Brissie, sports, et al

I was up in Brisbane – “Brissie” – two weeks for work. Several interesting things struck me. First, as I learned last year, but still surprising nevertheless, is that you need absolutely no identification to fly on planes in Australia. If you print up your boarding pass at the self check in kiosk, then the desk agent makes a point to ask for it when you check your bags in. But what good is a boarding pass without a verifying your ID? Same thing at security, not a soul asks to see your picture for passenger verification. Even in the world that we lived in pre-September 11 checking for ID on a flight was pretty standard. Second, it was my first time going thru daylight savings times when traveling south to north in a country. Melbourne being almost as far south as you can get on the Australian mainland has daylight savings for the summertime. Brisbane is central east coast so much closer to the equator (with 95 degree humid weather to verify!!) and does not do the daylight savings thing. Everywhere in the US of course does daylight savings all in one fell swoop from Maine to Miami and from what I recall when living there, Brazil does the same. I’m loving the late summer nights in Melbourne with the sun still setting a little past 8:30.

I was bracing myself for a lot of destruction and damage in Brisbane in the aftermath of last month’s terrible floods. Thanks, by the way, to all who inquired about how I am doing and if I was caught up in the floods. I was in Sydney when it all went down watching it on the news, a good 600 miles south. I was very surprised to barely see any trace of damage in the city itself; the closest I saw to an unduly sight were the brown, murky waters of the city’s river. From how it was explained to me, while the river did rise and overflow in the city itself, the worst of the damage occurred in the northern suburbs.

My Superbowl Sunday was spent driving a long 6 ½ hours each way to an industrial port town called Gladstone. I left Brissie at 5:30am on Monday morning and did not reach my destination until a little before noon; kickoff for the Steelers-Packers was approximately 10am Aussie time. As long as the drive was, it was really cool to go up to Gladstone. Long story short, an island about the size of Manhattan less than a mile off Gladstone’s coast will soon be the center of gravity of the country’s petroleum industry in about seven years. Various consortia of the industry’s heavyweights from Royal Dutch Shell to Total to ConocoPhillips are throwing hundreds of millions of dollars at building four large-scale liquefaction plants to export natural gas to Asia. Basically oceans of natural gas are being explored, then frozen to a liquid state, and shipped off to China, Korea, Japan, and Malaysia. Ground will be broken next month on the first big project, but meanwhile I had a meeting with the main port corporation that runs logistics out of there.

Island in the background will provide decades of energy to China, Korea and Japan. The guy in the foreground was happy to be there.

Admittedly it ached having spent Superbowl Sunday/Monday on the open road. As I’ve told my friends, you can take the boy out of America but you can’t take American sports out of the boy. From a sports perspective, it’s big time games like the Superbowl, World Series, and the 3 NY Knicks games this season in which the Garden was buzzing that make my heart ache for not being able to kick it with friends in the US. Australia is in its own separate world with sports and is so far removed both in time and selection from my sports of interest. Football, baseball, and basketball are replaced with Aussie rules footy, rugby, and netball. Not even soccer is that popular here. And much to my surprise which I learned last year, they call it “soccer” here at well. So while Europeans make fun of Americans calling football “soccer,” 22 million Aussies do it as well. “Football” here is Aussie Rules Football….in short, a mix between rugby and soccer, sort of.

However, one sport that has caught my interest, I must admit, is cricket. As an avid baseball fan I can appreciate the intricate rules that go into cricket – although I don’t quite know them yet – and I dig the mere fact that it resembles and perhaps inspired the creation of baseball. Cricket is huge in Australia, as it is in most of the former British colony countries, in the many highlights I have seen of it on TV here it is a pretty badass sport.

Last year in Perth I had a conversation with an English guy living in Australia who was a big time cricket fan. He gave me hell for now knowing what The Ashes were. Making the wild leap that you don’t know what The Ashes are either, it’s a cricket tournament played every other year between England and Australia. From what I understand it is Duke-Carolina basketball times Auburn-Alabama football sprinkled with Yankees-Red Sox baseball. To reciprocate, I gave him crap for not being able to explain what the very bare bones basic objective of cricket is in one sentence. Examples : soccer – kick the ball past a fixed line more times than your opponent.; basketball – put the ball in the hoop more times than your opponent; baseball – round the bases and touch homeplate more times than your opponent. But when this guy started explaining he went off with “you see there are these things called wickets and then the bowler has to roll the ball and then….” WRONG!! One sentence or that’s it! To me, any sport should be able to be explained in one sentence. And then the strategy of how to achieve that objective – the beauty of the game – develops from there.

But my time in Australia has exposed me to enough cricket highlights to convince me that it’s actually a pretty bad ass game. I still don’t know the first thing about it, but my knowledge will get there. I am very interested to learn more about the game. Last weekend marked the beginning of the cricket World Cup being held in India. As such, ESPN.com surprisingly had a brief article about the game, widely lauded as the second most popular sport on the planet after soccer. I remember watching an Anthony Bourdain episode a few years back when he went to India. They tried to teach him cricket and in his bastardized explanation of the game it came out as extremely convoluted. But this clever document sums it up pretty well.

http://a.espncdn.com/media/pdf/110215/cricket101.pdf

I still crave and would kill for the NBA, MLB which will start up soon and La Liga soccer. But each time I watch cricket I get more and more intrigued.

