February.  It was such a beautiful and vibrant city when we visited it two months ago, which makes the pictures we are now seeing all the more dismaying.

            Our new home is Hanoi, Vietnam, where I am again teaching, though younger learners this time.  Amazing experiences continue to crowd in on us, so the best approach is probably just to recount a few, in no particular order, and trust that order will come to these postings eventually.  Or not.

            First of all, everything you’ve heard about traffic in Vietnam is true: to cross streets here you essentially have to ignore every rule your parents taught you about doing it safely back home.  You do not look both ways, cross with the lights, and only proceed when nothing is coming.  Following that method, you would find yourself marooned for life on a single city block, and even then you likely would be run down eventually by the motorbikes that take to the sidewalk when the streets are too choked for movement. 

            Before my visit to Hanoi last October, a teaching colleague in China gave me advice that probably saved my life:  “Be the rock,” he counseled.  When crossing the street, he said, I should move slowly and predictably, thinking of myself as a rock in a running stream.  This I do, the water (traffic) flows around me, and harmony is maintained.  I’m sure I still look like a giddy, hypersense foreigner, but the system works tolerably well most of the time.  Nonetheless, I’m a pretty vigilant rock, and am prepared to skip if the flow is obviously going to go over me rather than around.  I have a 20-minute walk to work, and have not had a dull commute yet. 

            The other day, waiting at a corner to cross a busy road, I heard a loud clunk a few feet away.  Looking over, I saw two motorbikes had collided in the crush of traffic.  As I watched, the woman who had struck the other bike leaned down and picked up a piece of something that had been broken off the other bike.  She calmly handed it to the other rider and then, because the light was now green, she rode off.  No words were exchanged, much less insurance information: just a typical ride home for both of them, I suspect.

            My only street mishap so far didn’t involve a moving vehicle at all, but was up on the sidewalk.  I had been in town just five days, and it was late evening. I was making my way to a restaurant that had been recommended, and as I stepped between some parked cars and up onto a dark spot on the sidewalk I felt something heavy and quite sharp hit me in the upper left thigh.  It knocked me sideways a few feet, and it was only then that I realized that the heavy, sharp thing was a rottweiler-sized dog with a good set of teeth.  He began snarling, now that his chain prevented him from sampling any other part of me.  If I could have laid my hand on a bat at that moment we might have settled things there and then, but I couldn’t, my thigh was already quite painful, and I didn’t know how strong his chain was.  So I just shook my fist at him and limped away, back into the crowd.

            As soon as I could discreetly do it, I stuck my hand down my pants to see if I was bleeding.  I wasn’t, and my pant leg appeared totally undamaged, so despite the soreness I went on to dinner.  My sense of adventure was at a low ebb by this point, so I just returned to a restaurant I already knew.  There I had another surreal encounter (which I’ll save for a later post) and then returned to my hotel room.  By this time my thigh was very painful and going red, and there was a bit of blood from one of the three distinct tooth marks as I showered before bed.

            I had to observe classes the next two days, so I just winced and limped as my thigh went from fiery red to greenish purple.  The people at my hotel were full of sympathy, and one of them went with me to ask the dog’s owner if, perchance, pup had had all his shots.  Through my translator, the owner assured me the dog was perfectly healthy, and indeed he had felt so during our brief meeting.  This reassurance comforted me for perhaps 30 seconds, and then I realized that the first words out my own mouth, If I owned a vicious cur that had bitten a foreigner, would be, “Don’t worry, he’s perfectly healthy.”  I had the next day off, so I decided to see what a doctor might think.  I was whisked into the examining room minutes after my arrival at the clinic, dropped my pants for two female doctors, and was immediately told that I would need a series of rabies shots.  Furthermore, they didn’t have the shot there, so I would have to mince along to a different clinic a few blocks away for my first rabies cocktail.

            And here’s where the silver lining began appearing round the cloud:  as the one doctor who spoke English stepped outside to give me directions to the other clinic, a young woman pulled up on a motorbike and joined us.  She was the doctor’s cousin, and the doctor quickly related to her what had happened to me, where I needed to go, and what she thought of my underwear, for all I could tell.  But the thing is the young woman instantly volunteered to give me a ride on her motorbike to the other clinic.  Not only that, she led me through the intake process and and remained on hand till I had had my shot.  The nurse who administered this shot had to mix the contents of two small vials, but before she did this she held them up for me to look at.  I nodded at her and she proceeded to give me the shot.  It reminded me of a waiter displaying a bottle of wine and pouring a small sample for the customer’s approval before serving the rest of the party.

            My new friend, Thu Bac, also volunteered to give me a ride to yet another clinic, even more distant, for my next shot in three days’ time.  Her family has since more or less adopted Kathryn and me, and hosted us for a meal during the Tet (Lunar New Year) holiday, took us to a thronged local pagoda, and even took us in a taxi to a small town an hour outside of Hanoi where Thu Bac’s father owns a private school.  We have been overwhelmed by the kindness and generosity of the Vietnamese people.  Another family that has taken us under its wing is that of Mr. Tran, the uncle of a former student of mine in Melbourne.  This student put me in touch with her uncle when she found out we were coming to Hanoi, and his family likewise had us over for Tet and hosted us for the day in Mr. Tran’s ancestral home in a nearby village.  He teaches English at university, and Kathryn and I went in and spoke to his class a couple weeks ago.

