Harbouring a thought

Dear Sydney, 

The first impressions of Sydney are that it’s finished.  Quite unique among world class cities that always seem to be locked into some kind of permanent reconstruction scheme.  No, Sydney appears to actually be almost finished.  With the obvious exception of one or two sites where the cranes poke their jagged steel noses above the marble and glass skyscrapers the whole place seems to be done.  As if they’ve spent considerable time thinking it all through, making sure the designs would work, then going and building it to get it all finished for the twentieth century, for it obviously wasn’t always this way.

The site of Australia’s oldest church must have preceded the towering skyscrapers that surround the tiny little spire set in very old stone atop its own plinth.  They are courting disaster with one of the heaviest inner city traffic loads of all time during office hours but that’s a battle to be played out at a political level.  The results will no doubt materialise in the form of reconstruction.  And if these are a couple of negatives then the harbours are great places, all tidied up and polished with lights and fancy restaurants beyond all recognition of drop-off zones for the crates of cargo they once were.  Of course the Opera House with its almost iconic nautical nautilus shells has to be seen and touched to be fully appreciated and the Harbour
Bridge itself must tell a thousand tales.

Any city that has a harbour though will always find favour with me, they are wonderful places and I simply love them.  A place where the land meets the sea that has been created by people, they capture so much and as such are unique, even the working ones full of hustling porters and shouting docksiders.  Screeching gulls, clanking flagpoles, drumming diesel motors and laughing people assault your ears.  A myriad of colours, texture of stone, water, wood and polished or painted steel attack your visual senses, then there are the smells of tidal seawater, iron bridges, fuel and of course food, be it fish delivered from the boats or freshly cooked in the restaurants. Nothing else on earth quite manages to mix all these things together like a harbour.

Notes from the Harbour Darling.

landed

Finally got round to scribing some news from latest drop-zone.

Flight was rubbish.  Not the fault of the airline, more that of the cabin staff, which is what we’re now supposed to call the trolley-dollys of old.  Packed in like sards the bus was full, hot and stuffy, no opening windows again, the service was dismal and just getting a glass of water or orange juice was like asking to sit with the pilot in the cockpit.  Alcoholic beverages were even harder to find because I suspect the world is moving away from booze-induced airline sleep.  Although not the fault of the airline the travelling company either side of me on the first eleven-hour leg was dire and after the F1-style blitz-schnell pit stop in Singapore the next seven-hour leg Stepford Wives were even worse.  Wonder what Singapore’s like?

Jet lag has been akin to a mild pyscological disease this time round and zombie-like strolls round the hotel and surroundings at 3am didn’t help at all.

My gifted acccommodation has been budget in the style of those hotels in US movies where the gangster is holed up with police protection.  Police sirens occasionally wail and the train line really does rattle past on cue, but at least it’s on ground level and not zinging above the window height on the second floor; all that’s missing is the flashing neon sign outside the window.  It was a welcome sight indeed after twenty hours on the flying sardine box and it’s even beginning to feel homely…

Been here just a week and feel like I live here already.  Work’s gonna be interesting, I’m the new network transmission planner which suits me great, job scope is as wide as the Harbour Bridge so no change on detail there either.  For those of you who have no clue, I put together plans and details of some of the major pieces of equipment in your good old mobile phone network.  Work colleagues are a mixed bunch of locals, asian-orientals (for that read – all one and the same) and the ever present pool of Finns, it’s Nokia remember.  But I’ve had plenty of experience swimming with sharks…

Our choice of place to live is continuing to raise eyebrows because the southern suburbs are a long way off on the train – 40 mins, but more because the majority of my co-workers fall out of city appartments paid for by their companies to arrive a maximum of twenty minutes later at work.  And do not have the responsibility of a small army to look out for with regard to schooling, pastimes and personal safety.  Some are also obviously slave to the dollar and hate parting with money for travelling too far.

The preferred brand of car seems to have passed the Holden or Ford stage with Toyota and Mitsubishi all vying for top spot just before we get inundated with Chinese and Korean efforts in the budget range.  Personally we’ll be looking for a similar kind of troop-mover to what we had in the good old Confederation and if I could legally get away with a Ute kitted out with rear seats I would.  The kids would love that.  There’s plenty to do outside of work either in the city centre or outside of it.  Eastern Creek  is a race track for cars and bikes so that will be getting a visit, as will its neighbour the drag strip too.  What a lucky result.  We came here for the outdoor life so there’s plenty of that too.

All in all things are going well, there are some houses to view this weekend as well as checking out the long-awaited famous beach culture.  And next week will see me actually commuting from the suburbs. More later…

One and a bit

Last night Lottie wouldn’t go to sleep at her usual bedtime.  For a while we thought she couldn’t sleep due to the appearance of yet more teeth.  She is one and a bit and has the two bottom and two top teeth through but there are three more just under the surface or cutting through the gum.  And I assume that could be troublesome from the way she was chewing the soft, comforting rubber of the dummy in between bouts of pained crying.

The funny thing was how, once she was out of the cot and upstairs with us in the study all the pain and subsequent crying stopped.

