scenes from Adelaide
When I first arrived in Adelaide, I was thoroughly discombobulated after getting very little sleep. I was also delighted to see my best friend, A., waiting for me at baggage claim. I’ve gotten to see her about once a year since she moved from Boston (where we were roommates and officemates) to Australia, and I’ve missed her greatly.
A. immediately decided to get some food into me and took me to a nearby Subway. I got my sandwich with “avo” on it, as Australians are fond of calling both avocado and guacamole. When I reached the cashier, I tried to order some cookies. “Can I have two dot cookies?” I asked, proudly using the Australian word for M&M cookies, which I’d noticed on signs up in Cairns.
The woman behind the counter grabbed two of the fudge chocolate chip cookies. “No, not those,” I corrected. “The dot cookies.”
“These are the dark cookies.”
What was wrong with her? Didn’t she understand Australian? Maybe she was a little slow. “No, not the dark ones. I want the ones with…” I reached for the word, and couldn’t find it. “The… colorful, candy-type… dots…”
“Do you mean M&M’s?” A. asked, looking at me oddly.
“Yes! Those! That’s what I want!” I shouted triumphantly.
A. gave the woman behind the counter an apologetic please-excuse-my-weird-American-friend look.
“So, they call these dot cookies in America, then?” the woman asked politely, bagging the new cookies.
“No.”
“Okay…” she looked confused. I didn’t have the energy or mental capacity to explain. I explained to A. later, though, and she told me she’d never heard the term “dot cookie” before. I surmised that it must be a Queensland thing. She agreed that that was possible, but also suggested it might be something I hallucinated in the sleep-deprived state that led me to forget the word for M&Ms.
(I just searched and can’t find evidence on the internet that the term “dot cookie” means what I think, or is used in Australia. Dammit. The internet is not doing its job.)
* * *
When we got to the house that A. shares with her spouse, T., they explained to me that the Tyler would be coming tomorrow, and apologized for the fact that their kitchen was in total disarray currently in preparation. I wondered what kind of strange Australian job this was. Eventually, however, I realized that they were just having someone come to tile their floor. I was disappointed that there was not an actual position known as the Tyler.
The tiler came and did some work, and then told us that he’d be back to finish the floor “tomorrow in the avo,” and we were to stay off of it until then.
“He’s coming to work on it in the avocado?” I asked, intrigued. But no, it turns out that he’d actually said “arvo,” which is short for afternoon. Obviously.
Thanks to the re-tiling, the house had several odd properties. For one, the refrigerator was kept, unplugged, in the middle of the living room. Rather than keeping things cold, it served primarily as an obstacle to conversation and to walking. More inconvenient, however, was the fact that the living room and the deck, where we spent most of our time during the day, was cut off from the bedrooms and the bathroom on the other side of the kitchen. Every time I needed to pee, I would stare wistfully across the forbidden stretch of kitchen floor until my bladder could stand it no more. Then I would put on my shoes and walk all the way around the outside of the house to reach the toilet. After the sun set, this involved an extra element of danger, as the uneven paths around the house were unlit.
As if that weren’t enough, A. and T.’s heat was broken, and their internet service was intermittent enough to be non-existent on some days. “We thought we were camping before,” I told B. during a rare IM session, “but I’m really roughing it, here.”
Despite the fact that I made fun of A. for the strange Australian habits I claimed she’d picked up - such as keeping the fridge in the living room and abandoning modern utilities - I did not mind these quirks at all. The outside temperature was warm, and the lack of internet did not bother me. When A. was at work, I spent a bit of time wandering around the city of Adelaide, a lot of time wandering around a large park near her house, and some time reading, writing, relaxing, and thinking. And when A. was free, we spent a whole lot of time trying to cram several years of talking and catching up into one week. (We talk on Skype sometimes, and email occasionally, but it was SO NICE to actually be in the same place - and the same time zone - and be able to have in person, high bandwidth conversations.) We also saw a movie and went for a hike with T. (A. was very sick at that point, and her hiking speed and capability was therefore limited to about my own abilities, for which I was grateful). T. and I also had a nice time talking, and we spent some time mocking A. together, which was fun.
I also spent some time at the University of Adelaide. I attended a psychology class lecture and a philosophy talk, both given by A. I also attended one of her lab meetings. This gave me a nice sample of what life is like for her as a professor at the university there. It’s great to see the classes and labs my friends from grad school have gone on to build, and to watch them bringing their research visions to life. And I had a good time poking fun at A. in front of her students just a bit, which I think is an important job of the visiting friends of every professor. I also got to meet a good friend of A.’s who is also her research collaborator, D. I’d been hearing about D. for years. The moment we got together, we joined forces to start making fun of A. It was excellent! For us, at least.