            But back to my rabies shots.  I got the last four of them at that third clinic, and finished the series a couple weeks ago.  I was impressed by the production-line efficiency at this place (a lot of babies were in getting vaccinated each time I turned up) and was even more impressed by the price of the visits—the total for all five shots didn’t even use up the deductible on my insurance.  Indeed, Vietnam seems to be the place to come for cheap drugs.  On the pharmaceutical end, all manner of things that require prescriptions in the west are available here over the counter—from amoxicillin to Viagra; on the recreational side, marijuana is so widely available that half the sidewalk food vendors have a bong on hand for their own or customers’ use.  Even alcohol is dangerously cheap, with a beer going for about 75 cents, while a 750-ml bottle of decent vodka costs just over $3.  I suspect other products are available, but I haven’t made inquiries.

            You see already how one topic leads to another that needs explaining.  Everything is like that here.  I could mention, for instance, that this clinic had a small shrine with incense sticks and offerings of food around it.  All businesses have these shrines, as do most homes.  Ancestors are prayed to at these shrines for guidance and “luck,” especially at important times such as the beginning of the new year, and the first of every lunar month.  Usually the food offerings are fruit, but I have seen boxes of cookies, six-packs of beer, and even a bottle of whiskey.  The practical-minded Vietnamese consume these offerings themselves after a few days, but they always give their ancestors first crack at them.  And still the interesting impressions keep coming—too many for one posting.

Red Light, Go!

            So, about those traffic regulations.  I have not spent any time researching what the statutes say about driving here in Guangdong because, frankly, the written laws are irrelevant.  There are really only two rules of the road, and they’re very simple:  1) The larger vehicle has right of way; and 2) Red light, go!  Of course, drivers go on green lights as well, which keeps things inexpressibly lively out on the highways.  There’s no need for free-coffee rest stops here, because the sheer exhilaration of moving at speed on the roads is enough to keep you awake and alert.

 

Every week three or four of us teachers pile into a motorcycle-trailer contraption and drive a few miles down the road to a vegetable market.  It always staggers me to consider how many laws we would be breaking back home in doing this:  no helmets; no seatbelts; no seats, even, except for the plastic lawn chairs we load in at the start of each trip; ignoring lights; driving the wrong way down streets and highways; all in a vehicle that is clearly unroadworthy.  Along the way we navigate an intersection that you might find in any American city—if that city had not done any road repair for 10 years or so, and you happened to arrive there in the middle of a civil disturbance.  But here the bedlam is just business as usual, and dammit, we need our vegetables.

The market itself is fascinating.  I have learned the Chinese numbers, but only to 10, so the vendors obligingly hold up fingers to tell how much I owe them, or sometimes just show me the figures on their electronic adding machines.  It works out better than I would have guessed a month ago.  There is also a meat section in the market, but I confess I have been too much of a gastronomic coward to buy anything there yet.  It would be easy to become a vegetarian because there is absolutely no escaping the fact that you are eating parts of dead animals when you buy meat here.  You can even get to know your dinner, if you wish, because the animals are often alive when you pick them out.  I’ve already described the chickens.  The last time I was at the market I also saw eels and fish flopping in small tubs of water, saw a turtle thrashing its limbs feebly against a plastic mesh bag.  I also was told one vendor had a sackful of tasty snakes, but declined the invitation to inspect them.  As I say, I’m eating mostly eggs, fruits and vegetables these days, though I have also started taking some meals in the student cantine, where I can get a hearty plate of rice, chicken or fish, and vegetables for seven to ten yuan (AUD$1.25 - $1.60), and it saves me washing up.

I should say a few words about the people.  I have begun teaching now, and have a class of 30 freshmen, none of whom have had a foreign teacher before.  I got the impression at first that for some of them it was as if they had a unicorn at the whiteboard lecturing on the Present Perfect Continuous.  They were initially quite shy and reticent, but are coming out of their shells nicely now.

 

Our college shares a large campus with perhaps half a dozen schools.  The students at these other institutions have entered the “marching and shouting” phase of the year, as my teaching colleagues call it.  These students must undergo a month of quasi-military training, so they get togged up in battle-dress uniforms, stand or sit in the blazing sun for long periods and listen to what sound to me like angry harangues in Chinese.  Later, I’m told they will take to marching or running around campus in formation, shouting out slogans as they go, often at unsociable hours of the morning. For some reason, our students are exempted from this training.

Despite these militaristic drills, I have met with nothing but friendliness and kindness at every turn, and the people around campus are generally very light-hearted and affectionate.  It is absolutely normal to see two female students arm in arm or holding hands as they walk along, or two guys with their arms around each other’s shoulders—not “partners,” as we would say in the west, but just teens and early-20s who haven’t yet learned to feel awkward about physical contact with a close friend.  I have to say I envy them that.  Moving through a crowd, I do see a lot more smiling, animated faces coming at me than I am used to at home.  They enjoy their mobile phones, of course, but I have seen almost no one isolating himself between a pair of mp3 earbuds.  It’s quite remarkable.

