Back to Oz

Grand Canyon (North Rim)

Yes, after incredible 5 months in the states we are back to Brisbane. I have been asked many times if we regret going to Amerika. What can I say? From San Juan Islands in Washington state down to Grand Canyon in Arizona it is impossible to describe with words the beauty and incredible landscape and climate diversity of this country - you have to see it for yourself. May be it's not the best time for looking for work but the experience we had there is priceless. No, we don't regret at all! And we surely will be back - there is so much more to see! (Besides, our visas are still good until January next year :-))

The Grand Circle Part Three

Hi from Flagstaff Arizona. We're staying at a very comfortable inn that does hot breakfasts, extra comfy pillows and the service was outstanding - the clerk got us a room even though we checked in well before time. This for a third of the price of the hotels in some other locations which had much less going for them because in those locations they were the only hotels. C'est la vie.

Unfortunately the pool here is heavily monopolised (see I'm still using 's' not 'z) by families of loud trolls. I did manage a quick isolated swim for two minutes before one of these families descended on the pool and after vainly attempting to swim in circles around them I surrendered and returned squelching to our room.

This was OK because the room has a 37 inch LCD TV. I started watching one of the many old movies that cable TV promotes as new because they haven't shown it yet. In this case it was Terminator Salvation. We started discussing the number of movies in some big franchises - eg Alien, Terminator and Predator.

Given that there's been cross overs between franchises eg. Aliens vs Predators, why not Terminators vs Predators and Aliens vs Terminators? You read it here first people. Terminator Salvation features a terminator disguised as a human. If memory serves me correctly, Alien Resurrection ends with a cross between Aliens and humans. Terminators vs Predators might feature Terminators returning to the past to capture Predators to clone them with terminator-humans thus capturing the essential predator skills combined with machine like efficiency and the human capacity for sentiment.

Of course this is highly unlikely but so is Sarah Palin being the next president. Or is it?
Anyway off to see the Grand Canyon tomorrow - that should be fun.

The Grand Circle Part Two

A few days ago we visited Capitol Reef National Park. Capitol Reef may not be as popular or as spectacular say Bryce Canyon or Arches but perhaps that's why I liked it.

We went on one of the less popular walks in Capitol Reef, starting at orchards where we picked apricots from trees - the original orchards were planted by Mormon settlers many decades ago and along a small river ending on a rocky outcrop with spectacular views.

This walk had everything I could want in a walk - there were no other people, there was no litter on the trail, and striking scenery including a couple of deer or maybe the same deer on separate occasions. When we got to the top, we sat under a ledge and ate an orange - bliss.

Deer are the kangaroo of America - they are everywhere, and although they have cute big eyed heads, they often end up as roadkill and the redneck community spends time shooting them.

In Arches National Park, there were a lot more people - it is an extremely popular park. Walking the trails we encountered the underprepared - many people doing long hot walks without suitable footwear, hats, water or even shirts; and the unappreciative - a man complained to me that as his wife was mobility impaired he couldn't understand why there wasn't a road leading directly to one of the rock arches (perhaps so that the arch could be viewed in drive-by fashion like so much else here - fast food, banks and shootings).

Caesar Salad

In Las Vegas we were staying in El Cortez Hotel/Casino in Downtown. It was great value for money as we only paid around $30 a night. Besides, we received a voucher book, which included a $5-off voucher for the hotel’s café. Why not use it we thought… Ha, ha, ha… Big mistake.

The next day we went there for lunch. I ordered a caesar salad with grilled chicken. Peter decided to go with the day’s special, which was chicken fried steak and fries. It was an unpleasant surprise when my salad arrived. Now, when I go out to eat I expect my food to be if not delicious at least edible. Is this too much to ask? As far as I can remember, a classic caesar salad includes iceberg lettuce, crispy fried bacon, croutons, hardboiled egg, parmesan cheese and a smooth creamy dressing. In my salad there was no bacon or egg, it was liberally dressed but the dressing was so salty – it was impossible to eat! I thought I might have imagined the saltiness – Peter tried it and also agreed it was very salty. If this was happening to me in the good old Soviet Union I would have probably eaten this salad, swallowing my tears and scared to mention this to the waiter in fear of being verbally abused. But this was happening in a western country so Peter advised me to send the food back. The manager arrived and agreed that the dressing was indeed very salty and that she always has it on the side. She offered to replace my salad with another one and dressing separately. Ok….

