So I've been back from Sydney for 10 days and I finally made into work this morning without passing out on the bus, so I think that means I'm officially over jetlag and can now lucidly describe my trip. It was about Thursday night last week before I got what could be considered a decent night's sleep. Australia is a great place to visit, but the commute is a killer.



The 11 days I was there is a blur of 10-hour work days where nothing much happened of consequence, punctuated by evening-long dinners involving multiple courses, tons of wine, beer and dessert, cocktails in the hotel lounge afterwards, then waking up hung over the next morning and doing it all again. It was great to have people to go out to dinner with, but I was having trouble keeping up with the amount of alcohol that was being passed around. On the plus side I never had trouble falling asleep once I got back to the room. Some of them stayed out even later and went to salsa clubs and such, but that wasn't my thing. We had one meal at a very gourmet thai place (they didn't serve pad thai, can't say I've ever seen a thai restaurant that could claim that before). Dessert there was some sticky coconut mixture steamed into dumplings (we called them kangaroo balls, but they were ostensibly vegetarian). Another dinner was al fresco at Kingsley's in Wooloomooloo featuring not one but two enormous seafood platters as appetizers (crab legs, oysters, mussels, prawns, etc.) such that when the real meal arrived no one was hungry but the seafood-haters. When I got back here I was hungry for three days while my stomach adjusted back to eating normal amounts of food. For the post-conversion celebration we took the ferry across the harbor to Manly and ate at a place called the Cove right next to the ferry terminal, but it was night time by then (being winter, it was only light out from 7 am to 5pm or so), so there wasn't much of a view. The ferry ride was a riot, though, took a lot of pictures of the nighttime skyline, but most of them came out too blurry to post.



When I wasn't working or eating I was shopping. Went up the Queen Victoria Building to scope out some black opal earrings for Mom that she had requested. The place I'd bought Beth's black opal pendant at last time had changed hands and no longer had much to choose from, but I found another place that a decent selection. I spent a fair amount of time scouring the jewelry stores along the Rocks and up George street looking for Australian pearls for Beth this time, but the best I could find was still a thousand aussie, which was out of my price range. Opted instead for a purse/handbag made out of kangaroo leather, which is both very durable and slightly creepy. Got a few tchochkes for the kids, but nothing too exciting since they're not into the Wiggles any more and the stuff is all over the place here now anyway. My first stop before any of this was to the Galaxy SF bookstore and the main Dymocks store to look for Ditmar and BSFA nominated books and anthologies that weren't otherwise coming to the US, and came away with a modest stack of books which still cost a fortune. Some of the other Bostonites were buying uggs, some sort of wool-lined shoe which are apparently all the rage in Hollywood but have gotten to be way overpriced and hard to find in the US, and one guy sent home a didgeridoo (or however it's spelled, he kept calling it a diggilydoo) for his kids.



I opted out of the group dinner Thursday evening to go to the concert hall at the Opera House to hear the Sydney Symphony under their new conductor Gianluigi Gelmetti. The program, called "The Shock of the New" was a bit gimmicky, replete with voice over, projected titles and elaborate lighting cues, but the mix of the music was interesting. The basic premise was to try to recapture the feeling of when new works could be considered shocking, so they encouraged people not to read the program ahead of time (for $6AUD I felt I could read it any time I wanted). A couple of women sitting nearby were more amused by the new than shocked, especially at one solo oboe work by some 30-something composer which sounded terribly difficult and extremely well-played but still was mostly just duck-call noises. More interesting were Webern's Six Pieces for Orchestra, which were spread out amongst the rest of the program. There were several other solos for various instruments (Bach's Toccata for organ, Paganini Caprice for violin, Varese's Density 21.5 for flute, etc.) which were very well received, plus some parts of more standard works for full orchestra (the last movement of Beethoven's 7th, the first part of the last movement of Beethoven's 9th, the first half of the Rite of Spring, etc.) which taken out of context of the whole work were probably more annoying than shocking. But still a very adventurous program that I doubt you'd ever convince the powers that be to do at the BSO. The Saturday concert was a completely different set of works, ending with La Valse, but I didn't know that ahead of time so I didn't go to that one too.



Instead on Saturday night I wanted to see the inside of City Recital Hall, and I'd missed the Jerusalem String Quartet earlier in the week because I couldn't get out of work in time for either concert, so I opted for the Australian Brandenburg Orchestra, certainly not something I would ever seek out under normal circumstances. This period-instrument early music ensemble seems to be doing pretty well, the house wasn't full by any means but this kind of music is probably best heard live anyway for the visual interplay between musicians and the sometimes unfamiliar sounds they can produce. Special guest for these concerts was some German guy who sang a number of works in various languages. It was actually a pretty good show, not something I'd go to a lot, but I was glad I went, and because they like to start concerts at 7pm in sydney, after it was over I was still able to hook up with the rest of the gang for one last dinner on the harbor.



