Sydney closed

Today, Friday September 7^th, is a public holiday, in Sydney anyway, because of the APEC conference taking place this weekend.

            The APEC (Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation) summit features world leaders from all the Asian-Pacific countries, which covers everywhere from America, Canada, New Zealand, China, Russia (a surprise that one, I had to look it up on the map), Indonesia, Japan, South America and several others I can’t remember – more or less everyone that is except Europe, India and the Middle East.

            The security is unprecedented and seems to be causing a mixture of annoyance and amusement to Sydneyites. The streets in the CBD (Central Business District) are barricaded and many of them are closed to traffic. I went into town the other day to take a look and it was empty of almost everything and everyone but a whole lot of police standing around looking faintly bored.  President Bush arrived on Tuesday night with a 10-mile motorcade (maybe an exaggeration, but not much), and this morning I heard him say on the radio how pleased he was to be in Sydney for the OPEC (sic) conference.

            The most interesting event of the week so far has been a bunch of TV comics called ‘The Chaser’s War on Everything’ (a kind of five- or six-man Aussie version of our Mark Thomas) managing to drive through two security check-points in a hired car bearing Canadian flags. The police were only alerted when a Bin Laden look-alike stepped from the car wearing sandals and a (fake) beard. The perpetrators were arrested, charged and released on bail (pending further action) and a lot of fun was had by all except the chief of police, who did not think it was funny.

            I did think it was all a bit much for my adopted country to allow such an event (the summit I mean, not the stunt) to interfere with people’s everyday lives to such an extent – closing all the streets, diverting public transport, declaring all the roads within a fifty or so mile radius ‘clearways’, insisting everyone take a day off work – whatever next? The Opera House has been closed all week! And what of all those poor traders, café-owners and so on, whose businesses have suffered so badly many of them have been forced to close for the week. Will they be compensated?  And as for the street closures – such a thing would never happen in London!  (Or would it? Come to think of it I can’t remember an event involving so many globally important people taking place in London, not ever. And true to say London is that much bigger so the odd road closure would probably go pretty much unnoticed.)

            The saddest part is the weather. It’s miserable. Cold and wet. Just like London.

  

Macquarie Street barricade

A common language?

 

Generally speaking I think Aussies and Brits understand each other pretty well (unlike Americans, from whom we are definitely divided by a common language); generally speaking we do ‘speak the same language’, which means we use similar words to mean similar things, and through the years we (that’s us Brits) have absorbed quite a few Aussie expressions into our language – such as ‘whinge’, ‘no worries’, ‘a big ask’, not to mention (because it is such a horrible word, and to be honest I’m not totally sure it is an Aussie word but I certainly heard it here first, and it sounds Aussie, in meaning at least) ‘wuss’; and the other day I heard someone on the radio in England using the word ‘shonky’ – and for all I know Aussies have absorbed some expressions from us, but I wouldn’t necessarily know what they were. (‘Gobsmacked’ I think is one.) Nonetheless as a new Aussie citizen I have found myself coming up against the odd language difficulty.

       When I first arrived in Australia in my previous incarnation 39 years ago I presented to my cousin (a different one), with whom I was staying, by way of a thank-you, a bunch of gladioli, at the sight of which she burst out laughing. I hadn’t realised of course that as long ago as 1968 Dame Edna (aka Barry Humphries) as part of his/her stage act habitually showered the audience with ‘gladdies’, thereby transforming them, in Australia at least, into a laughing stock.

      The other day I was discussing the business of internet access with Libby and her (Australian) boyfriend. In London recently I was introduced for the first time to wireless internet, otherwise known as ‘wi-fi’ (I’m not sure what the ‘fi’ stands for – ‘fidelity’??). I discovered, through a fair amount of trial and error, that by acquiring a wireless adaptor and simply plugging it into my laptop I could log onto the internet using a neighbour’s unencrypted wi-fi signal. This was wonderful, because I use the internet a lot.

      I tried doing the same here but it didn’t work. So I told Libby I needed to find a computer shop so I could buy a wireless router, at which point both she and her friend burst out laughing.

      Now I do know this: the word ‘root’ in Australia means the same as ‘rut’ (and is quite probably a corruption of it, or vice versa), and is widely used to mean as much. So for example, an Aussie joke that is meaningless anywhere else is the definition of a one-night stand as a ‘wombat’, who ‘eats roots and leaves’. You get the picture?

