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| Many of Adelaide's beautiful buildings feature intricate wrought iron work. |
Greetings, dear
friends. Here we are well into our fifth
and final week in Adelaide (we’re scheduled to leave on leap-year day) and we
haven’t posted a single blog about our time here. That’s mostly because I’m a poop who has
spent most of our sojourn here working (somewhat to Moira's consternation, I
fear, but so it goes; I've been reasonably productive during the visit and my
proclivity in that direction is how/why we got the chance to do this trip). So rather than a delectable series of tasty
little morsels doled out over time we’re giving you the big dump all at once.
Worse, we haven’t taken many pictures, so this is mostly text. It’s entirely optional, of course – surf off any time you
get bored and we’ll never know. Remember that if you double click on a picture you'll see a larger version of it.
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| Ehmckes (not a typo) Lane |
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| Our place, 14 Ehmckes Lane |
Our first few days here it
was very hot, pushing into the high 30s, but then it moderated and
most days had highs in the lower 20s or even less and we even had some days
with rain squalls. Don’t you feel for
us? But for the last several of days
there has been a warming trend, and yesterday (Feb 25) it hit 38. And that’s in the shade; the sun here feels
like a physical force, a big hot push, pleasant in small doses but not to be
fooled with. Fortunately, we have
excellent AC units in both the lounge (a small, ill-lit, cave-like substitute
for a living room) and the bedroom (quite large, bright, and airy). Even on the cooler nights we sometimes
indulge in the AC in the bedroom because then the possums playing in the dry
leaves below our window don’t keep me awake (not to complain about them
compared to our night-time visitors in Hawai’i!).
Australia is big big big
and wildly diverse, and we’ve hunkered down in one small spot. Adelaide itself is larger than I had realized
(something over a million residents, we’re told, including the vastly sprawling
suburbs). The core of the city was well-planned
in advance in the 1800s as the capital of a free (i.e., non-transported-convict)
British Australian province (South Australia).
The core of the city is entirely surrounded by extensive park
lands.
The centre of the city has lots
of gorgeous 19th century buildings and some quite interesting modern
ones, and there is a lovely central shopping district called Rundle Mall. Overall, downtown has a British/European feel,
tinged with something akin to a Western twang and shot through with modern
internationalism.
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| The bloke in the dog costume seduced Moira into rubbing his belly and then "peed" all over the front of her dress. You had to be there. |
It is certainly a different
place, a different culture, from Canada, and yet with enough overlap that one
sometimes forgets that one is elsewhere. Until someone says something
completely incomprehensible. We’ve
sometimes been startled to realize that the guy babbling away behind us on the
bus was speaking English.
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| Beautiful "fence" and gate in front of a home a few blocks from our place. |
Australia Day happened to be early in our stay. We heard that the Australia Day parade was
not to be missed, and so we read up on the parade route and headed down there,
arriving just before the parade began.
Imagine that you took the Victoria Day parade and deleted the
high-school marching bands and the floats.
This was a parade of thousands, in groups of one to two dozen, representing
each of umptyump nations. There was one
Scots pipe band, and many of the national groups had a few musical instruments,
and there were some fine antique cars and a few penny-farthing bicycles, but
mostly it was just a series of groups of people in the traditional dress of
their home cultural walking along, smiling and waving, one after another after
another. Most of these groups were
preceded by a rather bored- or embarrassed-looking young man in some sort of
Aussie uniform.
The sun was merciless, making it quite difficult to take good photographs. The parade route ran
only a few blocks, so after the last group passed we and the rest of the crowd
followed along behind. The route
terminated in a lovely large parkland with a bandstand. Here people set up picnic dinners (some
having brought food, more buying it from the variety of vendors on hand for the
occasion). We listened to the band and
watched kids play. Every now and then a
child’s balloon got loose and drifted across the sky.
Australians
seem more social than Canadians. For example,
there is a big fad among middle-aged people (mostly men) for riding
extremely high-end carbon-fibre bicycles while all togged out in racing gear.
One sees some 30- to 60-year-olds doing that in Canada, but here there are
hordes of them, especially on weekends, frequently in groups (and more often
than not stopped at a pub or coffee place, click-clocking around in awkward
shoes, their beer bellies making the lycra shine). More generally, I
have the impression that people here chum around more with their mates, having
long chatty coffee breaks and confabs between coffee breaks, hanging out at the
pub, cafe, etc.
I think Canadians (or at
least those in our cultural hubs) fancy themselves multicultural, and compared
to many places we are multicultural. But
Adelaide, in my perception, is vastly more international than, say,
Vancouver. I have the impression that
Australia has quite liberal immigration policies (which makes sense in a place
with [reportedly] 6.4 people per square mile).
Anyway, we’ve seen an array of skin tones and feature shapes and heard
lots of accents and languages.