Between shopping in the morning and concert-going in the evening, that Saturday afternoon I took the ferry by myself over to Manly and met up with Shelley's brother Mark, who had offered to give me a tour of the north beaches. It was nice to be able to see something besides the immediate downtown Sydney area, and it was a great day for a drive, so he picked me up with his two kids and whisked me off to his house, where we met up with his wife Gina, and then went out for some lunch and drove all the way up to Palm Beach, where we walked up to a lighthouse to get some good shots of the coastline. Mark filled me in on some of his history in coming to Australia from Ohio, but otherwise we talked politics and professional cycling. It was very nice of him to take the time to entertain me for an afternoon, especially when he'd look wistfully out at the surfers. We were back in Manly by 5pm as it was getting dark anyway and I was headed back for the concert. I had a few extra minutes to walk around the plaza there and who should I come across but three of my co-workers who'd spent the afternoon shopping in Manly, having a rest in an outdoor cafe. If I'd scored on the pearl thing during the shopping trip that morning, the day would've been perfect. Close enough, though.



Now all I need to do is upload the pictures, although there aren't that many since I didn't do much sightseeing since I'd been there before. Took a couple of runs through the Botanic Gardens rather than just around them this time, and went through the rain forest area with these enormous bats hanging from the trees right over the path, screeching away at 8 in the morning. Took a tour of the Opera House with one of my co-workers, but didn't see much that I hadn't seen already, except it was daytime so you could see the interior lobby and stairways with better lighting (the place is pretty dim at night). The opera wasn't in town, so the opera theater was being used for the Australian Ballet's production of Swan Lake, and we got to go in and watch them rehearse for a few minutes during the tour. Also went late on a rainy Sunday afternoon to the Musuem of Sydney and saw some special exhibit on red cedar plus some permanent stuff about the history of Sydney.



There's other stuff I'm probably forgetting, but that's most of it. If you have the chance to go to Sydney, go. If you have the chance to go with 9 other hard-drinking co-workers with expense accounts, drop everything and go.

And then, four weeks later...



Can't say I've been too busy, just too lazy, really. I'm entering these words from the SSC office in Sydney, Australia, where we're all busy at work on a Saturday night converting over their backoffice FX system. I was glad to get the thumbs-up to come on this trip, and this time there are nine other people here from the Boston office. When I was here in 2002 I was an envoy of one, and it was kind of a weird feeling to walk around the streets thinking "I don't know anyone in a 10,000 mile radius". So at least this time around I've got somebody to have dinner with.



Took off bright and early Wednesday morning and arrived here Thursday night, an hour late but otherwise unscathed. Because this was a sanctioned visit and not the stealth operation I was operating under before, this time I could fly business class and take advantage of the Qantas club lounge and LAX and get hot towels and choice of movies and all that good stuff on the plane. One of the other Boston people was on my flight, too, so we split a cab to the Hotel Intercontinental and were checked in by 11pm or so.



Before I left I switched my phone over to international service with the promise that my regular cellphone number would work in Sydney, but it didn't behave as advertised. After a couple of calls to the Boston help desk, they finally got a Nextel guy who determined that I should have Worldwide service rather than International service, and once he'd pushed a couple of buttons from his location in Canada somewhere, about 10 seconds later I, on the other side of the planet, was connected. I was telling some of my co-workers here, "that's so much more cool that what we do".



Anyway, I showed up in the office Friday morning with the last of the arrivals (some have been here for two weeks or more) and got all hooked up and plugged in and ready to roll. Most of us went to lunch at some pizza place over in The Rocks, where the waitress insisted we couldn't charge the tip, so we didn't leave one. There wasn't much to preparation to do from my end, but I was able to line up a couple of meetings with other groups in Sydney for next week, plus meet with the middle office guys here to give them a heads-up of what to expect. We hung around till 7 or so at the conference room that's really a bar here on this floor, then headed off to dinner at the hotel. Although I woke up several times during the night both Thursday and Friday, I felt like I got a decent night's sleep, and I'm enjoying the two block commute.



Today is when the conversion began in earnest, once it hit 6 pm Friday in Boston. This whole 14 hour difference makes your head bleed, because not only do you have to keep track of what time it is at the other location, but what day it is, and when you're in Boston you're used to adding 14 hours, and now that you're here you have to subtract instead. Got the cellphone working this morning and called Beth and talked to the kids as they were getting ready for bed. After getting set up here this morning, I went shopping for a couple of hours, mostly at Dymocks main branch on George Street, where I got a couple of British and Australian sf books I was looking for. Came back here and did some conversion verification stuff with Aiming over the phone (it was midnight at his end by then), then we had some down time so some of us went over to the Rocks again and did some shopping. They didn't need me until around now, so I went back to the room for a couple of hours and watched some rugby and read.



I'm here until next Sunday, so I hope to cover some more ground than I was able to do in my last trip. Couple of concerts later in the week I wouldn't mind going to, but nothing too exciting. Weather has been great by Boston standards, but the days are short as it's nearly winter, and the locals are all freezing. Cheers, mate!