A week in Sydney

No no, dear reader, I haven't just spent a week in Sydney. That title is rather misleading isn't it? Well a colleague of mine is heading to Sydney over xmas and I put together my top 10 'must do' list for him, and then thought I would share it with you too. If you ever find yourself in Sydney, make sure you tick off as many as these as possible and then you may find you love the city as much as I do :)

Sneaky number 11 is whale watching, but its out of season at the moment, hence not being included in the full list.

1) Sushi Train in Bondi Junction. PERFECTION. Don't go to the Town Hall or Bondi Beach ones, its just not as good.

2) Cocktails/meal at Orbit/Summit

3) The Hyde Park Barracks Museum

4) Take a ferry to Watson's Bay and walk up to the South Head for a view back into the harbour and out through the harbour heads

5) Glebe markets. You can also do Bondi markets or Paddington markets (not to be confused with Paddy's market), but my fav is Glebe and its the biggest.

6) $7 steak on a Wednesday night at the North Bondi RSL. Just sign yourself in and indulge in the best steak in the world. Get a balcony table and watch the sunset behind Bondi. Kitchen closes at 9pm and it gets mad busy in summer. (its the upstairs floor of the building in the pic, door down the side).

7) Thai and BYO (bring your own booze) in Newtown (wander down King St and take your pick of a million places)

8) Cocktail at Opera Bar as the sun sets behind the bridge

9) Sydney Opera House tour (and if poss, see something there)

10) Blue Mountains for a day

Because that's the point of getting married...

Courtesy of FailBlog and one very rude and shallow lady on Facebook.

Memories

I just took a look through some of my travel snaps on Facebook and gosh I had the best time. Here are just a few randoms I love.... because I never did upload any for you... I may do this every month or so just to keep me smiling :)

They are (out of chronological order):

Karijini National Park
The Malcolm Douglas Crocodile Farm in Broome
Shark Bay and Ningaloo Reef

The joy of not being sold anything

From Something Changed:

When I met Henry VIII

I don’t often blog about things I have been up to. Even when I used to blog lots, I tended to tell you all about things I thought, or that other people said.

However this weekend The Boy and I went to Hampton Court Palace and had a fabulous time, so I thought I would mention it. We did all the audio tours all over the palace, and learnt that pies were originally invented as an oven dish, so you are supposed to tear the top off, eat the middle and chuck the pastry away. We saw the Henry VIII stuff (throughout which I insisted on boring The Boy with my deep Tudor knowledge (gained half from BBC History Magazine and half from excessive reading of Philippa Gregory books). We saw William and Anne, we saw the Georgian bits. We played in the maze (Luke lost me and left me wandering for 10 mins alone between box hedges trying to find the centre, which made me giggle a lot). We wandered in the gardens and saw the world’s oldest and biggest vine...

AND I SAW HENRY VIII! No I really did! He was all dressed up and wandering through his palace on his way to his wedding to Kateryn Parr. I curtseyed (I really did!) while Luke loitered in a corner, scared because the guide book said he has a tendency to shout at rude courtiers. We saw him again coming out of the Royal Chapel with his new queen on his arm and looking very cheerful. Was bloomin’ good fun.

And the best bit? Well not only is Hampden Court our ‘local’ palace (just 15 mins drive down the road), and not only have they nearly finished constructing the pictureskew ice skating rink out the front, but the gardens are entirely free all winter! That’s 1^st October till the 31^st March ... totally free (except the maze, but we have done that now...)

So we can wander back for more fun (pretending to be Tudors, or Georgians or whoever else we fancy) any time we like J.

(In?)-Equalities Bill

In the Queen’s speech this week we found out some details about Harriet Harman’s Equalities Bill. And I don’t like it. The bill proposes that firms will have to prove their commitment to the equal rights agenda to win tax-payer funded work worth a total of more than £200bn.

The bill has immediately proven to be unpopular with small businesses, who claim it will make it even harder for them to win public sector contracts, as they will be lost in bureaucracy and disadvantaged by the numbers game.

But I object on a more fundamental level.

I am a feminist and I find this to be an incredibly patronising and misplaced ‘positive’ discrimination. Tweeting my dislike for the bill I was pointed, by a fellow twitterer, to the Norweigan example of female quotas for boards as an successful outcome from such legislation. The idea, I suppose, is that the end justifies the means. Equality, this all suggests, is a numbers game and we can all declare victory and go home once women and men occupy all the positions we value in society in equal numbers.

But hang on a minute, surely that misses the point? If you believe (as I do) that equality is not about outcomes but opportunities, then the numbers of women on the board can only ever be an indicator, not a conclusion. Personally, I don’t give a monkey’s bottom how many women occupy board positions – as long as every woman who wanted one of those seats was given the opportunity to compete and was judged fairly and regardless of sex.

What woman would want to occupy a board position knowing she was there to make up her company’s numbers? Her colleagues would know likewise and her opinions and ability to do her job would be severely undermined. Through actions like this we drive sexism underground into a deep seated resentment.

