Randomsterdam

So I am getting real worried about my return flight home this coming Thursday. It has been snowing pretty steadily in Amsterdam over the past few days and more accumulation is expected during the early part of this week. As it is, many flights around Europe have been cancelled because of snow in London, Paris, Germany, etc. Let’s keep our fingers crossed that the weather holds up for an on-time flight back home for the first time in close to a year!

Geez, closing in on one year since I was last home. It has been a fun year “on the road” and Amsterdam, my current home away from home, has proven itself to be quite the comfortable quarters. Coming here immediately from Perth I thought that the enthusiasm of being in a heavily connected cluster would see me whipping around every weekend to London, Brussels, Luxembourg, and everywhere in between. But thanks to financial crises with the Euro that have made the dollar stronger and my handy dandy Museumkaart (one time payment of $60 giving you access to hundreds of museums in the city…a normal museum entrance costs anywhere between $10-$15) I have been quite cozy lounging around in Amsterdam on the weekends. I did take a weekend trip to Barcelona several weeks back, but other than that, Amsterdam is the place to be!

My weekdays have been plenty full of driving around the Dutch countryside from meeting to meeting, and weekend activities have largely focused on museum hopping by day and Belgian beer drinking at night! The only work-related plug I’ll make here is that all my driving around has made me straight nasty at stick-shift driving. Ha, truth is there is still that awkward jolt between first and second gear and I will occasionally stall when going in reverse uphill – only because the clutch in our car is uber sensitive in reverse. But other than that, I quite enjoy driving stick shift and would go so far as to say that when I do eventually buy my own car I will prefer to have it be stick shift.

Like any good fashioned Western European city Amsterdam has its plethora of museums. The Anne Frank house and the Van Gogh Museum are the typical heavy hitters, both of which I was fortunate to visit. I was intrigued with what I learned in my visits to both.

Regarding Van Gogh, I was surprised to learn that he only really painted for some 10 odd years. He dabbled in other careers (including a preacher) before deciding to become a full time artist only 10 or so years before his eventual death by suicide. On top of that, although hailed as a Dutch master, most of his painting career was in France, not the Netherlands.

The surprising takeaway point at the Anne Frank house was that the annex where her family live/hid during Nazi occupation was actually a lot larger than I expected. From purely a physical space perspective, the square footage was larger than what the historical accounts I had learned in school relayed. The annex as it exists today is empty, as was instructed by Onno Frank, Anne’s father, when he renovated the house into a museum and foundation upon return from Auschwitz. That alone speaks volumes. The man survived Auschwitz. So while the annex is empty of original furniture, the diary is still there as are numerous relics and re-creative videos depicting that dark chapter in history. Perhaps the most sobering lesson of all was to learn that the worker who smuggled food and supplies to the family while they were in hiding and who found Anne’s diary and gave it to her father when he returned from Auschwitz, only died last year. Learning that was a sobering reminder into how not-so-far removed we are from WWII.

Beyond those two famous museums, my off-the-beaten track favorites so far have been the Amsterdam History Museum (Historisch Museum) and the newly opened Hermitage Museum, an extension of the world famous gallery in St. Petersburg, Russia.

When not museum hopping, it doesn’t take a bipartisan task force study to discover that one of my favorite activities is aimlessly wandering around the streets with my backpack and camera, popping into cafes to read my book and drink either coffee, beer, or wine on my weekend afternoons. Amsterdam certainly lends itself well to that on several fronts: its easy tightly compact urban layout has a “maze effect” to it, always lulling you into wandering to just the next corner; the English fluency of everyone makes it easy to ask “who, what, where, when, and why” is going on; and it is actually a decently cheap city compared to the rest of Western Europe (don’t get me started about Australia) so why the heck not take breather with a quick drink?

Despite the recent snow, the weather has held up for the most part. I was honestly expecting colder weather considering I’m in northern Europe, right along the fringes of the chilly North Sea. But with the exception of a few numbing winds, the temperature has never been too unbearably cold. The snow, mixed with the urban layout of Amsterdam with people zipping around on their 1950s style bikes (yup, everyone still bikes around in the snow), the many tram lines, and the brownstone houses really make the city feel like one big snowglobe …or perhaps a life size version of a Christmas tree train set. It has that charming, idyllic effect in other words. As much as I like the Christmas and holiday setting here, I’m eager to get home! So again, keep your fingers crossed that the snow gods remain dormant at least until the weekend. I’m all for a white Christmas, just not a white travel day!