In case she is sounding unfairly ganged up upon, I must point out that A. brings this mockery on herself. I was supposed to meet her and D. for beers in the faculty club. A. told me to meet her in, “The Union Building - you know, the Student Center.” So, on my way from the train station, I followed signs for the Union Building and the Student Center (Centre, actually) whenever I saw them. When there were no signs, I would ask someone if they knew where the building was, asking for either the Union or the Student Center. Eventually, I realized I was zigzagging back and forth across campus. I began to suspect that A. - who I nicknamed Dr. Oblivious in recognition of the acuity of her observational skills - might not have noticed that the two names she gave me actually applied to two separate buildings. Eventually, I found a campus map and determined that this was true. The Student Center, in fact (which did not contain the faculty club) was in the same building as A.’s office, but she’d never noticed the sign. (This was completely typical of A, who also hadn’t realized, after 3 years there, what I noticed in a single day - that there are two substantially different types of trains, built in very different decades, running on the Adelaide commuter rail tracks.) Eventually, I found my way to the Union Building and commenced drinking and mocking.
A. gives as good as she gets, in the mockery department. Of course she made fun of me a good deal for forgetting the word “M&Ms.” Additionally, she and T. had been on the lookout for koalas near their house - they have them in the yard sometimes, and they were excited to show me one in the wild, or to let me hear the noise koalas make. “They sound like enormous pigs, grunting and snorting madly,” said T. One of the first mornings I arrived, A. told me that she’d gotten excited when she heard one right outside her window. As she ran to tell me, she realized that it was just me snoring. I consoled myself with the fact that, at least if I ended up nicknamed Koala Girl, people might be more likely to assume it was because I was cute and cuddly than because of my fearsome nocturnal noises.
* * *
One day, I went to the Royal Botanical Garden in Adelaide. It was very nice. I saw a bunch of plants. (That’s about as specific as my memory for botany gets, although I do remember in particular the Amazonian lily pads capable of supporting small children -- the display included a photo of an explorer’s daughter seated atop of one of them.) More excitingly, I saw some big spiders!
I thought I’d seen the last of the large web spinners up in the tropics. However, while the ones in the botanical garden were not as large, they were still impressive. I had trouble photographing them, though - they were about 8 feet in the air, and I couldn’t find anything to use for scale. All the plants and leaves nearby were absurdly large themselves, so the spiders looked boringly normal with only those plants for comparison.
Finally, I hit upon a scheme. I would take a picture of a leaf in my hand for reference, then fling the leaf into the spider webs, and take another photo with the leaf next to the spider for scale. I tried this with about five different leaves. Each time, I took a photo of the leaf in my hand. Then I flung the leaf, and watched the wind carry it in some random direction, far away from the web. After a while, I acknowledged that I would need to use heavier objects. I repeated the process with a number of pieces of bark. But all I had to show for it at the end were a bunch of photos of pieces of bark in my hand, and three angry spiders, pissed off at me for making holes in their webs with the too-heavy wood chunks.
It was at around this time that I became aware that someone was watching me. I have no idea how long he had been watching, but he seemed fascinated by my process of picking up common detritus, holding it for a photo, and then flinging it in the air. He was peering at me from behind a tree, as if I were a strange form of wildlife to be observed, myself. I immediately became rather self-conscious. But I would not give up in my spiderly pursuit.
At last, I found the perfect plant needle. Lightweight, yet aerodynamic. Doing my best to ignore the eyes on my back, I photographed it in my hand, then launched it into the web. Success - the needle struck, and stayed! I could have sworn the spider sighed, and I snapped a photo as it moved to start assessing the damage and cut the foreign object free. I put my camera away and turned to leave, deliberately not looking at my own observer.
And that’s how I ended up with all my photos from the Royal Botanical Garden being of the spiders. Aren’t you delighted by my devotion to bringing you pictures of large arachnids - with objects for scale? I knew you would be.
* * *
As I mentioned before, I spent many hours in Adelaide wandering around the park near A.’s house, which had a wonderful view down from the hills we were in, looking out over the city proper and the sea beyond. I worried a little bit about wandering around in the semi-wilderness by myself on a foreign continent. Usually, when I hike near my house, I can rest assured that I won’t end up needing to hack off my own arm because I only go places that have cell reception, so I know I can call for help. However, my phone didn’t work in Australia. Oh, I could easily enough listen to podcasts on it as I roamed, but I knew that if I were to get struck by a falling rock or tree - or, more likely, get bitten by a deadly snake or spider or previously unknown land jellyfish, or twist my ankle on nothing and fall into a ravine - I would not be able to use my phone to summon help. And I didn’t know the lay of the land in advance, so I could not tell A. and T. where I was headed so that they could come track me down if I disappeared (although, with A.’s lack of sense of direction and general obliviousness, that wouldn’t really have helped anyway).
