Well, yesterday was quite eventful. We had made plans this whole weekend to go to the beach on Sunday. The plan was to leave at 11, which we almost made (Leo woke up at 11 or so, and was ready quickly, so I guess that counts). The "we" in this story consists of Leo, Tomy, and myself, by the way. We took a bus from here to Circular Quay, where we caught a ferry to Manly. There are actually two varieties of ferry that you can catch: the Jet-Cat, which is a catamaran jet boat that takes about half the time of the second variety: the Sydney Harbour Ferry. We were literally thirty seconds late for the Jet Cat, for which we had just bought tickets. It was like something out of a chick-flick: someone running at top speed, dropping probably important pieces of paper on the ground behind him, jumping through gates, hurdling small children, careening through a maze of metal fences to arrive, with melodramatically perfect timing, at the edge of the dock with the boat just five or ten feet away, people waving from its upper decks. If only it were Meg Ryan on that boat, and I had just received word, through e-mail or a call-in radio program that she was my match, my soul-mate, the one person in the world who would truly and for all time make me happy? luckily it was mostly Japanese tourists, who, oddly, took our picture as we nearly slipped and fell in the harbour. Actually, if you want the gods-honest truth, none of this actually happened, it was just a short exercise in creative writing. We bought tickets for the jet-cat but missed our opportunity to get on it by, literally (I wasn't kidding), seconds. The electronic gate system locks you out after it has let its last passenger through, and the last passenger through was a guy just in front of us. You liked the Meg Ryan bit, though, didn't you? Anyway, we caught the much slower but certainly functional Sydney Harbour Ferry about five minutes later. Tomy, ever the miser, was actually happier because it cost A$1.00 less (keep in mind that that's about 50 cents in America). We got off at Manly. Manly apparently gets its name from a European description of the aborigines that lived there: Manly fellows. So it stuck. If I ever find a good map of Sydney and all its myriad harbors and inlets and rivers and beaches and islands, I'll certainly post a link to it here, but for now, just trust me on where I went and how I got there. Manly looks a lot like Miami, Florida. There are palm trees down every street, art-deco hotels and shops on every corner and main thoroughfare. It's also laughably gawdy. I hear Bondi is even worse in this regard, but the mix of people, so balanced and pretty in Sydney itself, is laughable at Manly. The prevalence of yuppified Australians, rich, Porsche driving beach bums, and overweight Asian and American tourists collaborates to provide a picture that is somewhere south of the great melting pot image. The only Miami stereotype missing were Latinos and gay people.

Sidenote: America owns everything. I came 100052 miles, by my estimation, and the first establishment I saw was an American Hotel chain: Holiday Inn. Walking through Manly, I saw: McDonalds, Burger King, Pizza Hut, and some other places that skip my mind. Even things I thought were actually Australian, like Hungry Jack's, a burger-and-fries fast-food type place, are actually just fronts for American companies (Burger King in this case). This is mind blowing. I mean, we always hear about the dominance of America around the globe, but it never quite hit home till I got here. Australia seems to like the US a lot, but like, apparently, tons of other people around the world, they are wary of its influence and power. I guess I can understand that. I mean, Americans themselves are scared of how much power the government has, how much Microsoft knows about them. It's a perfectly rational and normal fear to have, I guess.