Christmas feeling in A'dam

The bad children go to Spain

So this past weekend was the feast of St. Nicholas in the Netherlands, Flemish Belgium, and the former Dutch territories in the Caribbean. We can say it’s a Dutch thing. The Dutch, in their ingenuous and history-shaping ways, have given us “the Big Apple” as New York City’s nickname (see previous post), memorable World Cup final matches, and now….Santa Claus!

Saint Nicholas is historically the patron saint of the city of Amsterdam. Before that he was/is the patron saint of sailors, merchants, and children (straight from Wikipedia folks). That Amsterdam is a city whose riches and fortunes were underpinned by the trade of merchants and sailors might explain why a 4^th century bishop from Turkey ended up being the patron saint of a northern European capital. As such, Saint Nicholas came to be known as Sinterklaas in Dutch and therefore, the Dutch are credited to have handed down the tradition of Santa Claus. The names of course are similar, but the imagery of Sinterklaas and Santa Claus are nearly identical as well. Saint Nicholas/Sinterklaas is an old Caucasian man with a long white beard dressed in red. He comes by on the 5^th or 6^th of December every year and delivers presents to all the Dutch children.

Yes, yes, pretty much the same story as Santa Claus. However, I am a huge fan of the Dutch uniqueness to SinterKlaas. First off, he lives in Spain. Yes, SinterKlaas lives in Spain. Theoretically then, you can GPS the location of where Sinterklaas lives. Perhaps Sinterklaas is paranoid about the damaging effects of global warming in the North Pole? Maybe he studied Catalan as a second language and wanted more practice in the greater Barcelona area? I don’t know. All I know is that according to the Sinterklaas story, he lives in Spain.

Second, Sinterklaas comes every year to the Netherlands on a steamboat. When I was in Germany last year I learned about the term “blue banana” for the first time. It is a densely populated urban corridor that arches like a banana (don’t know why it’s blue however) from southern England all the way to Milan. Belgium and the Netherlands fall entirely in that populated cluster so you can imagine the traffic. Having personally sat in long hours of traffic in Belgium and throughout the Netherlands, I’ll admit that it might seem odd for Sinterklaas to come by steamboat, but in the end it’s pretty dam smart.

Third, Sinterklaas comes to the Netherlands every year in early December and it accompanied by his little helpers called “Black Peter” who help distribute presents. These tend to be white Dutch folks who paint their faces black and dress up in court jester suits. The black could symbolize the coal on their faces from sliding down chimneys……..or………a historical reference to the colonial and slavery footprint of the Netherlands. I’ll let you decide.

Finally, after delivering the presents to the good kids, the story goes that Sinterklaas takes the bad children with him back to Spain. This was the showstopper for me. Being bad means going to Spain? Sign me up! While Spain is typically where bad study abroad students go to party and drink beer at the Oveja Negra, how can a trip to Spain be a punishment by any other standards?

Behave - or else go back to Spain and talk with a lithp

I was one week early in Sinterklaas’s book, since just the weekend before I took a quick trip to Barcelona. It was my first time back since my junior year of college semester abroad in 2003. More to come on that in a bit. But in brief, it is still the same amazing city seen from a new yet still reminiscent perspective; hence the hilarity of the Sinterklaas story. While I did search for Sinterklaas this past weekend I admittedly came up short in seeing him. Instead, I did see some familiar faces and enjoy the company of co-workers from different projects who were visiting Amsterdam for the weekend to crash out and party like rock stars.

No sign of Sinterklaas in Dam Square

(l) Me, Lea visiting from Poland & Elyse; (r) Koen the Goon visiting from London. A Belgian drinking a Belgian beer

I Amsterdam

Having left my apartment in Perth at 12pm on a Tuesday and not arriving at my room in Paris until 10pm local time Thursday night, I calculate 64 hours of door-to-door travel. I flew from Perth to Sydney, where I spent the night; Sydney to Seoul, where I spent another night; and finally Seoul to Sydney. The worst part of it all? Not a single lousy mile of the 6 million mile trip counted towards my Delta Skymiles account. I flew Korean Airlines which is part of the same Sky Team Alliance as Delta, Air France, KLM, etc. So if you fly Korean Airlines, you rack up miles as if you were flying Delta. Simple as that. But because of “the class of ticket,” or “price of purchase” or “designated route” or “blah blah blah” this trip “isn’t eligible to transfer miles to my Delta account.” Whatever, alliance my @$$.

