A taste of local culture -- part 2

So, Tuesday brought kangaroo on a plate and Wednesday brought Anzac Day, a unique Aussie/Kiwi memorial to veterans, fallen soldiers and military combat.

I had absolutley no idea what Anzac meant when I arrived in Australia. It sounds a bit like the name of an insurance firm. However, in my first week in Sydney I discovered the Anzac Memorial in Hyde Park, a small but beautiful stone structure that is the perfect spot for a moment or two of quiet reflection. Anzac -- the Australian and New Zealand Army Corps --is what they call soldiers down here.

Anzac Day happens each year on April 25 to mark the anniversary of the first major military action seen by the Aussie/Kiwi troops in the First World War. There are Anzac Day parades, dinners, luncheons and the like. I have to say that for a day that marks many awful, sombre events, Anzac Day was fairly fun and festive, in a tempered sort of way. This is due largely to the afore-mentioned parades but also to a wonderful game called Two-up.

I was vaguely aware of a form of gambling that is only legal to play on Anzac Day between certain hours, having seen something about it on the news a couple of days ago. Yesterday, while strolling down the street in Kings Cross, I came across a circle of people gathered on a street corner. A pile of gravel was scattered on the ground and a few different men were taking turns tossing two coins into the air. "Heads!" and "A head and a tail!" would yell the man in the centre of the circle. After each coin toss, more and more bets were placed. Guys would throw down $20, $40 or even $100 while declaring their intention to back heads or tails and calling on others to match their bets.

It's really the simplest of games. If you bet heads and two heads are thrown, you win. If two tails land on the ground, you lose. That's it. But the energy these guys brought to game was pretty fun to watch. Eventually people just walking by on the street would stop and throw down a bit of cash to try their chance. A couple of the guys, who had clearly played this game before, made a small fortune. I was tempted to play but not being much of a gambler (read: I be po') I held back and let the other guys lose their money.

Last but not least, I made more travel plans yesterday. I am now the proud owner of a bus pass from Sydney to Cairns, a city at the far northeastern end of Australia. I have six months to use the pass and can hop on and off the bus as many times as I like en route. The first leg of the journey begins next week when I leave Sydney on May 1 for Coffs Harbour, a coastal resort town about 500 kilometres to the north. Can't wait!

A taste of local culture

Boy, do I feel Australian these last couple of days.

After a fairly uninteresting and uninspiring couple of weeks spent mostly working and saving money (you'll notice I haven't written much lately on the blog), I turned up to weekly Tuesday job at the Wine and Food Society of New South Wales. The society is a bit like a secret society in that you'd never know it existed unless you were a member or, as the case may be, a waiter who serves its members. It's definitely been one of my most interesting jobs so far. The club has been around since 1939, meeting every Tuesday for a celebration of food and drink in a heritage house just next to Sydney's Harbour Bridge. Membership is only open to men so it's a bit of an "old boys' club" and I mean that literally as the average age of the members must be 60.

Perhaps the best part of the job is that I, as a waiter, get to sample a bit of the wine and eat the same meal as the members once I'm done serving. This is a huge bonus on a backpacker's budget. So far the food has been very tasty but mostly predictable (roasts, stews and the like). Well, yesterday I was in for a surprise as the day's featured entree was none other than kangaroo. At first I thought the chefs were pulling my leg when I asked what the meat was. Oh, how gullible they think we travellers are! But, in fact, they were quite serious about the matter.

So how did it taste? A lot like beef, to tell the truth. So much so that if they had told me it was roast beef I would have believed them. Still, it was an experience and I felt slightly squeamish the first couple of bites. Is it wrong that I've now eaten kangaroo but have not yet seen one in Australia? The ironies of life.

I have more to say on Anzac Day (a public holiday held today) but have run out of time. I'll save that for tomorrow's entry.

Just a few pictures

I'm short on words today so I've opted to just post a few pics of things I've seen in the past few weeks or so. Enjoy.

One of the big trees that line the street in front of my hostel. If you look closely you'll see that the bark is patchy and two different colours, kind of like camoflouge. Hence, I call these army trees. It's a technical term.

A parrot flew into the kitchen at the hostel this morning! At first I thought he was someone's pet but I guess he just came on inside. The kitchen has large doors opening onto a courtyard so it musn't have been too hard for him to get in.

Couldn't believe the wild colours on him.

