Recently (for say the last six weeks) I've been mainly occupied with travel and marking. Appropriately, this blog-post is being partly written in Singapore airport on a stopover on my way back to the Northern hemisphere. I propose to talk more about the former in this post, for, let's face it, marking really isn't much fun. Sometimes the pain can be attenuated by a fine crop of bloopers, but sadly there was nothing outstandingly hilarious in the scripts I read this time. Certainly nothing compared to this gem from a previous session, a description of the beginning of Mozart's Magic Flute: 'Tamino is fleeing from a serpent, who is trying to bite him in a liminal location'. (The phrase which gave rise to this delicious double entendre was one we had employed in seminars to describe places where the boundaries between our world and the supernatural dimensions are thin and permeable).
My two overseas trips took me to the US and New Zealand, both motivated by conference activity. In my Nov trip to the States, I attended the Annual Meeting of the AMS [American Musicological Society] in Indianapolis, which this year had somewhere around 2,700 delegates in attendance. This, in case you hadn't guessed, is the world's biggest annual musicological jamboree, a chance to catch up with old friends and make new contacts, to sample what's new in the world of music research, spin book projects to publishers, and generally revel in the feeling of being part of a large community. Like many in the humanities, my research is largely a series of solo projects, so it's always good to get a chance to reconnect with my peers and discuss the burning issues in Strauss scholarship.
Compared to other US cities that I've visited, Indianapolis was rather non-descript and featureless, although admittedly all I have to go on is what I happened to see during a couple of pre-dawn runs. Moreover, I had already visited Chicago during this trip, and most urbanscapes in the States will suffer by the comparison. Having walked down Michigan Ave, I can see why the Windy City is rated so highly by cognoscenti. In comparison to the cramped (if stimulating) streets of NY, there was a spaciousness to Chicago that appealed strongly. Moreover, several buildings really took my fancy, in particular Marina City Towers (two honeycombed structures which apparently were designed as integrated communities, with a mixture of office and domestic spaces). When one adds to the architectural attractions Chicago's well- known music scene (sadly I didn't get to sample either the CSO, Lyric opera or the jazz clubs this trip), its cuisine (deep-pan pizza is surprisingly good, even though normally I prefer Italian-style thin crusts), and the visually stunning lakeshore panoramas, it could be a great city in which to live as well as to visit. With one major caveat - the temperatures. Legendarily cold and harsh in the winter (a local friend told me that negative Farenheit (-22C) was not uncommon), it apparently also gets uncomfortably hot in the summer. Thankfully, I lucked out - it was really mild when I was there, as the locals confirmed.
Another stop on my tour was Minocqua. No, I hadn't heard of this part of rural Wisconsin before this trip, either. My purpose in going there was to visit a friend, a trainee medic who had a placement in the boonies. Thanks to the kindness of my friend's sister, who was also due to visit Minocqua, I was able to be the passenger on this mini road-trip. The third and fourth members of the party were an 8-week old baby and a bull-terrier, both of whom were impeccably behaved throughout. With the former needing regular feeding, I was deputed to look after the latter at the rest stops. Willie (for such was the dog's name) may have looked like the kind of animal owned by the murderous Bill Sikes in a version of _Oliver Twist_ I once saw, but he was in fact the most timid and quiet chap imaginable. In fact, he was so shy that I had to drag him out of the car to relieve himself. Incidentally, having to mop up the animal's defecations was another new experience for me. I had a sheltered upbringing, don't you know.
We stopped off for lunch en route, which enabled me to see at least cursorily Minneapolis and Madison (once going, once coming). Minocqua, when it was eventually reached, proved to be a one-horse town set in some moderately attractive countryside. One of its claims to fame is that it contains the restaurant where John Dillinger had his altercation with the FBI. The bullet-shattered glass is still preserved in the frames, set between the more functional double panes that keep the restaurant moderately warm. This location was recently used for the film about the gangster, _Public Enemies_, starring Johnny Depp and Marion Cotillard.
The last stop on my trip was Chapel Hill, North Carolina, where I was scheduled to give a guest lecture and seminar for grad students at UNC. I was also enabled to visit another ex-Cantab friend, who's been living there for some years. What will remain in my memory of this part of the world is the glorious autumnal colours of the trees, 'yellow, black, pale and hectic red', as Shelley said. Both the UNC and Duke campuses were pretty, the latter having a particularly impressive quadrangle. The lecture on Friday afternoon seemed to go over fairly well, and was followed by supper with some of the faculty and students. UNC has the name of being a demanding grad-school programme, and this is perhaps nowhere more clearly evinced than in the fact that the 2-hour seminar took place on Saturday morning (sic). It was lots of fun, engaging with 16 or so bright grad students, and 8 of them took me for lunch afterwards.
The whole experience reminded just how professional the academic training is in the States. After spending anywhere between 5 and 8 years in their doctoral programme, the students emerge battle-hardened, with a breadth of knowledge and an intellectual rigour that really isn't provided by PhD programmes in Ireland, the UK or Australia. As a graduate of the UK and Irish systems, I do not mean to denigrate the many virtues these possess - they perhaps encourage intellectual autonomy to a greater extent - but still the exclusive emphasis on one's thesis topic from the very beginning by definition means they have a narrower focus.
Anyway, this post is already extensive enough - I'll take up the tale of my NZ trip in the next. (OK, the real reason is that this is being written at 3.30am in Singapore airport, as I wait for an already twice-delayed flight, and I'm about ready to try and see if I can't sleep a bit on the floor.)