And they are an active lot.  China used to be known for its prowess at table tennis, of course, but today the sports of choice here are basketball for the young and fit, and badminton for the older set.  Every evening after dinner young and old swarm down out of their living quarters for some exercise—vigorous or gentle—and a bit of socializing.  Other sports are practiced just as enthusiastically, but generally less competently, than these top two.  This evening as I was returning from the student cantine, for instance, I stopped to watch some comically inept students batting around a volleyball, and they soon invited me to join in.  It was great fun, and I actually didn’t make too big an ass of myself.  I may go back for more tomorrow if my legs don’t seize up in the meantime.

 

It seems that any form of movement, no matter how bizarre, is countenanced.  I have seen people gravely walking backward (or sideways) through parks, clapping at every other step; I have seen people dancing, in couples and singly, and striking preposterously affected ballroom poses while a boom-box played a cloying ballad nearby; I have seen rotund middle-agers dripping sweat and very adroitly kicking a shuttlecock around a circle, as younger people do a hacky sack back home, and of course tai-chi in the park is not just a stereotype—they really do it.

If I can manage to sort out some visa issues, I hope to visit Vietnam in a couple weeks, so my next installment may be about that country.  But don’t let me forget, on my return, to touch on “non-persons” and “the Hard Word.”   There’s just no end of interesting things to remark on here.
--originally posted 9/2010

Whoa, Didn't See That One Coming...

            Let me start off by saying I know it shouldn’t be done like this.  It strikes me as pretty bad form to be incommunicado for months and then to let fly with something from way, way out in left field that had not even been hinted at before.  So I apologize at the outset for doing precisely that, but really the only alternative was to continue in radio silence indefinitely and pretend nothing is happening here.  That also strikes me as a pretty shabby trick, and I mean to treat my regular readers—both of them—better than that.

            So let’s dispense immediately with the totally unforeseen, which, once absorbed, will make the rest of the news seem less shocking.  I am in China now, Guangdong Province, to be precise—way down south on the northern edge of the tropics, near Hong Kong.  I’ve been given a three-month teaching contract at a Sino-Australian accounting school, and will return to Melbourne in mid-November to pack up and prepare for the move to Vietnam in January.  Kathryn remains in Melbourne, holding down the shoebox.  My school is located about an hour outside Guangzhou (formerly known as Canton), which is the provincial capital.  I’ve seen widely varying population estimates for the city, but I believe the most accurate is about 10.3 million people, so it’s not just a blip on the map.  It’s the third-largest city in the most populous country on earth.  I have been here just a week, and haven’t met my students yet, but never mind—there’s plenty to write about anyway.

            I am in teacher accommodation here—foreign-teacher accommodation, I should say, because it definitely makes a difference.  My first few days here I had been admiring the hardihood and eco-friendly outlook of the fellow whose balcony faces mine, because he never, ever closed his doors and windows, no matter how dreadfully hot and it was outside.  He just went about his business shirtless and in shorts.  I meanwhile was hunkered down in my apartment with the windows closed and air-conditioning on full blast.  Then I found out that Chinese teachers, such as my friend across the courtyard, do not have air conditioning in their apartments—it’s only for foreign teachers, such as myself.  Though I’ve never spoken to him, I genuinely feel for the poor sod, and wish I could take a few shopping bags of conditioned air over to leave anonymously on his doorstep.  Strangely, the student dorms are air-conditioned, because students pay big money to attend these private colleges, but there are four to six occupants to each dorm room.  So I have it pretty good, compared to people around me.

            I’m on the sixth floor, and there is no elevator, so I’m getting plenty of exercise.  My cooking facilities are spartan-bordering-on-primitive, and my kitchen sink is actually outside, on my smaller balcony, but I have been able to make do so far on rice, noodles, vegetables, some canned fish, and lots of fresh eggs.  They have the freest of free-range chickens here—they wander everywhere—around the stores, along the roads, through the living compounds, and for all I know borrow motorbikes on weekends to visit friends who live further out.  But if they can get a passport and emigrate, they should do it, because there’s no future in being a chicken in Guangdong.  Cages at the markets are stuffed with them, panting out through the bars, and you are given the privelege of picking out the one who looks likely to make the tastiest soup or BBQ.  “Come back in 10 minutes,” the vedor suggests, and when you do he hands you a warm, weighty little bag.

            This past week has given me a strong dose of what my students must go through when they come to an English-speaking country.  About the only word I have found that means the same in Chinese and English is OK.  The rest is all new, but I have been trying to pick up a bit here and there.  I have made a set of flash cards for myself with various words, and I’m constantly flipping through them.  As I think of a new word or phrase I would like to know, I write the English on one side of a blank card and then go and bother an extremely patient Chinese lady who also teaches English at our school, and she writes the symbols and pronunciation on the other side for me.

