Lost in the city
Sunday, 29 August, 2004
I love the Sydney CBD. Well, aspects of it. I don't like the crowds or the noise or the litter that peppers the streets, and I probably wouldn't be as fond of it if I worked there every day. But I love the Queen Victoria Building with its stately architecture, interesting shops and restaurants (like The Tearoom which is located in the old ballroom on the northern end of Level 3) and toilet stalls that were once horse stalls (and the Foucault's pendulum which isn't there anymore but I thought it was fascinating and used to watch it for ages when it was) ... I love sitting on the Town Hall steps watching the traffic go by, reading a book while waiting for a friend ... I love the art galleries, walking along Cockle Bay at night, the Royal Botanic Gardens ... I love the fact it's always changing—always different ... and, oh yes, I love it that my favourite bookstores are within a 5-minute walk of each other (Galaxy, Dymocks George Street and the increasingly popular Kinokuniya). Every now and then I like to plan a visit to the city just to walk around in it. Get lost in it.
On Friday I slept in, made minestrone for the first time (you have to boil the beef for two hours until it's tender), tried to make a dent in my To Do list and then Ben and I drove to Sydney to my father's house. My father's family sometimes reminds me of The Godfather's but without all the violence, crime and killing. There are all these extended branches that seem only loosely connected with me and yet everyone is so close and loving (even if they all speak Chinese and I can't understand them). Helena's brother even gave Ben and myself little red money packets, though I don't understand why.
Everyone was late so we were waiting for a while. We read the newspapers and the magazines on the kitchen counter. I noticed that Richard Linklater has made a sequel to that lovely movie, Before Sunrise—Before Sunset. (I always wondered what happened to those characters. Perhaps it is fitting that now I should be talking about wandering around the city as that is what Julie Delpy and Ethan Hawke do in Before Sunrise—eating ice creams, playing pinball, paying a poet for a poem that includes the word “milkshake”, walking for hours and hours, talking and talking.)
We had family photographs with a professional photographer in just about every single group permutation known to man before heading out to dinner at an authentic Chinese retaurant in Hurstville—the kind where the carpet has nearly been worn threadbare, there are tanks full of lobsters/crabs/abalone at the entrance, the floorspace is almost the size of a football field and is packed full of tables, and the waiters, when a party is done with their meal, sweep everything up in the tablecloth and dump it in a trolley for cleaning.
We had the customary savoury soup-before-the-meal and sweet soup-after-the-meal, as well as stacks and stacks of seafood (scallops, lobster, crabs, pippies AND fish). I thought it would all be over when we demolished the seafood but no, there was more. And of course there was fruit and sesame seed biscuits to finish it off. We staggered out of the restaurant at 10:30 and Ben drove me to my mum's house where I was staying the night. (He went home to Wollongong.)
I found my mum asleep on the couch with the TV tuned to some show called “The Glasshouse”. She turned it off and we ended up talking until 2 in the morning. I haven't done that with my mum for ages. She told me something interesting about my upbringing that I hadn't really known but perhaps had guessed—that the reason why she got me and my brother to do household stuff (like the washing up, making our own lunches, the laundry and taking out the garbage) was because she was reacting to the way her sister was raising our cousin. Our cousin was never allowed to do anything for herself; everything was done for her. She was driven to school every morning and picked up from the station every afternoon. Now she's in her thirties and still more or less dependent on her parents. My mum wanted us to be independent—to be able to do things for ourselves. Even when my brother complained bitterly about the washing up, often wheedling her into helping him, and she thought it would be easier if she did it herself, she persevered because she knew in the end it would be worth it. And now, if my brother comes over to have dinner with them, he will automatically get up and do the dishes for them.
On reflection (and in addition to some of the stuff that came out of Ainsley Poulos' elective on hospitality), I think that this is probably a good thing to do for your kids. Not only does it take some of the pressure off you to do everything (which you can't) but you are slowly training them to be unselfish and servant-hearted, as well as giving them the skills they will need when they leave home. Ben never had that and I really noticed the difference between his background and mine when we got married and he didn't know how to do anything. Perhaps if he had lived out of home before we got married that would have helped. Who knows?
