I've changed my mind, I love Adelaide

Its amazing how drinking over two bottles of wine will change how you feel about a city. We've just finished a wine tour of Adelaide's Barossa Valley. Four vineyards and more than 30 tastings later, I find myself at the front of our tour bus, sitting on a cooler, telling jokes over a microphone. My sister, the environmentalist vegetarian who won't eat animals she thinks are cute, is telling anyone who will listen about how much she liked eating kangaroo meat.

We're thinking of filling the rest of the day with a trip to the hotel sauna and hot tub. Its about all we're up for at this point.

Oh, the bus just joined in for dome impromptu karaoke with the the song playing on the radio. We spent yesterday in Glenelg, a small suburb that looks like you accompanied Marty McFly back to 1955 in the Delorian. It's a sea-side beach town that, like Adelaide, is stuck in the 1950's. Why did we go? We saw the major attractions (really all of the city) of Adelaide in the first half-day after we arrived. So we took a little bus trip out.

Tomorrow is on to Cairns in the north of Australia, where we're excited to meet up with warm weather. We have a rainforest tour, a coral reef dive and a trip to the Aboriginal Cultural Center booked.

Adelaide: 50 years and :30 minutes behind Sydney

So we arrived in Adelaide this afternoon. The first thing that struck me about the city is that it's in its own timezone, 30 minutes behind Sydney. Half an hour -- I kid you not.

When I heard the flight attendant announce the local time over the PA system, I thought I misheard her, but noticing the funny expression Arielle had on her face, I realized I hadn't. We flagged the flight attendant as she passed, asked the local time again, and she responded with, "yeah, I know, it's odd."

If Sydney is New York, Melburne is Chicago, Brisbane is Boston, then we've decided that Adelaide is Toledo, Ohio. And many of you know how I feel about Toledo.

Adelaide is seriously the same as it was in the 1950's. Everything (including our hotel room decor) looks like it's in the 50's. What makes things tougher is that it's Sunday, about 4:30ish (that's 5:00 Sydney time) and everything is closing down. Amanda suggests we take it as a sign that we're supposed to check out the hotel spa. I think she may be right, as in the four hours we've been here, we've seen about half of the attractions, and have a full day left to wander tomorrow. We don't want to see it all in a single day. Luckily we have a full day vineyard tour booked for Tuesday, although we made hit a liquor store and start our own tastings tonight in the hotel, if there is little else to do.

I like to boogie, I like the nightlife

Forgive me if this isn't the most coherent of postings, we've just come out of a pub.

So a bunch of you have written and asked about the nightlife. It's very cool. We've been having our share of fun evenings.

The Aussies like their live music, and almost every bar we've gone to in Brisbane and Sydney has had a band. Mostly they play covers of Australian and American music (the Aussie songs have been awesome) ranging from Prince to Greenday to Paul Simon.

Almost all have multiple rooms and/or floors with different music on each, and in Brisbane, almost all had some kind of outdoor area (its warm there for the most-part year round). In Brisbane almost all of the bars also had Pokies, the most popular form of slot machines. If you find yourself in Brisbane, I recommend, in this order, the Royal Exchange Hotel, the Victory Hotel (affectionately called the RE and the Vic, respectively) and Friday's (no, not as in TGI Friday's). In Sydney, so far my favorite is Three Wise Monkeys, where we were earlier tonight.

Okay time to sleep. More later on the Sydney harbor cruise we took this evening, and about the seagulls who will eat right out of your hand.

What do you mean, “you love my accent?”

As I write this, Arielle and I are sitting in a riverfront cafe on the Yarra River in Melbourne, taking a little rest. I think I can safely say the jetlag is over, but we've been so busy and on the move that we're exhausted. Last night we checked out the Crown, Australia's biggest casino. The place is massive and has over 40 bars, 25 restaurants, movie theaters, stages, video game arcades, billiard halls and oh yes, gambling. Apparently the Aussies love to gamble and it makes up more that 10 percent of the national economy. Crikey!

I won't say how much we dropped in the casino, but after we hit sensory overload, we left and found this little pub that had trivia night (which I absolutely love) going on inside.