            Yesterday, despite my language deficiencies, I managed to get into Guangzhou—the big city—on the bus, and even to buy a few small items.  Specifically, I was looking for short-sleeved shirts and a small chess set, and per a suggestion from a Canadian colleague, I went first to a large department store, Jusco, which stands for Japan US Company, or something like that.  At the time I was there (about 10:00 on a Saturday morning), the employee-to-customer ratio seemed to be about 1 to 4, which meant that the instant I showed even a passing interest in anything, an assistant was at my side to call my attention to its many fine features.  I stopped to inspect some shirts, for instance, which caused a woman to materialize from nowhere to show me that all of these Jusco shirts had sleeves and buttons, and came in different colors and were made of material.  She took it well when I declined her shirts, however.  I was a bit disappointed at the prices, frankly, this being China and all.  But these shirts were about RMB 150 and up, or around AUD $30.  I thought I could do better at the Bai Ma (White Horse), another market my colleague had told me about. 

Next my thoughts turned to chess, and an intrepid pair of shop assistants led me to the stationery department, where we eventually turned up an acceptable set.  And then there was some fun.  When one of the assistants finally understood I wished to buy the set, she immediately took it back and wrote me a ticket.  After some gesturing on her part, I carried this to a nearby cashier, who received my money and issued me a different piece of paper.  I brought this back to my helper with the chess set.  She then stuck a green sticker on the box and handed it over to me.  Note to America:  if you want to solve the unemployment problem overnight, simply institute the Jusco sales system in all of your stores.

One other interesting feature of Jusco was that they had a lot of their electronic and cooking devices revved up and going to show how well they worked.  I saw humidifiers puffing out foggy air for the comfort of those who find the tropical atmosphere of Guangzhou unendurably dry.  I also saw things like crock pots bubbling away on display tables beside the aisles.  I could imagine a personal-injury lawyer prowling through the store, licking his lips and wishing he could persuade just one Wal-Mart in the States to set up a similar display.  Then just turn loose a pack of mothers with young children, and his fortune would be made.

Eager for more commercial recreation, I moved on to the Bai Ma to look for shirts, but in the end I came away with only one.  I was soon overcome by the sheer scale and labyrinthine complexity of the place.  Imagine a multi-level rabbit warren lined with cubby holes selling jeans and women’s shoes and leather goods, with the cubby-hole staff sitting on low stools in the warren runs, eating noodles, and you pretty much have Bai Ma.  I soon wished I had left a trail of bread crumbs to find my way back to the subway entrance.  In the end I blundered into the men’s section, or part of it, but most of the cubby holes there seemed to be selling suits, jeans, and young-persons’ casual wear.  A few were selling dress shirts, but these were mostly long-sleeved, and frankly the patterns were hideous.  At last I found one small shop with some semi-decent, short-sleeved shirts and friendly shop girls who spoke a bit of English.  Unfortunately, only one of the acceptable shirts was big enough—a polo shirt with a logo that delighted me immediately.  It is in non-sensical English that is mis-spelled to boot.  It is supposed to say “Paul & Shark Yachting,” whatever that means, but instead it says “Paul & S| ark.” Oh well, it only cost RMB 45, and I’m sure it’s one of a kind, “a genuine fake,” as a shop assistant once assured a colleague.

Wow—what a place!  Remind me next time to touch on the local attitude towards traffic rules.  Well, they’re not rules so much as a set of suggestions, to be followed or not at the driver’s discretion.

--originally posted 8/2010

Let Seat Strine!

            Ah, I need some help—about three hours of your time, actually, if you can spare it.  Kathryn’s away, see, at one of her weekend booze-ups.  Excuse me, I mean at a conference.  That’s what they have to call their drinking sessions if they want to stick the university with the bill.  Anyway, I need to do the shopping, and I’ve only got two hands, and, well, would you mind?  You’ll enjoy it—it’s a nice little three-mile walk to the store, but only 300 yards coming back.  Don’t worry; I’ll explain as we go.  It’ll be fun, I promise. 

            So, this is our road—we go up this way, and yes, here we have High Street, Armadale.  Look at the date on that building there.  That’s when this suburb really got off the ground—the gold-rush years of the 1850s.  But now it’s ground zero for the Victorian wedding industry, as far as I can tell.  To save you counting, just on this next half-mile stretch there are 11 bridal shops with wedding dresses so over-the-top and overpriced that I’ve even seen some of the manequins blushing to wear them.  In addition, this street has 57 boutique clothing stores, 32 art galleries, 21 cafés and restaurants, not to mention the sundry bookstores, houseware stores, Persian rug shops, and four places to get your nails done, though we don’t have time for that today. 

Yes, there is rather a lot of money around here.  You will have noticed all the Mercedes, BMWs and Lexi, of course, and we have a pretty fair chance of seeing a Maserati or a Lamborghini somewhere along the way.  I recently learned that the neighboring suburb of Toorak is the most expensive in the state, and in fact is the seventh priciest in all of Australia.  So this is a community of bank managers, judges and old money—people whose antecedents probably wore top hats and pince nez, and said “What ho!” and “Jolly good,” or, when shocked, “Harumph!”  Since we moved in, I have daily expected a visit from the local citizens’ council to request that we strike camp and remove ourselves to a place more obviously suited to our station in life, but so far I guess we have stayed under the radar.  Possibly they think we are help for one of the estates.