It was therefore with a bit of trepidation that I set out on my initial journey, slathered in “sun cream” and insect repellent, and clutching my water bottle, which I dearly hoped would not have to last me more than a few hours.
As I reached the park entrance, I realized something. It was true that my phone had no reception, and there were no wireless networks nearby. However, my GPS still worked. I opened an application called My Tracks, which makes use of map and GPS data to show you where you currently are and where you have been so far (as well as statistics about speed, elevation, etc.). I had been using it frequently to track the walks and runs I took at home. Now, I turned on GPS tracking and hit Record.
As I wandered, I would look periodically at where I had been so far. Because of the lack of a data connection, my phone could not download any map for the local area. I could see my winding path traced out across a uniform field of gray. It was initially unclear to me whether this was serving any purpose other than amusing me. However, as I reached forks in the trail, I felt free to explore various paths without worrying about losing my way back. I ended up making several loops on paths that I would not have realized would connect back to a previous trail were it not for the paths of those red lines on my phone, moving ever closer through the void.
Once I got back to the U.S., I looked at my tracks again, and maps magically appeared. “Huh, there was a river nearby,” I noticed. “I wish I’d known that at the time!” Still, I was pleased that my tracking software had turned out to be handy even without my phone having almost any sort of data connection or functionality whatsoever. And, after years of relying on the internet for detailed maps, wandering around through a mysterious wilderness of gray turned out to be its own sort of fun. It reminded me of playing text adventure games, where you know the path that you’ve taken, but you have to draw the map yourself as you go along (I suppose that’s also how explorers feel, but I’d been primarily a geek explorer when growing up).
Of course, if I’d gotten bitten by something deadly, my phone would have been no use. But when they found my body, they could have gotten a lot of nifty statistics about where I’d been and how quickly I’d been traveling.
* * *
Traveling from A.’s house to my house took 25 hours, door to door. My flight from Sydney to SFO arrived before it departed (left 2:45pm on Sunday, and arrived 11am that morning). It was all rather disorienting, and jet lag took me quite a while to recover from. But I would gladly make the trip to Australia again. I hope to return to visit A. again in the future, hopefully visiting other locations in Australia and New Zealand along the way. And returning with many more stories.
A. immediately decided to get some food into me and took me to a nearby Subway. I got my sandwich with “avo” on it, as Australians are fond of calling both avocado and guacamole. When I reached the cashier, I tried to order some cookies. “Can I have two dot cookies?” I asked, proudly using the Australian word for M&M cookies, which I’d noticed on signs up in Cairns.
The woman behind the counter grabbed two of the fudge chocolate chip cookies. “No, not those,” I corrected. “The dot cookies.”
“These are the dark cookies.”
What was wrong with her? Didn’t she understand Australian? Maybe she was a little slow. “No, not the dark ones. I want the ones with…” I reached for the word, and couldn’t find it. “The… colorful, candy-type… dots…”
“Do you mean M&M’s?” A. asked, looking at me oddly.
“Yes! Those! That’s what I want!” I shouted triumphantly.
A. gave the woman behind the counter an apologetic please-excuse-my-weird-American-friend look.
“So, they call these dot cookies in America, then?” the woman asked politely, bagging the new cookies.
“No.”
“Okay…” she looked confused. I didn’t have the energy or mental capacity to explain. I explained to A. later, though, and she told me she’d never heard the term “dot cookie” before. I surmised that it must be a Queensland thing. She agreed that that was possible, but also suggested it might be something I hallucinated in the sleep-deprived state that led me to forget the word for M&Ms.
(I just searched and can’t find evidence on the internet that the term “dot cookie” means what I think, or is used in Australia. Dammit. The internet is not doing its job.)
* * *
When we got to the house that A. shares with her spouse, T., they explained to me that the Tyler would be coming tomorrow, and apologized for the fact that their kitchen was in total disarray currently in preparation. I wondered what kind of strange Australian job this was. Eventually, however, I realized that they were just having someone come to tile their floor. I was disappointed that there was not an actual position known as the Tyler.
The tiler came and did some work, and then told us that he’d be back to finish the floor “tomorrow in the avo,” and we were to stay off of it until then.
“He’s coming to work on it in the avocado?” I asked, intrigued. But no, it turns out that he’d actually said “arvo,” which is short for afternoon. Obviously.
