Rich and Strange Aeons

Nov 23

Mostly stayed home reading and cooking, then went out to the St Kilda games. The cute girls from last week weren't there. :( But I got to teach people Settlers of Catan, and to my surprise ended up winning after a long game. My expansion sucked but I bought lots of dev cards, got largest army and longest road and manages to break out a bit, then build a sheep port, then get lucky rolls, trades, and the sheep port to build cities and win. Sheep were usually abundant -- rolled on 5, 6, 8, or 9! -- but I think my final trade was in fact to buy an extra sheep so I could port it into stone and build my city.

Then played more Bang! the Dice game. Couple with 5 players, couple with 7. I think the AWOL organizer had a houserule last week for 7 players, where you randomize whether there are 2 deputies or 2 renegades; I applied that and people seemed to like it. Also the one where you deal out two characters per player so people can pick an ability.

Chatted about accents and politics before going home.

Nov 24

Went to the Royal Botanic Gardens. Any actual botany was mostly wasted on me, but as experiences I liked some lake with islands (and a gondola), a rather large fern gully, and a rather small and hot tropical greenhouse. There are also various signs about plants and ecology used by the aborigines.

Went to a Meetup to see that penguin colony at dusk. The organizer messed with the times so I walked in earlier, running into a couple from the stargazing Monday, so we hung out. The penguins don't really come in until half an hour after sunset, but if you wait until it's dark and the people go away, you can have a pretty rocking penguin experience. There are streetlights so you can actually see them, also rangers with red flashlights (torches, here). They swim out before sunrise and return after sunset and spend their time deep in the water, so apparently they can't see red light and have no ability to protect their eyes from bright white light. No flash!

Tram out announced stops, tram home on the same line didn't.

17 Nov

Made travel plans (one more week in Melbourne, 2 weeks in Hawaii, LA.) Had a nice phone call with a friend. Went to another Japanese exchange meetup, more about culture than language per se, was pretty fun. Checked out the Night Noodle Market, was crowded and expensive and my nose kept running, I fled home.

18 Nov

Took the 109 to Port Melbourne beach. I preferred St Kilda beach, less any difference in the beach (which I stay off of because of sand) and more the surrounding area. Kilda had shops and a Coney island clone and penguins, Port had a cruise ship and trucks loading it. I did find a parking meter saying $5/hour or $13.30/day, which I think overrides the "thirty" I thought I heard Saturday. I had to blow my nose nearly continously and wondered what kind of pollen was blowing off the ocean!

Later I looked up my allergy results and yeah, I'm allergic to grass pollen, the levels of which are HIGH and EXTREME.

Took the 1 tram downtown. Some trams like the 96 are spiffy. Some are old and poorly air conditioned (but have opening windows) and no stop announcements and horrible narrow tram platforms in the street inches away from traffic.

Spiffy or not, tram speeds aren't that much faster than walking, if nothing goes wrong.

Checked out a Japanese market, got mugicha, no hojicha available.

Tonight's meetup was a stargazing trip, taking the train out to some stop with no obvious reason for existing. I was the only white person. Had fun talking to a couple of Korean girls on the train. This is a real train, with bathrooms, and conductor checking tickets, and 30 minute headways if that. At our gaze point the ground was pretty dark but there was still a fair bit of glow from Melbourne, especially off the clouds as they moved over. More stars than you see in a city, but sure not Dark. I did see two satellites (one of which I found), two clear shooting stars, and maybe two more. The organizer took photos. I didn't realize what the multi-exposure ones would be, I thought they'd be superimposed in one place, not 'walking'.

19 Nov

Went to the St Kilda tram stop, which is several minutes earlier than St Kilda beach. It wasn't too exciting, just a modest and not entirely thriving commercial district. Some "New Orleans" ornate buildings. Also a Madame Spaghetti gelato shop, which sounded confused, but is actually https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spaghettieis

16 is another horrible tram, which I took to go pick up the keys of my next place. But some tram broke down and we were stuck for 15 minutes until the passengers rebelled. There were at least 11 trams backed up head to tail, and apparently everyone rebelled at once, or one tram rebelled and triggered the others. So something like 1000 people marched toward downtown Melbourne, in surprisingly good humor. I almost felt sorry for the cars trying to make a simple turn and having to wait for a human river to pass.

