Jun 2009

According to my mom, I visited the Taronga Zoo THREE times as a youngster. In fact, my earliest childhood memory is of petting the kangaroos; I distinctly remember the feel of their backbone under my little hand. What was the big deal with this place? I had to find out, so today Paddy and I hopped on the ferry and cruised across the harbor to visit the animals. The day was beautiful: sunny, not too chilly, and so clear you could see straight across the water to the city's north.

After taking a gondola up to the entrance from the ferry dock, we grabbed a map and made our way towards the "Wild Australian" area to check out the wombat, platypus, snakes, lizards, birds, and of course, the 'roos and koalas (which, amazingly enough, don't thrill me the way they used to. Perhaps I've gotten used to these silly creatures after living a year in their country.) Paddy used to watch a lot of animal documentaries when he was a kid, so he acted as my tour guide, sharing many interesting (and some not so much) facts about the differences between Asian and African elephants (round head/small ears, square head/big ears), why snow leopards have small ears (to conserve warmth, apparently) and how far red kangaroos can travel in a single jump (seven meters! But the longest distance ever recorded is 12.5 meters) Plus he was much better at navigating with the map as we weaved a twisted path around the Australian, African and Asian animal enclosures.

The zoo was much nicer than San Francisco's, where the gloomy Sunset District weather makes the animals always look depressed (I don't blame them.) And the location was unbeatable! A picture is worth a thousand words, and these pretty much sum up a wordy description:

We were just heading over to see the hippo when, out of the blue, MY CAMERA STOPPED WORKING. Just stopped. I tried to turn it on, and it made this horrible grinding sound when the lens moved, and the screen shouted "LENS ERROR" in red. Well, obviously.

Since I'm leaving for Melbourne on Thursday, this is going to present a serious problem if the camera store can't fix it...ahhhhh!

I spent the week doing work experience for the ladies (and one guy) of Women's Health, a two-year old publication produced out of a tiny office in the massive North Sydney Pacific Magazines building. The atmosphere was just as you'd expect: friendly and laid back, plastered with past magazine covers and Triple J (alt. music radio station) playing in the corner...and the writers and editors running around in their active wear after their lunch break (and yeah, they're all quite fit!)

The week breakdown was as follows...

Monday: I spent the morning compiling possible story ideas from news pieces and features I cut out of The Australian, the Daily Telegraph, and the Sydney Morning Herald weekend sections, tagging them as one of the magazine's six feature categories: fitness & health, money & career, mind & wellbeing, sex & relationships, food & nutrition, and beauty & style. This was a great way to start each morning.

Afterwards Hanna, a writer, sent me on an errand: for a pricing piece she was working on, I had to run over to the IGA supermarket and buy two types of muesli (the Black & Gold home brand and more expensive Carmens) and batteries (home brand for a whopping $1.60), which she tested along with high and low-priced toothpaste, chocolate, etc. to figure out if the extra money is worth it. (For the record, IGA batteries last for only two hours in a flashlight, and skimping on pricier muesli means you're also skimping on flavor.)

After lunch the beauty editor, Nicole, asked me to put away several bags of products she'd been sent to test: Chanel makeup, Benefit face scrubs, Dermalogica day creams, lotions from the Body Shop, and more shampoo and conditioner, serums, eye creams and nail polishes than I could use in a year. Everything's kept in what resembles a narrow walk-in closet, and I had quite a lot of fun checking out the products as I crammed them onto the overfilled shelves. I became increasingly envious every time I went downstairs to pick up the mail and ended up picking up two or three bags for Nicole, each elegantly wrapped and ribbon-ed like glamorous little presents.

Tuesday: After perusing the papers for story ideas, I retyped a couple stories from previous US Men's Health issues for an upcoming issue (much of the men's and women's Australian version reuses content from the US publications), then spent the rest of the day transcribing an interview about internet vs. digital radios for Alice, the men's and women's magazine editorial coordinator, and part of an interview features editor Tara conducted with Helen Fisher, an author from the US who wrote a book about match.com and how couples come together based on their biological personality types. Needless to say, my fingers were very sore when I left the office.

