Crouching Kangas, Hidden Spider

 

One of the highlights on these family trips is often the church services we attend, and church at St. Andrew’s in Sydney will surely be remembered for their friendliness. Toast, tea, and a g’day following service was great: “We invite you to join us. In fact, if you don’t join us, we’ll take offense.” From getting a brief history of the Anglican Church in Australia from the archbishop, talking American baseball with the bishop, and getting ginger cookies from another, they all made us feel very welcome. And seeing the man in front of us wearing his Onitsuka Tigers to church all but made that purchase a sure thing for me.

Instead of seeing a show, we took the Sydney Opera House tour. The 20 seconds of opera rehearsal we got to see was probably 15 seconds more opera than the kids wanted anyway, and we also would have missed out on the story of the construction challenges, the spurned Danish designer, and seeing the breathtaking red 70s carpet. Speaking of the 70s, Gould’s Books in Newtown rounded out our Sunday afternoon. The place is jam packed with used books, including an impressive assortment of 70s disaster novels.

Our time in Sydney is almost over and we had yet to see or eat a kangaroo and that needed to change. It doesn’t look like the Taronga Zoo serves kangaroo, but they do lounge about like they own the place. We’re not big zoo fans because forlorn animals usually don’t bring us joy, but to see Australian animals up close seemed worthwhile. This included gang-gang cockatoos, wallaby, koalas, emu, and the adorable quokka. And spiders. Very large spiders.

The kangaroos looked way too tough to eat so our day ended with pancakes near Campbells Cove.

Kangas crouching, probably up to no good

This kangaroo is named Lorraine, she smokes 12 packs a day

You’ve all seen the outside, but look at this awesome carpet!

Pancakes almost as big as the spiders

My kind of cove

Then there was rain

There were ambitions to run in Hyde Park and through the Royal Botanic Gardens this morning. But then there was rain. A lot of rain, rain for hours and hours. Plans shifted to spend a day indoors and there are plenty of museums in Sydney to make this work.

We started at the Australian Museum, which is just a few blocks from our apartment and like most of the other museums in Sydney, is free. With little downside, we spent a half hour there on our first day and it was clear there was much more to explore. Today, three of us breezed through the rest of the museum, which is filled with aboriginal history, animals, and birds of Australia. Two of us chose to read every single word of the exhibits. If it weren’t still rainy outside this would have been a real problem. One member of the three even tried to obfuscate the hidden secrets on the other floors of the museum by saying there are” only arachnids” on the next floor. Alas, this did not deter them even a little.

Chinatown had been calling since we arrived, and we finally made the trek after many more museum hours than necessary. By then the rain had cleared, and Chinatown is close to Darling Harbor, which also has the Maritime Museum. A day with submarines is always a day to remember.

Don’t be deceived by this sunrise, the rain started minutes later

Yellow crested cockatoo, properly presented rather than stuffed in a paper bag and put in the freezer

HMB Endeavor from 1768 when Capt. Cook sailed the ocean round

Forgotten Songs above Angel Place, representing the birds that used to sing in the city 

Important tips on a submarine: give CPR for as long as it takes and DO SOMETHING YOURSELF!

The sky and the skyline from Darling Harbor, it’s like it never rained

Our job was beach

 

Daniel has been talking to us for years about going to a real beach with the whole family. Not a pebble beach (turns out we tried that twice unsuccessfully), not a beach on a rainy day, and not a beach alone with too much sun. Just beach.

It’s winter in Australia, so it makes sense we would beach. Today was the best day in the 7-day forecast with a high approaching 70 degrees, so if there was ever going to be a beach day this was it. A relatively quick bus ride to Bondi beach and mission accomplished. Except no one had swimsuits. Oh, and Daniel doesn’t actually like sand. Now Dinah can’t stop talking about beaches and Daniel may never want to see another one.

The walk from Bondi to Coogee is wonderful and full of beaches. There’s a cemetery on the way, which is also right on point for our vacations. If you want people to come visit your corpse for years and year, pack it in a place that has a nice view.

It was an extraordinary day. Like true Coloradans, we found the local brewpub in Bondi. Curly Lewis is worth a stop for anyone who likes beer and good things in life. You should go.

A perfect day and perfectly sandy beach with hardly any people - winter beach!

The scenery on this walk was extraordinary

McMurray chose to upgrade to a room with a view

For swimmers who don’t like sand

A Tim Tam Man and an extra tasty mukbang

 

We did not have a Wednesday, July 24 this year. It takes close to twenty hours to fly to Australia from Denver. We broke this up into three legs, with a short flight to LA, a long flight to Auckland, and a shortish flight to Sydney. We left on Tuesday night and arrived in Australia on Thursday thanks to the International Date Line. It’s very unclear what happened to Wednesday.