The second worst part of it all? Realizing that despite how great of an actor Liam Neeson is, he has been in some really really horrendous movies. Liam Neeson goes from class-A performances in movies like Schindler’s List and Batman Begins to put me out of my misery flicks like Taken or, as I regrettably watched from Seoul to Paris, Chloe which is basically a bastardized imitation of Unfaithful. Chloe is now up there with The Perfect Storm as movies where I just want to get two hours of my life back.

I arrived in Paris on a Thursday night and by Saturday afternoon I was driving through the Belgian countryside en route to the Netherlands. I never made it to Amsterdam during my study abroad semester in college or my 3 months working in Germany around this time last year. In restrospect, I am glad that I missed it on both occasions and can now “do it right” being based out of here for approximately the next three months. Despite its small size which I was unbeknownst to before (only 800,000 people) I consider Amsterdam one of THE premier Western European cities. The Netherlands itself is a very big small country which carries a large weight in the world.

It could be the Perth effect of just coming from the most isolated in the world, but this city is teeming with energy and packed with life. Amsterdam integrates various parts of different cities into one compact cluster, and I am still struggling to find the proper analysis for it after one week here. Its brownstone houses remind me of Boston; its alley-thin central city streets lined with H&M and Mango have a distinct Barcelona feel; the intersecting tram lines converging on the main plaza come off as very German; and of course, the anything goes tolerance of certain neighborhoods is something I have only previously come across in Asia. But the combination of everything is uniquely Amsterdam.

Very first impression: Amsterdam is a friggin wacky, mind-twisting alternate reality in which pedestrians, an army of bike riders, trams, and cars peacefully and harmoniously coexist. The Netherlands has more bike paths than the US and Canada COMBINED. That is a fact. Anyone who has been to Amsterdam would be a fool to dispute it. To get from one side of the street to the other you make your way past the pedestrians, look both ways through the super highway bike lane, watch out for cars in the street, and then dodge slow moving trams. That just gets you to the median and you then cross over the equivalent lanes on the other side of the street. Driving through Amsterdam’s thin roads you will find yourself tightly packed between a flurry of bikers on your right and tram cars on the left, and when crossing through one of the city’s many roundabouts your blood level rises trying to figure out just who exactly has the right of way. The harmony and volume in which all forms of transport intermingle on one street corner is just mind boggling. I cannot exaggerate the biking enough. Everyone, everyone, everyone in all shapes, sizes, colors, and age has a bike. There are multi-tiered parking garage structures for just bikes which has them stacked up by the thousands. I believe 1 million bikes can be found in a city of just 800,000 people. Every year 25,000 bikes get pulled from Amsterdam’s plethora of canals. No one wears a helmet and every bike looks the same.

I am very intrigued by the Dutch. For such a small country they pack a huge punch in the chapters of history. New York City – New Amsterdam – was of course first settled by the Dutch and in fact last year marked the 400^th anniversary of Henry Hudson’s arrival (Hudson was English, but sailed for the Netherlands). Common knowledge for sure, but do you know how New York got the nickname “the Big Apple?” According to a Dutch phrase, if you come out on top in a one-for-one trade, you have gained an egg from an apple. The Netherlands struck a deal with England during one of Europe’s 17^th century continental wars in which the Dutch traded their New Amsterdam colony for England’s territory of Suriname, just north of Brazil. Suriname, rich in sugar and a potential commodity cash cow, was the egg that the Netherlands got in exchange for the apple of a small, deserted island on the banks of the Hudson River. The English aptly changed the name of New Amsterdam to New York. Whoops….

As I often reflected about Portugal when living in Brazil, the Dutch once ruled the world. They were a naval power which dominated the trading route from Europe to Asia. During the Netherlands’ Golden Age of the 16^th century, Amsterdam was the most powerful cities in the world – built almost single handedly on the success of the Dutch East India Company, the world’s first public, multinational corporation.