            And well, here we are at Glenferrie Road.  Down that-a-way you have another 31 boutique clothing stores in case High Street didn’t have what you were looking for; and an additional 33 restaurants and cafés as well.  That stately Victorian pile across the way, hiding behind the scaffolding, tram lines and that outlandish Christmas wreath, is Malvern town hall, where the local government is housed and where I occasionally donate blood.  And—what?  Oh yes, those bronze sculptures—aren’t they sublime?

What do you mean, “hideous”?  What a philistine you are!  Look what it says here on the plaque:

THE SUN AND THE MOON IS A UNIVERSAL SYMBOL OF HUMAN ENDEAVOUR.

THE FIGURES ALLUDE TO CLASSICAL MYTHOLOGY:  THE MINOTAUR, APOLLO THE SUN GOD, AND DIANA THE HUNTRESS GODDESS OF THE MOON.

            Note the careful wording:  the figures allude to certain mythological characters, rather than depicting or representing them, which means the artist could throw in as much mythological rubbish as he wanted without fear of being called an ignorant jackass.  He could have added Neptune’s trident, if he’d cared to, or Thor’s hammer, or Ganesha’s trunk.  In one sense, though, these figures are genuinely universal.  They have no connection at all to this particular spot on the globe, but then, being hybrids, they have no connection to any other place either.  They would be equally irrelevant wherever they were set up, so they might as well be here, I guess.

            I tell you, if I could travel back in time and witness one moment of history in this place, it would have been the 1989 unveiling of these sculptures.  How I would love to have been there with maybe a dozen photographers to record the crowd reaction when they first beheld “The Sun and the Moon” and realized A) that they had paid for them; and B) that they and posterity would have them to enjoy for a long, long time.  I haven’t been able to track down a copy of the local paper for that date, but I imagine the headline was some variation on “Harumph!”

            But come on—we have shopping to do, and can’t aford to be swooning over artwork all day.  Up here is our local library—very helpful staff and an excellent selection of jazz and classical CDs.  And this is Malvern Gardens.  They’ll have some free Sunday concerts there this summer, as well as in other local parks; we’ve got the schedule at home somewhere.  Okay, get ready to skip now:  we have to cross the road.  Yes, of course I see the lights up ahead, but where’s the glory in crossing that way?  Mind the tram tracks in the middle, and do step out a bit—there is some traffic bearing down on us rather smartly.  Drivers here give no quarter; I’m convinced they get insurance-rate reductions if they can prove they ran down a certain number of pedestrians in the previous year.

            So this is our weekend routine, Kathryn’s and mine:  we do this one-hour walk to the store and have a talk as we go.  Oh, but look over there, back across the street.  That’s the Harold Holt Swim Centre.  Well may you ask.  Old H.H. was Prime Minister of Australia back in the ‘60s, but he went for a swim in heavy seas a bit south of here and drowned.  Yes, while in office.  They never did find the body, and—what’s that?  Well, yes, I guess it is a bit ironic, looked at like that.  Never thought of it; well observed. 

But oops, round the corner we go here.  Now isn’t this a splendid little piece of suburban heaven?  I actually like this neighborhood more than our own.  The homes are more reasonably proportioned, and they have more yard.  Also, they don’t hide behind brick or stucco walls, as they do back in Armadale, so you can enjoy your neighbors’ gardens as you pass.  And just look at those big, beautiful London plane trees marching up and down the street.  Aren’t they splendid?  The branches shake hands with their partner across the way.  It keeps it lovely and shaded on the hot, summer days.  Now one more death-cheating dash across a 46-lane speedway, and here we are at our usual supermarket, Coles.  Okay, I’ll tear the list in half—you get those items, and I’ll get these, and I’ll meet you at the checkout counter.

What, done already?  You are efficient!  Let’s see—it looks like you got the essentials.  Ah, Tim-Tams:  diabolically tasty, those things.  It’s totally misleading to call them cookies or biscuits—they’re simply in a class by themselves.  Personally, I think they ought to be available only by prescription, they’re so addictive.  And good, some ginger marmalade:  that’s superb as well.  Kangaroo steak, check; and good, some Vegemite too.  Yes, definitely not for everyone, but I think we’ve acquired the taste now—this is our fifth jar since our arrival last year.  

But there’s a story to that little jar.  Every now and then a really big organization here in Oz will do something so spectacularly stupid, that it is forced to curl up in a fetal position while the public kicks it in the kidneys and heaps abuse on it until it reverses course and sets things right, or until another organization does something stupid and gives the public a new target.  Here’s a perfect case in point.  A few months ago, Kraft, which makes Vegemite, decided that in order to boost the sales of this venerable Aussie product, they would have to update the stuff—bring it into the 21^st century.  It would be too simple, of course, just to come out with a clever ad campaign or sponsor an athletic event.  No, if a thing’s worth doing, it’s certainly worth over-doing, so they had a big contest to come up with a whole new name for the product. Vegemite was so yesterday.  But guess what name won.  Go on—let’s see what kind of ad exec you are.

Give up?  iSnack.  Truly.  iKid uNot.  Absolute howls of public fury, the head of Kraft’s CEO ended up on a pike, I think, and the name was changed back to Vegemite within nanoseconds.  But there were already a few thousand jars of iSnack being distributed, and they have slowly disappeared from store shelves as people buy them in the hopes that they will one day be collectible. 