Sunday, December 19, 2010
Thursday, September 9, 2010
Rushing around
'Good work, Dave [sic], keep it going'. No, not words of commendation from senior Conservatorium staff for the superlative job I'm doing there, with promises of promotion and bonuses if I indeed do 'keep it going', but from a trainer. You know, one of those people who seem born to roar 'push it' just at the point when you feel you need to ease up or have that coronary. For those who know me well, another 'sic' is pretty much called for, but it's not a typo: I have come into contact with the shadowy world of supervised exercise. And I'm rather enjoying it, to be honest.
So let me back up a bit after this pre-credit sequence. At the end of July, I came back from my month in Europe, three days before the semester began. The trip was excellent, thanks for asking, although not particularly restful: two weddings (Oxford & Ingolstadt), a conference (Southampton), writing a paper for said conference (Dublin), and trying to sort out the tedious last finalising of marks for Sydney from the other side of the planet. Most enjoyable was seeing family (London, Dublin) and friends (all of the above + Cambridge). There wasn't much time to launch into preparation for the new semester, but at least the pressure of work pretty much staved off jet-lag: amazing what one can forego if one doesn't have time for it. Anyway, casting about for a way to fill the spare three hours I had a week, I decided to enter some kind of road race. Not perhaps everyone's first choice, but spring was around the corner, and given the heat during summer, it seemed best to max out on exercise at this rather than any later/earlier stage in the year. My first thought was to enter the City to Surf, a popular 14km event which takes one from the heart of the city to Bondi, but by the time I got my act together, the only spaces left were in a group which would have included mums with strollers, people dressed as furry mascots, and the like, so that seemed pointless. In compensation, I decided to go for the more demanding Blackmores half-marathon, which would take place seven weeks hence.
Now, I've always run (anti)socially since the summer of 2001, when I was writing up my Master's dissertation and realised that 12 hours a day at the desk needed some kind of counterbalance. The amount and intensity has fluctuated over the years (there was one bad time when I had to take several months off with a knee problem), but at least twice a week, and more typically three to four times, I'd get a morning run in before undoing all the calorie-burn with an extravagant breakfast. My only regular running partner was my brother, and since we've more often than not been living in different cities over the past decade, it's become a pretty solitary pastime. Not that this bothered me: if I found I was running slowly enough to be able to converse, then this seemed to defeat the point of the exercise. There's a reason why the film title is not 'the gregariousness of the long-distance runner.'
Until last April, I was a stranger to competition, assuming one doesn't count a 10km 'race' against the clock with two friends one morning on the university track in Cambridge. Then I did a local five-mile (8km) race at two weeks' notice - didn't break 30mins as I was hoping, but squeaked in under 31. So I was pretty much a novice when starting out on this project. For instance, my idea of training for running was simply to go out and run as hard and long as I could. Despite the intuitive simplicity of this, there's a lot more needed. Now I'm at least aware of such things as splits, negative splits (despite the semantic implications, these are actually Good Things To Do), fartlek, pyramids, intervals, the necessity of doing sprints, hill-sessions, mixing distances, and a whole repertoire of stretching and muscle-strengthening exercises. A possible next step into this murky subculture might involve working on my running technique - I was told the other day when doing some speed work that I was a bit low to the ground. While this might seem to be something past praying about, apparently it has more to do with one's carriage than adding cubits to one's stature (which, as the good book points out somewhere, isn't really practicable).
Initially, I tried to clue myself up via the web: downloaded a seven-week schedule, and more or less stuck to it for about a fortnight. Then the race organisers offered the chance of weekly group training sessions, which sounded like a good thing. I signed up with alacrity, only to discover that they began at 6am. My morning runs were NEVER before 7am, and frequently closer to 7.30, so this was a big ask. Nonetheless, I did two of them, and then was invited to join another, somewhat more hardcore group which met at 5.45am on an additional morning. Well, in for a penny, I thought. If you're going to take the medicine, don't balk at licking the spoon. In the last two weeks, I've moved to another part of the city (that's a tale for another blog post), and getting to the starting line for 5.45 has meant rising at 5am and a 30-minute cycle. Still, with the race at 6.20am, it's less gratuitously masochistic than it sounds.
So I'm now running about 5-6 days a week, with a particularly long run on Sundays (between 65 and 110 minutes). One plus from all this insane activity, aside from calves to die for (which are some compensation for toes like a chiropodist's nightmare) has been that I've seen lots of new parts of the city. For instance, one circuit took me from my former dwelling-place on the North-shore on a loop through many different harbour-side areas via about 6 bridges (see picture 1).
Relocating to my present location has of course opened up a new set of panoramas - last Sunday I hit some of the famous Eastern beaches (Maroubra, Coogee, Bronte, Clovelly - see picture 2), and Bondi is on my radar for this Sunday, my final hour-long run before the race.
So, this has been a mostly positive experience, and hopefully I can nail a sub-90 minute time Sunday week (19 Sept). I've enjoyed my two days a week spent running in the company of others (not that it's a time when I'm at my conversational best, what with the early start, shortness of breath, etc.) Probably the most difficult part of the training has been the food sacrifices: I cut down hugely on my intake of puddings and biscuits once I signed up, with a total ban on them for the past two weeks. Am looking forward to making a beast of myself with some sticky toffee pudding once this race is done. And maybe getting a life back again (though after all this time, I'm not sure I'd know what to do with it. And anyway, lecturing duties continue, as sure as those perennial standbys, death and taxes). But I rather suspect that I will 'keep it going', as the coach enjoined - maybe at lower intensity for a bit, but enough to stay sharpish. After all, once you've done a half-marathon, you can't help thinking that, back in 490BC, this would only have got news of the victory to somewhere midway between the battlefield and Athens. Although, had Pheidippides bethought himself, and realised that 'no news is good news', he might just have saved himself (and the rest of us) a whole heap of bother...