      So a wireless router, a perfectly harmless expression in England, is known here as a ‘rowter’, pronounced in the American way with an ‘ow’ in the middle. When I pointed out to my friends here that that made no sense, since the word router has its roots (excuse the pun) in the word ‘route’ to mean a ‘way’, and Aussies don’t talk about the ‘rowt’ from Sydney to Melbourne for instance, as Americans would, I was told that is how it is pronounced the world over (except England), so what’s my problem?

      My problem was that I could no more go into a shop here and ask for a ‘wireless rowter’ than I could row across the Atlantic. Perhaps it’s because ever since I became an Australian citizen I perversely feel myself to be more British than I did before. So I found myself having to go into the shop and ask for an item I was unable to actually mention, which meant I was reduced to asking for ‘something that will enable me to pick up a wireless signal’, which in turn led me down several false and confusing alleys until I finally swallowed hard and asked to see wireless routers (English pronunciation), at which the young salesman had the decency not to laugh out loud.

      It may be a small thing, but I don’t think Aussies realise how American they have become. Before you know it they’ll be talking about ‘pants’ rather than trousers and ‘lines’ instead of queues. (Come to think of it they already do.)

      But rather more importantly, how far am I prepared to go, now I am a full-blooded Australian citizen, to prove I am a true-blue, dinky-die Aussie (and a Sheila to boot)? (And I see my computer has automatically put a capital ‘S’ on the front of that word, so that’s something else to contend with.)

 

The joys of flying

I don’t know why anyone chooses to fly if they can avoid it. There’s the hassle of getting to the airport in the first place, long queues at the check-in desks and even longer ones to get through security. They’ve introduced new regulations since I last flew to Oz six months ago, not all of which seem to make a lot of sense. In addition to the liquids/gels/ creams-and-lotions-in-a-plastic-bag rule, there’s now the one-bag-only-on-board rule, which means packing your handbag inside your take-on-board bag at least as far as the security gate, when it can come out of the take-on-board bag for the duration, and once you’re through to duty-free you can then weight yourself down with limitless bags of booze, perfume, electronics, cosmetics, clothes and whatever else have you. So it can’t be for reasons for space. Still, I was chastened by the affable young Japanese American guy who sat next to me while we put our shoes back on and remarked how much safer he felt thanks to having to remove his shoes for inspection.

      A cab driver who does a lot of airport pickups was telling me the other day that Heathrow has become such an unpopular airport for business travellers they rarely go near it any more (they go to Europe instead). I said considering the amount of traffic it has to cope with coming in to the airport is remarkably easy and quick but going out is another thing entirely. And as I was sitting reading The Times in the airport lounge waiting for my flight to be called the lead story was about the general awfulness of all the London airports and how much worse they are all going to become, Heathrow especially, due to planned staff cuts (in all areas other than security) which will mean even longer delays, God help us, and you’re already expected to arrive 3 hours before your flight if you are flying intercontinental. Forget carbon footprints. Soon flying will simply become so impossible nobody in their right minds will want to do it.

     I was thinking I was sitting on the plane watching the little toy plane zigzagging across the map of the world on the on-board screen, following our route – across Europe, zigzag right at Russia and straight on over Saudi Arabia to India (stopping at Dubai), zigzag right again at Malaysia and on and on in a more or less straight line across northwest Australia past Alice Springs and Ayres Rock (sic) to Sydney – how absurd it is to be travelling halfway across the world and not to be stopping off at some of these places. In all the journeys I’ve made to Australia through the years I never have stopped off anywhere. I’ve usually been travelling on my own and I suppose I’ve thought it isn’t worth the hassle of offloading your suitcase, getting it through customs, loading it into a cab and travelling all the way into town unless you can spend several days there, and I didn’t know that I wanted to do that on my own; not to mention getting back to the airport, going through check-in again, then security (again), and so on. But it does seem a shame.

      Anyway, here I am in Oz again, thanks to Emirates (good service but awful food), safely landed more or less on time and met by an old and very dear friend at the airport and an hour later sitting at an outside café drinking coffee looking over the Pacific Ocean in the sunshine. Could be worse, hey?