the garrison show

i have come 7000 miles to be trapped in suburbia with a single mom and her 7-year old (adorable) boy. is this a vacation???

while i am indebtted to my host for free lodging, meals, transportation, introductions to (almost) everyone i know on the continent, i need a little variety. last night, saturday night, i played connect-4, put together a bionicle (if you don’t know what that means, i’m jealous), played playstation, watched rugby (okay, that was education) and then ‘the exorcism of emily rose.’ while entertaining in its own right, that’s not what i had in mind for a crazy sydney adventure. i have yet to have a social beer in the city. that’s unacceptable.

so i think i will stay in the suburbs through thursday (saving money and planning), but then if i’m still in sydney i’m going to just stay in a hostel in the city. it will be relatively cheap, but keep me close to where i want to be and perhaps surrounded by the kind of people i want to see.

i hope i have some better things to report in near future. 

i was picked up at wendy’s house at 1:00 in the afternoon and settled into a cocoon of a coma 14 alcohol-soaked hours later. my god.

we started out at a Bondi RSL. an RSL is a place where they have cheap beer and food. we consumed much of both. it overlooked the beach and ocean which was pretty fantastic, but i sure didn’t get any pictures. brilliant!

then we moved on to a hotel and watched a game of footy. note, a hotel is really a bar and a bar is really a restaurant. also note, footy is australian football, which is different than rugby, which is different than something else. i ordered spaghetti and was served approximately my body weight in noodles. i ate it all. in between the 10 beers.

next stop, ______! there was a party here for a drama school that had just put on their last performance before graduation. those cats are crazy. that party moved to another bar after a few drinks and we followed. it was now a full-on dance party, and that’s where we closed the night down.

this morning came all too soon and all too painfully. but i dutifully crawled out of “bed” at 12:30 or so and wandered around to the city.

in the only disappointing sidenote to the story, somebody lifted my sunglasses right off my damn person at the dance party! i was standing there and they were hooked in the back of my sweater. i feel somebody lift them right off but it was late, i was less-than-sober, and by the time i actually managed to turn around, the evidence was gone! the thief had disappeared into the crowd and i was sunglass-less. bastards!

i need an aspirin.

we met for lunch yesterday. i was a good half-hour late, thanks to crazy bus/train schedules, so i was off to a good start.

to all those people i told i knew what i wanted and the meeting was going to be a formality and all that other crap…i officially have no idea what i’m talking about.

it was an emotional reunion, far more so than i was really prepared for. we started off with small talk and catching up but after 20 or 30 minutes got into the good stuff.

jeez, what can i say…for a few seconds here and there, it was as if the last six months hadn’t happened. i don’t know what that means, if anything, but it does sort of make things harder to just dismiss. before she left, she really was everything i thought i could possibly want in another person. time and distance worked to dull that but yesterday, full-on in the face of it, it feels silly to just walk away.

it’s clear that she’s not coming back to georgia; she may not come back to the states at all. it’s difficult to stay in aussie-land given her visa situation, but it sounds like she’s going to give it a go. so - we’re moving in different directions at the moment, but maybe not quite as happily?

what do i want? fuck if i know. forgive the harsh language, but really. i know i obviously don’t want a girlfriend 6000 miles away (tip: that doesn’t seem to work out to well), but maybe i’m not quite as ready to throw everything away as i thought i was?

i just thought i’d have an easier time getting to sleep last night than i did.

i hope this freaking post will generate a comment or two. what does a guy have to do???

are up! there’s a random selection and completely uncommented for the moment, so bear with me, but you can at least see something.

check the “my pix” link on the right for the gallery.

as one of my earlier posts indicated, i’d been struggling with the idea of this trip a little bit. it turns out i’m not a very good tourist on my own; i’m not interested in “seeing” things. i’m a fantastic companion, of course, just not on my own.

well, i had a mini-revelation on the bus home yesterday and figured out some direction. i had to figure out what i liked - and what do i like? i like learning.

so i’m going to try to learn what i can for the rest of this trip. i want to learn to sail and to dive. i want to learn about the aboriginal culture here.

that’s what i’ve got so far. if you’ve got any other ideas or suggestions, please have at them. i’m happy to at least have some sort of idea what i want to do, though.

the next leg of my journey is now confirmed. i will be flying to cairns on wednesday morning. for those unfamiliar with australian geography, check a map.

are you really that lazy? just google “australia map.”

do i really need to do it for you? fine. here.

at cairns i will probably investigate the diving and sailing thing and see what i can get into. i’ll also start figuring out how to get in to the center of country where Uluru is.

what do i do for my last six days in sydney?

i went into a library last night. i can hear you all now - “you’re on vacation, why are you in a library??” but it’s MY vacation and i wanted to go into a library so stuff it!

anyway, the point is that books are another place where the US and australia are radically different. for example, they think science fiction actually qualifies as fiction. they lump it in there with all the rest, and they seem to like it quite a bit. if you’re a trekkie, you need to relocate down under and find some social acceptance.

books are also ridiculously expensive. a frickin’ paperback at borders (yes, they have borders) is like $30!! there aren’t any presses here so all the books have to get shipped and you sure do end up paying for it.

okay, enough with the book talk. i’m going back to surfing and drinking and smashing australian women.

right.

i met matt and teesha for dinner last night and caught up (which was very good). we ended the evening in the Star City casino, the only one in sydney. it is populated largely by asians. and by largely i mean exclusively.

we wanted to sit at a poker table and play some hands and see what we got but the $5/$5 no-limit tables had a $200 minimum buy-in which was a little more than we were prepared to lose. so we sat at a 3-card poker table instead.

matt tapped out within the first twenty minutes - sorry. i was still at the stupid table 4 hours later. i ended up sitting next to a high school math teacher from san francisco!! what are the odds? we chatted about teaching, cards and money. great fun.

in the end, i managed to turn my $50 investment into $250! at highest, i was around $300 but when i dropped down at 1:30 in the morning, i figured it was time to call it off.

all in all, it was way too easy. i see how it could become a habit. i’m not addicted, but i’m interested. maybe i’ll go back…

i can thankfully say i am more at peace with the sarah-situation now. i was able to get some more background information and while you can’t always trust what people tell you, i think it’s pretty clear that she’s not the girl i wanted when we were in vienna.

so, a little tip to you aspiring couples out there: one person taking a 6-month “holiday” in a foreign country that costs $2000 to visit is not the recipe for wedding bells.

i will carry on. thanks for all your support out there!

played a friendly, $10 game of poker last night with three other people.

thought i was in the money for sure when after the first three hands i took out two people. first hand, no action, small bet, fold. second hand, i’m big blind, i flop a straight, someone goes all-in on 2 pair, i call, no-brainer. third hand, i get bullets. i go all-in and the guy holding top pair calls. so i’m looking at a ton of chips ready to make some moves.

it didn’t turn out well, but at least it didn’t take long. we really didn’t “play” much; just all-in’s back and forth until we both had hands we felt like playing.

australian people are cool.