So let me back up a bit after this pre-credit sequence. At the end of July, I came back from my month in Europe, three days before the semester began. The trip was excellent, thanks for asking, although not particularly restful: two weddings (Oxford & Ingolstadt), a conference (Southampton), writing a paper for said conference (Dublin), and trying to sort out the tedious last finalising of marks for Sydney from the other side of the planet. Most enjoyable was seeing family (London, Dublin) and friends (all of the above + Cambridge). There wasn't much time to launch into preparation for the new semester, but at least the pressure of work pretty much staved off jet-lag: amazing what one can forego if one doesn't have time for it. Anyway, casting about for a way to fill the spare three hours I had a week, I decided to enter some kind of road race. Not perhaps everyone's first choice, but spring was around the corner, and given the heat during summer, it seemed best to max out on exercise at this rather than any later/earlier stage in the year. My first thought was to enter the City to Surf, a popular 14km event which takes one from the heart of the city to Bondi, but by the time I got my act together, the only spaces left were in a group which would have included mums with strollers, people dressed as furry mascots, and the like, so that seemed pointless. In compensation, I decided to go for the more demanding Blackmores half-marathon, which would take place seven weeks hence.
Now, I've always run (anti)socially since the summer of 2001, when I was writing up my Master's dissertation and realised that 12 hours a day at the desk needed some kind of counterbalance. The amount and intensity has fluctuated over the years (there was one bad time when I had to take several months off with a knee problem), but at least twice a week, and more typically three to four times, I'd get a morning run in before undoing all the calorie-burn with an extravagant breakfast. My only regular running partner was my brother, and since we've more often than not been living in different cities over the past decade, it's become a pretty solitary pastime. Not that this bothered me: if I found I was running slowly enough to be able to converse, then this seemed to defeat the point of the exercise. There's a reason why the film title is not 'the gregariousness of the long-distance runner.'
Until last April, I was a stranger to competition, assuming one doesn't count a 10km 'race' against the clock with two friends one morning on the university track in Cambridge. Then I did a local five-mile (8km) race at two weeks' notice - didn't break 30mins as I was hoping, but squeaked in under 31. So I was pretty much a novice when starting out on this project. For instance, my idea of training for running was simply to go out and run as hard and long as I could. Despite the intuitive simplicity of this, there's a lot more needed. Now I'm at least aware of such things as splits, negative splits (despite the semantic implications, these are actually Good Things To Do), fartlek, pyramids, intervals, the necessity of doing sprints, hill-sessions, mixing distances, and a whole repertoire of stretching and muscle-strengthening exercises. A possible next step into this murky subculture might involve working on my running technique - I was told the other day when doing some speed work that I was a bit low to the ground. While this might seem to be something past praying about, apparently it has more to do with one's carriage than adding cubits to one's stature (which, as the good book points out somewhere, isn't really practicable).
Initially, I tried to clue myself up via the web: downloaded a seven-week schedule, and more or less stuck to it for about a fortnight. Then the race organisers offered the chance of weekly group training sessions, which sounded like a good thing. I signed up with alacrity, only to discover that they began at 6am. My morning runs were NEVER before 7am, and frequently closer to 7.30, so this was a big ask. Nonetheless, I did two of them, and then was invited to join another, somewhat more hardcore group which met at 5.45am on an additional morning. Well, in for a penny, I thought. If you're going to take the medicine, don't balk at licking the spoon. In the last two weeks, I've moved to another part of the city (that's a tale for another blog post), and getting to the starting line for 5.45 has meant rising at 5am and a 30-minute cycle. Still, with the race at 6.20am, it's less gratuitously masochistic than it sounds.
So I'm now running about 5-6 days a week, with a particularly long run on Sundays (between 65 and 110 minutes). One plus from all this insane activity, aside from calves to die for (which are some compensation for toes like a chiropodist's nightmare) has been that I've seen lots of new parts of the city. For instance, one circuit took me from my former dwelling-place on the North-shore on a loop through many different harbour-side areas via about 6 bridges (see picture 1).
Relocating to my present location has of course opened up a new set of panoramas - last Sunday I hit some of the famous Eastern beaches (Maroubra, Coogee, Bronte, Clovelly - see picture 2), and Bondi is on my radar for this Sunday, my final hour-long run before the race.
So, this has been a mostly positive experience, and hopefully I can nail a sub-90 minute time Sunday week (19 Sept). I've enjoyed my two days a week spent running in the company of others (not that it's a time when I'm at my conversational best, what with the early start, shortness of breath, etc.) Probably the most difficult part of the training has been the food sacrifices: I cut down hugely on my intake of puddings and biscuits once I signed up, with a total ban on them for the past two weeks. Am looking forward to making a beast of myself with some sticky toffee pudding once this race is done. And maybe getting a life back again (though after all this time, I'm not sure I'd know what to do with it. And anyway, lecturing duties continue, as sure as those perennial standbys, death and taxes). But I rather suspect that I will 'keep it going', as the coach enjoined - maybe at lower intensity for a bit, but enough to stay sharpish. After all, once you've done a half-marathon, you can't help thinking that, back in 490BC, this would only have got news of the victory to somewhere midway between the battlefield and Athens. Although, had Pheidippides bethought himself, and realised that 'no news is good news', he might just have saved himself (and the rest of us) a whole heap of bother...Tuesday, June 15, 2010
Matters acquatic
On the surface of it, this is a procrastination posting: I'm swamped with exam marking right now, and putting it off to deal with something more pleasant (though itself long postponed) might seem a touch feckless; typical, perhaps, but not canny. Still, it's 11.20pm at night, and I've just marked a script in which a student, asked to identify the name by which Beethoven's Sixth Symphony is better known, answered 'the Erotica', so a break is definitely called for before my soul shrivels up entirely. In any case, I've finished all the scripts I took home with me (the result of a choir rehearsal ending surprisingly early), so my conscience is clear.
