Sydney: A City Best Seen from the Water

It's been five weeks to the day since I first arrived in Sydney and I've only posted one blog post and it didn't even have photos. I am a lousy tour guide! Well, part of the reason is that I just haven't felt like I've done a whole lot. Sure I've seen things, but Australia is much different than Scotland in that there just aren't the centuries of tangible history that is so evident in Scotland. It's not to say that Australia doesn't have its own unique history, it's just a different kind of history.

My first week in Australia, after getting acclimated to the chilly winter was spent at Macquarie University, where I am now studying, planning my first excursion out into the region of New South Wales that is my research area. I am here to study a bunch of sediment that has caused quite a stir. The sediment has been deposited over the last few centuries, but when it actually started to be eroded from its original undisturbed sites and why or how are not well understood. That's where I come in. I'll sort all of that out in the long run, but after reading about this sediment for five months while in Glasgow, it was about time I actually went out to see some of it!

We were in the field for a week, and pretty much just driving around visiting different rivers and looking for the type of sediment we are interested in. We would drive to two or three potential sampling sites each day, and with breakfast and lunch in there, we somehow always managed to fill the day with things to do. Often, though, we would also get stopped by the scenery, or wildlife (kangaroos and a real live echidna!), or other roadside oddities. Lots of time was spent on farms, or in rural areas, looking at creeks. The Australian landscape, even where vegetated, is harsh and demanding. Much of the region surrounding Sydney was deforested for sheep and cattle grazing, but even that was beautiful in its own way. Of course, paddocks can't compete with the natural landscape, and I got my fill of both, driving through a few National Parks along the way.

TONS of kangaroos near Canberra

One really cool experience I had in the field was getting stuck in a snow storm! Most Australians have told me you never see snow in Australia (though I swear I saw some downtown a few weeks ago - not many flakes, but definitely snow!). Anyway, we were driving through Namadji National Park in the southern end of the Australian Capitol Territory and the weather and scenery were beautiful! On the other side of the mountains, however, it started getting blustery and as we drove into the small town of Adaminaby, there were big, puffy, flakes of snow blowing around! It was such an experience that even the woman who owned the cafe we were eating at ran outside with her camera saying that she had never seen anything like it in her life before! Well, from Adaminaby to Cooma and almost all the way back to Queanbeyan, where we were staying, we had to drive carefully and slow to a creep just to get through some parts of it! An awesome experience that extremely few Aussies have had the chance to see! 

Driving into the snowstorm

Here are some more photos from the field:


Once we got back from the field, I realized I needed to put a budget together for my research over the next year and a half (something I'm still working on!). It's a tedious process, and right now, while I'm still settling down, there's not much else I've really been able to do around the city, and since I don't know too many people yet, it's been a slow-going process checking things out. Over the last few weeks, I decided that while I like the apartment I am in right now and my flatmate, I really longed to be somewhere near a park, the water, or some semblance of nature. Sorry Parramatta Road, just not cutting it. Also, I'd love to be closer to a train line or one of the ferry terminals. Somewhere that is just easier to move around. So in looking for other apartments, I've seen a fair bit of the city.

The nice thing, though, was that last week, one of my best friends from high school was back in Sydney! Arianne moved to Australia last September though hadn't been living in Sydney, but last week our paths crossed and we spend a lot of our free time checking out different neighborhoods. We had drinks and Indian food in Newtown, shopped at the Glebe Market on a Saturday morning, took the ferry out to Manly Beach, spent an afternoon in the Botanical Gardens, and had a few schooners (rather than pints) at the Fortune of War, Sydney's oldest pub. It was so much fun seeing a face from home.

I think sometimes when you have these big life-changing moves around the world, you almost wonder if the rest of your life leading up to this moment actually happened. Sure, I talk to my friends and family frequently, but you get this nagging suspicion that it's all part of some larger conspiracy theory against you, making you think none of it is real. But then you get the chance to go home and see that everything is, in fact, still there. I haven't had the chance to go home, and probably won't while I'm here, but seeing Arianne really lifted my spirits and somehow I knew things down here would turn out all right.

