"You just had a near-life experience."

The last two days have been rather fun-filled. On Saturday, Tomy and I went to Darling Harbour to meet Leo, who was tending bar at the IMAX Theater there. He just works for IMAX, and, by his own admission, has no clue how to tend bar.

Sidenote: Mom, just because Leo was tending bar and Tomy ordered a tequila sunrise, it does not necessarily imply that I was drinking as well. Making radical assumptions of this sort is risky at best, and inadvisable always. That said, it was noon somewhere, right? :)

We were going to see an IMAX movie, but both Tomy and Leo were more interested in food from Taiwan than adventures in Antarctica of any kind.

Darling Harbour is as close as I have seen yet to something like the great fabled American Mall?. It's an open air construction with a beautiful park, water art, an elaborate metal and water jungle gym construction that instantaneously makes everyone in the vicinity jealous of those under 10 years old, an IMAX theater, a regular movie theater, a Starbucks, a McDonalds, a place called "Australian's Northern Territory and Outback Centre," a big convention center, plus the harbour itself where they have stunt shows every day. It's quite a place. I felt right at home. We had a good time. It's also right near China town, so Leo and Tomy had immediate access to apparently good Taiwanese food. I felt a bit ostracized for not having it, but any guilt I might have had about not completely soaking up the local culture evaporated like anything resembling my appetite when the pigs ears were brought out. "No thanks, fellas."

We came back to the dorm, where I read for a few hours (Dubliners continues to impress, and our primary sources for history are deeply interesting, if numerous). Then Mel, Paul and I went to see Rat Race. Mel was meeting us there after work, so Paul and I had to get there on our own. The first and obvious place to look for transportation was the bus stop, which is just up the street. Paul and I waited awhile, and, as Paul is now very quick to point out, we could have walked all the way down to the theatre given as much time as we had, so waiting it out for a bus wouldn't have been such a horrible thing. Then came Corinne. Corrine was a beautiful Aussie blond, a general sciences major at U Sydney (which everyone here calls Sydney Uni; The University of Melbourne is known as Melbourne Uni, and so on?). She had just come from a nice Thai resteraunt (more on that later), and was on her way to work at The Establishment, a yuppy lawyer/stock broker bar downtown. From her description, I almost thought she was talking about the Capital Grille (I don't care if no one gets the reference, because Dad does, and that's all that matters). Anyway, she, also had plenty of time to get to work, but she was "rather cold." Well, one thing led to another and Paul and I got conned into taking a cab for the short distance to the movie theater. Paul blames the whole thing on me, and maybe that's deserved, but you never know. It was relatively cheap, thankfully, but entirely unnecessary. Not only that, but we were even earlier for Mel than we thought we were going to be, so we bade the fair Corinne farewell and went to McDonalds. We had an interesting discussion of Australian/American politics/economics and then went to the movies.

I had already seen Rat Race, but it was still extremely amusing. Definitely comes recommended, just maybe not for kids. Ah hell, censorship is annoying. Let the kids see it. It's not like protecting them from everything resembling real life will have a positive effect on them either. Just as long as a distinction is made in two places: 1) The boundary between real life and fiction/fantasy, and 2) The distinction between what is made to look good on screen and what is undeniably bad. As long as those two are taken care of, I think anybody should be capable of seeing just about any movie at any age. This, of course, requires a great deal of faith on the part of the parent towards the child, but, if the kid is even decently intelligent, go for it. Let it be a bonding experience. You'll both grow.

Anyway, the movie, again, didn't disappoint. We took the bus home where I snapped the funny looking candid shot you can see on the Yahoo! Photos gallery. Once arrived, I really can't remember exactly what we did, but it was relatively boring and I came downstairs and went to sleep.

I woke up this morning, did NOT go to the beach as fatigue and looming assignments got the better of me. I wrote some (tons) of emails, uploaded some pictures, then actually got some work done so it wasn't a completely wasted day. I admit, I was still thinking about how perhaps, in this cosmopolitan city, I should take greater advantage of the wildly varied cultural cuisine. My experimental side killed my reserved American side, and I decided I wanted something cultural for dinner. I suggested Thai, Tomy, who holds his embrace of many cultures over my head, suggested Turkish as an alternative. We followed his suggestion and went and got Turkish Pizza. It looks a lot like a sliced calzone, but it was excellent. Garlic bread was good, too. I'm sure the Italians in the reading audience will be quick to fire off emails saying how this isn't really a new culture that I'm embracing, because the Turks stole everything from Italy, but throw me a bone here. It's the first non-American-owned establishment I've been to and really, really liked since I've been here.