There is a saying that God made the world but the Dutch built Amsterdam. The whole of the Netherlands is flat as a board and Amsterdam itself is built on ugly, harsh swampland with its highest point a whopping 1.5 meters above sea level. But through innovative engineering to reclaim land from the North Sea and an array of canals (more than Venice), the Dutch built a European powerhouse metropolis out of otherwise inhospitable land. The result is a very unique and mesmerizing urban landscape. Intuitively, Amsterdam is an easy place to figure out. The cobbled streets and murky canals are essentially concentric half loops revolving around the main train station in the north of the city. Being built on weak and wobbly foundations, side leaning houses and crooked buildings are common sites. By city ordinance, no building can be more than 5 stories high. Land is very valuable because of how scarce it is, so property taxes are calculated based on width. Naturally, this encourages tall, narrow, thin buildings with spirally staircases. Interestingly, windows on the upper floors tend to be very large in order to rope up furniture rather than the headache of transporting it up and down the stairs.

The Dutch are the tallest nationality on average in the world. Men are 5’11’’ on average, women 5’6’’. Yay for me! The Dutch are known for being among the most attractive people in the world (according to Lonely Planet) and for their forthright, brutally honest, and blunt sense of delivery. Don’t ask a Dutch person “do I look fat in this” and expect a modest answer, in other words.

Perhaps the most impressive and intriguing aspect that I have been most smitten by is that the Netherlands is a fluent, but not native English speaking culture. I know from experience that most Germans speak English and you can easily get around Paris playing the odds that enough people speak English. But this is a whole other ballgame. A Dutch person will greet you in Dutch but upon the slightest sign that you don’t speak the language, without pause, with no annoyance, and with astonishing ease he/she will switch to perfect English as cool as the other side of the pillow. The grammatical precision and fluency is astounding for a country and culture that has never been colonized by an English speaking nation. And whereas most countries consider it a burden to switch from their language to your English (rightfully so) the Dutch embrace it with a smile and a “how can I help you?”

That brings us to the theme of tolerance, also very typical Dutch. From what my walking tour guide told me, the Netherlands has had two traumatic historical experiences that have emboldened its psyche of liberalism and tolerance. First was the founding of the present day Netherlands itself. In the 1500s the Netherlands was ruled by Charles II of Spain, a staunch Catholic, who went on a relentless purge of non-Catholics in the Netherlands. Once they broke from Spain the Netherlands vowed to establish a tolerant country open to all religious practices. Fast-forward to WWII when Amsterdam, once a thriving metropolis home to more than 150,000 Jews, saw its Jewish population depleted to just 5,000 by the end of the war. Both prompted a lot of internalizing about the type of open and accepting culture the Netherlands wants to be.

Do those events directly explain why hundreds of legal marijuana-selling coffeeshops populate the city and half naked women dance in Red Light District windows soliciting themselves for 15 minutes or best offer? Probably not. Do they contribute in a way to the liberal and tolerant attitude of the city? I think so. The main theme that my tour guide promoted on our excursion was that there are three things to guarantee your success and assimilation into Amsterdam: be discreet, be good for business, and don’t hurt anyone. Add a bike into the mix and you're golden.

Since you've been gone

Well, well, well…where to begin? The travel winds have swirled yet again and this time I’ve ridden the gales back to the “old world,” back in time so to speak where it’s only a +6 hour time difference between me and majority of my modest readership. Greetings from Amsterdam! Almost six months to the day from when I first touched ground in Australia, I hopped on a jet plane and made a long trek from Perth to Paris with one night layovers each in Sydney and Seoul. I’ll get to Amsterdam in a bit because, as you can imagine, it’s a roller coaster of a place in its own right.

