adelaide's lament

as of sunday i had been in two of the states of australia. as of yesterday i have been in four. but it might take bit of legwork to get into the fifth on the list.

on sunday i packed up the life i had made for myself in sydney and said a bittersweet farewell to sheila. monday morning i jumped into a van and shared the backseat with a german shephard named jed for the ten hours down to melbourne. from melbourne i met up with the guys i was set to travel all the way through the outback to darwin with: guillaume from brittany, france and michael from tipperary (yes, as in "it's a long way to"). we had a great time driving the snaking, scenic great ocean road and sneaking past the security booth to save on park entry for camping in warrnambol. we spent wednesday trekking in the grampians and then retired to guillaume's friend's giant sheep farm outside of hamilton. the farm was unreal; it is an experience for an entirely different post. last night we rolled into adelaide. and things have come to a bit of an abrupt halt.

guillaume started mentioning the possibility that he would need to spend more time than originally anticipated in adelaide- first three days, then a week, then perhaps up to two weeks or maybe more. a story emerged about some occular disease that he might have because his brother just found out he has it (don't ask me, i don't get it either). and one hour outside of adelaide he announced that he wanted to part ways and find out own way north to darwin. thanks for the heads up.

michael and i are now trying to sort ourselves onto a two week bus journey throught the heart of this massive country. we are trying to haggle ourselves onto the cheapest deal and make the most of our time in adelaide. and adelaide is about as exciting as i imagine saskatoon to be. nothing against saskatoon, but let's call a spade a spade- it certainly isn't the cultural hotspot of canada.

cross your fingers that we get a good deal. while you're at it, you might cross your toes too.

whitsunday in the park with george.

it has been nearly two months since chris was here. in all the time since i haven't written about our trip to the whitsunday islands. i'm not quite sure why. i think it is mainly because it was an experience too wonderful to distill into a cohesive blog post. i feel the same way about my time on fraser island when my dad was here not too long ago. i don't have the words for how perfect those times have been.

this is a picture of me and chris at whitehaven beach. we were one day into our three days at sea with fifteen other passengers and three colourful crew members. we hadn't yet kayaked by mangroves and watched ancient sea turtles gasp for air at the surface of the turquoise water. we hadn't yet stretched out under the blinking night sky and picked out the southern cross from amongst a million stars. we hadn't yet swum face to face with clown and zebra and maori fish. we hadn't yet made friends with a cross-section of travelers from all over the globe and learned that in danish they don't say "cheese!" in photographs because cheese in danish is "ost" and you can imagine what that would look like in a snapshot. we hadn't yet been rocked to sleep by the waves of the pacific and learned to walk around the boat with one hand holding onto something fixed at all times. we were just beginning.

we had a wonderful time. we met lovely people, some of whom we are still in touch with. we saw fantastic things, experienced word-stealing beauty and stomach-turning waves. we had a wonderful time. i wish you could have seen it all.

jam please

chris and i get along. i would hope so, at the very least. sometimes i think that it is much easier to love someone than to like them. luckily, chris and i manage to do both. sometimes i think the liking is made easier by the fact that we are so different.

chris manages to be five minutes early when i breeze in ten minutes late. if a salesperson is rude to us, chris grumbles after the fact while i'm busy asking to speak to the manager. chris is organized; me, i'm a bit more haphazard. and while i consider myself an outgoing person, chris is decidedly shy.

it has taken me time to understand this part of chris's personality. i'm sure he would say that i still don't, really. sure, i have my moments of self-conscious stammering and i can blush when caught unawares. but when it comes down to the nitty-gritty, i am not shy. but i am trying to understand.

chris is shy. chris once slammed his finger in the door of my dad's car and didn't tell anyone so as not to be an inconvenience. when room service didn't tidy our hotel room in montreal a few years ago chris very tellingly asserted, "if we get back and they still haven't cleaned our room, i'm going to call the front desk and be irate! or you are going to call and be irate for me!" when we arrived at a b&b in stratford i couldn't understand why chris so desperately needed me to ring the doorbell instead of him- they couldn't even see us, for heaven's sake! but i am trying to understand. and trying, in my own probably misguided way, to help him to be a little less shy.

and so we found ourselves in australia together, sitting on the patio of a cafe in airlie beach, eating breakfast back in march. we had just completed a wonderful three day boat trip through the stunning whitsunday islands and taken in the splendor of the great barrier reef. and now we were back on dry land and i wanted jam for my toast. and i asked chris if he would be so kind as to run inside and ask the waitress for some jam.