There is also a very small
minority of aboriginal peoples in Adelaide (or the parts of it we’ve
frequented). They are strikingly
distinct (to my eye at least) from other passersby in physiognomy, overall
morphology, and gait (and sometimes in dress, but more often not). To say that some people look powerfully
different from others is to risk being misunderstood as saying something else,
but my point is that I have been acutely conscious of the gap between self and
other (which, of course, is always there between persons) when passing these
individuals. I sure dig their art.
As you probably know,
Australians drive on the wrong side of the road. In our first week here I had a very near miss
that still makes me sweat to recall. I
looked in the wrong direction and walked all the way across one south-bound
lane and was just barely into the second when a car whizzed by in the first, no
more than a meter from my skinny butt.
I’m not sure if the driver saw me at all – certainly I saw only the back
of the car, and my legs jellied as I continued my journey to the other side.
Mostly we’ve been riding
the bus to get around. The bus drivers
here are wonderfully friendly and knowledgeable. Nonetheless I am weary of standing at bus
stops. We did rent a car Sunday before
last for a little wine touring in the Adelaide Hills region. It’s been a number of years since we’ve
driven on the left, and next time I think we’ll rent an automatic. I drove for the first bit (lunch and the
first two tastings) and then Moira (have had mere sniffs and sips, as is her wont
these days, bless her heart) took over behind the wheel. We both suffered repeated embarrassment by
turning on the wipers when we wanted the turn signal, then miss-shifting in
flusteration. But the good news is that
we didn’t have a single head-on collision.
And we found some pretty good wine.
I’m not a huge fan of the big fruit-forward Australian wine style, as a
general rule, but we found some really very delicious treats.
My hosts at Flinders
University have been very gracious. Main
guy Neil Brewer and his wife Kathy hosted a wine-tasting party in our
honour. We delicately swirled, sipped,
savoured, and spat our way through four lovely exemplars of local shiraz,
evaluating each with wit and insight.
Not. This sort of wine tasting
event involved opening one bottle after another and sucking it down, while
talking about psychology in an increasingly creative and interesting (but, most
unfortunately, not very mnemonic) way. Exactly my cup of tea. [Moira interjection: At the end of this evening, Steve said to me,
“I think I’m drunk.” Ooohh, yeah.]
A few days later, barely
recovered (discipline is what it’s all about) another faculty member named Paul
Williamson took us (and my former student Michelle Arnold, who recently joined
the faculty at Flinders, and another of their new hires named Melanie
Takarangi, who is a former student of my Wellington collaborator Maryanne Garry
[whose nephew was briefly engaged to the daughter of the woman who designed the
draperies of the... just kidding]) for a tour of a few MacLaren Vale
wineries. Just now I am sipping
(delicately, of course) on a bottle from one of the vineyards we visited, Primo
Estates; I’ll get up and look for a glass as soon as I finish writing.
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| In the Primo tasting room. Melanie Takarangi, Michelle Arnold, Moira, and Paul. |
One of the best things
about this area is the birds. According
to Wikipedia (what a font!), there are about 800 species of birds in
Australia. Adelaide probably only has a
couple of hundred of those. Our
particular neighbourhood has the misfortune of being dominated by dull and
dim-witted-looking doves that say the same thing over and over (“Give peace a
chance” or some such rubbish). But we
also have a variety of magpie, quite different from the magpies I remember from
the Midwestern US, although both are a sharp black and white. Their call is quite extraordinary, a sort of
liquid metal waterfall. Check it out at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SHkCnBJoZkc (youtube, another font). There are also extravagantly colourful parrots
of a number of varieties and dinosuaric blue-black birds with red bills.
The trees, too, deserve
special mention. Wonderfully huge, with
a stunning array of wildly different sorts of bark and absence of bark. I won’t even give you a link – just Google
“images gum trees Australia.”
Adelaide is near to but not
right on the coast. We’ve visited two of
the nearby beaches, Glenelg (twice) and Henley.
Both are essentially suburbs of Adelaide, and both have beautiful vast
expanses of very fine very light coloured sand, very gently sloping out to sea
and with very little in the way of surf (at least on the completely calm, hot,
quiet days we’ve chosen for beach visits).
Both of these beaches have quite long piers (as they’d have to in order
to service boats with any draft at all.
We were able to walk out a good 20 yards in spots while wearing shorts
without getting them wet, and I’d say it was about 70 yards from shore before I
could no longer stand flat-footed. The
shallowest water was bath-water warm, but out a bit further it was just about a
perfect temperature – delightfully refreshing without being at all chilling.
At both beaches we saw
flocks of kids wearing uniform bathing costumes, include cloth bathing caps,
being exercised (in and out of the water) and trained by adults. These were surf life saving clubs (see, e.g., http://www.glenelgslsc.com.au/lifesaving/about-us/our-history ). Moira
figured out that the caps were used so that instructors could identify pupils
even when they were up to their ears in water.