Tried taking another tram after my keys, but it merges onto the tracks of the broken down lines, which were jammed with late trams or something. Remember I said they were only somewhat faster than walking if nothing went wrong? Yeah, if something goes wrong then they are not at all faster than walking... I found that meditating while I walked really did reduce my annoyance levels.

Meetup was a Spanish language thing. A Colombian guy talked faster than I could understand easily, and ended up seeming annoyed with us and reading; he said he was a professor of Spanish literature back home, but is here with his girlfriend and just works as a laborer. I walked with an English woman, whose levels matched mine.

Took a bus home. Yeah, no stop announcements.

Skype call with W. Woo!

20 Nov

New place. Really hot -- 32 or 33 C -- and high grass pollen levels, so I hid indoors apart from a grocery run. I'm in a desert of reasonably priced food: the close market is an IGA which is small and overpriced, and the alternatives are IGA Xpress which are even more so. In the evening I went to a general language thing, running into the aftereffects of *another* broken own tram. The event was loud and disorganized and I fled earlier, getting some Japanese food. A possibly drunk guy walked in demanding chow mein, which the staff hadn't even heard of; they eventually sorted out that that was a Chinese dish and this was a Japanese place, and he left abashed rather than belligerent. I waggled my eyebrows at the waitress, who later asked if I'd been there before, she thought she recognized me. Was pretty friendly, I was trying to weight the odds of 'flirt' vs. 'being friendly'. Bayesian prior is against me.

Only spent one week in Hobart. Small city didn't appeal to me; cold rain made hiking unattractive, as did increasing hay fever; figured two weeks left could be more happily spent in Melbourne, say.

Arrived in Melbourne Wednesday. Once again, the flight involved no ID checks, no shoe removals, no emptying of water bottles... Took 30 minutes to drop off my bag with Virgin Australia, no kiosks and only a few people to handle multiple flights. Also either luggage scales are shit or I've somehow acquired 5 more kg in my luggage.

Magnetized substances are considered dangerous items.

Virgin gives a bit of water and a cheap snack for free.

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Like Hobart, there's a SkyBus to escape the airport, costing $19.50. Unlike Hobart, it runs every 8-10 minutes.

First impression: 8 or 10 lane highway, flatness, a building saying "Sexyland" but with high clear windows.

Second impression: mass of skyscrapers, like the Chicago Loop.

Ran into my host on the way there, lol. I'm actually staying with her old Chinese parents who don't speak much English. Friendly, though.

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Melbourne transit is a mix of buses (not taken), trains (longer distance and lower frequency, I think), and trams, lots of trams. When I'd checked ahead on a Sunday afternoon they seemed to be running every 30 minutes, but on a weekday it's more like every 10. They have ROW (right of way), but not signal priority, so I'd put them in between buses and true light rail. Fares are high (4.30) but capped low ($8.60), not sure if caps are per mode (tram, train) or global. If you know you really want to travel, a pass is $44. But there's a free tram zone, which I can walk to in 8 minutes.

My host had a spare transit card and lent it to, but I decided to explore my phone's NFC capabilities, activating Google Pay. So in general I can now pay for things just by tapping, and I didn't have to pay $6 for a pre-paid card. I *also* have a Melbourne 'card' on my phone now, though that wouldn't have worked in the other cities. OTOH reading the phone card has been finicky.

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Took to the tram to the east of the zone (I'm SW, in Southbank), explored Treasury Gardens a bit, explored Chinatown rather more. Melbourne has drinking fountains on some city corners, which is pretty novel, even Brisbane kept them in parks and campuses. The Chinatown seems mostly linear, along Little Bourke Street; I'd guess smaller than Sydney's but still decent. The gates had Persian title patterns, which is unusual.