Being brought up in the Soviet Union, where customer service practically did not exist, I felt bad about the whole thing like it was me making troubles and bothering the busy people with my silly requests. Anyway, second Caesar Salad arrived in 45min after arriving at the café and after asking the waiter twice. Iceberg lettuce and chicken on the plate and the dressing (same one), croutons and parmesan in individual plastic containers. By that time, Peter had already finished his meal (not fantastic as well, as it turned out but at least edible) and had paid the bill. Good thing is that we had our $5 off voucher and didn’t have to pay the full price. No tips, sorry…

After the worst food experience in America it wouldn’t be fair to not to mention the best one too. Mine, I think, was Brazilian style grilled salmon cooked by my friend’s husband. First, a salmon fillet gets marinated for 20 min in lime juice and sea salt. Then it is grilled on the BBQ on flat cedar wood boards. The heat and the smoke cook the fish. The result is this incredible combination of sweet, salty, citrusy flavours of the fish, which is irresistibly moist and tender… Yum! Peter’s best food experience in America was –surprise! – cook at home $5 pizza from the supermarket. I guess it is really a surprise, when you buy something and expect it to be ordinary turns out to be quite nice and tasty, in fact, better than Domino’s or Pizza Hut.

The end…

The Grand Circle Part One

There is a road trip in Nevada, Utah and Arizona called The Grand Circle. It's one the most scenic road trips in the world. So far we have completed about a third of this journey but have experienced some of the most amazing landscapes, and surprising diversity in topology and plant life (I was expecting desert everywhere).

We left Las Vegas in 40 degree heat with fires occurring around town in the weeks we were there.

Since then we've stayed at Zion National Park, the second most popular site for rock climbers in the US after Yosemite. We visited the North Rim of the Grand Canyon. For those who thought the Grand Canyon lies in the middle of a desert like I did - wrong! The approach to the north rim is through beautiful mixed pine forest containing deer, bears and even bison.

The Grand Canyon itself is a sight that has to be seen to be believed - words and photos do not do it justice.

Whilst the Grand Canyon is on an unimaginable scale the other National Parks on this trip also have equally distinctive and impressive geological formations.

Take Bryce Canyon. Before this trip I had never heard of it and thought that the Three Sisters in the Blue Mountains were quite impressive. After seeing Bryce Canyon I hope that I remember never to try to impress an American with the Blue Mountains.

The End

That's right - it's the end. There's no money left and I have to return to mediocrity and lethargy in some mind numbing office routine. Or worse I will be stuck in a tiny room in some sweaty, noisy slum in the Brisbane 'burbs contemplating a bleak unemployed future.

Now you can think to yourself, "I knew it couldn't last" and relax in the knowledge that my aimless wandering existence while alien and incomprehensible to yours was ultimately unsustainable.

Although I spend a lot of time worrying about my employment prospects and dwindling fortune, I feel fitter than ever - I swim, go to the gym, I'm five kilos lighter than the sitting in an office chair looking at a screen version of myself. I'm traveling the world, albeit slowly and poorly, but isn't that the best way.

Anyway we've bought the tickets so we'll be in Brisbane at the beginning of August.

Golden Gate

Humans have a strong affinity with water and cities with watery views tend to be more attractive than those without. San Francisco is firmly in the former category. It's also a cool (temperature wise) city so you can explore it on foot or using it's effective public transport system even in summer without becoming exhausted as you might do in Singapore, Bangkok or Brisbane.

The city is on a peninsula so many of it's more interesting sights are near the water: for example the sea lions on Fisherman's wharf, the Golden Gate Bridge and Ocean Beach. The cable cars with their element of risk are great fun and the cheap theatre tickets you can buy at Union Square can lead you to an unexpectedly satisfying evening of musical enrichment (we saw The Fantasticks). In spite of my mistrust for big cities and crowds, San Francisco was rewarding on many levels - culturally, aesthetically, gastronomically (go to Chinatown)... and we also met a celebrity (see previous entry).

Anthony Bourdain in San Francisco

Here is a picture a really cool guy with Lena and Anthony Bourdain. No, the really cool guy is Tony Bourdain.