An article in last weekend’s Sunday Times Magazine gave great detail about the successes that women are seeing in our society. School grades outstrip those of the boys, female university graduates outnumber male, the predominance of male doctors is being balanced, ‘female’ (urgh) skills are central to the UK’s services economy and this (combined with increasingly flexible employment conditions) have meant that the recession has affected men in the workplace more than women. We are also members of a society where increasing single parent families (read; single mum-headed families) are producing boys lacking in male role models, unable to cope with their own biology and massively underperforming.

I am not suggesting for a moment that the battle is won. Nor can we stop in our efforts for equality because female successes inevitably cause a rebalance in male successes. There are multiple forces at work here, all of which need addressing.

However I fundamentally cannot believe, with so many examples of women successfully breaking through the glass ceiling and simple economics and market dynamics driving companies to recognise the benefits of female input, that the focus of legislation should be at such an elite level.

Girls need to be given fair access to education, exposed to powerful role models and allowed to achieve their own ambitions. If women cannot compete for board seats on their own merits then there is a problem further down the chain. I fear for a society where we develop resentful male / female professional relationships and promote individuals on the basis of quotas rather than ability.

The Tube

So here I am. On the tube. At Turnham Green actually - my first
station in London. I am en route to Richmond from Paddington and boy
has my mental state changed since I last commuted on the tube.

I need to work harder on my seat-securing strategy, my balance and my
vacuous stare (at the moment I am aware of looking far too interested
in the goings on of everyone else). I have even forgotten how to keep
track of stations out of the corner of my eye, so as to give the
impression of a psychic link with the route.

But frankly it makes it all exciting again. And this carriage is nice
and new and clean. Just wish the man next to me was as clean...

It's all gone quiet... Ah, that's coz she can't talk

Wow getting your brain to think in blog frames is hard after so long
off.

This week I have mostly been moping in bed and on the sofa with what I
first thought was flu but turned out to be a nasty bout of tonsilitus.
Who'd have thunk something so teenage sounding could wipe you out so
thoroughly!

So I managed 7 days in the new job before having to phone in sick.
Very not ideal as I was due to meet two clients on the day in question
- and one of them in Finland! Running a temperature of 39 degrees I
was rather emotionally unstable and had quite a 'poor me' weep after
making the call to the new boss. The weeping continued that night
while at an NHS walk in centre (I of course have no doctor, having had
to start work on the first working day of living in twickenham. Not
sure how to resolve that) because by then I was such a sub-human I
couldn't hold my head up straight.

3 days of enforced silence (a delight for the boy and no hardship for
me, feeling as I was) and dehydrating sweats and I am beginning to
feel better. Thank the lord for penicillin. I just wish the tablets
didn't taste so rank because I have to take them for another 8 days...

Business as usual

I am not going to dwell on the long period of silence here at TOE. Least said soonest mended and all that. I shan't even recommence my regular web diatribe with excuses because, frankly, I have too many and haven't yet worked out bullet points on the iPhone.

Instead I shall begin service as usual and hopefully posts over the coming weeks will fill you in on fundamental facts such as: I now live in the uk. I have a new and great job. Er, and such.

So without further ado.

This morning when the boy stumbled downstairs to dutifully help me wash my hair (well, he chose the house with no shower) he asked; Did I ignore you while you were talking to me this morning? No, I replied, he hadn't. It transpired that he had had a dream where I was talking at him and he could only hear white noise and so decided to pretend I wasn't talking at all.

And his closing remark? I wonder if it's indicative of our relationship? Cheek.

Update from my travels #2

So, where did I leave you? Ah yes... in Broome.

Well first off I should mention that I totally forgot to tell you in my last update that I had hand fed a WILD dolphin with a fishy for brekky. Awesomely cool. Never been near a dolphin before and my eco-ness highly appreciated that it was wild, and therefore only eating my fish because it felt like it.

OK, so what since Broome? Well.... in my last I told you all about how I had been served on a platter for bed bugs in my hostel, and how those bites had blistered. I set off into the Kimberley with 6 major blisters and about 4 others I disregarded. Major, by the way, means at least a centimetre in diameter. 4 on the top of my arm, one on the calf and one on my wrist. Just a scene setter there, as the Kimberly is one of the most remote regions in Australia - medical attention is 3 days away in some spots and infection is a BAD idea. How brave/silly am I?