Anyway, to business(?). I was talking with a long-lost friend recently who was visiting Sydney for the first time, and I remember myself saying that one of the glories of Sydney are its beaches. And it's true (even Melbourne-ites admit this) - denizens of this city are probably uniquely favoured in Australia, maybe even the world in terms of the quality and accessibility of the beaches. I've visited quite a few in the months I've been here, although am genetically unsuited to sunbathing, so they've tended to be brief visits. What follows are my impressions, eroded by time in most cases, but still hopefully will serve to inspire countless visits from my Northern hemisphere readers.
First in fame would have to be Bondi. Who hasn't seen images of this golden strand, strewn with bronzed bodies in their thousands? Well, me, for one; at least, not since I've been here. I've taken two trips out to Bondi, the first by bus on my reconaissance trip last summer, I beg your pardon, *winter* (June), and another as part of a long run in February. Both days were uncharacteristically grey with the threat of rain the first time, and a fulfilment of the threat second time round. So the only folk out were the hardiest of surfers, in full body suits, and self walking (or second time, jogging) down the famous path from Bondi along the coast through Bronte, Clovelly, Tamarama (known as 'Glamourama' to some locals because of the proportion of beautiful people living there) as far as Coogee, passing some marginally less crazy walkers on the way. On both occasions, I had a delightful swim in the sea bath (walled off area of beach) at Coogee.
Manly is another well-known spot: I've visited once (it's a 30 minute ferry ride from Circular Quay), but spent most of the time in a less well-known nearby beach called Fairlight. That was my first sea swim after moving here, and one of the most treasured - the water was incredibly warm (by Irish standards), but still cooling in comparison with the inferno-like air temperatures. Having visited the GBR (work it out) during a trip to Queensland, I was familiar with the fact that you'd see lots of fish when swimming in these waters, and this was borne out here, if less spectacularly than on the reef. A second swim on Manly was nearly as nice, but what makes it great for surfers (i.e. the waves) make it fractionally less convenient for swimming. Not that I'm such a technical perfectionist/stamina-freak that a little spray or swell makes much difference to me - I move through the water with the ponderous grace of a semi-submerged and still anchored canoe - but apparently one has to be careful of 'rips', beastly currenty things that take one miles out to see at no warning at all.
Where else? Well, I had a jolly pleasant day swimming at two locations near Vaucluse (on the South head, near the mouth of the harbour), and another delightful double swim at the majestically named Balmoral. My single visit to this last place happened some Sunday about a couple of months back, and I learned that it was on the same day that they actually closed Bondi for a few hours because of Tsunami warning. The Balmoral lifeguards showed a far more robust attitude to the patrons' safety by omitting any mention of it. OK, the beach isn't on the coast, but given that the Tsunami was caused by some rift on the other side of the planet, an extra five miles or so doesn't seem to put us entirely outside its sphere of influence. My other mild complaint about this otherwise delectable spot is the road getting to it, or rather, getting away from it: a ferocious and prolonged ascent to get back to the main road which strained chest and quads to their ragged limits. Still, at least I didn't have to get off the bike - I'm still of an age where it's much better to fall off it with angina than take sensible precautions.
At some point during the semester (the weeks and months have fused together into a vague miasma of lecture prepation punctured by infrequent intervals when I was doing SOMETHING ELSE) I went with some friends on a dolphin cruise. Now, in my imagination, I saw myself swimming in the water beside some friendly, trained-to-a-hair acrobat of an animal, who would take time out from jumping through hoops to allow me to recreate the climactic whale-rider scene. (I'm a reasonable man - even in my dreams, I'm willing to scale down a whale to a measly dolphin.) Blame it on being brought up in Ireland in the late 1980s-early 1990s - we had a single, sociopathic, attention-whore of a dolphin called Fungie (I jest not), who haunted the Dingle (SW Ireland) coasts for what must have been more than a decade.
As a result, it's hardly surprising that the dolphin expedition didn't come up to my expectations. The gang up at Port Stephen justified the reputation of the species for intelligence by largely avoiding us: assiduous hunting only ever produced a couple of dark tail fins before they'd sumberge again. We did get to venture into the water - by sliding down a chute into a net at the back of the boat, and thus, lying in about a foot of water with knotted rope digging into one's back, I and various other masochists were towed behind the boat for a while. Still, a fun day out, which ended with a proper swim in the vicinity. Actually, while surging through the waves like..., well, you now can imagine what I was like, I spotted another of this land's sweet creatures - a Stingray, about 4 feet from me. Not having a Steve Irwin penchent for messing which such animals, I calmly left her go her own way, and I went mine, which happend to be in a direction 180 degrees from hers.
