Sydney

7/14/2008
Sydney

I’m finally getting a chance to sit still for a few minutes so I write down all that’s been happening since I arrived in Sydney a week ago. I’ve been having trouble keeping in touch because the internet isn’t quite as accessible as they led on it would be. Since it’s winter break for the students here, most of the buildings on campus are closed after business hours and my free internet in the room shuts off after 7 pm, so while you guys are sleeping I have internet, and while you’re awake, I’m sleeping. I getting it straightened out this week, though, so here goes.

After getting settled into our dorms on campus at the University of New South Wales, we explored the main street we live on, Anzac Parade where there are tons of asian restaurants. I think it’s the cheapest option for dinner available (about $7), aside from buying groceries. The catch there is that we don’t have any facilities in the dorm to cook for ourselves, so unless you can microwave it, there’s no real way for you to eat here. Unless…you can survive on peanut butter and honey sandwiches like I am. No, I’m just kidding…I’ve been eating egg salad sandwiches too. We’re only provided breakfast and lunch at the dining hall downstairs; I think people aren’t considering how much even just a $10 dinner every night for three weeks adds up to. People keep giving me crap for being so cheap, but when I’ve already spent tres mil dolares ($3000) since I left LA, I’d say I’m in the lead for spending the most money.

On Sunday morning I went to a church called Hillsong, a very contemporary worship-based church that was similar to Buckhead Church in Atlanta. The guest pastor was from Louisiana and did standup comedy for most of his ‘sermon,’ but had a good message in the last 15 minutes about generosity, something I need to be more comfortable with. Jacky helped me realize that when she was telling me about how when she gets too much stuff she wants to give it to other people who can use it. I like that idea a lot.

Our ‘uni’ is situated in a convenient spot for access to the city – we’re pretty much directly south of downtown. The bus stop outside my window takes me downtown in about 20 minutes. There are a couple different buses that run to the beaches: Coogee being the closest, Bronte, and Bondi. The bus system can be figured out by knowing which number bus goes where…and you better have figured that out before you go to the stop because other than asking the driver, there’s no real way to figure out which goes where. Although we’re south of downtown, the area is referred to as the ‘Eastern Suburbs’ and the city center closest to us is Kensington or Randwick. Our campus is nice, our dorm is right next to the athletic field (a huge circle used for playing cricket and Australian football) and the tennis courts. Campus takes up one rectangular block of the area, with one main center walkway and an up-sloping hill that has endless sets of steps. It is a sort of technology school like Georgia Tech; it’s pretty obvious that everyone here is focused on science. On Sunday I took a run through campus and went down the other side of the campus hill to the beach. Lots of the people I passed looked at me funny in my t-shirt and shorts as they were dressed with big coats and scarves, it was a chilly 60 degrees during this bitter winter…not. It reminds me a lot of San Diego because the sun warms things up during the day and you can wear a light coat at night. Today it looked like it was going to rain in the morning and later at the beach it was a cloudless sunset.

On Tuesday, we took a fieldtrip for class to a steel recycling plant called OneSteel. This plant takes in scrap metal, melts it down and sells bars of high quality steel to customers for further manufacture. It was a great tour, the plant site mixed with the way they make their product was very interesting. This plant is situated right next to a large highway and also is surrounded by residential housing, so it was designed to have minimal sight, sound, and pollution effects. Because of this, you wouldn’t be able to tell it is an industrial site if you stood on the other side of the trees surrounding the boundary. The buildings were set up to absorb and contain the sounds from the processes so even the difference between internal and external sounds of the plant buildings were incredible. They bring in scrap metal from all over Australia and dump it into their indoor scrap yard. A large magnet then grabs loads of metal and dumps it into a bin. The bin is stacked with light scrap at the bottom, heavy scrap in the middle, and light scrap on top of that. The bin then supplies the working metal for the furnace. This plant uses what’s called an ‘electric-arc furnace’ and is basically a huge lightning bolt style electricity arc that melts the metal so it can be formed into other shapes. The temperatures for this process are ridiculously high, somewhere along the lines of 6000º C to keep the metal in a molten state. We watched from inside the control room the furnace loading process: the cap opens as you can see the radiating glow off the roof of the molten metal in the furnace, the bin releases a load of fresh scrap metal into the furnace and huge flames shoot up feeding on the impurities and coatings of the scraps, the lid comes down and clamps shut, the graphite electrodes spark up and the incredibly loud sound of repetitive, constant lightning bolts pulse through tons of metal, heating the pile from the middle into a molten soup while a lance with measuring equipment waves through the soup, spitting lava-like debris out of the lance hole. Then we got to see the bottom of the furnace, where the metal exits, being formed and cooled at the same time. The bars of metal are glowing yellow orange and are radiating so much heat you can’t stand to get closer than 10 feet or you’ll get barbequed. The rods are sent down an assembly line until they cool enough to be cut to length and stacked. The plant reminded me a lot of my time at the chemical plant in Augusta, FinnChem, where I often thought about how much stress the work environment puts on the operators’ bodies. With so much heat, metal dust, and electricity pulsing through the area, I couldn’t imagine the effects on someone’s body over the course of 20 years.