from the reaction i received you might have thought i had asked chris to perform a rhythmic gymnastics routine in the nude at the superbowl halftime show. or sit next to his grandmother and watch a montage of movie sex scenes. you would not think that i had asked him to walk ten paces and ask a stranger for a packet of jelly. please, i implored, it would mean a lot to me if you could do this for me, this one thing, please, just this once. the more i tried to talk him into it, the more firmly chris became rooted to his slatted patio chair. but i wasn't giving up that easy- i was a man on a mission. please, i asked again, i would do the same for you. nevermind that i wouldn't think twice about such a thing. poor chris. it would mean a lot to me if you could do this for me, said in that tone that almost says if you really loved me this wouldn't be an issue.

chris got me the jam. i said thank you and i put it on my toast. we finished our breakfast and went on with our lives, more or less intact.

if anyone ever asks me why i'm with chris, i will say it is because even though it went against ever natural instinct in his body, one time in australia he got me jam.

visa limit.

have you ever tried to get a tourist visa to go to china? i have.

i have tried. and tried. and then i tried again. three straight days of immeasurable frustration interrupted by one actual nightmare. three two hour round trips to the consulate in camperdown, two fruitless encounters with the same visa clerk, one frantic dash to an atm.

fine, i'll take the blame for wednesday's empty-handed venture. what idiot gets within spitting distance of a consulate only to realize that he's left his passport back home on the lower north shore? (for the record, on that same day i also went to the gym with a towel and socks but no shorts. who am i, amelia bedelia?) but i refuse to take the blame for thursday. no where on the website did it say that i must provide a confirmation number as proof of accommodation. when i had asked sally at the far east yha in beijing via email if the letter she drafted for me would be sufficient i got a resounding yes. only to get a resounding no at the visa counter. this after i the bus driver decided not to stop at my stop, forcing my to sprint the three blocks to catch the bus at the next strand, hopping aboard and shooting a filthy look toward the driver's seat. this after i arrived at the front door of the consulate to find the security guard trading profanities and threats with a delivery man who had parked in the wrong place. this after i had made the same trek not twenty-four hours early, walking away empty-handed on both occasions.

so today i showed up, packing a detailed email from our beijing hotel and my brightest smile. only to get shafted again. and told that i needed to speak to the receptionist. and then the supervisor. and then the same visa clerk. for the third time in three days. when i was finally granted the go ahead, i was asked "do you want to pay extra to get this back in a few hours or come back and pick it up next week?"

are you kidding me? come back again? no thank you.

i have a visa now. it is pasted into my passport and grants me access to the giant nation anytime before august 16. that's if i still want to go.

china and i have some making up to do.

countries that start with the letter c

i have been in australia for over three months now. this also means that i have not been in toronto for over three months now. obviously. this is, i have realized, far and away that longest i have ever been away from the city i have called home for nearly twenty-five years. one would expect a certain element of homesickness, and while there are things about home that i certainly miss, i wouldn't say i'm sick about it. (people, well now that's a different story- i miss some people desperately.)

it's funny the things that i do miss. walking past christie pitts to scoop up some mint chocolate chip or german chocolate cake ice cream at baskin robbins. riding my bike along the treacherous stretch of bloor from bathurst to spadina. banjara's veggie combo. my thursday afternoon attack class. twizzlers, which haven't immigrated to australia. paying one (albeit exorbitant) fare to ride the subway for as short or long a distance as i please. my blundstone boots. things like those. it's in the infrequent moments when the canadian inside me all of a sudden wants a tim horton's double-double that i remember how far i am from home.

it was my and chris's trip to southeast asia that brought me to the constant reader, a book store in nearby crow's nest, and found me thumbing through the lonely planet c titles in search of 'cambodia, laos, vietmnam, and the lower mekong'. but it was the part of me that misses home that made me reach past cambodia and cameroon and wrap my hand around the spine of 'lonely planet: canada.' hungrily skimming past british columbia and the prairies, my eyes came to rest on the chapter entitled: ontario. and right there, the first city profiled in the chapter, in all its leafy, semi-self-conscious glory was toronto, my home and native landmass. page after page after page of home.