I'll leave a bunch of photos here, and I've put captions with them to give you an idea of what they are, but there's no real story to them yet. Nice scenery, though, if I can say so.

Sydney: I've moved to a land Down Under

It's about time I update this thing.

A little over three weeks have passed since I moved to Sydney at the end of July. I visited Sydney and some of the surrounding areas last year for a few weeks and had a blast. The weather was warm and sunny, the people were friendly, and I got to do a lot. Australia is one of those weird places in the world, though, that most people from the US just don't understand...at all. We are fed these images of a sunny, tropical, sandy, sometimes dry land with tall, blonde, cheery, extremely fit citizens who go around chasing kangaroos and surf all day. We think of people like Nicole Kidman and Hugh Jackman and think, "What a cool country!" And it is, for the most part. I think Australia is a prime example of a location being completely different when you're visiting than it is when you live there.

Now, to be fair, my preparation for the move to Australia was biased from the beginning when it took Macquarie University four months longer to get me registered as a student and situated with a valid student offer to get my visa than it should have. The upside was that I got to spend four extra and amazing months with wonderful officemates who all became close friends in Glasgow. But the registration process at Macquarie really put a damper on my spirits. But then the paperwork went through and I bought my tickets and things began to brighten up as I started the journey Down Under.

I had to stop at home, in Michigan, first for my brother and new awesome sister-in-law's wedding. The Monday after the wedding my dad drove me to Chicago Midway airport and I felt fine and was excited to finally be making this journey. I was upgraded to first class on my flights from Chicago to Minneapolis and Minneapolis to Los Angeles which is always excellent, but on the flight to Los Angeles, I started feeling achy, my stomach was upset, and I could feel my tonsils swelling up. By the time my flight was due to leave Los Angeles for the 14 hour ride across the Pacific and down to the Southern Hemisphere, tonsillitis was full-blown; I felt awful and it it hurt like hell every time I tried to swallow. I was looking forward so much to that flight because it's kind of an enjoyable time to veg out, read a good book, watch a movie or two, and if you're lucky, you'll have attractive flight attendants. I was flying Virgin Australia, and the entire crew was gorgeous, though of course, I didn't bat an eye as the nice ladies passed my seat. It was Mr. Flight Attendant who kept asking if I wanted a refill on my water that caught my attention. But it wasn't to be, of course, because thanks to my swollen tonsils, I was miserable, couldn't speak normally, and didn't have it in me to take advantage of the free drinks on the flight to give me a little liquid flirting courage (which I feel comfortable enough to say would have been welcomed by him!).

Oh well. I watched a few movies but pretty much just slept the entire time, wanting so bad to just touch down in Sydney. But for some reason, luck was just not on my side during this journey. About an hour out of Sydney the captain announced that we were going to try and land but that the airport was covered by an unusually thick fog. For most airports, fog isn't an issue. But Sydney's airport is not equipped with the proper tools to guide planes to the runway with no visibility. The airport was only landing about one out of six airplanes and the rest were being diverted to Brisbane, an hour north. Our plane descended, but right at the last minute, the pilot pulled the plane up and announced we were Brisbane-bound. My heart sank because all I wanted were some damn antibiotics. I knew as soon as I'd get them, I'd feel better in an instant (at least that what happens each time I get tonsillitis).

The weather was clear in Brisbane and landing wasn't a problem, but then we taxied behind all of the other diverted planes and sat on the tarmac for another hour. It was long enough that the plane ran out of water (but not before I got a small bottle and a number of salt sachets which I used to gargle and try to loosen some of phlegm from my swollen tonsils), had no food, and the pilots even went through the cabins speaking personally to each row of passengers. They explained that what happened in Sydney is so incredibly rare that in their 20-some years of flying into the airport, they'd only been diverted due to fog three or four times!

