6 March 2009

So this week made me hate public transportation. At first I thought it was the best, because the city seems so attainable! Just jump on a bus here, grab a train there, and you are automatically at your destination! Anyone can get anywhere in just a blink of an eye! Wrong. It takes forever. Thanks the thing, public transport (as they say here) tricks you. You think you can get somewhere super fast, but it actually takes so long, by the time you get where you want to go, you lost the desire to go there in the first place! So last weekend, a group of ASC-ers went to the Blue Mountains (a mountain range close to Sydney – it only takes a few hours by bus or train!), but another group of us have our required service placement on Saturdays, and we couldn’t go, so we decided to visit Manly Beach. We were done at noon, so we’d have the whole day basking in the sun, right? Nope. We had our orientation on Saturday, at Hillsong Church in Baulkham Hills. We were told it was just a short train ride from the city. We were tricked by public transport. Sure, it was just a half hour train ride, but that was after I had a half hour bus ride and previous fifteen-minute train ride, and before we had another half hour bus ride! So I had to get up with the sun. Then, when we were finished, we missed our bus by ten minutes that comes hourly, so we had major time to kill before we made the long trek back to the city, just to take a 40 minute ferry ride to actually get to the beach. So we made it to Manly just in time to get an hour or two of sun and for two girls in my group to get stung by Bluebottle Jellyfish. Awesome. Don’t get me wrong; it was still a great day, I just now have a more realistic view of the public transport and how long it actually takes to get places! Also, the trusty 506 bus that takes my roommates and I anywhere we want to go is actually not so trusty. It usually comes 20 minutes late, or not at all, and when it is on time, it is actually about four minutes early. We were told by one of our program directors that it was the “Bus of Kings” but that is a very false statement. Whatever would be the opposite of the “Bus of Kings” would be our bus.

But before I had my public transport realization, last Friday our group went to the Rocks. The Rocks is the oldest neighborhood in Sydney and was where the convicts were brought to Australia to begin the colonization. It is now a trendy district with stylish pubs and restaurants and the biggest street market on the weekends, but it didn’t start out that way. It was a corrupt area with about as many pubs as homes, and people lived in filthy, cramped quarters without fresh running water or any kid of septic system. The houses were steeply stacked on top of each other on the edge of the hills leading to the harbour, so all the waste ran down to the homes on the lowest level. Obviously, the higher up you lived, the higher the class you belonged to. The area of the Rocks was morally corrupt as well. People spent most of their time at any of the hundreds of pubs and prostitution was extremely common. We were even told that the first night that the boats arrived on the New South Wales shore, there was a massive orgy that mostly everyone participated in whether they were willing to or not. As colonization grew, with the aid of the Sydney Harbour with its deep waters so that ships could dock right at the shore, the gritty neighborhoods grew as well, and gangs and promiscuous sailors ran rampant through the streets. At the beginning of the 20th century, the Rocks became infected with the Bubonic Plague and the whole neighborhood became quarantined. After the plague was contained and destroyed, a Royal Commission began to clean up the slums of the city, which began at the Rocks. The restoration would last for most of the 20th century because of the two world wars, but now, the Rocks is a popular spot for tourists and city-dwellers because of its fresh cosmopolitan streets mixed with the history from the first colonization. Some of the pubs from the slum days are still around, and the sandstone rocks that convicts were forced to dig out, and then carve in their own “signature” pattern, are still visible in the walls of buildings. Our group split up and explored some of the “hot spots” of the Rocks, including Pancakes on the Rocks, a 24-hour restaurant that makes the most decadent pancake dessert concoctions known to man. This place is a favorite stop for sure.

As far as the rest of the week, I just went to more class. I’m getting used to Wesley and am enjoying the lunch hours on the Grassy Knoll where most students hang out before our afternoon classes. This week we played a massive game of Twister with a homemade mat that was four Twister mats put together. We started with a large group, but as people fought for the color palettes and dropped out, the sides were rolled in so that we ended up with a mat smaller than the original Twister game. Needless to say, it was fun. We also went to the New South Wales Art Museum for a free concert with this year’s Australian Idol winner, Wes Carr (woo!). Yeah, that was cool too. Tomorrow, I have my service placement, (which by the way is called street teams, where we go to certain streets in Sydney and do volunteer work) at a closer location (thank goodness) and then hang out in the Sydney before the Mardi Gras parade tomorrow night! Look for pictures coming soon, hopefully.

I miss you all and enjoy your comments/Facebook posts/ AIM conversations/Skype chats! Much love!

P.S. Just fyi, cursing is very common, and acceptable, in any Australian conversation no matter how young, old, religious, high-class, whatever. This is a big change from Taylor’s campus, of course, but it does make life more interesting and jokes funnier. For example, while strolling down a picturesque beach on a beautiful day, it is very common to hear an eight year old boy yell affectionately to his friend, “I’m gonna f**king kill you!” Or in a classroom, a lecturer may apologize that his/her material is as boring as bat sh*t and a student may tell another to either shut the f**k up or go to hell. (Notice I use asterisks because for all of you in America, all of this may be way too explicit.) All of us Americans were not only forewarned of this in our orientation, but we were also told that it is quite reasonable for us to pick up this language. All of this to say, if I come home cussing like a sailor, blame Australia.