We continued through Manly and to the other side of what I guess is a small peninsula to Manly Beach. Now, understand here that one of my major goals for coming to Australia was to learn how to surf. One of the reasons I had no objections to coming to Manly was that I had read that they had surfing lessons there. I've always sort of had a thing for surfing, and what better way to flaunt my geographic and climatic superiority over my friends in the American Northeast, who are probably just now digging in, preparing for a snow storm, than to go surfing? This is a great mental refuge for learning how to surf, by the way. Every time I fell, every time I got hit in the head by some passing surfboard, instead of getting angry, I thought: Hey, at least I'm not shoveling. So we went to the other end of the beach and waited for the surfer dudes to open up. Leo and I went swimming in the meantime, and Tomy? well, sat. I have no idea why Tomy came and did not swim, did not object to Leo and I taking surfing lessons, and I have no idea what the hell he did for 2 hours while we were taking them. He seemed happy though. He probably went and listened to Jennifer Lopez for a few hours or something. She's big in Indonesia, apparently. I doubt Jennifer Lopez could find Indonesia on a map. Oh wait, Indonesia has four syllables, so she wouldn't understand the question anyway. Ouch, that was mean, wasn't it? Leo and I did not have reservations, as we were going by the general theory that with the skies overcast as they had been all day, the "possible showers" in the forecast as it had been, that people wouldn't be nearly as likely to sign up for lessons. Yes, I know, that would have stopped most people from going to the beach in general, but realize that it had been five months since I'd seen the beach, and Leo is from Canberra (pronounced Can-bra, I've learned) which is over three hours from, well, anything interesting at all, including the beach, so we were going to go, regardless. The diesel head-surfer-dude told us that if we waited, it was very possible that people wouldn't show, and we could jump in their spots. That happened to be the way it worked out. I also met this girl, I think her name was Karen or something, who was from Boston. She lived in Cambridge, and not only did she know where Providence was, but her ex-boyfriend lived in Little Compton (and was thus loaded). She loved Providence and was thinking of moving there. The surfing lessons themselves were quite cool. I'm really starting to get the hang of it. Retaining balance is a bit of an issue, but I signed up for three lessons, so I should at least be proficient by the time I finish. There was one interesting anecdote that you may be interested to hear: One of Bill Bryson's favorite things is to talk about the large number and wide variety of things that can kill you or cause you serious pain in Australia. I met one of them yesterday. I know you're all thinking the same thing: shark. Sadly yesterday was not THAT eventful, but what a story that would be, eh? The instrument of pain that I grew intimate with was this cute little thing called a Blue Bottle. To quote Bill Bryson: "It looked unprepossessing, like a blue condom with strings attached." It's a lot like a jellyfish, but, as I found out from the extremely knowledgeable and resourceful Jenn Pirri: "?blue bottles don't inject stinging cells like other jelly fish. They sting sort of like bees, injecting a toxin into the skin." There. I bet you didn't know that. Regardless of the form of the toxin, a whole lot of it got on my wrist and ankle, where the thin, strong, bead-like tentacles of this little bastard got wrapped around a few times. It hurt a significant amount more than a bee sting, indeed was a little startling at the time, but as Jenn also says: "Look out for box jellyfish... I hear they are worse than blue bottles." Again, to quote from Bill Bryson:

"It was the height of the season for Box Jellyfish, also known in Queensland as marine stingers, or just stingers. By whatever name they go, these little bubbles of woe are not to be trifled with. From October to May, when the jellyfish come inshore to breed, they render the beaches of the tropics useless to humans. It is quite an extraordinary thought when you are standing there looking at it. Before us stood a sweep of bay as serene and inviting as you would find anywhere, and yet there was no environment on earth more likely to offer instant death."

God, I love Australia. Check this site for some more fun facts on the Stinger. Apparently the Stinger can even show you God! What a creature! I went back to surfing after five minutes under a fresh-water shower. I felt the bastard for the rest of the day, however, and today, more than 29 hours after the fact, my hand is still swollen. It packs quite a punch for something so small. The rest of the day was relatively uneventful. I came back and immediately delved into Dubliners, by James Joyce. It's an excellent book, but I can't help feeling like I'm missing something. The sketches are excellent, and give you a great portrait of the subjects in question. It's actually exactly the sort of thing I want to write. Is that disrespectful to a literary master, to take his idea and adopt it for a new city? What would I call it? Providencians? People of Providence? Providence? Is it egoism to think that I could? I guess we'll see. Definitely thought-provoking, though, Dubliners. Beautiful. I also may have found someone to come with me to the Gold Coast when Summer School is out, but it's just in the discussion phase right now. Again, it all boils down to economics: If I can find cheap enough tickets, everything will fall into place. Today was a really lazy day. I sat around, read Dubliners, bought shampoo and coca-cola as well as batteries for my digital camera. Definitely just vegged.

Much love. B.

PS - You might think that writing this much is a waste of my time, that I should be out experiencing new things, not reanalyzing, rehashing old ones. I thought about that, but I think if I don't think through the things I've done, try and gleam from them as much enlightenment as I can, then the experiences themselves don't matter for crap. If I don't do that, then there's no real difference between me being here and me watching a travel video about the same subjects. Just to put that thought out of your mind?