When we came back, I read the paper a bit then went down to the barbecue that the guys from Unit 12 were throwing (Unit 12 consists of Dave, Ron, Paul, Peter Chan (who's never there because he's always here with Leo), and Colin). I'm always upset when I come out to a barbecue down here and no one says "Hey, it's Brian, throw another shrimp on the barbie?" I guess that's a bit much to ask. To be fair, none of them had ever heard of throwing shrimp on a Barbie till someone (probably an American, they noted) came up with that phrase. Ah well, yet another Australian cultural myth down the tubes. Yea, you can't find kangaroos here for fifty miles, either. I really expected them to be like stray dogs in the street, or something. Really, really fast dogs?

Anyway, after the barbecue I was convinced to go see yet another movie that I'd already seen (but which was just released here-I feel so cool): Ocean's Eleven. Good flick. On the way home, we took some pictures that didn't come out so great. I still may post some of them, just out of interests sake, but they may require some editing. I had an excellent discussion of many things with Cassie, from the 1st Floor (which is not the ground floor, by the way), and had fun helping her navigate her way home. Because she had a really crappy monitor placed at a horrible angle at the job she worked for 9 months or so, Cassie now can barely see out of her right eye. She put in drops just before we left, so that eye was almost completely dilated: thus, her navigation skills were a bit off. Mostly fine, but a bit off. I feel really bad for her, as it's gotten worse even since I've been here. Not a great situation.

Now, as I lay me down to sleep, the stars are awe-inspiring. These Sydney-siders have no idea how lucky they are to be able to see stars at night. No other major city in the world permits that. The glow of countless, pointless streetlights hides the things that most connect us to heaven. I'm definitely a modern guy, I believe in the ability of technology to make our lives better, I believe in the whole idea, I really do, but I also think that we may have irreversibly lost something:

• There are no wild places anymore, there are no more true explorers. The only places we don't know about, we send satellites to do our grunt work. I don't know about you, but I need a frontier. I need a great new project that humanity can rally around and go for. I feel a need to push the boundaries of our domain.
• Darkness is the enemy in the modern world. Darkness invokes fear, because we don't know what might be in the darkness, and fear of the unknown drives more human actions than we'd otherwise care to admit.
• How much of our time is spent traveling or doing travel related things? One of the things I can't get over in Dubliners is how much time the characters spend walking. Was this so before the rise of the metropolis? Did people in rural villages walk ALL the time? And in the modern, car-ridden world (don't you love my use of the word "ridden" there?), how much time do we spend on the bloody highway? How much time do we spend looking for parking spots? Listening to the radio? Do you really know how much damage your SUV is doing to the planet?
• Anybody will tell you: church attendance is down. I won't necessarily equate that as a horrible thing, but it says something, surely. I have to question the motive, though: how many people don't go to church because they're too wound up in the cultural great idea that we should work jobs we hate so we can buy stuff we don't need to impress girls that would otherwise not want us that we will eventually lament over in a pub till the early hours of the morning which forces us to sleep in on Sunday, rather than go to church? When Nietzsche said "God is dead," maybe he just meant that in this age we wouldn't quite have time for him?

I know I'm playing devil's advocate a bit here: I know that more streetlight helps with crime rates, makes leery women less scared to walk alone; I know that cars have numerous advantages that have added to the coolness of the modern experience, and God knows I love my Focus back home, but one of my main reasons for wanting a year off (even before I knew I could) was to figure things out, try to make rational decisions on where I thought things were going and then where I thought they should go. This applies directly to everything from my personal spirituality to my political beliefs to global trends. 2002 may be the year of the Outback here in Australia, but in McGuirkland, it's the year of the great reevaluation, the great breath of fresh air before the long road ahead. I won't be able to stay on that road if I don't. Besides, anything that challenges your reality has to be, in the end, a good thing, right?

Brian