We recently spent a few days in San Francisco and whilst strolling through the Ferry Building we saw that our favourite travelling TV chef would be doing a book signing later in the week.

So on Thursday we queued up (as you can see he has lots of fans).



By the time we got to see him, although he must have signed maybe a hundred copies of his book and posed for that many photos he seemed like a very agreeable fellow. I suggested that he do an episode in Brisbane and he laughed - ok he sort of snorted.

From this my first book signing, I can see how people get so much pleasure from meeting celebrities.

We're currently on a week long circle through Sacramento, Lake Tahoe, Yosemite National Park and Sequoia National Park. We're staying with Lena's best friend from school who lives in Sacramento, the sprawling capital of California.

Anthony Bourdain signing copies of his new book "Medium Raw".

Mountain Views

The golden light of a California evening is not a fiction. Perhaps it's the extra emissions from all those cars zipping down the freeway refracting the sunlight in peculiar ways.

We are living in Mountain View, one of several communities along the peninsula leading ultimately to Big Bay City San Francisco. Mountain View town centre feels like Noosa or Port Douglas but a few degrees cooler. The main street is neatly and pleasantly laid out and contains a succession of Indian, Vietnamese, Chinese, and Middle Eastern restaurants.

We're sharing an apartment with a noisy Israeli and a quiet German. There's the title of the book right there - The Quiet German. The noisy Israeli is an extreme jerk. The phone that we understood was a shared phone he keeps in his room for his personal use. He listens to loud godawful music all day through his shitty bass heavy personal speakers. He has his own dish rack, bin and cleaning cloth. Why do these people keep happening to me?

Here are children playing in the park in San Jose.
Four out of five children grow up to be extreme jerks.

Today I took the train one stop to see what it was like. This service is called CalTrain - not to be confused with the other services in the Bay Area, BART, MUNI, Amtrak and in San Jose there's also a light rail system. All of these systems are independent of each other so you need separate tickets. If they are like the San Jose LRT and CalTrain, they are slow, inefficient and expensive. Why the f... should renting a car cost less than taking a train - explain this to me in simple carbon emission equivalencies. Well it does. That's what's wrong with the system right there.

OK there are quite a lot of commuters taking these trains and many of them even bring their pushbikes onto the trains. But take one look into the faces of these fit, yoga practicing, vegetarian joggers and you know they're already converted. They were going to be on that train even if it cost fifty bucks for one zone. What about the millions of fat boneheads obliviously chomping cheeseburgers behind the wheels of their giant SUVs. They're not even going to consider the train if it costs $12 for a day pass into the city compared to only $4 bucks worth of gas and the convenience of never having to exercise any of their lower body muscles.

This part of the system doesn't work here. Public transport has to be cheap, fast and frequent - how obvious is that?

Better take my blood pressure medication.

ThorHulk

Today we caught a bus into downtown San Jose. From the window I saw a man at a street corner holding a sign. He also had two flags I didn't recognise sticking out of his backpack. To those motorists who acknowledged him he waved and saluted with two fingers held out, Winston Churchill style. The sign said "Bring our troops home". In Seattle we frequently went past a man with a similar sign but his sign said "Guns and Ammo" and had a giant arrow pointing at his shop.

We got off the bus at the Convention Centre in downtown. A comic book fan convention was happening and the square outside the convention centre was packed with realistically costumed teenagers and adults who weren't concerned with being mistaken for Comic Book Guy from The Simpsons. No I mustn' be too critical - I used to like comics when I was a young 30 years old. Who knows, If I had known there were comics conventions I too might have made a giant polystyrene foam hammer and dressed up like the son of Thor and the Hulk. (Apologies to comics fans who actually know who this character is).

We also visited the Tech Museum of Innovation. This turned out to be collection of interactive displays for children.

I am sure these interactive displays are great for teaching kids about science but whenever I visit one of these museums, the kids are monopolising all the cool things to do and usually smashing them to bits without seeming to learn anything. In my science museum the coolest interactive exhibitions would be reserved for certain select adults namely me.

Land of the Squirrels

We are living with Lena's aunt and uncle in San Jose. Like Seattle, this part of the world was once covered by forest. In San Jose - redwood trees dominated. Today the Bay Area is a vast megalopolis consisting of grids of suburbs and only pockets of these mighty giants remain. You can however, see the odd redwood on a street.