Our first day in Australia was really focused on food. Not that the food was bad on Air New Zealand, but I think not having a Wednesday made us really hungry. We’ve heard a lot about Australian snacks, including from the Melbourne guy we met on the airport shuttle at DIA, so it became crucial to get a huge haul of snacks to mukbang. This included rasberry bullets, hobnobs, shapes, vegemite, Australian licorice, bhuja, and both tasty and extra tasty cheese (whatever that means).

Tim Tams were the best. Tim Tams are described on Wikipedia as “two malted biscuits separated by a light hard chocolate cream filling and coated in a thin layer of textured chocolate.” But the Wikipedia page for crack cocaine seems to be more accurate: “Effects include euphoria, supreme confidence, insomnia, alertness, and a craving for more.” A Tim Tam is 1/20th of your daily suggested kilojoules. Dinah had five of them today. Kilojoule math is almost as hard as date line math for us, but I’m pretty sure your daily allowance shouldn’t come from Tim Tams alone.

Why would you settle for just tasty cheese?

Great on toast, not sure I’d make a sandwich out of this though

Some snacks are better than others

The view from our apartment in Sydney is as good as the snacks

This dead city longs to be living

 

We spent most of the day yesterday at the Archaeology Museum, colloquially known as the MANN (Museo Archaelogico Nazionale di Napoli). We chose not to make the trip to Pompeii because it’s jam packed with tourists in the sweltering heat, which is what we’ve been astutely avoiding since day 3 of this trip. And man, the MANN was jam packed with artifacts from Pompeii. It also has one of the largest collections of Egyptian artifacts in the world. Oh, and a weird sex room to see what acts the Romans were comfortable painting on their walls. Much of it was tame, some of it was shockingly nasty. I don’t want to spend much time thinking about what they were too embarrassed to paint on the wall.

 

We also went to the Catacombs of San Gaudioso to see the twisted funeral practices of the Dominican friars. From our time in Rome, we were already familiar with the idea of Christians burying their dead outside the city in underground catacombs, but the surprise in Naples was the fact that the friars squeezed the dead bodies of all liquids (which is probably very similar to what is done to get milk out of almonds). Then the wealthy few pay extra to get their heads cut off and put on display.

 

This morning, Daniel took us out to see the central business district of Naples, which was first envisioned in the 1960s but started construction in the 1980s. It’s now a strange dystopian wasteland of high rise buildings, broken escalators, garbage and stray mattresses. We did go on a weekend, but it’s hard to imagine this place ever being a thriving downtown. There’s a new Metro station under construction that looks incredible, maybe that will help them finally realize their dreams.

 

Is it any wonder

There’s squalor in the sun?

With their broken schemes and their lotteries

They never get nowhere

-        Patty Smith, Dead City

Ancient fishing technique?

If I hung out with a beak this big, I’d wear pants

If you look close, I think he’s wearing a Yankees hat

It’s a mummay!

Incredible every day wall art from well before the Renaissance

San Gaudioso starts innocent enough but you can tell something sinister may lie beneath

After squeezing the juice, everything left gets jammed into boxes until full 

By paying a bit more, your drained head can live on as a greeter (at least for a while)

Looks great, but where is everyone?

A bit pessimistic, maybe they haven’t seen the new metro station yet

All the stairs looked like this, stay above ground

One of the best empty towers I’ve ever seen

There were definitely more weeds than people while we were there

This has potential to become the most beautiful metro station in Europe

Naples Toledo station currently holds the title as most beautiful in Europe 

Forza Napoli

 

It’s good to be back in Naples. After being shocked and completely unprepared, we completely fell in love with this place. It’s raw and gritty, but also beautiful. The people can be aggressive, and many don’t even bother trying English, but they’re surprisingly warm and friendly. 

 

The town is full of surprises. A building can be covered with graffiti but astonishingly pretty and ornate inside. The cobblestone streets are winding and narrow, filled with cars that somehow fit alongside people. Scooters can come out of nowhere and nearly run you down, but there might be an Italian woman nearby who puts the driver in their place. No one picks up after their dogs on those streets but they’re rabid about separating their trash and recycling. You can step over a corner of the street that looks like it’s been used as a toilet and walk right through a model’s photo shoot and then buy some of the most amazing food on the planet. An unassuming pizzeria can be in the Michelin Guide. You won’t expect it, but if you give it a chance, it will always be in your heart.

 

An evening stroll to dinner

Margherita from Antica Pizzeria di Matteo, where President Clinton shoved pizza in his mouth more aggressively than we did 

Much of the art is on walls, just not always indoors

A door that deserves a chance

Somehow it’s bigger on the inside, and much more beautiful

The oldest thing we saw today

This sign has special allure in our family

There’s always a surprise around the corner or up the stairs. Usually good, sometimes not.

A marijuana vending machine, good for work and health, bad for the Mafia!

A scalding little package of fried pizza from a world renowned pizzeria