Departure day from Australia closed a very big chapter in the travel book that has been written over the past, say, 2-3 years. A nearly 6 month stint in Oz, made it my longest consecutive stay in any foreign country where I have ever lived. Through my one-on-one conversations with anyone reading this, it’s no secret that I wasn’t in love with Australia – Perth in particular. For me, both Australia’s virtue and vice was its similarity to the US. Same language of course which admittedly served as a guilty pleasure never having to preface a conversation with some version of “sorry, I don’t speak xxx;” same ease and accessibility of things because of efficient infrastructure (as opposed to Asia let’s say); and the same high quality of life which in itself provided less of a “wow factor” during my time there. All of the similarities perhaps explain why my entries were so few and far between in Australia – not so many culturally new things to write about I guess. The comfort and ease in which I was able to operate in Australia was certainly the virtue. But a big perk of my job is the chance to live in the obscure, different places. So Australia failed to live up to that respect.

However, professionally, I am very pleased with how the Oz experience turned out. I found the report that we were working on – the country’s upstream petroleum industry – super interesting. And as difficult as it was at times to understand, I really enjoyed riding the learning curve of the energy sector which included up close and personal conversations with industry folks such as the CEOs of Shell and INPEX in Australia, and the governor of Western Australia – Australia’s predominant energy state. Energy is definitely an industry that I am keen on getting more into in the future.

This has never been a blog about work, so I will end the work talk here. But it’s all to say that despite the personal boredom I often felt living in the world’s most isolated city, Perth and Australia as a whole had their fair share of great experiences. With the luxury of six months behind my back, I can now safely say that getting lost in the woods outside of Sydney (subject of a previous blog post) was one of the most exhilarating experiences of my life. I mean, shouting “help” into the barren wilderness so as to avoid sleeping on the dirt amongst God knows what types of snakes and spiders is quite the rush. I hit the open road for a fruitful trek up the Western Australian coast treating myself to stunning landscapes and scenery. I met some great people along the way, both local Aussies and expats whose travel paths I crossed. And I even conquered the tyrannies of distance for one week by taking a vacation to the Philippines and spending quality time with dear friends and family.

Australia is a tough place to “do” in six months, while working. There’s just so much to see and do. You can spend an entire year in the country enjoying all that it has to offer. At an initial glance it might look ludicrous that I never made it to the Great Barrier Reef or didn’t trek through the deserts in the central heartlands. Let’s just say that they’re high on my list of things to do when I do make it back to Oz and have more free time on my agenda for just the travel aspect. My job is interesting in that I am in an ambiguous state between “traveling” and “living” abroad. Too long in one set place to be just traveling, too short to be able to say I am living, this tension created a love-hate relationship between me and Australia. I loved having so many outdoor and adventurous trips to think of, but hated ultimately being dragged back to the infeasibility of squeezing cross country trips into just one weekend while budgeting $5 half gallons of milk and $2 per pound of apples into my weekly expenses. Australia has no shortage of fun and exciting things to do hence why I fully plan on dedicating one long strictly travel related trip to it sometime in the future. Until then, I leave Oz where it is, full of positive memories, and look forward to the new opportunities that await in the Netherlands.

Once every four years and one month later

Many people were expecting World Cup blog posts from me during the month of the tournament (and by many I mean 2). Yeah, I totally dropped the ball on that one. I coulda and I shoulda, but I didn’t. My bad. But in a nutshell here are my thoughts:

1) Europe is still clearly the king of soccer. The Spain-Netherlands final speaks for itself as the top two teams left standing were from Europe. But that aside, the two most dominant non-European teams of the tournament prior to them crashing out were Brazil and Argentina. You can argue Uruguay given their semifinal appearance, but let’s face it they had an easy road to the semis. Brazil and Argentina geographically are South American, of course, but European on soccer terms. Every single player on Brazil’s starting 11 against the Netherlands plays in Europe, with the exception of Robinho who played the second half of the season in Brazil while on loan from Manchester City. Ten of Argentina’s starting 11 against Germany play in Europe. There was much talk about the center of gravity shifting away from Europe given the success of all South American countries advancing out of their groups. But c’mon, when majority of your players play for the Barcelonas, Madrids, and Milans of the world as is the case with Brazil and Argentina, is there really a big paradigm shift going on? The equation is simple. You want to win World Cups, play in Europe. Hard pressed am I to see the US, Chile, Mexico, or South Korea ever winning the World Cup when your players are going to battle for Real Salt Lake or the Seattle Sounders.