The squirrels are still here though and very active right now as it's Spring. Imagine if squirrels had an oral history passed down through the generations in squirrelese. What would they be saying? Maybe, "Sure there's plenty of food now what with all these wasteful humans but I do miss the trees".

In the supermarket we were buying a bottle of wine for personal consumption. An elderly lady accosted us and asked where the Pinot wine was. We showed her a bottle of Pinot Noir from Australia. Her horrified reply was, "I was looking for something from California or Oregon. This is from Saath Orrstraalia!" To my South Australian readers, I can imagine your outrage reading this. I also showed her a Californian Pinot Grigio and explained to her what it was but she looked at me as if I had just climbed out of my alien spacecraft and vomited all over the broccoli in her shopping trolley.

Next as we were buying alcohol, the checkout lady asked me for my ID. I told her she was very kind to ask for my ID (it hasn't come up as a subject in this context for over twenty five years now) and she replied (rudely I thought), "We'll see how kind I am," as she minutely examined my Queensland driver's licence. She was quite polite afterwards. People are strange here or perhaps it's we who are the strange ones.

This is a winery we visited in the foothills of the Sierra Nevadas. Scientists calculate that this is the average daily quantity of wine one needs to drink to avoid heart problems. I usually drink more than this to be safe.

Seattle TV

We have been saying "American TV is crap" quite a lot since we came here. But how would we change it? The first thing I would do is change the ratio of advertisements to programming. One of the reasons people watch DVDs and go to the cinema must be so they can watch something uninterrupted. This would probably improve people's ability to concentrate and probably raise the IQ of the general population. Make longer ad breaks but less frequently.

And is there no social consciousness or control of advertising here? America is concerned about increasing obesity and global warming yet in the typical ad break we'll see three different fast food chains promoting their latest greasy burger and another for a tractor lawn mower. After you've eaten your pizzas and burgers you can go out and mow your twenty square feet of lawn using a machine that in another country would be used to harvest the annual food crop.

Secondly, I would change the censorship rules. Censorship here means nudity, gratuitous violence and profanity is unacceptable on TV. This results in a ridiculous blurring out of women's breasts and buttocks if a woman is wearing say a thong bikini. If someone raises a middle finger in a rude gesture, the offending digit is blurred. One is left curious as to what next the censors will consider overtly sexual or inappropriate. Maybe a jiggling man boob.

Perhaps the use of blurring has a benefit in that it forces us to use our imaginations already rendered sluggish from watching too much television.

Dialogue that includes words such as "hell", and "damn" are dubbed so that an unconvincing "heck" and "darn" are substituted. Entire key scenes in films featuring sex or graphic violence are removed. For viewers who have seen the uncut work it feels like pedantry at its most pointless and absurd. In place of this I would use ratings such as are in place in Australia - for example, "the following film contains nudity and graphic violence" and leave it to parents to control their children's TV access rights.

Thirdly, and probably most significantly I would place stricter controls on the actual quality of programming and what is allowed to be produced and broadcast. American television shows what happens when you have a completely unregulated market: the quality drops and so does our darn IQs.

Orcas Island - famous for its lack of television

Seattle Life

How green is America today? Green issues are talked a lot about in the liberal media (not Fox news). Unfortunately the streets are still full of cars that look bigger than those in most European or Asian countries and the streets are wider too - all that arable land lost forever beneath asphalt. There are also no cycle ways on the streets (or at least bits of road painted green or blue) as there are in Europe or Australia.

Water here in Seattle is still perceived as a limitless quantity rather than as a finite precious resource but then Seattle is surrounded by snow capped mountains and gets a heck of a lot of rain. The noisy and annoying man who lives in the apartment above us has ten minute showers at 6.30am every day and we can hear every squeak of his bathtub as his moves around.

This man is a weekend Dad. Every weekend he takes custody of his two small children and they run around in his little flat above us with their fat little legs pounding through our ceiling. I take out my frustrations on the people below us by pounding my fat little legs on our floor and hopefully these tenants do the same to the reception area below them who are the ones ultimately responsible for placing this man above us.