A gigantic, old fig tree I discovered next to an old church in a a part of Sydney called Newtown. Newtown is actually quite an old town, most of the buildings dating from the 1850s or so. The tree is about the same age. Amazing root structure, isn't it?

A view toward downtown Sydney from Watson's Bay. I spent a day at the beach out there last week. Very nice and relaxing place.

An interesting angle of the roof at Sydney's Opera House. As you can see, the roof is actually made up of hundreds of thousands of tiles that were shipped from Sweden when they were constructing the building.

More wild birds! These huge cockatoos just roam the park, not too far from where the bats hang out in the trees. They are pretty tame and will even let you get nice and close for a picture.

Da-na-na-na-na-na-BATMAN!

OK. Here they are. The bat pics. You can stop pressuring me to upload them now. God.

I'm just kidding. In fact, no one (except me, myself and Irene) has pressured me to put them up on the blog. I'm just excited about these pics. My mom reminded me the other day that there were a few bats in our neighbour's house in Lumsden (a small town outside Regina) when I was a little kid. I'd totally forgotten about that. But seeing the bats in Sydney still seems so exotic. I've never seen so many at once, especially not hanging in the trees of a public park. So have a look for yourself here:

As if that's not creepy! Especially with the grey cloud behind the bare branches of that tree. (The bats are the black things hanging off the trees that look a bit like big leaves themselves, FYI)

And here is a close-up I took with the zoom lens. You'll notice that they have reddish fur on them. Some people say they're not bats at all, as they're called "Flying Foxes." But my friend Wikipedia says that Flying Foxes are indeed bats, the largest bats in the world, in fact. They also eat only fruit so I don't think I need to cover my neck up when they're around.

And here is a lonely bat sailing through the sunny skies on Monday. I thought bats only came to life at night but they were making all kinds of noise when I visited on Monday morning. When I walked through the same park on Tuesday afternoon they were all sleeping and very, very quiet.

That's all he wrote for today.

Going batty

This entry to my blog was meant to be much more interesting than it is actually going to be. I'm just saying that as a warning. That's all.

First off, a Happy Easter to all. Hope the bunny was good to you.

I went to the Royal Botanic Gardens this morning, camera in hand, to take some pictures of the bats, as I promised that I would. I had no trouble finding them today. They were making lots of noise high in the treetops and a few of them would even get up and fly from tree to tree every once in awhile. It was so fun to watch.

Next I made my way to a nearby cafe where I've discovered they have free wireless internet (if you buy a coffee or something). What should follow is that I then uploaded pictures of the bats to the blog and we all get to ooh and ahh a bit.

But with technology being the great and terrible thing it is, that isn't going to happen today. It seems my new digital camera memory card is fussy and only likes pictures to be downloaded from the camera to my laptop, not from the card directly to the laptop itself. To do this, I need an extra connector cable, which is now resting quietly in the drawer next to my bed at the hostel. It figures, doesn't it? And so, more on bats is still to come!

So then, what else is there to talk about? Nicole Kidman and Keith Urban arrived in Sydney yesterday for a couple of days. Kidman is probably Australia's biggest international star and so she causes quite a stir when in town. Her arrival even made yesterday's nightly news.

The big gossip at the moment seems to be that Kidman is actually pregnant with her first child. This was reported yesterday in British tabloid News of the World, surely the most reputable name in news (ha!). Kidman's "people" have apparently denied the rumour ("As if she would confirm a pregnancy to News of the World," is what her publicist came back with, so says The New Zealand Herald). Ahh, such scandal. Eventually the truth will come out.

What Kidman is really here for anyway is to make a new movie. She will be the star of a movie called Australia, an epic drama set in (you guessed it) Australia. This film by director Baz Luhrmann has great promise, I think. Luhrmann directed Kidman in Moulin Rouge back in 2001 and didn't that turn out just fabulously? Besides the movie also stars another big Aussie star: Hugh Jackman. Set in the 1930s and 40s on the Outback, Australia promises plenty of glorious sunsets, dusty desert towns and "G'day mates" shouted by locals. With a big budget of AUD $130 million (about the same in Canadian dollars) it ought to be at least half decent. Shame that the same can't be said of John Travolta's Battlefield Earth, isn't it?