2) Soccer is very popular in the US but it is not the US national team nor MLS that is transcending the game in the US. Yes, the US national team was a tremendous rallying point for Americans during the World Cup and if you saw that Youtube video of the montage of celebrations and reactions around the country for Donovan’s goal against Algeria, you would have to have a heart of stone if your emotions did not move you. I have long argued that video games are the main spark for soccer’s popularity in the US. I am as big a baseball and basketball guy as there is, but have elevated my interest in soccer to almost the same level because of the exposure and player familiarity that FIFA for PS2 and similar video games have created. Add the new dimension of cable, ESPN covering the Premiership, and satellite TV and MLS really stands no chance. Soccer is growing in the US, which is great, but I think the MLS will always be a secondary league. Which is fine, but expectations by its apologists thinking that it will become a great league need to be fine tuned.

The US National Team itself will continue to be a big rallying point for everyone to get behind once every four years. But I think South Africa more than anything affirmed our status in peoples’ minds as a gritty, scrappy team, but ultimately mid-tier at the end of the day. The law of averages proved itself for the US in South Africa 2010. They had a miracle run to the quarterfinals in 2002. Then came Germany 2006 when the US tried to prove that 2002 was not a fluke. They crashed and burned. South Africa 2010 averaged things out for the US as a good team, but not top-tier status. We needed an extra time goal in the last game of the group stage to earn the right to lose to a reputable, but not Alpha Dog Ghana team.

3) Spain (i.e. the Real Madrid and FC Barcelona All-stars) wins the World Cup and the KING of the country is not present to watch it? The Prime Minister not being there….still pretty weird but acceptable at the end of the day because of the 20% unemployment rate and other things on the country’s agenda. I still think he still should have been there, but again, forgiven. But the King not there? What else does he have to do? C’mon.

4) Italy’s coach at the end of the tournament shouldered the blame for not fielding a younger, more energetic team. To use a line from The Wedding Singer – “that’s something that could have been brought to my attention YESTERDAY!!” It was as if it were some revelation that they lost because of age and being outpaced. Can’t believe they didn’t see it coming when choosing the squad.

5) France was karma. Enough said. Shouldn’t have been in the tournament in the first place.

6) Portugal was ranked the #3 team in the world heading into the tournament. Really???? Did I miss something?

At first I thought being in Australia for the World Cup would be a drag, but it turned out to be perfect for my match viewing schedule. I was 6 hours ahead of South Africa, so same times at the US but pm instead of am. Matches were on conveniently at 7:30pm and 10pm. Yeah I had to get up early or stay up late to watch the 2:30am matches, but all in all it was better than if I were at work in the US and had to miss a great match because I couldn’t get away from my desk.

I spent a lot of time at the Perth casino and its entertainment complex watching some games because 1) it was a great atmosphere and 2) most bars were not open late whereas the casino is open 24 hours so the only spot to watch the 2:30am games. I was there for the US-England match. I was the lone American, maybe 3 others, amidst a crowd of hundreds of English folks. My ears are still ringing from their incessant chants. Makes sense that they were so large in number because Perth afterall is like 50% Asian people, 40% backpacking Brits, and 10% local Aussies.

So that's that . I am so going to Brazil in 2014 that it's not even funny. Who's in?!?!?!

The Second Coming

Aaahh, there’s nothing quite like taking two months off from blogging. But alas, I am back…with a vengeance…and I am glad to see that I did not upset anyone with my long layoff.

A lot has changed in the world since my last update. Mark Fred Truman and Jamie Meltzer are engaged to be wed (big ups!!), Spain is the champion of the world, LeBron takes his talents to South Beach, and leaking wells in the Gulf have been capped and unplugged and capped again. Hopefully this time for good. But the one constant that has remained is that I am still in Australia. Life goes on swimmingly and I find myself amidst “heaps” of work. Quotation marks required to emphasize that I am learning a bit of Australian down here. They don’t say “lots of” or “tons of”; to emphasize superlatives for quantity they say “heaps.” I’ll have lapses where I slip into local lingo but for the most part I am very proud, perhaps to the point of obstinate, of my American English.