We have a housekeeper who knocks on the door and appears with a trolley of cleaning equipment outside our door every Tuesday. She changes sheets, vacuums and cleans the bathroom. She comes from Mexico. In the gym I started talking to another tenant, Dan from Virginia. Dan is an engineer and his work has taken him all over the world. He was more relaxed at meeting a foreigner. Dan told me there are on some estimates 20 million illegals here mostly from Mexico. But our cleaner later told me she was married to an American so maybe she wasn't one of the 20 million. What do I care anyway - I'm just like her, trying to survive on the edges of the system.

Later I met Dan's moody Columbian wife Lina. When we all went for a drive in Dan's car to find Bill Gates house, she turned out to be more fond of dogs than people (just like the Queen). Anyway when Dan and Lina left to drive around the US they gave us a whole bunch of appliances they didn't want - deep fat frier, portable oven, toaster, crock pot, laundry basket and a huge box full of tupperware containers.

Now that we're leaving we've decided to give all this stuff to our cleaner. When we told her this - I think her name is Blanca - she told us fine but that she would have to smuggle them out soon. She told us the reception guys would take everything a tenant left behind even if it was left specifically for the cleaners. I shall stamp my legs an extra twenty minutes today.

And we didn't find Bill's house - secretive bastard. All I wanted was a few million and a job.

Humour in America
The funniest show in America today has to be the The Colbert Report - it has the most cutting edge writers and segments. In spite of the "special relationship" between the two countries, the perceptions of British culture are limited. It's strange watching British comedians appearing on Colbert or the Jon Stewart Show trying to make Americans laugh. It's like watching the Mr Bean movie or the American version of The Office. Honestly it's funnier to just watch Stephen Colbert here because there is an authenticity and integrity to the writing than trying to watch a British comic make it work stateside.

Recently, we visited the San Juan islands a lovely spot that I would like to settle down in one day. On the way there we pulled over in our rental car to a gas station near Everett, the place where Boeing makes its jets. Operating an American gas pump for the first time proved problematic.

I inserted the nozzle and pulled the trigger but like the crucial moment when the hero has got the drop on the bad guy in a movie, nothing happened. I decided to ask another motorist who had just arrived what the procedure was. When I told her I didn't know to operate a gas pump, she asked me if I was from Oregon. Not Mexico, or Asia or Australia but Oregon.

Here is a wild deer on Orcas Island that we ran over and ate for dinner.

Seattle Parks

Have you ever noticed the colours of leaves and flowers in Spring. Especially on a clear day. It's as if Gaia has taken her brightest set of paints and splashed them infinitely carefully across a wall.

I have been complaining about the ability of my decrepit and rusty camera to capture this vividness. It's really an excuse to buy a new camera but if I did buy a new camera we would have to go without food. Someone famous used to buy books instead of food but he probably died of starvation whilst trying to eat his books.

I took these photos at the Washington Park Arboretum which is a gorgeous park on the only completely clear day in Seattle since recorded history.

During a ten kilometre walk in the Discovery Park the next day, due to poor planning we were forced to subsist off the land, eating wild raspberries and rose petals to supplement our meagre supplies of one small muesli bar and a mandarin each.








Seattle's skyline is dominated by Mt Rainier. On clear days like this as you sit on the 271 crossing the world's longest floating bridge across Lake Washington it's like a sculpted blob of Haagen Das Five vanilla ice cream sitting hugely on the horizon just waiting for you to head over and stick your teaspoon into it. Unfortunately there's no picture -I don't have a good zoom lens. I'm sure you can google for one.

Seattle Blues

It's a grey cold morning here in Seattle. In the side alley below my apartment window a cop is sitting in his cruiser waiting to pull over speeders. A couple of weeks ago there was a minor incident on the road outside involving two cars. It seemed no more than scraped paintwork but the entire Bellevue police department showed up for it.

What can I tell you about Seattle? Well nothing 'cause we live in Bellevue. Bellevue is a satellite city. There are modern office buildings and landscaped terraces.

Our days here consist of constantly heading to Safeway and searching the shelves for specials; days spent in the library to escape the noise of the construction that surrounds the hotel on three sides and the days when we take a bus to see the sights.

We're neither tourists nor locals. I'm a job seeker but also a traveller. I'm neither an illegal nor a resident or are they the same thing? I don't have a green card but my passport now has a document stapled to it that says I can work here - I even have a social security number now.

The cop car is gone. Time for breakfast.