After an hour and a half of sitting on the tarmac, we taxied up to an empty jet bridge and were directed to disembark the plane with all of our belongings because we would be going through Australian customs here and be re-booked on other flights into Sydney now that the weather had cleared. It was here in Brisbane, on the ground, that I was finally able to get in touch with my advisor from Macquarie, who was supposed to pick me up from Sydney Airport at 7:30am (it was now 9:30am!). He told me to just take a taxi out to the University from the airport when I did arrive. Customs was fairly easy-going, even though there were some inconsistencies with my middle name on my passport and visa, but they let me through anyway with a friendly wave. It was amazing! In the US, I'd've been pulled aside and questioned like a terror-suspect, likely after a full strip search. But I got my bags, and I proceeded to the domestic check-in desk where I was, after again waiting for an hour or so, booked on a small flight into Sydney, which was now taking planes after the fog burned off within an our after our attempted landing (which only meant we could have circled Sydney for an hour instead of flying to Brisbane and been on the ground, at our intended arrival airport, at least four hours earlier!).

My advisor suggested I didn't need to come all the way out to the University which was a 40 minute drive from the airport, but there were still a few hours left in the day and I felt it was important not to waste them and to meet my advisor for the first time in person as well as my co-advisor who I hadn't spoken to or heard from ever before. I got there and everything was fine, except for the fact that I still was suffering from the end of day two of untreated tonsillitis. I was given a cab fare to get to my apartment, in the Camperdown suburb of Sydney, and I arrived in the early evening, meeting my apartment-mate, who was so generous and welcoming, even holding the room over for a few weeks and covering my portion of the security deposit (or bond, here in Australia) just so I could have a place to call home right from the get-go. We chatted a bit, got to know each other some, but then I had to clean up, take a shower, and get some rest.

I unrolled my sleeping bag and inflated my Therma-rest camping pad, because my room wasn't (still isn't) furnished and went to bed. The next morning came very early, and I was up around 3am, but the first thought that went through my head was, "DAMN! It's COLD!!!" Yes, that's right. Sydney is absolutely FREEZING in the winter time - which it is down here in the Southern Hemisphere while the rest of the people I knew were enjoying the warmth of summer. It's not so much the temperature that makes Sydney cold, but none of the houses or building have heaters installed nor do they have insulation. It's like every winter people here think that maybe, just maybe, it will be the last cold winter and that next year the temperature won't drop below freezing at night. They're never right, and because of that, I am so thankful I had enough room in my luggage to pack my sleeping bag which keeps me warm down to 0°F (-18°C), and I am so thankful that my family got me a Therma-Rest before I left for UM's Field Camp way back in 2007! Even though it's only an inch thick, this mattress pad is comfortable and warm, and without it, I am sure my apartment-mate would have found me frozen to the floor the next morning!

The day of my arrival, at the University, I was informed of a mandatory campus-wide introduction for new incoming post-graduate student. It was supposed to be six hour long and from what I gathered would be pretty pointless, though according to those speaking at it, full of information every student must know. Well, this convocation coincided with the only time of the day the Higher Degree Research office was going to be open, and I had to stop there to pick up my healthcare card, which thankfully had been set up before I arrived in Australia. Since I value my personal health over almost everything else, I told the nice office ladies, "Tough shit. I'm skipping that meeting and getting healthy!" (In nicer, more diplomatic words, of course.) With my healthcare card in hand, I oh-too-early sought out the campus's General Practitioner's office at the hospital where the diagnosis was, yup: tonsillitis. And then I successfully predicted the doctor's prescription: penicillin - four capsules a day until the prescription runs out. With two pills down by the end of the day, I woke up the next morning feeling rejuvenated and 100% better! But what a crappy way to start out transition to a new life in Australia.

There's more to tell from these first few weeks, but I have to leave it there at the moment. But I'll give you a little preview: Shock-and-awe at the cost of living, freezing cold nights, field work in the Tablelands, freezing cold nights, finally meeting some people in my department, freezing cold nights, exploring the city's suburbs, freezing cold nights, coping with being so far away from everything familiar, and oh yeah, freezing cold nights.