Wednesday: Today I finished transcribing Tara's interview, then Alice set me up with an organizing project: taking a towering pile of folders filled with every article's rough draft, notes, and research from the July issue, and sorting it into three plastic-sleeve filled binders. In numerical page order. That task took me close to three hours to complete.

Thursday: Today was a day of research for Alice and Bessie, a writer and associate editor. The topics? Everything from how music affects your health and fitness (upbeat music makes you run 15% faster!), to recent breakthrough research about sex and relationships, fitness, and...coffee. Apparently there's a caffeinated sunscreen being developed.

Friday: The staff decided to have a bake-off today, so everyone brought in an array of cupcakes, cookies and sweet bread - plus avocado salad and a tower made of carrot sticks. This is a health magazine, after all. Michael Jackson songs played all morning in memory of the King of Pop, whose death I still can't believe. "Beat It" was my favorite song of his, and I remember playing it nonstop on my way to gymnastics class, refusing to get out of the car until the song finished.

Between cookies, I also helped Bessie research for an upcoming article about bouldering (essentially rock climbing, but without the ropes, harness, or height above about six meters.) I called various climbing gyms and companies to find out safety tips from the experts, compiled a list of "climbing terms," and called an additional list of stores around NSW to see if they could send us climbing shoes, crash mats, chalk buckets, and other bouldering gear for an accompanying photo shoot. Considering I had no idea what bouldering was before I started researching, I now feel like an expert on the subject.

So there you have it! Another internship to grace my resume, and I didn't even have to get anyone coffee.

Winter is settling upon Sydney, and that means it's cold - but not the cold we're used to back home. Cold in Sydney means the dry air whips through your layers of clothing and bites your skin, and the rain comes in spurts. It's pretty funny actually: it'll start to sprinkle gently, as though Mother Nature Down Under is warning you about what's coming, and as the drops begin to fall faster, you have just enough time to pull out your umbrella and cover your head before it starts pissing rain. It only lasts for a few minutes, then the rain ceases, and the cycle repeats.

One of my (new) favorite things to do in this sort of weather is escape to one of the many museums around the city, so today, I chose to strike the Powerhouse Museum off my to-do list. Since Rob had already finished exams as well (he studies property economics) and finished work (at a real estate company) at midday, he went with me to explore what I gathered to be "the museum of inventions."

Well, that describes a few galleries.

It was the most random museum I've ever been to: along with the Steam Revolution (trains, power and industry) and outer space/NASA galleries (pretty much everything featured American or Russian astronauts, as the space station in Canberra sends out mostly satellites), we explored...

- Cyberworlds: computers, "Girlgeeks" and robots, which also had a bunch of interactive games that Rob happily tried out while I took photos.
- EcoLogic: sustainable housing appliances and disposable clothing inspired by Japanese fashion. After taking Sustainable Enterprise, I felt much more knowledgeable about the power-saving displays and legislation-producing summits held in Europe from the 1970s.
- Lace Study Centre: 300 types of lace collected over a 100 year period - unfortunately, or perhaps fortunately, this was closed.
- Chinese belt toggles: no idea.
- Yinalung Yenu: a gallery filled with Aboriginal artwork and loaned possessions. An interview with Aboriginal Australian academic (at UTS) and writer Larissa Behrendt was played in a corner room next to a glass display of her prized possessions, which ranged from a barrister robe (she was the first Aboriginal Aussie to graduate from Harvard Law School in 1994) to a pair of glittery purple stilettos (apparently she's a fan of shoes.)
- Inspired!: a really cool room featuring funky shoes by Christian Louboutin, a newspaper print evening gown (commissioned by the Weekend Australian newspaper), and a gorgeous amethyst-colored glass piece by Dale Chihuly. Another one of my favorite galleries.

On the way back, I stopped at Bar Broadway (a pub located across the street from UTS; during exam time, it's packed with students once they finish finals) to meet up with my Danish friend Soren, who'd just completed his last IT (info tech) exam. We've been friends since International Business last semester, so we talked for nearly two hours about our experiences in Australia, American politics (he likes to keep up with US affairs and sent me quite a lot of fun-poking sites about Sarah Palin before the election last year), Twitter, and how we wanted to visit each other's countries. Good to know I have somewhere to stay in Aarhus!