I had a friend of mine in Vancouver (Hi, Steven!) ask me in email the other day where on earth I find the time to write all the words for this blog. Well, let me just say that working for a newspaper teaches you a trick or two. It may not be glamorous and it may not pay well, but being a reporter teaches you this: a) to type as fast as hell, b) to churn the words out no matter how boring the subject matter or even how little you actually know about it, c) to make it seem like you know a lot and like in fact what you're writing about is really very interesting after all, now isn't that nice?

Next time there will be real pictures of real, creepy, live bats on this blog. You have my word on it.

Up to bat

Have I told you about the bats yet?

Oh, I must! Sydney is full of bats . . . big, black ones that swoop over your head at sunset on their way to . . . well, wherever it is that bats go to play.

I'm going to get some pictures and post them here and then you'll see what I mean. It's quite something to take in when you first see the bats coming. It's like Transylvania but hotter. Maybe it's the Romanian blood in me that finds this so fascinating (Transylvania is a region of Romania. You can put that in your useless trivia file.)

Anyway, more on bats to come.

Is it but a dream?

It's time I devoted a few words to my newfound employment here in Sydney.

About two weeks ago I got a call from an agency that specializes in the hospitality industry. I'd submitted a resume to them via internet, not quite knowing what the agency was or what exactly I'd be doing. Within about three days I was interviewed, had my uniform and went through the "induction" process where they show you a workplace safety video and have you fill in all sorts of mumbo-jumbo legally required forms.

And then I was off to work a few days later.

There are some wonderful things about working for an agency, as I have discovered. First of all, you are completely entitled to set your own hours and days of work. I just have to tell them which days I'm available and between which hours. If, for example, I decide to take off to north eastern Australia for several weeks or months (something I fully intend on doing), I just have to tell the agency and they'll mark me as away for that time. If I decide I just need a few days of R&R and really can't be bothered to go to work, again, I just have to let them know. And if I should end up back in Sydney at some point down the road, another phone call to the agency will put me back on the roster. Now how great is that?

There are also some risks involved in agency work. For one, you really don't know where you're working until you get there most of the time. It could be a business function. It could be a hotel. It could be a wedding. It could be a regular old restaurant. So far, in just 12 days, these have been my gigs: the in-house restaurant for a local theatre company on opening night; a wedding reception held at a small restaurant on the harbour; a goodbye dinner and recital for Japanese homestay students; a private luncheon and several cocktail parties on the 25th floor of an office building downtown; a VIP luncheon at the National Art School (which, by the way, is in an amazing old building that started its life as a jail); and last, but certainly not least, a Jewish bar mitzvah. That last one pretty much takes the cake as far as surprises go. As I said, you really never quite know what you're getting into until you report for work.

Not all of the jobs have been a blast. The wedding and the bar mitzvah both involved a lot of running around, sit-down meal service for nearly 100 people, and plenty of cleaning up afterward late at night. There is nothing quite so unpleasant as polishing silverware at 1 a.m. on a Saturday night. On the other hand, the office building functions and the luncheon at the art school were incredibly easy. So easy that you can't really believe you're being paid quite well to do it.

That brings me to another great thing about Australia: really, truly fair wages for all. Minimum wage here starts somewhere around $12/hour. This is what you'd be paid at a fast food outlet or if you were doing general labour-type work. A French guy I met at the hostel is working in a downtown department store as a clerk, and he is being paid $14 or $15 per hour.

Now, let's talk about those hard-working waiters and waitresses for a minute. First of all, it must be said that people do not generally tip in Australia, unless perhaps they're in a fancy restaurant and the service is quite good.

In Canada, the lack of tips would be a terrifying prospect for any server as tips are the only way you can survive. I've worked for at least five restaurants in Canada, sometimes for as long as two years in one place, and never once was I paid more than minimum wage by an employer. Never once did I get a raise for being a good employee. It just isn't done.

By contrast, servers in Australia make about $18/hour. And their wage can often be as high as $20/hour, from what I can gather. All employees are automatically paid more for working on Saturdays or Sundays, meaning a Sunday wage can be as high as $26/hour (Saturdays is more like $22). I just have to say that this totally blows my mind. Can it be real??

Even after I went to university for six years (!) and earned two degrees, and moved to one of the most expensive cities in Canada (actually in the world, for that matter), and got a "real" job at a newspaper, I made slightly less than your average waiter in Sydney, Australia. Put that in your pipe and smoke it for a good long while.

I don't want you to think I'm bashing Canada. I'm just awfully fond of Australia at the moment.