Just another day at the office

(part of my Sydney trip 1st - 3rd December 2013;
stay tuned for more)

It's his rostered day off

This chap was too busy reading the FINANCIAL REVIEW to ask for my donation

Build a better mousetrap, and the world will beat a path to your door

 

Failure or poseur, the big city has room for them all. I spoke to an old woman at Central Railway Station who sat on the ground with her little foxy pup.

I felt sorry for the little pup who is not entitled to any social security so I gave her a $20 note which she almost snatched from my hand just in case I changed my mind.

I hope she spends it on Schmackos and not smack.

 

Adieu Tristesse

(part of my Sydney trip 1st - 3rd December 2013;
stay tuned for more)

 

There was something "Hopperesque" about my small room at the Blues Point Hotel. It took me right back to my early days in Australia at Barton House and the many hotel rooms I occupied since in the course of my working life, from Apia to Athens, Penang to Port Moresby, Tehran to Thursday Island, and Jeddah to Yangon. They all, even when they were four or five stars, created this constant feeling of ennui with their lack of domesticity and anonymous furniture.

And yet, it is away from home that we best encounter our true selves. The furniture at home insist that we cannot change because it does not; the domestic setting keeps us tethered to the person that we are but who may not be who we essentially are.

Hotel rooms offer an opportunity to escape our habits of mind. Lying in bed in a hotel, we can draw a line under what preceded our arrival, we can overfly great and ignored stretches of our experience. We can reflect on our lives from a height we could not have reached in the midst of our everyday world.

There is poetry in the unfamiliar world around us: in the small wrapped soaps on the edge of the basin, in the view on to an unknown city. Even in the discomforts, the harsh lighting, the unfamiliar bed, we implicitly feel that these places offer us a material setting for an alternative to the selfish ease, the habits and confinement of our ordinary, rooted world.

Adieu Tristesse!

 

What a great idea!

(part of my Sydney trip 1st - 3rd December 2013;
stay tuned for more)

 

On my last day in Sydney, I caught the morning ferry to Manly, just in time to watch Theo pack up his mobile Manly Library Afloat which operates Monday to Friday from 7.15 am to 9.15 am to offer its unique service to ferry commuters.

He posed for this picture after which we had a chat about the merit of the printed book versus the ebook and agreed that the tactile enjoyment of holding a real book will be with us for a very long time yet. And so, I hope, will be the Manly Library Afloat!

I enjoyed our little chat, Theo, and if you ever come this far south, you know where to stay, don't you?

And, of course, the rest of Manly didn't disappoint either. It is such a pleasant change from 'the foetid air and gritty of the dusty, dirty city' just across the harbour. According to Jan Morris's beautiful book, simply named Sydney, "In 1857 Henry Gilbert Smith, a rich emigrant from Sussex, England, decided to turn the fishing hamlet of Manly, which straddled a spit between the harbour and the open sea, into an ocean resort for the city. Perhaps he was remembering Brighton, after which he originally intended to name it. Certainly he made of it an emblematic pleasure place, still a kind of blueprint of your ideal seaside town. From the ferry station on the harbour shore (which has its own small beach, fun-fair and shopping plaza) you walk down a wide pedestrian street, called romantically the Corso, until there opens out before you the wide surf-ranged crescent of the ocean beach, lined with now raggety Norfolk Pines planted by Smith himself. There is an aquarium and a museum, there are innumerable ice-cream ships and pizza parlours and fish-and-chips places. Manly calls itself a village, a rare usage in a country where every huddle of shacks is a township; and what with the homely satisfaction of it all, and the green headlands, and the level sweep of sand beneath the pines, and the terrific surf pounding the beach, it remains everything that a Victorian entrepreneur could want of a populist watering place."

Which reminds me: I knew a chap once who was called Bondi. Why? Because he was far from Manly ☺

 

Diamond Princess is a traveller's best friend

(part of my Sydney trip 1st - 3rd December 2013;
stay tuned for more)

 

I saw her first from the 24th floor of the ANZ Tower on Monday as she came through Sydney Heads. Next day, when I was at Circular Quay to catch the ferry to Manly, she towered sixty metres above me while her length of 290 metres blotted out everything around her: the Diamond Princess.

She has a crew of over a thousand and accommodates close on three thousand passengers, four of whom I met later while I waited for the bus at Central Station where they had just arrived by train from out of town. They had been cruising in her several times before and were joining her again on this 8-day Tasmanian cruise which, at $1,800 per person for an outside room with balcony (half that price for an inside cabin) and all the food you can eat, was the best deal in town.

You can find her current position here.

 

To get you into the spirit of things!