Wanderlust Heaven!

In the words of the (hopefully) immortal Bill Cosby, I told you that (LA) story to tell you this one. I’m in Adelaide, Australia now, spending some time with my old friend Iain and his wife Stephanie. I was last here in April 2005 for their wedding…but only spent 24 hours here before flying to the States for some business meetings. I vowed to return, unemployed, ASAP, and here I am. Iain and Stephanie are building an amazing new home in Adelaide and I volunteered my unskilled hands while in town. Iain knew what he was getting – I did once change the oil in my car – so I think he had extremely modest expectations about my contributions, which I suppose I met but just barely. Anyway, the house is coming along nicely and Iain’s only tearing his hair out every other day. At least he’s a construction pro and is handling much of the work himself. At first glance you’d think that would lessen his anxiety level, but that’s probably not the case. He knows what the contractors can and can’t do, and what can go dramatically wrong – so his mind is constantly cycling through these potential disasters and how to head them off. Things will work out fine, but it’s good that you don’t build yourself a new house every year.

The work is pretty hard, and you develop a healthy respect for the guys who work on construction sites every day. Perhaps the biggest learning for me is the criticality of spending time on the planning and design. One day Iain, Stephanie and I went to the site to install some steel beams. I thought we’d spent a couple hours there, but we spent six, with five of those hours devoted to measuring, calibrating, and other painstaking activities that involved zero muscle but substantial brainpower. The final hour, of course, comprised lifting heavy steel beams and working them into place. Right when we were finished placing the final beam, two brilliant rainbows appeared overhead – a nice reward for a long day of work. You’d think I’d already have known the value of careful planning from my years in consulting – but that lesson isn’t obviously portable across industries, or maybe I was just being mentally lazy when I turned up at the construction site. Anyway, my other learning is that my next job will not likely be anything related to construction. I’m a lot better at destroying things.

The other area I should cover in this blog, is, of course, Australia itself. It’s a fantastic country and one I’ve kept coming back to over the years. I lived in Sydney during 2000-01, went to the Olympics, made some good friends, and consider it a second home. There’s no easy way to characterize the place, but I’ll make a stab at it here:
-Sometimes Oz feels a bit like a British-flavored Los Angeles. People have an accent that Americans would call ‘British’ or ‘English’ (although it’s quite distinct if you’ve got the ear), they use many terms found in the UK, and so forth. They also speak proper English, which is a nice change from the mindless valley girl dialect spoken all over the US these days (and which originated in LA). Australia, at least much of it, is sunny almost every day, people are laid-back (‘no worries’ is the expression heard most often), and there’s a nice edge in everything – music, food, coffee, clothing, and general design of stores, buildings, etc. I suppose Oz was a dreary, white-bread type of place in the 1970s (as was Britain), but now the place is as multi-culti as they get (25% of the population was born elsewhere) and the mix works really well.
-While the design and fashion is Australia is cutting-edge, Australians aren’t particularly precious or fragile. Most are self-deprecating, semi-profane, and risk-taking. And the lingo is fascinating…some of the common words in Oz have a western US bent. ‘Reckon’ is used all the time (‘I reckon Quay Grand Bar has the best margaritas in Sydney’), and while jogging by pizza joints I often looked twice as I saw ‘hot spuds’ offered and not ‘hot subs.’
-The entire country feels like a well-kept secret. Only 20 million people live there, and while tourism is huge, the distance seems to keep most people away. Those who do make it there seem to be the strain of tourist able to relax and fit into the Aussie lifestyle.
-Sydney and Melbourne are obviously well-known, but the Oz is full of cool spots. Case in point: Adelaide. The metro area probably comprises a million people (and the entire state of South Australia just 1.5 million), but there are more art galleries, music spots, fine restaurants, buzzing bars, boutique hotels, etc. than in many cities 2-3 times the size. Festivities seem to be taking place every few weeks, and the sports scene is great as well. You could happily spend a year in a campervan traveling around the country, taking in the excellent beaches, mountain ranges, deserts, and country towns. I may just do that at some point.

Since I got to Oz I’ve managed to spend 90% of my time doing things I want to do, and not stupid errands. My aim is to get that figure up to 95%, and I think I’ll succeed. Today I went with Stephanie to the construction site to talk through a few things with the builders, then over to the Art Gallery of South Australia to take in a lecture on Margaret Preston, an Aussie painter whom I’ve never heard of and who created some excellent stuff. We had a nice long lunch in the gallery’s restaurant – which, typically, had a lengthy wine list that we sampled. Tomorrow we’re going up to the Barossa Valley for lunch at a winery there. The Aussie wine industry is both large and of high quality, and while here I plan to balance my drinking across beer and wine – which I find is difficult to do in the States, but easy to do in Oz and Europe (particularly Spain and Italy).

I’ll be here in Adelaide for a few more days, then head north with Iain to check out the Flinders Mountain range, stay in some Outback pubs, and get even farther away from anything remotely demanding or stressful. After that, I’ll make my way over several days up to Darwin – which distance-wise is similar to traveling from New Orleans (say a prayer) up to Minneapolis. I’m looking forward to seeing the Outback and Ayers Rock/Uluru, which somehow I’ve managed to miss during the time I was posted in Oz. More on that journey in days to come.

A final bit here: if possible, Australia is even cooler than Skype…

This entry was posted on Wednesday, June 7th, 2006 at 3:52 am and is filed under Travel. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.