July 25, 2003 Friday
Today, the international students and their Aussie mates took a trip out to Manly. It’s a trendy little beach community north of Sydney Harbour, probably like Venice Beach or other places in California. I would know if I’d ever been, but I haven’t :) We took the ferry across the Habour (by the way, that’s the way they spell harbour here…you go ahead and keep spelling it the other way, I know you were wondering), which was really cool. Before we left the house I said to myself, “I have enough battery left in my camera for today, right? Yeah, sure.” This, of course, meant that my camera ran out of juice after one picture. We hadn’t even gotten on the ferry yet. Oh, well…such is life.
Manly Beach had the coolest seagulls. If I dropped one onion sliver on the ground, only the closest seagull would react. The others wouldn’t even turn around. The same if I dropped two slivers of onion. When I threw down a whole handful down, there was only two gulls within ten feet. Seagulls from far and wide instantly descended on the pile of onion, each getting a sliver. It was kind of scary to have 20 seagulls rush at me, but they were like F-16 jets landing on an aircraft carrier the way they stopped right on the onions. OK, maybe YOU don’t think that’s all that great, but I thought it was pretty neat.
At night we had the official welcome party at the Coogee Beach Palace Hotel. Before you get visions of marble floors and chandeliers, let me clarify something. In Australia, they call bars or pubs hotels. It goes back to the days when most of Australia was sparsely populated. Just like the saloons with rooms upstairs in the Old West, the hotel would have a bar downstairs that was the central gathering place for the town. It was right on Coogee Beach. (Where we almost lived, remember?). More meeting, greeting, getting names, forgetting names. We stayed until about midnight, late for us old folks. It reminded me just how much I hate, yes hate, house/dance/techno music and cigarette smoke. And there was plenty of both. At least back in Austin you can’t smoke in the clubs and bars.