Thanks to the re-tiling, the house had several odd properties. For one, the refrigerator was kept, unplugged, in the middle of the living room. Rather than keeping things cold, it served primarily as an obstacle to conversation and to walking. More inconvenient, however, was the fact that the living room and the deck, where we spent most of our time during the day, was cut off from the bedrooms and the bathroom on the other side of the kitchen. Every time I needed to pee, I would stare wistfully across the forbidden stretch of kitchen floor until my bladder could stand it no more. Then I would put on my shoes and walk all the way around the outside of the house to reach the toilet. After the sun set, this involved an extra element of danger, as the uneven paths around the house were unlit.
As if that weren’t enough, A. and T.’s heat was broken, and their internet service was intermittent enough to be non-existent on some days. “We thought we were camping before,” I told B. during a rare IM session, “but I’m really roughing it, here.”
Despite the fact that I made fun of A. for the strange Australian habits I claimed she’d picked up - such as keeping the fridge in the living room and abandoning modern utilities - I did not mind these quirks at all. The outside temperature was warm, and the lack of internet did not bother me. When A. was at work, I spent a bit of time wandering around the city of Adelaide, a lot of time wandering around a large park near her house, and some time reading, writing, relaxing, and thinking. And when A. was free, we spent a whole lot of time trying to cram several years of talking and catching up into one week. (We talk on Skype sometimes, and email occasionally, but it was SO NICE to actually be in the same place - and the same time zone - and be able to have in person, high bandwidth conversations.) We also saw a movie and went for a hike with T. (A. was very sick at that point, and her hiking speed and capability was therefore limited to about my own abilities, for which I was grateful). T. and I also had a nice time talking, and we spent some time mocking A. together, which was fun.
I also spent some time at the University of Adelaide. I attended a psychology class lecture and a philosophy talk, both given by A. I also attended one of her lab meetings. This gave me a nice sample of what life is like for her as a professor at the university there. It’s great to see the classes and labs my friends from grad school have gone on to build, and to watch them bringing their research visions to life. And I had a good time poking fun at A. in front of her students just a bit, which I think is an important job of the visiting friends of every professor. I also got to meet a good friend of A.’s who is also her research collaborator, D. I’d been hearing about D. for years. The moment we got together, we joined forces to start making fun of A. It was excellent! For us, at least.
In case she is sounding unfairly ganged up upon, I must point out that A. brings this mockery on herself. I was supposed to meet her and D. for beers in the faculty club. A. told me to meet her in, “The Union Building - you know, the Student Center.” So, on my way from the train station, I followed signs for the Union Building and the Student Center (Centre, actually) whenever I saw them. When there were no signs, I would ask someone if they knew where the building was, asking for either the Union or the Student Center. Eventually, I realized I was zigzagging back and forth across campus. I began to suspect that A. - who I nicknamed Dr. Oblivious in recognition of the acuity of her observational skills - might not have noticed that the two names she gave me actually applied to two separate buildings. Eventually, I found a campus map and determined that this was true. The Student Center, in fact (which did not contain the faculty club) was in the same building as A.’s office, but she’d never noticed the sign. (This was completely typical of A, who also hadn’t realized, after 3 years there, what I noticed in a single day - that there are two substantially different types of trains, built in very different decades, running on the Adelaide commuter rail tracks.) Eventually, I found my way to the Union Building and commenced drinking and mocking.
A. gives as good as she gets, in the mockery department. Of course she made fun of me a good deal for forgetting the word “M&Ms.” Additionally, she and T. had been on the lookout for koalas near their house - they have them in the yard sometimes, and they were excited to show me one in the wild, or to let me hear the noise koalas make. “They sound like enormous pigs, grunting and snorting madly,” said T. One of the first mornings I arrived, A. told me that she’d gotten excited when she heard one right outside her window. As she ran to tell me, she realized that it was just me snoring. I consoled myself with the fact that, at least if I ended up nicknamed Koala Girl, people might be more likely to assume it was because I was cute and cuddly than because of my fearsome nocturnal noises.
* * *
One day, I went to the Royal Botanical Garden in Adelaide. It was very nice. I saw a bunch of plants. (That’s about as specific as my memory for botany gets, although I do remember in particular the Amazonian lily pads capable of supporting small children -- the display included a photo of an explorer’s daughter seated atop of one of them.) More excitingly, I saw some big spiders!
I thought I’d seen the last of the large web spinners up in the tropics. However, while the ones in the botanical garden were not as large, they were still impressive. I had trouble photographing them, though - they were about 8 feet in the air, and I couldn’t find anything to use for scale. All the plants and leaves nearby were absurdly large themselves, so the spiders looked boringly normal with only those plants for comparison.