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Thursday

Went back to the same general area, aiming for FitzRoy gardens. There are botanic gardens but they look annoying to get to. Got diverted by St. Patrick's Cathedral, which is rather large, lots of nooks to explore. A class of small kids was there, I wonder if public and cultural trip or Catholic school and religious education trip. Gardens themselves decent, it's nice to be back with random subtropical plants.

OTOH I haven't seen any ibises or bats. Ditto for Hobart but I figured that was a different climate. I later saw mention of a Melbourne bat colony in the Yarra Bend golf course, relocated from the Botanic Gardens; that's like an hour away by transit.

I finally started looking at Meetup more, and went to a board games night. I introduced some people to Hanabi, and got introduced to Space Base.

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Today: went to South Melbourne Market, bought some not exceptional dumplings, chatted with some artist girl with a dragon-shaped 'homeless' tent.

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Past things

I'd mentioned all the bikers wearing helmets; it came back to me that Australia started mandating that some years ago, followed by the predictable drop in cycling.

Australian city definitions are weird, there'll be a tiny core like a US downtown, and suburbs right around that. E.g. the City of Sydney is population 200,000 (and density 8000/km2) in a metro area of 5.3 million. Artist girl indicated that housing policy is up to the individual suburbs/councils, but clearly someone coordinates public transit over the metro area much better than we see in the USA.

Looking at Wikipedia, Hobart is cool but very rarely gets cold; the record low is -2.8 C, and monthly minimum rarely go negative. Sea level snow is a once in 15 years event.

Cars seem more colorful than I'm used to, like more red and blue cars relative to the white/gray dominance.

Yeah, the street parallel to Elizabeth, sampled further down, was car rental and hospital and university. No reason for a pedestrian to be there. Hobart is like 240,000 people, and I recall yesterday trying to get to the Cenotaph and found myself walking along a near-highway (with sidewalk) out of two. So like a small town core and then lots of blah.

Now in Hobart.

JetStar bag drop in Sydney was way less efficient than Qantas in Brisbane. 17 minutes after I had printed my bag tags, just to be able to hand the bag over. A friend snarks that the purpose of JetStar is to make you wish you had paid Qantas. Wait, that might actually be literal:

"It is a wholly owned subsidiary of Qantas, created in response to the threat posed by low-cost airline Virgin Blue. Jetstar is part of Qantas' two brand strategy[6] of having Qantas Airways for the premium full-service market and Jetstar for the low-cost market."

Once again, no one asked for any ID -- not at bag check, not at security, not at boarding.

Flight was okay. Announcements were loud. I was glad I paid AUD$18 for exit row legroom. Nothing is free, even a small bottle of water would be $4.

Hobart airport low but sprawling, and far from the city. More to the point, no public transit to the airport; ended up taking a SkyBus shuttle. Got yet another transit card, and headed to my place.

And yet another Australian bus system doesn't announce stops. They did have numbers on bus stop signs, but I missed #6 and got my #7 only because of GPS. The stop there didn't even have the number. So much for that coping mechanism.

Tasmania gets rain! It's grey and green! With pine trees, not palm trees! So different.

I recall what I forgot last night. I've been living for 21 weeks in "drive on the left" countries, and I'm still not used to it, especially for turning cars.

The T4 line seems genuinely inconsistent about having stop announcements, or at least ones loud enough to be intelligible.

One thing I don't think I mentioned: when I flew from Brisbane to Sydney, the jetway on this domestic gate serving domestic flights said "Welcome to Brisbane" in English and Japanese. And very distinctively Japanese, all kana, no overlap with Chinese. Interesting.

Today I confirmed the Sunday fare cap, doing lots of train travel for the sum of $2.80. First some kaitenzushi nearby, tempting because they put out lots of grilled salmon, though at AUD$3.80 a plate it's way more expensive than the 100-200 yen plates of Sushiro in Osaka. Then the T4 to Town Hall station, and I noticed that this train doesn't announce stops either, like the terrible buses! WTF. Well, there was no sign, and I think there was no voiceover, though I'm not certain now.