I’ll occasionally say “lift” when referring to the “elevator” and more often than not these days I say “flat” when talking about my “apartment.” My mind still thinks in miles and Fahrenheit but I am becoming equally fluent in kilometers and Celsius. However, there is just some local lingo that I will never use. Ex: never ever will I say “hire” when I mean “rent.” It just doesn’t seem right. Trivial, but always out of place whenever I see “a car for hire” or the chance to “hire snorkeling equipment for the day.” But of greater importance, never on God’s green earth will I say “holiday” when I mean “vacation.” I recently had three days off from work so I took a road trip up north for vacation…not holidays. Christmas, Easter, 4^th of July and National Speak Like a Pirate Day. Those are HOLIDAYS. Trips that you take for pleasure are VACATION.

So on my recent VACATION, I went to a beach town called Monkey Mia (real name, not a joke) which is located on the peninsula of Shark Bay, about 10 hours north of Perth. I stopped along the way in several places, namely: the Pinnacles, Geraldton, Kalbarri National Park, and eventually Shark Bay/Monkey Mia. It was a lot of driving – basically about 4 hours each day either heading to or from Perth – and certainly life on the open road as one would imagine in Western Australia. The urban landscape of Perth gave way to open roads, green farmlands outside the city, then turning into dry, flat, rugged bushlands which blended into red sand deserts. I cut west as I headed closer to the Shark Bay peninsula so there were some times when I was driving in very pretty settings along the coast.

My first stop was at a place called the Pinnacles which is a desert about 3 hours north of Perth that has hundreds of limestone rock formations that have the same shape and look as termite hills. From there I spent the night in a fishing and shipyard town called Geraldton. Next stop was Kalbarri National park where I took probably one of the better hikes I have ever been on. First off, I did not get lost, so that of course always makes any experience worthwhile. But the 8km hike I went on had a great variety to its terrain. It began atop the cliffs of a ravine, then eventually dipped down into the ravine along the sandy dried up banks of a river, and then ended up going thru a forest terrain saying what’s up to some wallabies along the way.

Monkey Mia and Shark Bay were real kick ass beach towns with sparkling blue waters and stunning ocean views. Sunsets atop the cliffs let you see several whales blowing water out of their spouts and pods of dolphins swimming along. I could describe more in words, but the pictures will better serve you.

Driving on the open road under clear blue skies I was naturally tempted to push the car up to high speeds. I was probably averaging 90-95 mph, which admittedly, was scary at times. The roads are one lane in each direction so I broke a nervous sweat or two zooming past a car a 95 mph that was heading at me in equal speed. The most perilous thing to watch out for though were animals. They say to avoid night driving whenever possible, which I did. I only got caught driving at night for the last 2 hours of my trip heading back into Perth. But the “heaps” of dead kangaroos and emus on the side of the road reminded you that any of those guys can just jump out at you and take you (and them) out.

It’s the dead of winter here in Perth, which isn’t all that bad. Yes, it’s cold for Aussie standards but let’s face it, on any given day during peak afternoon hours I can very comfortably walk around outside in a t-shirt. Average daytime temperatures are around 60 degrees, but yeah, there is a nighttime and morning chill in the air. Australia suffers from the typical southern hemisphere infrastructure syndrome….like in Brazil, astonishingly, houses here are not built with heating or insulation! So when sitting at home the cold air lingers and it actually feels colder inside than the temperature is outside. But having survived a glimpse of a Russian winter and being of true New Jersey blood, I scoff at this winter weather.

Work is going well. We have had a crowded apartment for much of the past month and a half. First, one of our bosses from the Paris office was making rounds visiting teams on the field so she graced us with her presence. Then a few weeks after she left a new trainee in our company arrived to work with us for about a month. On top of that one of Jessica’s (my co-worker) friends from Paris was on VACATION and stayed with us for about three weeks. Come Monday it’ll be back to just Jessica and me, back to an empty nest. Having all this company was good, pleasant, and very healthy for work I believe. The mere physical presence of other people around changed up the atmosphere. And in training a new person to the job it forced both of us to think, rethink, and analyze our motions in a way that is perhaps subconscious when it’s just the two of us.

The report that we’re doing gets more interesting with each week. Having met with “heaps” of exploration and production companies, then marine service vessel companies, and onto subsea engineering ones I have expanded my vocab to be able to hold my own in cocktail conversation about multiples imaging when shooting 3D seismic; dynamically positioned floating production, storage, and offloading units; and flowlines, risers, and umbilicals, in subsea systems. Technical sarcasm aside, it’s a real great learning experience which I am enjoying.