Finally, I hit upon a scheme. I would take a picture of a leaf in my hand for reference, then fling the leaf into the spider webs, and take another photo with the leaf next to the spider for scale. I tried this with about five different leaves. Each time, I took a photo of the leaf in my hand. Then I flung the leaf, and watched the wind carry it in some random direction, far away from the web. After a while, I acknowledged that I would need to use heavier objects. I repeated the process with a number of pieces of bark. But all I had to show for it at the end were a bunch of photos of pieces of bark in my hand, and three angry spiders, pissed off at me for making holes in their webs with the too-heavy wood chunks.
It was at around this time that I became aware that someone was watching me. I have no idea how long he had been watching, but he seemed fascinated by my process of picking up common detritus, holding it for a photo, and then flinging it in the air. He was peering at me from behind a tree, as if I were a strange form of wildlife to be observed, myself. I immediately became rather self-conscious. But I would not give up in my spiderly pursuit.
At last, I found the perfect plant needle. Lightweight, yet aerodynamic. Doing my best to ignore the eyes on my back, I photographed it in my hand, then launched it into the web. Success - the needle struck, and stayed! I could have sworn the spider sighed, and I snapped a photo as it moved to start assessing the damage and cut the foreign object free. I put my camera away and turned to leave, deliberately not looking at my own observer.
And that’s how I ended up with all my photos from the Royal Botanical Garden being of the spiders. Aren’t you delighted by my devotion to bringing you pictures of large arachnids - with objects for scale? I knew you would be.
* * *
As I mentioned before, I spent many hours in Adelaide wandering around the park near A.’s house, which had a wonderful view down from the hills we were in, looking out over the city proper and the sea beyond. I worried a little bit about wandering around in the semi-wilderness by myself on a foreign continent. Usually, when I hike near my house, I can rest assured that I won’t end up needing to hack off my own arm because I only go places that have cell reception, so I know I can call for help. However, my phone didn’t work in Australia. Oh, I could easily enough listen to podcasts on it as I roamed, but I knew that if I were to get struck by a falling rock or tree - or, more likely, get bitten by a deadly snake or spider or previously unknown land jellyfish, or twist my ankle on nothing and fall into a ravine - I would not be able to use my phone to summon help. And I didn’t know the lay of the land in advance, so I could not tell A. and T. where I was headed so that they could come track me down if I disappeared (although, with A.’s lack of sense of direction and general obliviousness, that wouldn’t really have helped anyway).
It was therefore with a bit of trepidation that I set out on my initial journey, slathered in “sun cream” and insect repellent, and clutching my water bottle, which I dearly hoped would not have to last me more than a few hours.
As I reached the park entrance, I realized something. It was true that my phone had no reception, and there were no wireless networks nearby. However, my GPS still worked. I opened an application called My Tracks, which makes use of map and GPS data to show you where you currently are and where you have been so far (as well as statistics about speed, elevation, etc.). I had been using it frequently to track the walks and runs I took at home. Now, I turned on GPS tracking and hit Record.
As I wandered, I would look periodically at where I had been so far. Because of the lack of a data connection, my phone could not download any map for the local area. I could see my winding path traced out across a uniform field of gray. It was initially unclear to me whether this was serving any purpose other than amusing me. However, as I reached forks in the trail, I felt free to explore various paths without worrying about losing my way back. I ended up making several loops on paths that I would not have realized would connect back to a previous trail were it not for the paths of those red lines on my phone, moving ever closer through the void.
Once I got back to the U.S., I looked at my tracks again, and maps magically appeared. “Huh, there was a river nearby,” I noticed. “I wish I’d known that at the time!” Still, I was pleased that my tracking software had turned out to be handy even without my phone having almost any sort of data connection or functionality whatsoever. And, after years of relying on the internet for detailed maps, wandering around through a mysterious wilderness of gray turned out to be its own sort of fun. It reminded me of playing text adventure games, where you know the path that you’ve taken, but you have to draw the map yourself as you go along (I suppose that’s also how explorers feel, but I’d been primarily a geek explorer when growing up).
Of course, if I’d gotten bitten by something deadly, my phone would have been no use. But when they found my body, they could have gotten a lot of nifty statistics about where I’d been and how quickly I’d been traveling.
* * *
Traveling from A.’s house to my house took 25 hours, door to door. My flight from Sydney to SFO arrived before it departed (left 2:45pm on Sunday, and arrived 11am that morning). It was all rather disorienting, and jet lag took me quite a while to recover from. But I would gladly make the trip to Australia again. I hope to return to visit A. again in the future, hopefully visiting other locations in Australia and New Zealand along the way. And returning with many more stories.