Following the trip, my Penn State friend Mike and I went for a walk along the coast to check out more of the beaches, and made a stop to check with a lady about a surfboard I found for sale on the internet. This was our first attempt at figuring out the bus system on the fly and it worked out pretty well. I felt like I was making forward progress on exploring the nearby area. Since we traveled well on Tuesday, he decided to accompany me on Wednesday to an area next to the University of Sydney to check out another surfboard. After class, we hit up a few thrift stores in the area and then went to see how good my bargaining skills were. The guy I found on the internet was moving a few days later to France and had a combo board/wetsuit for sale. He was nice and the equipment was in pretty good condition – the board was impeccable other than a repair from this guy’s accident on a 5 meter tall wave the year before. It was a little longer than I was hoping to get, but I figured I could use that as a arguing point and if it wasn’t cheap enough then I could walk. So whenever I offered him $225 for the board and the wetsuit which he had listed for $300, he looked at the ground, groaned and said in his thick French accent “Ohhh…you are mean…” We settled on $260 for all of it: a 6’6” pintain surfboard, full 3/2 wetsuit, and a shortie 3/2 wetsuit. I’m pretty pleased with the purchase, I’ve been out on the board 3 times and it feels much different than my 6’8” at home because it’s a lot thinner.

Later that night, I walked across the main drag of campus to find some wireless so I could talk to Amira on Skype, but I was having trouble finding any buildings open at 8 pm. I decided to walk a little further to see if I could find another one. As I walked out onto the main walkway, I heard some scuffling behind me. I turned around to see this group of guys surrounding this other guy on the ground. I thought they were friends wrestling at first, but after I saw one of the guys standing up kick the guy on the ground and another grab his backpack, I knew they weren’t friends of his. I stood about 20 feet away trying to see anything distinctive about the 6 guys in hoodies, but they were running down the street before I knew it. The guy on the ground got up, picked up his glasses and started walking towards me. I asked if he was ok and he was fine, just stunned from being mugged. I didn’t really have any options for helping him since there were so many of them, but I stuck around to help describe to the police what I had seen. It was really surprising to me that it happened on that part of campus because it was right next to the tennis courts (with lots of people on them), in the well lit center of campus. He lost his wallet and car keys but still had his phone and house keys so he was able to call the credit card company and the cops. I had my laptop in my backpack and probably would have been fuming if those guys had chosen me instead. People have been making fun of me for carrying around a pocket knife but you never know what could happen. It seems that only the couple girls from Philly are the ones who brought the keychain style pepper spray. It was a good lesson that walking alone or even girls walking without a guy is not a good idea. The thing I hate most about the ordeal is that the victim had just gotten repaid a debt from a friend so he had around $400 in cash in his wallet, so those thieves were in a sick way rewarded for their efforts. Mom, I know this doesn’t help your worrying at all but I figured you’d rather hear the story than not. Let’s just say it helped to make me more aware of my surroundings.

Thursday, we had a field trip to show us some sustainable buildings around Sydney. We briefly visited a development that had solar power and rainwater reclamation, but didn’t inform their tenants of the energy conservative building because research shows that people tend to misuse energy in that setting, for whatever reason. Our next stop was a five star rated commercial high rise with a very unique design. With a mostly glass shell, the individual levels were open air, no walls to separate offices or areas. I assume they had low cube divisions, but from what we could see the offices were very airy. One side of the building butted up against the foundation of the building up the hill from them, where the architects cleverly left the bedrock exposed to the building to act as a heat mass, where it’s cool in the warm weather and warmer in the cool weather. They also used ‘chilled beams,’ which were just metal pipes that had cool water running through them, effectively cooling the air around the beam which then sank to the floor acting as AC. The last thing I’ll say about this relatively boring field trip was about the heating for this building. Theoretically, the heating system would be activated by running hot water through the pipes beneath the floor, heating the floor which would heat the air at the ground level. Heating air at the ground level wastes less energy than heating air from the ceiling (since we’re not walking around up there).

