My Year in Oz Begins

By all rights, I should have gone straight to bed.  55 hours of travel with only patchy bits of sleep does not make for a particularly coherent human being.  I just couldn’t, couldn’t close my eyes on that hot sunny day (after leaving a brisk snowy February Indiana), so I dressed in a sarong and tank top (my uniform for that year, and many subsequent).  Ben decided to take me downtown to Sydney and show me THE most stunning man-made site I have ever laid eyes on.  We strolled down to the bus stop, grabbing a sausage pie on the way (wow, I miss hot pies), and climbed on.  The ride was relatively short, and I drooled out the window the whole way, gazing at shops, people, the strange trees and strange cars and strange names full of vowels and double letters.  We stopped at Circular Quay, a place to catch ferries, buses, taxis, or sit and watch the thousands of people who do.  He pulled me onto the ferry that crosses to Manly Beach (where we would later live together), and I stood out on the foredeck with my jaw hanging down around my knees.

 

The Sydney Harbor Bridge and Opera House.  Go look at a picture, I can’t describe it.  They soar and take you with them.  I must have crossed that harbor a hundred times, and I never could find it in me to ride in the sheltered underdeck.

 

We got off at Manly and walked up and down the Corso (the Main Street shopping district of this suburb).  There were lots of sausage-and-pie shops, surf stores, outdoor cafes, coffee bars, and ice cream stands.  At one end of the Corso was the Harbor, and at the other was the beachfront.  All along that beach were shops and restaurants, and stunning people taking in the sun.  Ben really wanted to take me to the Sydney Aquarium, so it wasn’t long before we turned back for the ferry.  We landed at Circular Quay and walked through The Rocks, an upscale shopping district at one end of it.   If I remember right, there was an Irish bar we used to go to all the time, and during the Olympics they had all kinds of street acts performing in there.  Anyway, we headed for the Aquarium – by this point I was practically a zombie, so all I really remember was some sort of albino alligator and getting a soda can that was about a quarter inch taller than ours, which looked soooo strange.  I remember getting some kind of Greek food for dinner on a sidewalk cafe in Coogee, and then heading to bed at about 8 that night.  My first day in Australia was over – the next day  I would be catching a train to Wollongong, where I would begin work at university.  Lying in that bunk bed in a hostel room full of English twenty somethings, I closed my eyes and was asleep in seconds.