Add to that a shifting political landscape. Again, not sure how much of Australian news reaches the shores of the US, but the former Prime Minister, Kevin Rudd, basically got sacked by an overnight mutiny from within his party last month. He lost a tremendous amount of popularity and national support after he introduced a “super-profits” tax on the mining, oil, and gas industry – the cash cows of Australia’s economy. So the #2 in the Labor Party, Julia Gillard, did some behind the scenes deals with her party members and they sacked Rudd. We now have the first ever female Prime Minister in Australia…but perhaps not for long…she called elections for August 21 because she wants to govern on her own mandate and not have this cloud of mutiny hanging over her. Interesting time for Australian politics. All this work that Jessica and I are doing should come out either in the September or October edition of the oil industry magazine we work with. Copies to come for my three blog readers when it “hits the press.”

That is all for now. I am off to refill my “long black” and continue diving into Dan Brown’s The Lost Symbol which I….uumm…took out on a long-term loan….yeah….from a hostel I stayed at. Good to be back.

Confused identity

Australia can be a confusing place. A few weekends ago I made the great migration from the bright lights and big city of Sydney to the outback of Western Australia. I write to you from Perth, (second only to Honolulu as the most isolated city in the world) and former stomping grounds of Chris G-Man Gorini, which I foresee as my home base for approximately the next three months. I say it’s confusing because on my Qantas Airlines flight 575 from Sydney to Perth, NO ONE asked to see my ID. Not a single soul. When my co-worker and I arrived we checked ourselves in at the automated machine by entering our reservation code. Out popped our boarding passes and we proceeded to the desk to check-in our luggage. Normally that’s where they hit you up for identification…..

….except when traveling domestically in Australia.

It was most certainly a lack of oversight instead of policy that they didn’t ask for ID. Between our personal stuff and work related gear (printer, magazines, etc) we clearly got to the counter with a lot of excess baggage and frenetically asked the agent lots of questions hoping to find a loophole to not get charged the insane excess baggage prices. So amidst the flurry of questions he probably forget to ask for our ID. But at security, it was certainly standard procedure to not check IDs or boarding passes. There was a line of 8 people taking off their shoes, emptying their pockets, and no one was asked for identification.

Perhaps I am so programmed to post-9/11 air travel that anything short of 3 ID checks and full pat downs seems irresponsible. Last December when I flew from Paris to Philadelphia they checked for ID during the boarding process itself; after they ripped my boarding pass but before stepping on to the plane there was a guard who asked for my ID, opened my hand carry to inspect it, and patted me down. I’m not saying that should happen all the time. Just that we have come to expect full fledged ID checks when traveling by air and the absence of seems an oddity. Decoupling ID checks from the populist and in Australia’s case, unlikely, terrorist argument, to me it just seems sloppy to not verify someone’s identification when boarding a plane.

What a coincidence, you do not need to present an ID when entering a government building in Australia either. I have been in several government office buildings, both federal and state, for work over the past few weeks. In Canberra we had a meeting with the Secretary for Resources and Energy (the Secretary here is not the equivalent of a cabinet Secretary in the US like the Secretary of State, Secretary of Transportation etc….that equivalent in Australia would be called a Minister) and last we met with the Premier of Western Australia (equivalent of a governor). ID check? Nope. Just scribble your name on a sign-in sheet and have seat on the couch please, the Premier will see you in just a few moments.

So you don’t need an ID to board a plane or enter a government building in Australia. But go figure, you do need to present 2 forms of ID AND proof of an Australian bank account to buy a portable modem and sign up for a month-to-month plan at Vodafone. Then what about going out to bars and clubs? Well, that depends. I’ve been to some places where they let me in with my State of New Jersey Department of Motor Vehicles issued drivers license. I’ve been elsewhere where they demand a passport in order to let me in because “drivers licenses can be faked” (like I’m gonna carry my passport around to the bars) and another club where they ask for a passport AND scan your fingerprints upon entrance. All in all it’s a confusing mix of inconsistencies but not checking for IDs for air travel will make me scratch my head for a long time.