I went surfing Thursday afternoon by myself and again on Friday. Thursday was pretty good, consistently chest high surf with a few overhead waves. Friday was much smaller and weaker, just like today’s waves. Friday night, I went to a rugby game with most everyone in our program. It was a good game, fun to see in person, but not nearly as popular as I expected. There were 10,000 in attendance and it was a very social atmosphere, kind of like a baseball game. Afterwards, our group went out to a couple bars in Paddington. It was the first time we’ve been out in a small enough group to meet real Aussies. It was fortunate I went there because the next day I navigated for our group to make it to the Paddington Markets, a Sunday artist market around the church there. It is a very trendy area and reminded me of NYC with all of the interesting styles walking around. Afterwards, we went downtown to the Paddy Markets, a flea market full of cheap trinkets and souvenirs.

Sunday, I went downtown and took the ferry over to Manly. I didn’t know much about the town but heard a couple guys were going and decided to tag along. It’s on the north part of the harbor and gave us a great chance to see the city from the water. There were hundreds of sailboats on the water, big 30-40 footers cruising in the wind. We got to the Manly Wharf and decided to walk down the main street to see the beach on the outside of the peninsula. On the way there, one of the most coincidental things happened. We’re walking and talking and I saw a girl that looked like one of Melissa’s best friends from Augusta. I look a little harder and see Coleman Carter, a good friend of mine who went to Lakeside and goes to UGA. We were both flipping out and wondering what each other were doing in Manly. Turns out she came to Sydney for a week by herself to go to Hillsong Conference, a conference hosted by the church I went to the week before. She met some people through a friend and was spending the day with them and just happened to be walking down the street where we were. Her friends gave us some suggestions for things to do in the area, we exchanged numbers and decided to meet up later. We went for a walk out to the North Head, a west facing landmass protected as a National Park. Mike, Bryan, and I hiked up to secluded rock cliff and sat to see if we could see any of the Right Whales that were migrating northwards. Sure enough, we saw a couple groups pass by, about ¼ mile offshore being trailed by boats. We couldn’t see much more than the mist from their breathing and a little of their backs and tails. It was definitely a plus of the trip though. Later, we walked down the beach and watched the surfers before heading back to the ferry terminal. Coleman met up with us there and we went back downtown for dinner. We ate in a little restaurant in Darling Harbor and then Coleman and I walked around making our way back to the ferry. It was good to catch up with her, I hadn’t talked to her since I saw her at Melissa’s funeral and even then I didn’t get to say much. I couldn’t believe all the things that had to go right in order for us to run into one another…what are the chances. I felt bad for her because her flight left the next day and she hadn’t gotten to see much of the city since she was in a conference all week. It was good to hear her say that this trip inspired her to travel more, a lot of people from back home are scared or just don’t have an interest in doing that.

In class today, we watched Al Gore’s An Inconvenient Truth followed by a rebuttal film that spoofed his movie and countered it with scientific evidence as well. The most interesting rebuttal was that, in the past, it appears that a rising general temperature drives CO2 up instead of the reverse. One thing that really bothers me about Al Gore is his self-centeredness. When he came to speak at Georgia Tech, I could only stay for the first 45 minutes of his speech and all he did for that period was stand-up comedy about himself. I value his efforts, though, because he is trying to get people to realize what’s going on in our world. I can’t get over the fact that, apart from global warming, the world population is increasing so rapidly. The world population increasing almost four fold during one person’s lifetime is something that nobody’s really experienced…except maybe Adam. I’m not sure what we can do about that, or if we need to do anything.

After class today, most of our group went to Bondi Beach for surf lessons. I tagged along for the free ride down there and got to see some of the group catching the whitewater on their longboards. I got lucky and got a hold of one of the longboards and had some fun. It’s so much different than shortboarding, the rides are so much longer and smooth. I also had a fun session afterwards on my board on a different part of the beach. I surfed next to a kid I met the other day who was out there with his dad. My new 13 year old friend was telling me where I should go in Byron Bay when I’m there, they said I won’t want to leave when I get there. I found a couple guys in my program who’re wanting to rent a car and go surfing after we’re done classes on July 31st, so I think I’m going to have some travel partners for one of the two weeks I’ll be on my own before I go home.


Upcoming events for this week: Opera at the Sydney Opera House, Sunrise Cliffwalk, Blue Mountains Hiking Trip, World Youth Day.