But tell me, did you come across any abandoned baskets in your wanderings—a shopping basket half-full of stuff set down in an odd place?  Yes, I thought you might; I generally find at least one on every trip.  They mystify me.  I can only surmise that they mark the spot where a shopper was abducted by aliens, or suffered a fatal heart attack, or received a call to go perform emergency brain surgery somewhere, because I simply cannot believe that people would be such utter troglodytes as to fill a shopping basket with random items, many of them perishable, and then simply change their minds and leave the basket on a secluded shelf for the shop staff to deal with.  As I say, it’s a true mystery.  It wouldn’t surprise me to see a major investigative news item on the phenomenon.

And now we head out of the shopping center this way—no, over here—and behold, across the road, Caulfield train station.  From here we’ll catch a train toward the city.  Now, have a look at the sidewalks—see all the tiles with the horeshoe emblem?  Caulfield is home to a major racecourse, and earlier in the spring this railway station was a very entertaining place to embark:  every arriving train would decant hundreds of race-goers.  Now, don’t ask me why, but it’s an Aussie tradition to dress up—way, way up—for the races.  The men’s uniform is pretty standard:  suit, garish tie, perhaps a fedora, and a bottle of beer or bubbly in hand.  The women are the ones to watch, however.  Whether it’s bucketing down with rain, or the sun is out melting the pavement, the women go for nothing but superlatives in their dress:  the shortest, tightest, lowest-cut dresses allowed by law; the most preposterously high heels they can actually stand up in; and they finish it off by clipping a random bit of silk, felt, or lace on their heads, and by common consent everyone pretends it’s a hat, especially if it’s got a veil of some sort.  It’s quite a sight to see the young—and not so young—ladies mincing so carefully down the ramps to the underground passage, trying not to topple over. 

What?  Oh yes, there is a fair bit of graffiti—they do love to paint a wall around here.  If you’re looking for a good investment, sink your money into the company that supplies Australia with spray paint and you’ll do all right.  Every now and then our own local station gets muralized with some undecipherable gibberish, but the city must have some miracle-working cleaner on staff because the paint is typically removed within days and not a trace remains on the brickwork.  Ah, here’s our train.  One stop, two, and off we get at the third one, Toorak.

We’re just a few minutes away from tea and Tim-Tams now.  Mind your steps here—this is the street that nightly hosts a parade for incontinent dogs; I believe it won a five-star rating from Dogwalkers magazine.  Round the bend here, and would you believe that the last person to see Harold Holt alive used to live somewhere on this little nothing of a road?  I have no idea where, but I read it in the Sydney newspaper, so I guess it’s true.

And here we are, back home!  Come on through the gate with me and let me show you our beloved Shoebox. You know, I had a feeling you’d ask, so I measured it just the other day: it’s 10 ¾ feet by 29 2/3 feet, or about 318 square feet.  Thinking metrically, it’s about 3.29 meters by 9.05, or about 29.75 square meters.  Decidedly snug, but it helps us keep in check our urge to fling money in every direction, since everything we bring home must be able to justify the space it takes up.  But really, it has everything we need—a bathroom, space on the floor for our matresses, a small refrigerator, and two alleged cooking appliances, which I call the easy-bake oven and the easy-burn cooktop—the yin and yang of our kitchen. 

  

I’m not joking about loving the Shoebox:  it’s quiet and convenient and affordable.  Our neighbor, Paula, is hardly ever here, so we essentially have the back yard all to ourselves.  A delightful set-up, and it does help us keep things simple.  Anyway, here’s your tea; you get an extra Tim-Tam for being such a helpful bear.  Let’s get this on board, and then we can start thinking of the ‘roo and red—you will stay for dinner, won’t you?

--originally posted 12/2009

Adventures in Moving Out

            This is something of a time capsule—a diary entry I was working on almost exactly a year ago.  Somehow I just never found the motivation to tack on the conclusion and post it, but now does seem an appropriate time to finish the job in recognition of the anniversary it represents.  So here is what I wrote in early September, 2008:

A friend of mine, Jim, had a singular experience about 15 years ago.  He had built a home on high-bank, waterfront property on Bainbridge Island, and at 3:00 a.m. one New Year’s Day he got to ride that house down the cliffside to the beach.  This was not, mind you a poorly constructed house.  Jim had built it himself, by hand, and because he is German he is morally and culturally incapable of shoddy work.  It was a beautiful and well built house.

          Unfortunately, he had not built the bank below the house, and so, when weeks of rain had sufficiently lubricated the clay beneath the hillside topsoil, the whole thing simply slipped away like a tablecloth and stack of dishes off an up-tilted kitchen table.  Jim awoke just as his home weighed anchor, knew immediately what was happening, and says his first thought was, “I guess now I get to see how well I built it.”  How’s that for pride of workmanship?  When was the last time you heard of a homebuilder taking one of his structures for a nighttime slide down a cliff and regarding the experience as a good, if unexpected, chance to test the soundness of his carpentry?

