On to Perth
After our stressful departure from Sanya, we were delighted to have exactly the opposite experience in Hong Kong. Our transfer was smoothly handled (we were relieved to learn that the young women in Sanya had indeed gotten everything right in the end) and we were doubly delighted to learn that my lifetime membership in the Admiral’s Club got us into the Qantas business class lounge. Sigh. A return to civilization and then some. Since we had an eight-hour layover between flights, we really needed that little bit of luxury.
One glitch: we’d been told that as U.S. citizens, we didn’t need visas to enter Australia as tourists as long as we weren’t planning to stay more than six months. Wrong.
Or at least so we were told by the people at the Qantas check-in desk. Fortunately they were able to issue the visas electronically on the spot, although that service cost us another $100HK apiece. Maybe it has something to do with entering the country from Hong Kong rather than flying directly to Australia from the U.S.
The layover was longer than the flight. We left Hong Kong at about 11:30PM and arrived in Perth just after 7AM. If I’d been sensible, I’d've just put on the sleep mask, stuffed in the earplugs and had a nice restful night. I wasn’t sensible. I ate the meal, washed down with a cold Australian beer, and watched a movie – “Inglourious Basterds,” a bloody Quentin Tarrantino film. (Yes, I know that’s redundant.) It was about Jewish-American commandos killing Nazis during WWII. The film has been critically praised, but in my opinion it wasn’t worth the sacrificed sleep.
Coming across Western Australia from the north, we crossed a lot of dry brown desert, so Perth looked green to us despite the drought they’ve been suffering. We were met at the airport by Diane Slade, the head of the advertising department at ECU and my boss for the next five and a half months. (That’s Edith Cowan University, by the way, not East Carolina University!) Diane took us down to the apartment she’d found for us, right in the heart of downtown Perth. It’s within a couple-of-block walk of everything – Perth’s main performing arts venue (Her Majesty’s Theater), the bus station, the train station, the river and endless shopping.
The apartment itself is on the ground floor in an alley beside Bally – easy to remember, huh? At first glance it seemed a bit down-market for us (I haven’t lived in a basement apartment since I was a student at Columbia!), but the location is sensational, the space is adequate, and we’ll make it feel like “ours” soon enough. Diane thoughtfully supplied us with linens and towels, glassware and crockery and a few other things for our comfort, including a welcoming bottle of sparkling pinot noir. For openers we moved the furniture around to better suit the way we thought we’d use it and then went off to the big Woolworth’s grocery store a couple of blocks away to lay in the staples. (Woolworth’s and Coles are the two major grocery chains that seem to dominate Australia and New Zealand. I think Woolies is related somehow to the old Woolworth family in the U.S., but I don’t know how.)
The food items didn’t seem extraordinarily expensive, but when I stopped at the bottle shop and had to pay $15 for the cheapest six-pack, that was a shock! (The Australian dollar is worth about 90 cents in American money, so it’s easiest just to think of prices as one-to-one.)
I also had to buy a Vodaphone wireless modem; the apartment building doesn’t have wireless service nor is there a landline phone to plug into. (No one in the world but us has a landline phone anymore, it seems.) The wireless modem looks like a memory stick (in fact, you can apparently use it that way if you want to) but works like a mobile phone. It cost about $80 and has 1GB of something or other for starters. I don’t actually know what that means, but they said when it runs out I could reload it, so I assume it has something to do with how much on-line time I get. Anyhow, it was easy enough for even techno-ignoramic me to plug it in and log on to my email accounts. Worked fine. I’ll only use it for the personal stuff; I’ll use the school system for larger files.
Of course I’m not on the school system yet. I got a key to my office and directions to the men’s room, but everything else seems to be “in process,” such as my ID card and the ID number that will get me access to anything. They haven’t connected my phone yet nor assigned a phone number. I spent Tuesday just sort of hanging around waiting for the administrative people to shuffle the paperwork. It never happened. The school is in the middle of their version of accreditation, so everyone’s in meetings all day long. Some things aren’t different, no matter what side of the world you’re on.
Sylv came in with me to see what the university looked like (Diane had kindly picked us up in the morning), so we did explore a little. The campus is modern and relatively new. We’re in the School of Communications and Arts, which means that we’re surrounded by visual and performing arts people. There are at least three theaters in the building next door and dozens of studios. We saw and/or heard people practicing dance movement, instruments, and vocal work, even though officially the students aren’t back on campus yet. There’s art (mostly abstract) displayed all over the walls; there’s even a bank of monitors playing students’ multi-media creations.