Now onto the fun stuff.... We headed north on the first day, straight onto the Gibb River Road. If anyone has ever been cornered in a pub by a four wheel drive enthusiast you will certainly have heard of the road - its a hobbiest's idea of heaven. It is basically the road formed by the drovers (a la Hugh Jackman in Australia) droving cattle to Darwin. Only they never bothered to make it good, coz they whacked highway one about 200km beneath it eventually. So slackers take highway 1, and 4WD capable vehicles embark upon 5 days of AWESOMEness. We found on the road the following:

- Gorgeous gorges (one walk you can only start by loading your manditory 2 litres of water, clothes, hat, shoes etc, into a polystyrene box and swimming across the river with it)
- A walk through a gorge which is basically a cave and you have to wade through ankle deep water (with crocs) with a torch
- The BEST scones I have ever eaten (on a cattle station in the middle of nowhere, with a wild wallabee hopping around, an outside bath with a view, gorgeous birds....)
- Some fabulous stubby coolers (if you have no idea what this is, google it - Australians won't drink beer bottles or cans without one. It keeps the hand warm, and the beer cool). I have resisted this particular souvenir since my arrival, but finding a souvenir for - say - a roadhouse in the middle of nowhere on the Gibb, is pretty unique.
- Mucho scenery from the film Australia (which I love a lot already, but can now annoy Luke by not only making him watch it, but now also pointing out stuff)
- Zebedee hot springs (in El Questro station, a million acre plot - (??!!)). This is the springs that reputedly helped Nicole Kidman's man get her up the duff... along with 6 other members of the crew of Australia (not him, you understand, I think their own men got involved)
- Three men GENUINELY mustering cattle
- An aboriginal community (you have to phone ahead for permission) and their art gallery. They have no tradition of painting on flat surfaces until the seventies, and their stuff has no outside influences but is really lovely. Check out Warmun in the google).
- Sunsets
- Sunrises
- Road trains shifting cattle - droving is now done by diesel power

We came off the Gibb River Road to head south into Purnululu National Park (home to the Bungle Bungles). I was very excited about this - I have wanted to see them since I can first remember hearing of them and never thought I would get there (not being the adventurous type). And wow. I can't wait to download my photos. After a couple of gorge walks I opted to helicopter over the range. Caps required.... WOW. I had to stop taking photos at one point to have a serious internal word with myself; "Emily," (I said) "you are in a helicopter flying over the bungles. Just how much can life ROCK?"

Lots of swag action all along the way - in 21 days since Perth (and gosh just get back on Google and look up on the map how far that is from Darwin, where I currently sit. 6,600km no less!!) - I have slept in a swag too many times to be bothered to count.

What else...? Its hot. Bloomin' muggy. I naively thought the tropics simply had two seasons - wet and dry. Well they do, but these things don't change over night. The 6 weeks before the wet are called The Build Up (caps probably not required). That's when I appear to have chosen to head to the Top End. Wally me. This is the time of year when every other advert on telly up here is a suicide hotline, because Territorians (folk from the Northern Territory) all go "tropo" in the mental unescapable heat. Clouds come over around 1pm for a couple of hours. They are tantalisingly gray and heavy. Yet they do nothing. We all continue to wait for rain. Apparently when it appears everyone dances in the street and holds BBQs. I plan to escape long before that. In the meantime I am spending far too much time in overly air conditioned tat souvenir shops. Bliss.

But Darwin is a really nice city. On the way in we all got a shock when we stopped at traffic lights. No I really did intend to end that sentence there. Nothing happened - they merrily turned green again and we went on our way, but we hadn't had traffic lights for about 3,000km - possibly more.

Other things we have done that I have neglected to mention include:

- Taking a boat on Lake Argle - this man-made lake cost just $20 million in the seventies because the damn is, frankly, underwhelming, but it successfully flooded some unloved valleys to make a lake which (although I can't remember the dimensions) is vast. I think the water that flows through from the River Ord into the lake is enough to fill Sydney Harbour every hour. Or something. And to show how much rain they have in the wet season, this lake which was supposed to take 8 years to fill, filled in just 3. Anyway, it has successfully irrigated the Ord River region around Kununurra to become the nation's fruit bowl. Although now they seem to be growing a lot of Sandalwood - a controversial move according to the lady who made me a delicious mango smoothie.
- Driven through gushing rivers in our trusty 4WD bus
- Aboriginal rock art
- Walked more than 15 gorges, all of which (except 2) had a rewardingly paradisial (made up word?) waterfall/pool at the end to swim in.
- grass hoppers of around 4 inches in length
Crossing the border from Western Australia to the Northern Territory (WA goes on much longer than I thought, NT is a really narrow state and much of the north coast is WA or Queensland)
- Full roast dinners cooked in the camp fire. The last night goes down on record as one of my favourite meals of all time

So here I am in Darwin. We got in last night and all headed to the Mindil Beach Sunset Markets. Bustling busy craft and food stalls. Lovely. Today I went to a croc place (Again. Because they are fascinatingly ugly and beautiful, big, scary, cute...) had a nice brunch with some pals, a good thai dinner). Tomorrow I think I am the last one from my bus tour in left in Darwin so I plan a lazy day and then heading to the outdoor deckchair cinema with our tour guide Pete in the evening. Then Sunday morning I head off for my 3 day tour into Kakadu. Except it has been cancelled so I am instead going on a Lichfield/Kakadu one. Which is pretty cool because I heard on the route that Lichfield is lovely.

Signing off with love from a very happy and life-enhanced,
Em