          I had a similar feeling to Jim’s this past weekend as I helped our son, Benjamin, settle into the house he will share with four friends this school year:  “I guess we get to see how well we raised him.”  Not to suggest that Ben is beginning a slide down a cliff to a rocky beach.  I’m saying merely that he is now, to a far greater extent than ever before, on his own, and we, his parents, are commensurately less able to shield him from life’s pains.  Which is what we’ve been working towards all these years, of course—a sensible, responsible, self-reliant young man.  Nonetheless, our arrival at this point does cause a pang and gives one that over-the-falls-in-a-barrel feeling.

          In the weeks before the move, small tags of masking tape began appearing on virtually everything we own, marked with a “B” if Benjamin was taking it, or with a ludicrously knocked-down price if it was for our garage sale.  That was Labor Day weekend, by the way, and it netted us about $400—10% of that in quarters.

          Then, this weekend, we shoe-horned all of Benjamin’s chattels—and those of his friend Chris—into a 17-foot U-Haul truck for the three-hour trip to Bellingham, up near the Canadian border.  Ah, U-Haul.  “Adventures in Moving”—do you remember that slogan of theirs?  At the rental agency I looked for that familiar phrase but couldn’t find it anywhere; it’s completely gone.  Apparently U-Haul finally has realized that the last damned thing people want when moving is “an adventure.”  They might be looking forward to brighter days in a new location (perhaps where there is no warrant out for them), but adventure en route is not the desideratum.  You must have noticed that only tourism-related businesses use the “adventure” motif in their ads nowadays, and even they employ it with discretion.  You will never see, for example, commercials or billboards promising “adventures” in accounting, or in obstetrics, or laser-eye surgery, or divorce law.  There’s good reason for that.

          Nonetheless, I did remember the U-Haul ads of yesteryear, and for auld lang syne I began our trip with a bit of adventure by using the 17-footer to knock over the rental agency’s mailbox. The U-Haul lady was very nice about it. The box evidently takes quite a thrashing, and she keeps a maintenance fellow on retainer to come re-set it every second or third rental.

Among the above-mentioned chattels—computers, beds, pots and pans, kitchen table and a third-hand bicycle—was a leather sofa, purchased in July for $10 at the Rotary Auction.  It is the perfect sofa for a student house, in that it clearly has seen all that life can throw at a piece of furniture and remains, if not unscathed, at least recognizable still as a leather sofa, now past all caring what happens next.  It is extremely comfortable, and has an air of being ready for anything, from a Superbowl party to an unplanned pregnancy…

And, well, I’m afraid that was as far as I got in writing up our 2008 adventures in moving, probably because I recoiled in instinctive horror at the implications of that final sentence and could go no further.  I am gratified to report that Benjamin did enjoy a successful (i.e. no unplanned pregnancies) year following his installation in the rental house, and managed to cram what was left of his household items into storage for the summer.  He did this on his own because his parents had irresponsibly fled the country in the meantime, leaving him to fend for himself.  As of this writing, he is touring Europe, but will return at the beginning of September to share a different home with a different set of friends for the next school year.

And one year on, I am confident that, whatever lies ahead, Benjamin will do as well as my friend Jim and land where he lands, upright and exhilarated by the trip.  On second thought, if I know Benjamin, he’ll arrive at the end point reclining on his $10 sofa.

     --originally posted 9/2009

A Few Commuted Sentences

In preparation for making this entry I did a little research—very little, actually—and was chagrined to find that Seattle is not in fact among the American cities with the worst traffic congestion.  I had heard it was on that top-ten list; it seems to deserve to be on that list; and I had convinced myself that it was so.  But whatever its traffic ranking, Seattle’s public transportation is shabby and inadequate (or at least it was when we left 10 months ago, but perhaps Metro has wrought great improvements in the meantime), so we have been enjoying the much better transportation facilities here.

Which is ironic, because if you ever want to see Melburnians throw a fit, go ahead and compliment their city’s public transport.  “Oh, you’re joking,” they will protest.  “It’s terrible!  Connex has absolutely ruined it.  Back when the state ran the trains there was never a delay, and just look at what we’ve got now.”  What they’ve got now is an overlapping network of trains, trams, and buses that covers the city and its suburbs, and seems just fine to us, though, as indicated, we arrived here not expecting much.  Connex, a French corporation, operates the trains, though a Hong Kong consortium is due to take over in November; Yarra Trams runs the city’s famous tram cars; and I have no idea who controls the buses—Rupert Murdoch, perhaps.  Most of our travel is on the trains and trams. 

The $109.60 monthly ticket we each buy allows us unlimited weekday use of the network within zone one, covering the city and about half of the suburbs.  On weekends, the tickets are valid for the whole network, including the most distant suburbs, which gets us out into the hills for some bushwalking.  On weekdays, Kathryn brings her bike along, takes the train to the last station in zone one, then disembarks and cycles another couple of miles to work.  My daily train journey is just 25 minutes, door to door.  I have done this painless commute several hundred times now, if you count each direction as a trip, and cumulatively it has given me a fair bit of reading time, as well as opportunity to make pretty close observations of my fellow passengers.