It never ceases to fascinate me what’s going on in those tiny little minds.  There are a few noises emanating from her these days, some of them resemble “papa” or “mama”, there are some general classic little baby noises which can’t easily be replicated in mere words and her absolute favourite word “baby”.  That word comes out loud and clear every time she sees a photo of one of her siblings, or a picture in a book and when she is dealing with Dolly in and out of the toy baby-buggy.

She muddles about lifting Dolly into the seat and then pushes her happily all over the place, all the time saying “baby”.  Then a bit more organising as Dolly gets lifted out and offered round to anyone interested or standing by.  Dolly is then retrieved and off she goes again.  It’s fascinating for me because it shows such understanding already in this young life.  Where do they get it from?  Is it a learned thing, something we have inadvertently taught them?  Or is it, as I suspect, an instinct?  Does this little human being know instinctively how to care for another? 

All the signs point to a yes.

Miss the Swiss?

Will we miss the Swiss is the question looming as time marches towards a departure for far flung lands. Well I think we will in many ways. It’s a lovely place to live, if you can afford it. The countryside is simply spectacular as you travel through it. Meadows with dairy cows grazing, bells clonking around their necks to let their farmers know all is well. Huge traditional farmhouses adorned in summertime with beautiful floral window boxes, yards kept spotlessly clean, four wheel drive Subaru and Toyota estate cars in every driveway, ready to tackle months of winter snow. There are long swooping tarmac roads cutting alongside granite landscapes parallel to fast flowing crystal clear rivers bursting with iced mountain water. And once into a city they’re all too obviously devoid of fluttering crisp packets and rolling plastic Coke bottles, electric buses purr along, trams ding their bells as they seem to follow each other line astern through the city centres. Indeed it is a lovely place to live.

It is also curiously full of some very odd judicial and cultural situations. For example, currently, it is completely legal to keep your military service issued weapon at home, loaded in the closet, although it is now not legal to take a walk in the park with your Staffordshire Bull terrier without its muzzle.

The cost of living in Switzerland is famously on the high side and although eating out is very common it makes sense taking the doggy bag WITH you from indoors and asking the waiter to heat it up. Bring a bottle restaurants don’t just have you taking your wine but the family size bottle of pop for the kids as well and arguing over things that were definitely not on the bill, admittedly very rare, is never more satisfying than in Switzerland.

On the cultural side it is absolute heaven for lovers of fine food, good wine, impeccable service and of course, cheese. No more needs to be said here as volumes of words exist on the Swiss passion for cheese, we even live in Emmental…

You may buy and run a huge petrol-guzzling high speed autobahn missile but you must drive it at 80km/h when the traffic measuring systems report high ozone levels, a speed 40km/h less than the standard 120 limit. And they do. Almost religiously because the fines dished out in Switzerland for motoring offences are shockingly expensive, after all the money you’ve saved on the desperately low goods tax, a nice hefty fine can be happily deposited in the behaving badly pot.

It is a land of V8 Audis, turbo Subarus, kompressored Merc’s and petrol powered SUV off-roaders, not diesel which they treat as filthy things. If you don’t drive a diesel with a particle filter fitted in its exhaust system you will pay higher road tax because you are deemed to be a horrible pollutant. All this motor exotica, Zurich probably has one of the highest numbers of Ferraris per capita than anywhere in the world and yet motor sport was officially stopped in 1955 after the dreadful Le Mans disaster. Much more sensible to ban it than regulate it.

They will habitually turn off their engines at closed level-crossings of which there are thousands, because it’s the law, yet the fifteen year old 4WD Toyota wagon in front needs a good hard rev of the engine when started before moving off in a cloud of blue smoke?

If a member of the public, or a cop reports a driver for not stopping at a pedestrian crossing to let someone cross there is a whopping fine of almost a hundred pounds sterling to be paid to top up the town coffers. Speed cameras in Switzerland seem to be set with a plus/minus tolerance of 3 km/h, no ten per allowance here.

And that’s just the war on motorists. The police have recently been given the go ahead to use “man-stopping ammunition”, that’s ‘dum-dum’ bullets to you and I in their normal daily service weapons. How incredulous is that?

Apart from its idiosyncrasies there are many aspects of its culture that will be hard to replace anywhere we go. The beautiful architecture in the wonderful old city of Bern, currently being given a sprucing up at the parliament buildings. The quaint Altstadt with its alleys and alcoves, café bars and antiques shops is a great place to wile away the hours. On a clear day it’s fabulously relaxing to sit at a café and take in the simply stunning views out across the ancient granite masses capped year round in dazzling white snow. The Alps, famed the world over, sit majestically observing the tiny little surrounding countries. Eiger, Matterhorn and Mönch, their names and peaks fabled in history have to be seen to be believed and usually you are viewing them from many dozens of kilometres distant. Where you would expect to see a sky horizon there stands a mountain range and on some days the tops disappear into that high layer of cloud seemingly up near the jet-stream. If ever the word awesome could be used in description it is more than justified here.

And of course there begins another idiosyncrasy because just the other side of those mountains lies the next country of Switzerland. Italy or France to the south and Germany to the north and all the characteristics they themselves bring.
Indeed a special little country with a massive global influence and I can’t help wondering I’ll miss it quite a lot.