Speaking of water, my
friend Tim asked me about the direction of water swirling down a drain. I had to confess I had not particularly
noticed the direction of the swirl down the drain. Water pressure in our place is low
(especially if you happen to want hot water, in particular from the bathroom
sink) and the toilets sort of floomp rather than swirl, so even when (inspired
by Tim’s query) I studied the matter I really couldn’t say whether it was any different from in
Canada. Of course, I’m at a disadvantage
being unsure how it swirls in the north either.
But Moira plugged in the kitchen-sink stopper, filled the sink, and we
watched it go down and sure enough it is clockwise. How’s it work at your house?
Tim also asked about the
constellations. Viewing conditions have
not been great here, but they certainly look different to me. We are looking forward to better star-gazing
opportunities in Wellington.
Adelaide has a huge annual
Fringe Festival, sprawled over 300+ acres of space and a full month of time,
with scores and scores of performers of many sorts. It is preceded by a
smaller, fringier two-week festival called The Garden of Unearthly Delights,
which takes place in a lovely park with room for about 8 good-sized temporary
constructions (wonderful tents, a geodesic dome, various odd combinations of
materials in interesting shapes) and innumerable smaller ones. There are many
food venders, places selling beer and wine, areas with tables and chairs under
the trees to sit and eat and drink and watch the passersby, vendors of all
sorts of oddments and curios, and a wide variety of kinds of shows in the
larger structures (musicians, magicians, comedians, acrobats, and, mostly,
troupes that create fascinating mishmashes of multiple art forms).
The video doesn't really do
it justice -- it was jaw-dropping, enthralling, and funny as hell at times.
The next night we saw The
Table, a Polish creation involving four musicians sitting around what at a
casual glance might appear to be a simple old wooden table but was in fact an
extraordinary multi-instrumental device.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hcbg2lVj7Tc We were
again in second row, about 6 feet from the nearest corner of the table. From the first part of the youtube video you
might think it was all percussive, and in fact the best parts were (and this
clip fails to pick up a lot of the more interesting, subtle sounds). But the table also includes four stringed
instruments that were bowed and plucked and struck in various ways, and devices
for playing with the human voice and breath, and they also used wine glasses,
etc. Under the table there was a mass of
foot pedals enabling them to change the acoustic properties of the table in
various ways. Check out some of the
other clips.
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| Gum tree in the Garden of Unearthly Delights |
Best of all, the park is
filled with people of all ages having a good time. Admission to the park is
free, so one could just go for some kick-ass people watching, or to have
grilled barramundi in a wrap. The food options were diverse and it all seems
pretty darned down-home – that is, they were actually cooking real food to
order. Line-ups were short and
civilized. The bathrooms were clean and
accessible. It probably gets pretty wild
on Friday and Saturday nights, but on the two nights we’ve been so far it was
really rather peaceful. Lots of the
adults were having beer or wine, but we didn’t see any rowdiness. There are lots of staff (some, promoting
shows, are in costumes; others, doing various chores, wear t-shirts identifying
them as Gardeners), and the place is continually kept neat as a pin. Delightful, by gum, and we may go again.
[Moira here. Where we’re
staying is in the south-east corner of the city or CBD, as they say. This has
been an ideal location for touristing and general living. We are close to a
main street, Hutt St., which has one of the city’s best shopping and dining
areas. Lots of coffee shops, 2 pubs, a number of lovely restaurants, one fast
food joint. A post office, wine store, library, 2 grocery stores, a shoe repair
place, newsagent, and a boutique of the best kind. Mai Louie is run by a young
woman who carries some nice lines of clothing and adds her own creations to the
racks. I’ve spent all my pin money there and may buy something more before we
go. Of course, these purchases mean that something I brought has to go out or I
won’t be able to close my suitcase. ]
Actually, she’s just
planning to buy another suitcase.
[Moira continues, ignoring
that interruption: Steve told you that
we’ve been using the bus and my favourite is the free connector bus that loops
around the CBD and North Adelaide about once an hour in each direction. It is
chronically late but you can’t count on that. It uses one electric bus that has
to be charged up in the early afternoon so sometimes it doesn’t come at all.
These buses have lots of character in themselves, their drivers, and their
passengers - elderly folks, a few weirdos, and tourists of all ages. I love it
and plan my outings using it. Another quirk of using this bus is that you often
have to catch the bus going in the counter-intuitive direction to get where you
want to go. The Central Market is north and west of us so we catch the bus
going south because the bus going north from here is going to North Adelaide
before coming past the Market. We’ve only had one unplanned tour of North
Adelaide. Keeps the grey cells perked up.]
Yesterday I braved the heat and went to the Adelaide Oval to watch a bit of cricket. It was a special sort of match, reportedly called a pyjama match, that takes a mere 8 hours to play. I was there for about an hour and a half. I now know a little bit more about cricket than I did before. Very little. Pictures below of Adelaide Oval.
So, on to Wellington, New Zealand next Wednesday. We’ll try to do a better job of serving out
that adventure in digestible snippets.
Love,
Steve and Moira