They are from all walks of life, all socio-economic levels, and hail from every corner of the globe—a set of facts that delights me anew every time I look up and become aware of it once more.  Riders on the commuter trains are generally silent, except for the people on their mobile phones, though there never seems to be more than one or two of these per car.  When there are none, the silence can be a bit eery and oppressive to novice riders—at least, I found it so.  On one of my early trips I felt a strong urge to engage my fellow commuters in a rousing singalong of “Row, Row, Row Your Boat,” just to lift the somnolent and funereal atmosphere.  I was fortunately able to resist this urge:  it’s plain to me now that the results would not have been good.

The silence prevails even when the trains are very crowded, as they often become during the peak commute times, and riders stand jammed in the aisles and entry points.  As the train approaches a station, a passenger will shift very slightly toward the door, not saying a word, and his or her fellow commuters will likewise alter their stance enough to let the person by.  Only very occasionally will someone mutter “cheers,” if the others have really had to scrunch up, but that’s the exception.  It’s rather like bees tapping their antennae and passing smoothly through a tight spot in the hive, only with more iPods in the case of the train passengers.

On either side of the doors are signs announcing that certain seats are to be yielded upon request to elderly passengers or those with special needs.  I’ve never actually heard such a request being made because whenever anyone boards who fits the bill, the person in the nearest seat will immediately rise and offer it without being asked.  It really is striking for the outsider to see the way these veteran commuters, who normally seem to be deliberately ignoring the rest of the world, will instantly step up and act to help someone who needs assistance.

I got a close and unexpected look at this during my morning run the other day, when I came across a small old lady, tapping a white cane before her and apparently trying to tumble down into an underground parking lot.  She did not look like one who had left her Maserati there, so I stopped to ask if she needed help.  She did.  After a lot of garbled communication (she was from Hong Kong, and was difficult to understand) she called her boss and handed me the phone.  Apparently the tram driver had set her down in the wrong spot, and I soon found out where she needed to go.  I walked her to the right tram stop, where we waited till the next one arrived.  As we boarded together, the man nearest the door promptly vacated his seat for her; the lady in the seat next-door held my new friend’s arm and helped me get her settled; and the tram driver kept the traffic waiting till he was sure he knew where she wanted to get down.  And the thing is, no one took this as an inconvenience or an imposition; there was no fuss at all:  a blind lady merely wanted to go to work on the tram, and everyone regarded it simply as part of their morning routine to help things along and keep the commute running smoothly.  That’s the kind of place I live in now, and part of the reason I love being here.

I did forget to mention that pregnant women are among those “with special needs” and having, therefore, a free ticket to the seats by the door.  Australia encourages large families, and I have never lived in such a baby-rich environment as this.  So, along with the elderly and the infirm, pregnant women are regularly offered the doorside seats.  Of course, it is sometimes difficult to tell if a woman is pregnant, or is simply carrying a few extra kilos of non-baby weight.  And, just as in the U.S., it is an extremely faux pas here to guess wrong in this matter when addressing a woman.  A teacher I know says that because of this, a friend of his doesn’t usually offer his seat to a large woman unless he is sure she is pregnant.  His reason for such apparently unchivalrous behavior is pure Aussie—straight to the point, and mincing no words:  he would rather see a pregnant woman stand, he says, than see a fat woman cry.

--originally posted 8/2009

Weathering the Weather

            Now is the winter of our discontent

Made glorious summer by this sun of Victoria

Or something like that.  Tomorrow, 21 June, is the winter solstice here in the Southern Hemisphere, so I think a weather update is appropriate.  Melbourne’s solstice forecast calls for partly cloudy skies, temperatures from 11° to 16° C (52° to 61° F), with northerly winds averaging 30 km/h (19 MPH).   In local parks the deciduous trees have not yet dropped all their leaves, while down below the daffodils are just about ready to start blooming. 

For at least two months, as we have been descending into this extreme meteorology, native Melburnians have been solicitously asking how we are coping with their cold weather.  They usually accompany the question with a little drawing in of the shoulders and a pantomime of pulling a coat a bit tighter around themselves.  Sometimes it’s not even a pantomime—they actually do pull the coat tighter, pull down their gloves, settle their winter caps and cinch up their scarves.  Our answer is usually some variation on “so far, so good,” and Kathryn and I avoid each other’s eyes.

            I have seen no frost here yet.  For my morning runs I am still in leggings and a tee-shirt, and am sweating copiously when I get home.  Just for the sake of comparison with our weather in Melbourne so far, here’s something a friend once told me of her stint in North Dakota.  One winter evening there, she was in a hurry and rushed outside immediately after a shower, her hair still damp.  On the way to the car her head brushed up against something, which caused her hair to shatter and tinkle to the ground at her feet like a broken icicle.  That, I submit, is cold. 

What we have seen here so far is pretend cold, and the people who pile on the layers and wrap up in woolen scarves are simply playing at winter, the way children put on everything in their closet and imagine they are polar explorers.  Several times already we have grossly over-packed for weekend excursions because friends assured us that we were visiting “a cold place.”  So now, when one of us says that Such and Such is supposed to be “cold,” the other will ask, “Is that cold cold, or Aussie cold?”  There is a substantial difference.

--originally posted 6/2009