Peter is away at the moment so I slept in his room. I didn't sleep very well—I had a headache and my brain wouldn't shut up—but I was okay the following morning. I had fruit for breakfast. My mum kept giving me things (a free sample of muffin mix she didn't want [I have never seen my mother make muffins in my entire life], computer headphones). She drove me to the station at 10 and I caught the train to Town Hall, reading Dogsbody all the way (I had brought it because, even though I was really in the middle of Elementals: Water, it was too big, being a hardcover. Sometimes I'm uneasy about starting a new book when I'm in the middle of another one but Elementals: Water is short stories so doing that sort of thing doesn't break up the flow too much). The train wasn't that full so I was able to get a seat.
At Town Hall, the sun was shining and the streets weren't choked with people yet. I met George on the steps and she got me to hold pieces of her essay as she cut them out with a pair of nail scissors and put them in order. Miranda was running late so we had a good catch up while we were waiting, the sun warming our backs. When Miranda showed up, we walked down to the restaurant but I had sort of forgotten where it was so we headed in a circle around the block for a while. I knew the vague direction and we did eventually get there. It wasn't the rush period yet so we got a table straight away and were inundated with yum cha carts trying to get us to eat their wares. Miranda, who is fluent in Cantonese and Mandarin, did most of the ordering, with me going, “No thanks,” or “Yes please,” and George shruggging her shoulders going, “Whatever.” It was good to catch up with Miranda whom I'm sure I haven't seen since I quit working at UNSW last year. She treated us to lunch and she also had some packets of Chinese fungi and almonds for me because she wanted to teach me how to make soup.
We all parted ways at Town Hall and then I went on through the QVB, underneath George Street and Myers to the Pitt Street Arcade. (Another thing I like about the city is that there are bits of it where you can walk around without ever having to go out onto the street. Toronto has a warren of those sorts of places which connect with the subway.) I ended up in Lincraft (bypassing Borders and Angus & Robertson which was very self-controlled of me). I needed to find a birthday present for my mother-in-law and I thought vaguely I might be able to find something there because Cathy's hugely into craft (bear-making, knitting and patchwork). Every time I go into a craft store I feel giddy at all the possibilities of things you can make but which I can always ruin. I only had half an hour and had to make a decision quickly. I knew Cathy already had a sewing basket and I was just about to despair when I saw these sheep hanging on a pillar. They were knitting bags—with a zipper on their backs and handles coming off their sides. I stood there for ages unable to make up my mind. I called Ben to ask his advice but couldn't get hold of him. Finally I thought, “I'll get it anyway,” and supplemented it with some alphabet blocks and a gift voucher.
This meant I was late to meet Haoran at Kinokuniya. Not that he cared; I found him firmly entrenched in the Comics/Graphic Novels section, happily reading away. He raised his eyebrows at the sheep hanging off my arm. “Yes, I feel a bit silly carrying this,” I told him. “Sheepish?” he replied. (Ha ha.)
Haoran very generously lent me Sandman Vol's 1 and 6-10. My luggage, which had only started with one little bag, had now expanded quite considerably with all the things I had been given since the night before. I didn't mind but it does make wandering around a bookstore quite cumbersome. So I left it all with Haoran in Comics/Graphic Novels while I went exploring.
Kinokuniya, as well as being huge, is very extensive and doesn't just stock what is mainstream. Their stationery section, which occupies about one fifth of the floorspace, looks like it's been completely cut and pasted from Japan—everything is small, cute, covered in Sanrio-type characters and encased in clear thin plastic. There was an entire rack of origami paper, an entire rack of pens and an entire rack of folders. Their stock of journals was disappointing but then everywhere is disappointing or too expensive and I should just stick to the A5 spiral Visual Art diaries that you can get for $2.50 at the Uni shop#8212;perhaps this age's equivalent to the humble Moleskine (used by such visionaries as Van Gogh, Bréton, Hemingway and Neil Gaiman, but which now sell for the not-so-humble price of $30 each). I treated myself to a new pen which writes at 0.3 mm (black of course), I unearthed the DVD of Persuasion which is impossible to find and was equally impossibly selling for under $20, and I also splurged on The Spellcoats (Diana Wynne Jones) because my Dalemark quartet was incomplete and it didn't seem like it would turn up on eBay any time soon. (My set don't match but who cares.)