One final matter to mention under this heading: rain. Having enjoyed/endured three months of warmth at the beginning of my stay, it's turned a lot cooler and more changeable in the last few weeks. I've lost count of the number of people who have said cheerily to me 'Oh, you must be feeling quite at home now' as the rain spattered down next to the awning under which we are sheltering. Well, no, actually. In Ireland it only *seems* to rain all the time. Moreover, it's a different sort of rain. Perhaps a more exasperating, constant gentle drizzle, like those people who keep up a mild complaining commentary on life, the universe and everything. Here, it's more like a manic depressive, who rages violently, ceases abruptly, and then displays its charming face. There have been almighty deluges, but on most occasions, I've been able to dodge the showers. Moreover, the idea that I greet the cold and wet with the fondness of the exile who has been sorely missing these things is wide of the mark. Despite any grousing I may have been guilty of over humidity, it's easier on the whole to handle. I'm acclimatising, and not just literally. Last year, on my interview trip, I boldly took a dip in Coogee at the beginning of June - the lady at the guesthouse thought I was nuts, but I braved the rain, and found the water and air temperature highly acceptable. This year, *I* think I was nuts. My airy boasts that I'd swim throughout the year have rung hollow. It makes me wonder - can I ever face the Irish waters again? I expect I'll find out... in about 2 weeks' time.
Anyway, to business(?). I was talking with a long-lost friend recently who was visiting Sydney for the first time, and I remember myself saying that one of the glories of Sydney are its beaches. And it's true (even Melbourne-ites admit this) - denizens of this city are probably uniquely favoured in Australia, maybe even the world in terms of the quality and accessibility of the beaches. I've visited quite a few in the months I've been here, although am genetically unsuited to sunbathing, so they've tended to be brief visits. What follows are my impressions, eroded by time in most cases, but still hopefully will serve to inspire countless visits from my Northern hemisphere readers.
First in fame would have to be Bondi. Who hasn't seen images of this golden strand, strewn with bronzed bodies in their thousands? Well, me, for one; at least, not since I've been here. I've taken two trips out to Bondi, the first by bus on my reconaissance trip last summer, I beg your pardon, *winter* (June), and another as part of a long run in February. Both days were uncharacteristically grey with the threat of rain the first time, and a fulfilment of the threat second time round. So the only folk out were the hardiest of surfers, in full body suits, and self walking (or second time, jogging) down the famous path from Bondi along the coast through Bronte, Clovelly, Tamarama (known as 'Glamourama' to some locals because of the proportion of beautiful people living there) as far as Coogee, passing some marginally less crazy walkers on the way. On both occasions, I had a delightful swim in the sea bath (walled off area of beach) at Coogee.
Manly is another well-known spot: I've visited once (it's a 30 minute ferry ride from Circular Quay), but spent most of the time in a less well-known nearby beach called Fairlight. That was my first sea swim after moving here, and one of the most treasured - the water was incredibly warm (by Irish standards), but still cooling in comparison with the inferno-like air temperatures. Having visited the GBR (work it out) during a trip to Queensland, I was familiar with the fact that you'd see lots of fish when swimming in these waters, and this was borne out here, if less spectacularly than on the reef. A second swim on Manly was nearly as nice, but what makes it great for surfers (i.e. the waves) make it fractionally less convenient for swimming. Not that I'm such a technical perfectionist/stamina-freak that a little spray or swell makes much difference to me - I move through the water with the ponderous grace of a semi-submerged and still anchored canoe - but apparently one has to be careful of 'rips', beastly currenty things that take one miles out to see at no warning at all.
Where else? Well, I had a jolly pleasant day swimming at two locations near Vaucluse (on the South head, near the mouth of the harbour), and another delightful double swim at the majestically named Balmoral. My single visit to this last place happened some Sunday about a couple of months back, and I learned that it was on the same day that they actually closed Bondi for a few hours because of Tsunami warning. The Balmoral lifeguards showed a far more robust attitude to the patrons' safety by omitting any mention of it. OK, the beach isn't on the coast, but given that the Tsunami was caused by some rift on the other side of the planet, an extra five miles or so doesn't seem to put us entirely outside its sphere of influence. My other mild complaint about this otherwise delectable spot is the road getting to it, or rather, getting away from it: a ferocious and prolonged ascent to get back to the main road which strained chest and quads to their ragged limits. Still, at least I didn't have to get off the bike - I'm still of an age where it's much better to fall off it with angina than take sensible precautions.
At some point during the semester (the weeks and months have fused together into a vague miasma of lecture prepation punctured by infrequent intervals when I was doing SOMETHING ELSE) I went with some friends on a dolphin cruise. Now, in my imagination, I saw myself swimming in the water beside some friendly, trained-to-a-hair acrobat of an animal, who would take time out from jumping through hoops to allow me to recreate the climactic whale-rider scene. (I'm a reasonable man - even in my dreams, I'm willing to scale down a whale to a measly dolphin.) Blame it on being brought up in Ireland in the late 1980s-early 1990s - we had a single, sociopathic, attention-whore of a dolphin called Fungie (I jest not), who haunted the Dingle (SW Ireland) coasts for what must have been more than a decade.
As a result, it's hardly surprising that the dolphin expedition didn't come up to my expectations. The gang up at Port Stephen justified the reputation of the species for intelligence by largely avoiding us: assiduous hunting only ever produced a couple of dark tail fins before they'd sumberge again. We did get to venture into the water - by sliding down a chute into a net at the back of the boat, and thus, lying in about a foot of water with knotted rope digging into one's back, I and various other masochists were towed behind the boat for a while. Still, a fun day out, which ended with a proper swim in the vicinity. Actually, while surging through the waves like..., well, you now can imagine what I was like, I spotted another of this land's sweet creatures - a Stingray, about 4 feet from me. Not having a Steve Irwin penchent for messing which such animals, I calmly left her go her own way, and I went mine, which happend to be in a direction 180 degrees from hers.