Walked around Town Hall a bit, popped into St. Andrew's Cathedral which was decently impressive, then got caught up trying to get to a Japanese bookstore. Found myself in the Galleries, which might be underground shopping tunnels, but led up into a mall, with Muji, a store of Japanese goods, many with Japanese labels on them. I finally got up to Kinokumiya Books, which is a brand I think I've seen before. It's actually a full-service bookstore, and huuuuge -- one floor, but it just kept going. But they do have translated manga right up front, including a rather more-than-racy volume of How To Train Your Devil out on a sample table. Though I didn't find any *other* raunch manga. Yes I looked.

Rather large section of translated light novels. Well, not that big, but big compared to how many light novels I knew had official translations.

Waaay at the other end of the store they carry actual Japanese manga and books, plus "learning Japanese materials". I find it hilarious that the Japanese manga are in sealed plastic as in Japan, to prevent free browsing, but the English manga are not. A couple of Japanese volumes were around AUD$11 vs a 440 yen cover price, so fair bit of markup. I forgot to look at the English prices.

I walked toward the next stop, Central, and found Chinatown by accident. There was a building of "the Chinese Nationalist Party of Australasia", with KMT up on top. I haven't looked up what that's about yet. What's the KMT doing in Australia?

Didn't pass any really obvious dim sum places, whether bakery or cart.

Then got on the T1, which definitely did have signs and voiceover, and ended up riding out west quite a way. Not to the end, that seemed really long, though maybe not as much as I thought. Got off at Doonside, not much there -- some shops, some extent of one story buildings. I was traveling to see things (surface rail!) and also wondering if I can find places to go stargazing without making a huge trip or going camping (i.e. subway or ferry and *back*.) I definitely found some candidates, though I have no idea what the city glow would be.

Headed back, got off at Strathfield, got reminded of Osaka. Shops and malls and multi-story buildings around a train station, as it should be! Also a plaza. I found a food court with a Japanese style bakery, meaning a wide variety of products and you use tongs to put some on a tray, and I got a curry donut, which I never did in Japan because I couldn't tell what anything was.

From watching others I discovered that the T1 also has reversible seats. You just grab a handle on top and the back leans the other way and now you can sit forward instead of backward, or face your friends. It's great!

A tree was full of birds who collectively sounded like a mass of cicadas, only louder. Don't know what they were. From the silhouettes I would have guessed parakeets but the one bird I could see looked more like a magpie or the other black-and-white bird around here.

T9 back to Central. Also had the stops and seats of the T1. Explored east. Not very exciting.

T4 back, no visual sign, possibly audio announcements I stopped paying attention, and no reversible seats. So older models, I guess. All the trains have the three level design though, where most of the seats are above or below the boarding level but there are some disability-friendly seats at boarding level.

I've been feeling cramped by my phone battery not lasting as long, and my external battery no longer recharging it well. I at least diagnosed the latter problem: a bad cable. When I switched to the cable I use with my laptop, the batter charged the phone quite quickly without any fiddling.

I really wish I had more USB ports on this laptop. I basically have one socket adapter, and 3 things to charge or run right now -- phone, battery, and a tiny cheap USB fan I bought to help stay cool.

Public toilets seem a lot harder to find in Sydney than in Brisbane, and are stinkier when found. Well, lots of the train stations have toilets, which may be more than Brisbane had, but still stinkier.

Flew in yesterday. Qantas seats were small, 30 inch pitch 17 wide. Tiger and Jetstar supposedly wider at 18, but even more packed at 29 pitch. We got a free meal on a 1.5 hour flight, a half-pastrami sandwich for me and 140 grams of chicken pie (heated) for the guy next to me.

I quickly got an idea why Sydney has higher transit mode share than Brisbane: trains out were 7-8 minutes, 15 after 10 PM, vs. "every 30 minutes and sometimes 15". Central Station has 25 platforms. Base fare is $2.24 on bus, $3.61 train, longer with distance, but there's a daily cap of $16.10, or $50 for a Monday-Sunday 7 day period. Not counting airport fares ($19). $2.80 cap on Sunday, the website says, which is less than a single train fare!

Timetable says my local train runs every 10 minutes to midnight, slowing down a bit to 1:16 AM. Google disagreed.