At that point I thought I should escape before I bought anything else, so I returned to Haoran with my purchases and suggested that we pay a visit to Galaxy, making sure I checked in my wallet at the counter (I got the Michael Moorcock pigeon hole). It is always interesting wandering up and down the shelves with someone who reads the same sort of genres as you do but who hasn't necessarily read the same stuff as you. We meandered through science fiction/fantasy A-Z, reviewing and making recommendations as we went (“I can't believe anyone can actually stand reading Sara Douglass; her writing's appalling.” “Have you tried Guy Gavriel Kay?” “George R.R. Martin's A Game of Thrones is THE best fantasy series ever.” “That's a huge call.”) Haoran emerged with Death: The High Cost of Living (Neil Gaiman); I firmly resisted the temptation to snap up The Last Light of the Sun (Guy Gavriel Kay) and emerged with promises to lend Haoran a decent chunk of my library.
It was 4:30 when we emerged, blinking, into the dying light of the day. We looked at each other and said, “What are you doing now?” “I don't know. What about you?” Haoran said he wanted to get a drink so we traversed the underground of Town Hall station to some place called Easy Way and he treated me to a mango green tea with pearls and jelly (I was being adventurous. I'm sure it's the strangest thing I've ever drunk). We sat on the Town Hall steps and talked about budgeting for clothes (how much do you spend on clothes every year?) and words of wisdom to pass onto students doing the Unileavers course I'm running with Pete. Before I knew it, it was 5:30 and I had to go.
I ran into Chris at the ticket booth of Town Hall (he was off to play trivia to support the Australian handball team). My train had just arrived so I ran down the escalator to catch it (sheep, Sandman and all) and read Dogsbody all the way to Jannali where Ben picked me up. We drove to his parents' place where we had takeaway Thai for dinner, opened presents (well, I couldn't wrap the sheep so it was really unzipped) and then went to Tim and Ros' new flat for dessert (chocolate mudcake!) I can't believe they're getting married in three weeks! Ros gave us the guided tour. We sat around eating cake and drinking tea. I had a chance to catch up a bit with Liz who invited me to speak at St. George Girls' ISCF next term (still thinking about whether I should). Everyone else had to go but Ben and I stayed on for a bit longer, laughing at the text on the packaging on the pirated DVDs that Ros' current flatmate had brought back from China. Some of the credits were completely wrong. Some of the movie blurbs had us in stitches—particularly the ones for Charlie's Angels: Full Throttle and 2 Fast and 2 Furious. Ben wanted to scan them in and put them online. At 10:30 Ben and I said goodbye and headed back to Wollongong.
And I finished Dogsbody just after midnight.
Blinks:
A way of funding writing in the future: pitch and idea and get people to support it.
Place where you can hire play equipment for parties, etc.
How to recalibrate the home button on your iPhone.
Unsolicited manuscripts accepted by Pan Macmillan with certain conditions.
Thought Balloon is a group blog in which the writers tackle a new theme every week? month? with one-page scripts. This URL is for their Phonogram ones.
How to sew a zipper on a knitted garment.
Issues organised by tale.
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My fave part of Sydney is King St Newtown. I just love the way so many diverse people can co-exist in the way they do, plus all the rush that you get there.
I love Easyway! The pearl milk teas always make me sick, but I still drink them anyway heheheheh…your drink sounded nice.
It was great to see you
The Peter Lik shop/gallery on the top floor of the QVB is cool. His photography is sublime.
Just had a look at that link with Foucault’s pendulum - what a cool page =)
I look forward to exploring more of Newtown when I’m at college
I forgot to say how much I enjoyed this post. I love exploring cities and all their little nooks and crannies too.