One final matter to mention under this heading: rain. Having enjoyed/endured three months of warmth at the beginning of my stay, it's turned a lot cooler and more changeable in the last few weeks. I've lost count of the number of people who have said cheerily to me 'Oh, you must be feeling quite at home now' as the rain spattered down next to the awning under which we are sheltering. Well, no, actually. In Ireland it only *seems* to rain all the time. Moreover, it's a different sort of rain. Perhaps a more exasperating, constant gentle drizzle, like those people who keep up a mild complaining commentary on life, the universe and everything. Here, it's more like a manic depressive, who rages violently, ceases abruptly, and then displays its charming face. There have been almighty deluges, but on most occasions, I've been able to dodge the showers. Moreover, the idea that I greet the cold and wet with the fondness of the exile who has been sorely missing these things is wide of the mark. Despite any grousing I may have been guilty of over humidity, it's easier on the whole to handle. I'm acclimatising, and not just literally. Last year, on my interview trip, I boldly took a dip in Coogee at the beginning of June - the lady at the guesthouse thought I was nuts, but I braved the rain, and found the water and air temperature highly acceptable. This year, *I* think I was nuts. My airy boasts that I'd swim throughout the year have rung hollow. It makes me wonder - can I ever face the Irish waters again? I expect I'll find out... in about 2 weeks' time.
Wednesday, April 7, 2010
On getting around and about in Sydney
In my last post, I mentioned that complaints about weather seem to be a cross-cultural universal. On the evidence of my now 10 weeks in Sydney, there's another item that might be added to this list: dissatisfaction with the public transport. Despite having an extensive range of options, including ferries, buses, trains, and a monorail, Sydneysiders continually complain about the services provided, and (in at least a couple of cases) display a touching belief that things must be better organised back where I come from. I nearly broke a rib when the image of the Dublin transport system (sic) flashed into mind, while the rampant grumbling that London's transport system evokes is pretty legendary. So I was able to assure them that far-away hills were no greener in this case. In fact, the whole thing verged on becoming a sort of competitive one-downmanship, with both sides swapping their tales of woe in order to prove the inferiority of one's native hemisphere in this regard.
Anyway, as a former denizen of the far-side [of the world], I've been generally quite impressed with how easy it is to get around the Sydney CBD (central district) and nearby suburbs. My first few weeks were spent commuting by bus from my temporary lodgings to the Con[servatorium], and while the route I was on was admittedly a popular one, I never had to wait more than about 15-20 mins, and generally it was under 10. The buses weren't without their drawbacks: they were regularly overcrowded, which was a particular hardship in the blazing summer heat. Moreover, many were restricted to those with pre-paid tickets, which could only be purchased from selected newsagents, often perversely distant from the bus-stop and hard to locate in most cases.
However, since relocating to the North shore in mid-February, I have generally foregone bus travel in favour of the bike or ferry as the means of getting to work. The ferries are one of Sydney's most pleasant if expensive ways of getting around. The journey across the harbour from Kirribilli to Circular Quay only takes about 8 mins, and costs around $4, less if using multi-journey tickets. I've tended to reserve this for wet days, or times when I want to avoid the exertion of cycling. The bike commute only takes 20 mins door to door, but when the temperature is in the low 30s, that's enough to leave one feeling (and looking) like a well-basted turkey.
I acquired a bike through my first ever eBay auction victory, and my first ride could hardly have been more inauspicious, short of ending in hospital. The seller was based in Coogee (pronounced Cudge-ee, for those who care), at some distance from my place, and it was drizzling on the evening I collected it. What should have been a 40-minute trip back was prolonged initially by my errant sense of direction (I didn't have a map), which resulted in my heading south down the coast towards Maroubra, instead of roughly North-West. That detour wouldn't have mattered much, if the rain, which had been merely spitting half-heartedly until this point, hadn't decided to show its monsoon credentials. My forlorn attempts to whistle the Gene Kelly number were soon abandoned - opening one's lips just just let the water in rather than sound out. The literal and metaphorical dampening of my spirits was completed when I got a puncture - I went across one of those perverse Sydney drain covers, which almost seem to be deliberate cycle traps, with wide gaps running parallel to the road direction, instead of perpendicular. So there I was, half lost, miles from home, drenched to the bone, with a useless new bike (which couldn't be taken on the buses), and not a phone box or taxi in sight. Eventually I found a shop open and in the fullness of time was dropped home by a taxi.
In fact, that was only the first of two punctures I've had in the last six weeks. The second was also occasioned by another of those damnable drain covers - I saw it at the last moment, but the traffic was such that I didn't dare swerve aside. Which brings me to another gripe: drivers. Sydney is NOT a cycle-friendly city for a number of reasons (I'll just mention here the scarcity of cycle paths, and the horrendous number of hills, some of which seem like young cliffs in terms of steepness), but chief among them the behaviour of the average car driver, which verges between the discourteous and the positively dangerous. Apparently cyclists are by law entitled to take up an entire lane, which infuriates the drivers. From my Cambridge and Dublin training, I habitually stick close to the kerb (always giving those tyre-killer drains a wide berth), but this doesn't always enable me to escape their aggression. I've lost count of the number of heart-in-mouth moments they've caused me by cutting in ahead abruptly. Taxis, predictably, are the worst but not the only offenders. The idea of cycling to work (as opposed to the full-lycra leisure pursuit) is not yet sufficiently mainstream to imprint consideration of/for cyclists on the popular consciousness. It's a vicious circle, of course, for many refuse to cycle, given how fraught road conditions are. When I told people of my intention in the first few weeks, I got quite a few shakes of the head and expressions of dubeity, which I now understand. Thank heavens that the famous harbour bridge, which I cross twice a day, has a separate cycleway removed from the especially manic road traffic here.