333 bus runs every 3 minutes, or a bit less, to 11 PM. Other buses seem more like 30 minutes buses.

Intersections are still annoying, I timed 80 seconds to cross with the light. Which is better than Brisbane...

Sydney is on DST, so I have to remember that solar zenith is around 1PM now. Also webcomic update time is now 3PM or later...

* Australians really do say "no worries" often.

* Australians continue to be very good about not jaywalking, even when a crosswalk is safe and has been keeping them waiting for 90 seconds.

* I've seen lots of middle schoolers taking the bus, but today I saw my first elementary kids, three little kids nowhere near their growth spurt.

* Saturday I walked across the Story Bridge into Fortitude Valley. Not that long. Though it's not like you just get on a pleasant bridge, you get on the sidewalk of a very busy car bridge. First time I climbed a long spiral staircase, but coming back I walked down a long gentle slope.

* Sunday I finally took the free CityHopper ferry. Crowded and hot and smells of exhaust. Prefer CityCat.

* Yesterday I visited E&A again. Almost took the cross-river ferry, which is most frequent -- 12 or 18 minutes -- but a Hopper showed up first. E was sort of south of Brisbane, so I went down to meet him. Express bus and train were the same speed, and bus was more frequent, but I forgot that buses here don't announce their stops, so I had to be on tenterhooks, made worse by E changing where I should get off.

* New place today. Big and nice, though central AC and I suspect I'm more indulgent than my host is. Airbnb should try to tell us what kind of AC places have... I hinted that a fan would help, then found a AUD$9 USB fan. I'm not sure it'll do me much good but it's cheap.

Sep 30: Finally got to the Brisbane Botanic Gardens. Not the park in the CBD, which used to be the gardens, but the ones out west, 56 hectares of plant exhibits. The bus route was wonky -- 30 minute headway? so I took an Uber, which wasn't that much faster in the end. "Your car in 4 minutes" was more like 8 minutes, a common ridehail failure.

Visit was fun. Tropical dome, small Japanese garden, well labeled bonsai exhibit, giant bamboo... the further part of the park got confusing though, no signs out there, I even worried about getting back in time.

Saw my first live artichoke plant in the Kitchen Garden. I'd never thought before about where the artichoke actually grows.

I chatted with some employee while we waited for the bus back. I asked about age of mobility; he said his parents didn't trust him out to "go to the city" until 17, but at around age 7 he was walking to school and hanging out with friends until dusk.


Oct 1: had some Indian lunch. It was a bit creepy: no one else there at 12:20 PM, lights out... I tried it anyway but checked reviews, which were good. But I saw that Google says it's only open for dinner, maybe that's why no one was there... I uploaded some photos of the menu, and drew the owner's attention. Food was decent in the end.

Walked around the park 'gardens' again, then tried the QUT art museum. Accidentally first found the William Robinson gallery, a small museum devoted to just one artist, who is still alive and working. Weird. The paintings were interestng though, in the 10 minutes I had before closing time. More so than the actual art museum, which is given over to a couple of modern artists..


Oct 2: I'm in a new place for a week, on Kangaroo Point. As the ibis flies I'm closer to the CBD than I have been, but practically I'm further; no good transit on this tongue of land. There's a bus stop right outside the building but the bus is like every 40 minutes; my best on-the-fly option would be a ferry!

Walked around. Timed that a traffic light was indeed 2 minutes before I could walk. Nearby blocks are 1 by 6 minutes by foot -- 6 minute walk long! Eek. A school zone was posted as 40 kph, or 24 MPH; I think the default road speed is 50 KPH, or 30 MPH. So similar to the US, but shocking compared to Japan, where 30 KPH is a typical street speed.

I saw another postman on an ebike. I forget if I'd mentioned seeing one before.

For all the car orientation -- long signal times, wide roads, my last place and this one were both right by highways or busy roads though at least here I'gm facing away -- gasoline is AUD $1.70 per liter, or $4.29/gallon. I guess that's not hugely expensive, Japan was more like $5/gallon, but what's the US now, $2.50?