This is also an all-Apple, all-the-time venue, so there’ll be lots of tech help if I have any sort of a problem with my new MacBook Pro, God forbid. (The first problem that did come up, though, they couldn’t solve: my operating system is so new that Ricoh hasn’t written the software for it yet, so I can’t connect to the department’s printer. Hmmm.)
We gave up in the middle of the afternoon and took the bus home. Easy-peasy (as they seem to say here as well as in New Zealand), except that it cost us $2.40 each for a one-way trip back into town. A bit shocking for somebody who lives in Chapel Hill where the buses are free. (Actually, we found out later that the buses inside Perth’s CBD are free; it’s only the ones to the outskirts where the uni is that charge.)
We did a little shopping in the Reject Store, which is sort of like the Odd Lots places in New York. There’s a great range of stuff at knock-off prices. I bought a broad-brimmed hat, at Diane’s urging. Although there’s always a sea breeze to keep the air cool – Perth is the third windiest city in the world after Chicago and Wellington, NZ – the sun itself is extremely intense. The newspaper prints a chart of the expected UV range each day. Today, for example, it gets the top score of 12 between 10AM and 2PM. I’m not sure whether the intensity has something to do with a hole in the ozone layer or what, but I do know Australians are very serious about avoiding prolonged exposure without very serious sun protection.
Monday night Diane picked us up to take us on brief sightseeing tour and then on out for dinner at Fremantle, Perth’s quaint old port. The area is definitely about water, with lots of little coves and harbors, yacht clubs and sailing clubs. In fact, one of the sights she showed us was the Royal Perth Yacht Club, where the Alan Bond-backed syndicate that defeated Dennis Connor for the Americas Cup fifteen years ago was based. That was the first-ever U.S. loss in a century of international challenges in that series and Perth is still pretty proud of itself for the win.
Perth also must be the outdoor eating capital of the world. The streets and alleys of downtown Perth are lined with open-air cafes and bars and restaurants, such that there’s a constant buzz of conversation as you walk along and there’s always music in the air. And wonderful cooking smells!
Besides the sounds floating out of the bars, cafés and restaurants there’s another ubiquitous source of music – street musicians abound. There’s at least one for every block in the pedestrian mall area. We’ve seen guitarists galore, of course, but there is also a guy who plays the Chinese violin, a woman with an incredible voice who sings opera, and even a guy who rolls in a piano on wheels and plays ragtime! They might be called “buskers,” like in London’s Piccadilly Square.
Tuesday night we cooked our first little meal in our new home – spaghetti with a tomato, herb and garlic sauce, washed down with a tasty and relatively inexpensive South African dry red. To my surprise, wine prices seem to be about 50% higher here than in the U.S. even for the common Australian wine brands like Jacob’s Creek and Rosemont. That must be because of the high taxes necessary to support what amounts to a welfare state. (Australia’s “conservative” politicians are well to the left of Hyannisport.) I don’t qualify for any of the benefits, though, because I didn’t work here all my life and pay Australian wage taxes, said the agent in the bus terminal when I inquired about a senior concession fare! I don’t think Senior Citizen discounts are denied to non-citizens in the U.S., are they?
I went back to ECU on Wednesday to get my ID number, step two in the process of becoming official. I also got some much-needed help from another professional-turned-professor named Dan Hardy. He’s what we used to call “an old China hand” – an Englishman who’s lived and worked in the Orient for a long time. Singapore, in his case. He taught here last fall as a visiting professor like me and is on the faculty full-time now. He had to figure out how to put together the lectures and tutorials and assessment processes then, so he’s a great source of support for me now. Good guy, too. Dry British sense of humor.
Wednesday night Sylv and I explored a couple of the bar-and-café-lined alleys around the block and found an Irish pub called Durty Nelly’s offering a special T-bone steak for $16. I was afraid we might only get some small overcooked lump of gristle for that price, but no – they served us a tender, delicious, perfectly cooked, dinner-plate sized Australian prime beef steak on a mound of crisp, non-greasy French fries (”chips” here, as in England) with a bit of salad on the side. Another $15 bought us a pint of Tasmanian beer and a glass of good Western Australian red wine. Good deal. Sure and we’ll be back, Nelly dear!
We later learned that Nelly’s is only one of a baker’s dozen of Irish pubs in Perth. There’s also a big Catholic cathedral here. I suppose either would make the existence of the other unsurprising!
Farther down Nelly’s alley we also found an art supply store for Sylv; she’d forgotten to pack her paints and brushes. It was closed in the evening, of course – one of the things we’re going to have to get used to is that retail stores, including supermarkets and even “convenience” stores, close every day at five or at the latest six o’clock. If you run out of milk, you’re out of luck. However, I noticed that the bottle shop (that’s the only place you can buy beer or wine) stays open ’til 7. Priorities!