After I left the Opera House, I took a different, more direct walk back to Kings Cross through Woolloomooloo, around the wharf. This is a deserted, spooky place. Someone had developed some expensive looking condos along the wharf, but the architecture was chillingly inhuman. A naval warship was docked to the wharf and the sailors eyed me suspiciously.
It wasn’t really very late in the day when I found myself back at the hostel. I had walked several miles and was ready to rest, so I hung out in the lobby (living room?) of the hostel. I noticed two girls playing the antique Ms. Pac Man machine. I challenged one of them to a game, and won, as well as sextupling the tiny high score. After the game we got to talking. Their names are Mette (pronounced ‘metah’) and Daniela, hailing from Denmark. Both are nice girls and pretty cute too. Mette taught me to play backgammon, and I won that as well, really just beginner’s luck in this case. They both came to Australia to learn to be surgical veterinarians. They showed me pictures they had taken of each other operating on animals, which struck me as humorously grisly. Neither have seen America and they were curious about it.
A third girl joined us: Michelle from Ireland. She’s quite a wildcat, I soon learned. We struck it off pretty well. She, like Mette and Daniela, is here on a working visa for an extended period. The vast majority of people in the hostel have this kind of arrangement, and are citizens of the five countries for which it’s most easy to get an Australian working visa: Ireland, Britain, Denmark, Holland, and Sweden. Because of this they tend to be working during the day and not available to actually do anything. But at night they can come alive if they want to. Often they seem to like watching TV, but when it gets late enough they are far from averse to heading to the bars. That’s how Michelle is. She invited me to head over to O’Malley’s with her that night. This is a popular Irish pub about four blocks away. Two other Irish girls joined us, but left after only one drink. (Oddly, I saw one of these girls again when I got to Cairns, thousands of kilometers away. She was staying at the same hostel as I was too. Strange.) We talked and danced and drank for hours. But after a while the beer was really making me nauseous. I was drinking Victoria Bitter, the local cheap brand. I doesn’t taste bad but after three or four pints I was feeling ill. And I thought, “What’s wrong with me?” I could not keep up with Michelle at all, she was drinking me under the table! Wondering if it was the beer, I switched to rum and coke. In a last ditch effort to keep up, I slammed the last of the drink. That was a bad move. I suddenly felt the vestibular canals spinning, and I raced to the bathroom. So the evening included an unscheduled worship at the porcelain altar. I’m still baffled by the whole situation. Four beers and a mixed drink? Not even a good start! It’s puzzling, because I almost never throw up from booze; the only other time it happened was at a bachelor party in Chicago, years ago, and then I had had much more to drink. Anyway, we went back to the hostel, though on the way she wanted to call her mom in Cork. She gave me her email and a few quick kisses before we parted ways. She wants to move to Bondi Beach in a few days, possibly tomorrow.
You win the stuffed koala if you guess what this is.
So I tried to go to bed, only to find someone else was using it! I was too tired and sick to find out why, or to deal with the situation at all, so I just laid down on the floor and dozed off. I woke up later and realized one of the other bunks was unoccupied, so I took it, hoping no one would come back later still and have the same reaction I had just had earlier. Still not sure what happened, probably a booking mistake. Or someone was too dumb to notice that their bed was in the wrong place. I don’t really know, or even care particularly. After I woke up I came here to eat breakfast and to rehydrate myself. You get a huge breakfast (two eggs, pile of bacon, two pieces of toast) for A$3, ice water for the hangover no charge. An unheard of value by my standards. The butter is really butter, but the egg yolks are a disturbing bright orange. All that mattered was that it filled me up.
That brings us to today. Likely this will be my last full day in Sydney. I plan to take the harbor ferry to explore the extent of Sydney Harbor. I have some random observations I’d like to tack on to the end of this entry: A guy at O’Malley’s called me ‘mate’ for the first time. Almost all the movies, songs and TV shows I’ve seen here are American in origin. Irish people, or at least ones like Michelle anyway, talk much faster than Americans do. With her thick, high-speed Irish accent I had considerable difficulty deciphering her over the blaring music. The Danish girls Mette and Daniela tell me they prefer to sleep nude. One of the guys in their dorm actually complained about this. Aussies like -ie on the end of their words, and words with u’s or oo’s in them are just about always Aboriginal in origin. Just about everyone in the pub was not from Australia. Few people I’ve met are. The Australian media is really in a frenzy about East Timor. But does the American media concern itself with this business?
Protest for East Timor. Too bad I'll have to miss it.