Having started this post with an upbeat attitude on transport in Sydney and poo-pooing the local naysayers, I realise now that I, too, have spent most of my time voicing a litany of complaints. Does this burst of querulousness seem like a proportional response to trials beyond endurance, or does it mark my assimilation of Sydney mores? In short, is this the first sign that I am going native?
More soon.
Anyway, as a former denizen of the far-side [of the world], I've been generally quite impressed with how easy it is to get around the Sydney CBD (central district) and nearby suburbs. My first few weeks were spent commuting by bus from my temporary lodgings to the Con[servatorium], and while the route I was on was admittedly a popular one, I never had to wait more than about 15-20 mins, and generally it was under 10. The buses weren't without their drawbacks: they were regularly overcrowded, which was a particular hardship in the blazing summer heat. Moreover, many were restricted to those with pre-paid tickets, which could only be purchased from selected newsagents, often perversely distant from the bus-stop and hard to locate in most cases.
However, since relocating to the North shore in mid-February, I have generally foregone bus travel in favour of the bike or ferry as the means of getting to work. The ferries are one of Sydney's most pleasant if expensive ways of getting around. The journey across the harbour from Kirribilli to Circular Quay only takes about 8 mins, and costs around $4, less if using multi-journey tickets. I've tended to reserve this for wet days, or times when I want to avoid the exertion of cycling. The bike commute only takes 20 mins door to door, but when the temperature is in the low 30s, that's enough to leave one feeling (and looking) like a well-basted turkey.
I acquired a bike through my first ever eBay auction victory, and my first ride could hardly have been more inauspicious, short of ending in hospital. The seller was based in Coogee (pronounced Cudge-ee, for those who care), at some distance from my place, and it was drizzling on the evening I collected it. What should have been a 40-minute trip back was prolonged initially by my errant sense of direction (I didn't have a map), which resulted in my heading south down the coast towards Maroubra, instead of roughly North-West. That detour wouldn't have mattered much, if the rain, which had been merely spitting half-heartedly until this point, hadn't decided to show its monsoon credentials. My forlorn attempts to whistle the Gene Kelly number were soon abandoned - opening one's lips just just let the water in rather than sound out. The literal and metaphorical dampening of my spirits was completed when I got a puncture - I went across one of those perverse Sydney drain covers, which almost seem to be deliberate cycle traps, with wide gaps running parallel to the road direction, instead of perpendicular. So there I was, half lost, miles from home, drenched to the bone, with a useless new bike (which couldn't be taken on the buses), and not a phone box or taxi in sight. Eventually I found a shop open and in the fullness of time was dropped home by a taxi.
In fact, that was only the first of two punctures I've had in the last six weeks. The second was also occasioned by another of those damnable drain covers - I saw it at the last moment, but the traffic was such that I didn't dare swerve aside. Which brings me to another gripe: drivers. Sydney is NOT a cycle-friendly city for a number of reasons (I'll just mention here the scarcity of cycle paths, and the horrendous number of hills, some of which seem like young cliffs in terms of steepness), but chief among them the behaviour of the average car driver, which verges between the discourteous and the positively dangerous. Apparently cyclists are by law entitled to take up an entire lane, which infuriates the drivers. From my Cambridge and Dublin training, I habitually stick close to the kerb (always giving those tyre-killer drains a wide berth), but this doesn't always enable me to escape their aggression. I've lost count of the number of heart-in-mouth moments they've caused me by cutting in ahead abruptly. Taxis, predictably, are the worst but not the only offenders. The idea of cycling to work (as opposed to the full-lycra leisure pursuit) is not yet sufficiently mainstream to imprint consideration of/for cyclists on the popular consciousness. It's a vicious circle, of course, for many refuse to cycle, given how fraught road conditions are. When I told people of my intention in the first few weeks, I got quite a few shakes of the head and expressions of dubeity, which I now understand. Thank heavens that the famous harbour bridge, which I cross twice a day, has a separate cycleway removed from the especially manic road traffic here.
Having started this post with an upbeat attitude on transport in Sydney and poo-pooing the local naysayers, I realise now that I, too, have spent most of my time voicing a litany of complaints. Does this burst of querulousness seem like a proportional response to trials beyond endurance, or does it mark my assimilation of Sydney mores? In short, is this the first sign that I am going native?
More soon.
Monday, February 15, 2010
A swift passage and a smooth landing
Welcome, friends, to this, my first entry into the blogosphere. The Irish Rover will be updated irregularly and infrequently, but for those who may be interested, it will provide some kind of insight into my life down under. Not that this is intended to replace individual emails: I’m rather behind in my responses at the moment, but hopefully will get caught up at some stage.
For those who might be wondering at the url of this blog, it contains a nod to the celebrated Jail Journal written by the Irish patriot John Mitchel, who was transported to Van Diemann’s Land (present-day Tasmania) in the middle of the nineteenth century. My (voluntary) exile in no way resembles a penal sentence, of course: quite the reverse. Whether walking to work in short-sleeves, or enjoying a lazy dip in the warm Pacific waters, or looking at the lights of the city from the opera house terrace during the intervals, I feel like someone who has had his sentence of hard labour in the frozen North commuted at short notice. (I’ll try to make that the last of the unseemly gloating over those snow-bound or just suffering from SADness).