• SIDENOTE: According to my mother, I've been to the Powerhouse before - when I was four. Evidence of me, Katie and my cousin Jason is below...

Most of my friends were still studying for their final exams, so I decided to check a couple sights off my to-do-in-Sydney list (which is a compilation of guidebook and sightseeing-inspired places I have yet to visit in Sydney and plan to see before I leave). On Saturday, I took the Bronte Beach bus down Oxford Street to the Paddington Markets: a craft fair filled with vintage clothing, handmade greetings cards, jewelery, paintings, woodwork, and so much more, all displayed under summery canvas umbrellas. I grabbed a coffee and ventured in.

Passing by a particularly colorful booth, I paused to take a closer look at the artwork displayed on the table. They were magnificent: painstakingly detailed sketches of the Sydney skyline was etched on bookmarks and greeting cards, while the Harbour Bridge was portrayed across a canvas, dotted with paint in all sorts of colors. I stopped to examine a greeting card more closely when the woman running the booth approached me. She pointed at the card in my hand and said, "My son painted that when he was 11." I was gobsmacked. We chatted for several minutes and she (Sarah) told me more about her son, Ping Lian: he'd been diagnosed with savant syndrome (a developmental disorder similar to autism, allowing him to really shine in at least one area of expertise) at a young age, and as a form of "art therapy," Sarah had taught him how to trace and color. Ping Lian quickly caught on and was soon sketching all sorts of cartoonish figures (which she showed me through the laminated pages of the book on the table). By the time he was eight, he was sketching animals and architectural structures around his home city, Kuala Lumpur (yup, we talked a bit about Malaysia too!) and his work appeared in several solo and group art exhibitions. When they moved to Sydney in 2006, he began painting Australian icons such as the Harbour Bridge and the Opera House.

Sarah told me she's working on a book about Ping Lian's life and how art has given him an outlet to express himself. Fascinated with his story, I purchased a few cards with his Sydney images printed on them and exchanged contact information with Sarah so she could keep me posted on the book (which she's working on with autism researcher Rosa C. Martinez in New York.)

Check out more of Ping Lian's work: http://www.pinglian.com/

On my way down Oxford St, I stopped in the Australian Centre for Photography to check out the galleries. There were two: once featured photos that depicted an artistic take on outer space, and the other had photos of somber-looking Nigerian people. Interesting, but I didn't spend too much time looking around.

The rest of my walk down Oxford St was pleasant: window shopping past the boutiques, poking around knick-knack stores, and popping into Fringe Bar, which had magically turned into a vintage clothes and handmade jewelry market that afternoon. Gotta love those little surprises.

I'm officially done with uni in Australia!

Last week was my final week of classes, meaning Sustainable Enterprise was canceled on Monday for "revision time" and Wednesday's Australian History & Politics class consisted of a 30 minute wrap-up lecture and a trip to the Museum of Sydney, which was actually quite awesome. I spent the week finishing my final papers (for Malaysia, a 10-pager on Australian wine exportation to The US and Malaysia; for politics, another 10-pager about the assimilation of Aborigines into white Australia between 1940-1970), reviewing lectures and assigned chapters for business, and holding study sessions with my friend John, who took the same business class.

Saturday was the first day of a three-week finals period. Fortunately, my business exam was scheduled for 2 p.m. that first Saturday, so I was pretty lucky. The exam went well - 20 multiple choice questions, which were ridiculously hard but I think I did okay, and two short essays based on subjects I'd studied for hours (life cycle thinking, and sustainable fishing in Australia). Hopefully the marks reflect my confidence!

When I get back to SF State, I'll have four classes to finish up before graduating in December. It's a little nerve-wracking to think about, particularly because many of my friends graduated last month and several have since moved back to their respective hometowns, but I'm getting pretty tired of school at this point (regardless of the continent) and am looking forward to a new challenge!