and so it was that i spent the better part of an hour reading all about the place i've lived since birth. from the eaton centre to centreville, high park to regent park, sassafras to scarborough, it was all there. i loved the recommendation to try the seared tuna salad at utopia, my favourite college street eatery. i scoffed as the travel editors tried to talk up the non-existent charm of our waterfront. i smiled at the mention of kensington, smelling the incense and the smug, holier-than-thou attitude of its denizens. my eye twitched when they directed hipsters to 'west queen west'- don't they know i call it queen west west? but it was all there. yitz's at avenue and eglinton, where i used to gum breadsticks from a sassy seat before i cut my first tooth. edwards gardens, where i poked my curious nine-year-old head into a limousine, just to see if they really were that fancy. beck taxi- need i say more?

i must have cut an odd figure, standing in the middle of the travel section in a country full of newness and difference, lost in the warmth of the familiar. future's bakery. metropasses. goose shit in allen gardens. page after page after page of home.

reason #301 why i love sheila

i love living with sheila. she is easygoing and tidy and intelligent and caring. she sometimes makes delicious curried lamb and shares it with me. she always provides running commentary to keep me up to speed when i join her for an episode of 'home and away', an aussie soap that is her unabashed guilty pleasure. she and i never need the shower at the same time. and she is funny. she makes me laugh pretty much daily, deep down laugh from my belly. she tells circuitous, hilarious stories punctuated with her low register giggle. she regales me with lively tales of her working life most evenings. and she is quick as a whip.

last night she was doing laundry and she had asked me if i had any light coloured items i wanted to toss in. i did. and to be kind, sheila asked, "there are a few darker things in here. are you sure that there's nothing of yours that is too precious?"

"well there is the lost shroud of christ, but other than that..." i said.

and without a moment's hesitation sheila said, "so i'll wash it on gentle then?"

i love her.

cold front

there are few things that i thought canadians could lay true and rightful claim to. poutine, for example. no one in the world does poutine quite the way we do. no one else has the cbc or josee chouinard. and i thought we were head and shoulders above the rest of the planet when it comes to complaining about the weather.

apparently, i thought wrong.

australians are by and large a lovely people. they are sporting and jovial and laid back, for the most part. they have given the world the best olympics in recent memory and produced cate blanchett. they are, i repeat, a lovely people. but they need to get a grip. because 22 degrees celsius is not cold.

there is no such thing as autumn in sydney. as soon as the everyday temperature starts to creep below 25, it is immediately winter in everyone's mind. no slow transition, no gradual layering of clothing as hemlines inch back down to the ankles and sleeves reach toward the wrists. if you can't sleep in boxer shorts and with every window in your house open, it is unequivocally winter and marks the beginning of perpetual griping. stores down george and pitt streets are all full of mannequins hunched into their down vests and striped scarves. people are wearing mittens. and it is 22 and sunny!

when i arrived in february, everyone warned me that it would get cold by june before i left for asia. when i asked what cold is, they told me that sometimes in the dead of night it will get all the way down to 9 degrees. i had to stifle my laughter- when it hits 9 degrees in toronto, everyone pours out onto patios and my uncle ian is already in shorts. here you would think that it was the apocalypse.
everywhere you go you catch someone mumbling about "this damn cold" or "this frightful winter weather." just to give you a bit of perspective on said frightful weather, today i walked to the store in shorts and a polo and right now i'm sitting on my balcony typing this. it is anything but cold.

i guess the aussies deserve some slack. in a country where most provinces enjoy more than 300 days of sunshine a year and where you can go surfing year round, i can concede that 15 degrees might be considered relatively chilly. and just because you never have a real reason to wear a pea coat doesn't mean that you should be denied the right. but if you want to complain about the cold, i think you have to earn the right. you need to wait in an outdoor bus bay in your work shoes as the slush seeps into your socks and freezing wind whips your face. you need to venture about the treeline where -10 is considered balmy. you need to have at least read about the ice storm in quebec and northern ontario, if not weathered it. and it needs to be below zero. those are my conditions.

somehow i don't think that the sydneysiders will go for it. they're too busy bemoaning their lost summer to listen to this crackpot canuck still wearing his flip flops. and i don't know if they will hear me through their earmuffs.

i'm telling you, if you want a laugh come to sydney and watch these strange animals pretending to be cold. it's like watching fourteen-year-olds profess their undying love for each other- people trying desperately to emulate something that they've seen on tv but have no real understanding of.

i just have to say it one more time- 22 is not cold.