To complete the weather update, it’s extremely humid here, and on several occasions there have been almighty downpours. (One evening I got caught in the thick of it, but that’s a story for another post). Temperatures range from mid twenties (standard) to high thirties (exceptional). On my first day it touched 39C, meaning that over the month of January I experienced a temperature spread greater than 50 degrees celcius (we had -12C for sure and probably lower during a ski-trip over the New Year). Everyone assures me that the humidity (about which the locals grumble much as we Irish moan about the rain) will drop next month, and March to May should be lovely. However, I’m not complaining: with the aid of gallons of water and not budging from my air-conditioned office during daylight, I’m surviving manfully.
Three and a half weeks in, and in some ways I feel at home here already. Tomorrow promises to be another momentous step in the settling-in process: I finally move into my own apartment in Kirribilli, an area on the North shore just beyond the harbour bridge. The casual accommodation I’ve been renting in the interim is fine, although the cooking facilities leave a lot to be desired. Still, I take from these few weeks increased skill at cooking pasta in kettles, along with the fervent desire never to have to do so again.
Although my contract is with the University of Sydney, I’m actually based not on the main campus, but at the Conservatorium of Music (hereafter, I'll use the local dialect and refer to it as the 'Con'). Idyllic is hardly too strong a word for the location: right behind these converted nineteenth-century stables are the Botanic Gardens, with their fruit bats and summery fragrances, and the opera house is only about 10 minutes walk away. Thus far, life there has been student-free: just me figuring out what happens where, and which of my ever-patient colleagues I should bother with a seemingly endless series of queries. That will all change from 1 March, when I start my two new courses and a roster of supervising and tutorial activities.
Chief among the factors which have made my first few weeks so pleasant have been the people. My impressions of the Aussie character from the reconnaissance trip last June left me expecting conspicuous friendliness, and that has certainly been the case – in spades. Thanks to colleagues, friends, friends of friends, and so on to the third and fourth degrees of separation, my leisure time has been spent other than with DVD box-sets or in solitary walks. Beach excursions, concert/opera-going and the like have been infinitely more fun than they otherwise would have been. My least pleasant experience involved being told I look the image of Kevin Rudd, might in fact be his younger brother. Quite. Well, my address-to-be is apparently within a stone’s throw of the PM’s residence, so I may end up crashing some star-studded party yet. Or not. It will all depend on how much marking I’ve got piled up.
More soon. Would love to hear from you, so drop me a line.
For those who might be wondering at the url of this blog, it contains a nod to the celebrated Jail Journal written by the Irish patriot John Mitchel, who was transported to Van Diemann’s Land (present-day Tasmania) in the middle of the nineteenth century. My (voluntary) exile in no way resembles a penal sentence, of course: quite the reverse. Whether walking to work in short-sleeves, or enjoying a lazy dip in the warm Pacific waters, or looking at the lights of the city from the opera house terrace during the intervals, I feel like someone who has had his sentence of hard labour in the frozen North commuted at short notice. (I’ll try to make that the last of the unseemly gloating over those snow-bound or just suffering from SADness).
To complete the weather update, it’s extremely humid here, and on several occasions there have been almighty downpours. (One evening I got caught in the thick of it, but that’s a story for another post). Temperatures range from mid twenties (standard) to high thirties (exceptional). On my first day it touched 39C, meaning that over the month of January I experienced a temperature spread greater than 50 degrees celcius (we had -12C for sure and probably lower during a ski-trip over the New Year). Everyone assures me that the humidity (about which the locals grumble much as we Irish moan about the rain) will drop next month, and March to May should be lovely. However, I’m not complaining: with the aid of gallons of water and not budging from my air-conditioned office during daylight, I’m surviving manfully.
Three and a half weeks in, and in some ways I feel at home here already. Tomorrow promises to be another momentous step in the settling-in process: I finally move into my own apartment in Kirribilli, an area on the North shore just beyond the harbour bridge. The casual accommodation I’ve been renting in the interim is fine, although the cooking facilities leave a lot to be desired. Still, I take from these few weeks increased skill at cooking pasta in kettles, along with the fervent desire never to have to do so again.
Although my contract is with the University of Sydney, I’m actually based not on the main campus, but at the Conservatorium of Music (hereafter, I'll use the local dialect and refer to it as the 'Con'). Idyllic is hardly too strong a word for the location: right behind these converted nineteenth-century stables are the Botanic Gardens, with their fruit bats and summery fragrances, and the opera house is only about 10 minutes walk away. Thus far, life there has been student-free: just me figuring out what happens where, and which of my ever-patient colleagues I should bother with a seemingly endless series of queries. That will all change from 1 March, when I start my two new courses and a roster of supervising and tutorial activities.
Chief among the factors which have made my first few weeks so pleasant have been the people. My impressions of the Aussie character from the reconnaissance trip last June left me expecting conspicuous friendliness, and that has certainly been the case – in spades. Thanks to colleagues, friends, friends of friends, and so on to the third and fourth degrees of separation, my leisure time has been spent other than with DVD box-sets or in solitary walks. Beach excursions, concert/opera-going and the like have been infinitely more fun than they otherwise would have been. My least pleasant experience involved being told I look the image of Kevin Rudd, might in fact be his younger brother. Quite. Well, my address-to-be is apparently within a stone’s throw of the PM’s residence, so I may end up crashing some star-studded party yet. Or not. It will all depend on how much marking I’ve got piled up.
More soon. Would love to hear from you, so drop me a line.
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