Sprite is not lemonade

If you asked me four months ago if I would ever find myself back in Australia within a year I would have said something to the tune of “you’d have to tie me down and drag me over kicking and screaming.” No disrespect, but I had reached the limit of my comfort zone paying $9 for a pint of beer, $5 for a half gallon of milk, and being oh-so-close to the beach yet oh-so-far in season from swimming. I needed a healthy break from Australia in other words. And so I went off to the Netherlands and had a merry old time. Alas, life has thrown me a curveball and I now find myself back in Oz. East coast this time. And the second verse is indeed a lot more summer than the first. Oh hell yes, summer! Bona fide, legit, summer beach time weather. The beers are still $9 per pint (and depending on the bar, could be $9 per BOTTLE – holy $h!t) but the weather is 95 degrees and sunny on those Saturday afternoons on Bondi Beach. Or as they say in Australian speak: “35 degrees.” So yes, everyone here is decked out in their “swimmies” (bathing suit) and “sunnies” (shades) looking real pretty in their “thongs” (flip flops). Oh Australia….it’s a love hate I have with this place. But right now with the summer weather, sunny skies, and upbeat energy that was lacking my entire 5 months in Perth last year is definitely leaning more towards love right now.

The lingo here never ceases to amuse me. Australian English is not at inundated with slang and local phrases, in my opinion, as British English. But the randomness of things you don’t expect to hear gives me a kick. For example, they love to say “whilst” here; not as a derivative of “while” but as a means to contrast things. “Whilst it’s a really great beach day, we decided to go hiking in the mountains.” Sounds super formal right? Another one of my favorites is “stands me in good stead.” Translation: “put me in a good position.” Ex: “I think this job would be a great opportunity…it will stand me in good stead for my future career.” But perhaps my most interesting clash with the local language to date was trying to order lemonade at a bar.

Me: “Hi, can I please have a lemonade?”

Bartender: “Sure.”

Bartender serves me a drink.

Me: “This is a lemonade?”

Bartender: “Yes.”

Me: “Hhhhmm, it looks awfully bubbly and clear to be a lemonade.”

Bartender: “It’s a lemonade.”

I taste it.

Me: “This is Sprite.”

Bartender: “Yes, it’s lemonade.”

Me: “No, this is Sprite. A carbonated soft drink. I asked for a lemonade.”

Bartender: “Mate, that’s what lemonade is.”

The scene ends with me not leaving a tip.

Australia Part 2 has been full of those quirky little experiences, and a lot of moving around. I am currently in Melbourne (pronounced Mel-BURN…don’t make the horrendous American mistake of pronouncing it Mel-BORN) after spending most of January in Sydney. Sydney was great. As stated, it’s the dead of summer and every weekend for me was a merry-go-round of bumming around on Sydney’s three main beaches – Bondi, Coogee, and Manly. I had a great time.

Melbourne, however, is quickly creeping up on my list of favorite cities. It is almost the complete opposite of Sydney in its make and mold. The analogy that I often use is that Sydney is to Melbourne as LA is to San Francisco. Both LA and Sydney revolve around the beach. There is stuff going on downtown, in the city itself, but the main happenings are in the network of beach communities up and down the coasts. Melbourne and San Fran are both in a bay; so the beach life doesn’t dominate. Instead, life here is all about the cosmopolitan, artsy scene of the city. Melbourne has a very European feel to it with its outdoors cafes tucked in little alleys. It is also much thicker and wider in its ethnic diversity than Sydney. Sydney is very multinational, but mainly a hodge-podge of Asian cultures. Melbourne covers a much wider range of ethnicities. For example, outside of Athens and Thessaloniki, Melbourne has the largest Greek speaking population in the world….I never would have guessed. There is also a dominant presence of Turks, Middle Easterners, Italians, and East Africans here that I never came across in Sydney. I really appreciate the richness of diversity here. But of course, the Asian presence here is enormous, which I love since it has totally fulfilled my large craving and appetite for Asian food!

Victoria, the state which Melbourne is the capital of, has a lot of nicknames for it. They say you experience four seasons in one day (freakish weather patterns probably coming from the Southern Ocean) and that Victoria is the sports capital of Australia. Australian Rules Football (“footy”) originated in Victoria and every January the Australian Open is played in Melbourne. My very first night in Melbourne was the same night as the men’s final of the Australian Open. Huge crowds converged in Federal Park in the city center just a stone’s throw from the stadium to watch Djokovic vs. Murray.

I’m real excited to be here and am brainstorming the right way to balance getting to know Melbourne as a city with all the plentiful trips along the coast. I head up to Brisbane next week for several meetings for work. Brisbane and the state of Queensland, as you might have heard in the news, has been pounded by devastating weather over the past month. While the Northeast of the US is getting buried with snow, Queensland has been hit hard with floods and cyclones. While the recent Category 5 cyclone that hit Australia was much further north (near the Great Barrier Reef), Brisbane itself was devastated with flooding in early January. It should be an interesting experience to visit the city in its aftermath, which I’ll follow up with next week.