We also toured the Fitzroy gardens, which are beautiful, even if they are completely made up of trees imported from England. It also contains a miniature Victorian village that includes a model of Shakespeare's house, and was a gift from a town in England that the Australians sent food to during the famine in the 40s. A pretty craptacular thank you if you ask me.

Arielle and I have also been spending time with our 82 year-old aunt who lives here (and who we're staying with) she's hysterically funny and has a dirty sense of humor. Couple that with the fact that she's a bit hard of hearing, and you can imagine the embarrassment Arielle and I have felt when she asks us to repeat what Samantha said while watching Sex in the City. The Aussies, and my aunt love it.

Finally, a note to my male buddies: guys, you'll love the ladies out here. They all have that accent we faun over, many are tall, beautiful and complain that Australian guys are too short. Plus, they keep telling me how much they love my American accent. I think I'm going to move here and start a mail order (male order?) husband service. The only problem is they see our citizenship as less desirable than their own. Oh well.

Okay, off to Sydney tonight where we'll be joined by Arielle's friend Amanda in the morning for the next few cities.

We're staying in the Williamsburg of Melbourne

We arrived in Melbourne yesterday in the most remote airfield I've ever seen. I say airfield, because that's what it was, basically cornfields with a tarmac cleared out in the middle. Our plane, which was a full-sized Airbus 330, was the only one in sight. We had been diverted from Melbourne's very large, very active, very close to the city, main airport (which I assume is much larger) as there's construction going on.

We're staying with an Aunt who lives here, who scared us by suggesting we rent a car if staying with her. Then, when it took us an hour (and two trains) to get to her house from the city center (or CBD as the Australians call it) we were scared that we were in the boonies and nowhere near the city. Turns out we just took the long route, and are staying in a ultra hip, very young suburb, two blocks from the tram into the CBD. The night life is very cool, and Arielle and I explored the main drag a bit last night.

The people here are nothing short of lovely. People will take you far out of their way to help you if you need directions (as we've learned several times) or will double back to their cars to get a map. Fantastic.

I'm also learning some interesting language differences and plan on posting an Australian to American dictionary at some point soon.

Okay, we're off to go check out Melbourne's oldest prison and then to the zoo.

Brisbane

So I hadn't been in Australia for even five minutes, before I was detained by authorities in the airport (or as they say, aeroport). It turns out that when my sister asked me to bring her cashew nuts, she forgot to mention a little thing they take very seriously here called the Australia Quarantine. To prevent all sorts of germs and agriculture from throwing off the Australian ecosystem, they've imposed a quarantine on bringing any type of food, animal or plant products into the country, something that is enforced quite rigorously at the airports. How rigorously? You have to declare any items you might be bringing in, and enforcement dogs patrol and sniff you all over the airport. In the end, after a discussion with four enforcement officers, and an encounter with two beagles and a golden lab, the cashews and I were permitted to enter the country.

Yesterday my sister and I took a tour of the local state brewery. If there's one thing I learned, its that the Aussies take their beer very seriously, drink it in large quantities and start early. There are even little pubs set up in the middle of the block on the large shopping streets.

The animals are so interesting as well. Wild Ibis' fly around the streets, and the seagulls even look completely different. We've even seen some kangaroos and kowala bears. The roos are very cute, and the ones we encountered will eat right out of your hand. I want to bring one home as a pet. I bonded with one in particular who held my hand as she ate from it, and when I ran out of food, gave me a kiss and hopped away. We also went somewhere where we got to hold kowala bears.

Tonight we're going to an Aussie Rules football game to see the culture, and tomorrow we're off the Melbourne.

Packing

I’m currently packing for the trip, or rather repacking, as I’m leaving from a business trip in San Diego, which meant bringing like three weeks of clothing ranging from suites for the business portion to shorts for the trip to Australia.

Actually, packing for this trip hasn’t been easy at all. Besides the fact that I tend to over pack anyways, it’s complicated by the time I’m visiting. While it’s spring here in the States (and a beautiful constant 70ish in San Diego) in the southern hemisphere it’s fall. Ok, that part didn’t seem so bad. What’s throwing me for a loop is that the weather in Australia really varies. In Brisbane, where my sister has been living since February, its sub-tropical, and the weather is apparently very much like it is in San Diego. Great, I can deal with that, no problem. In the north, in Cairns, where there’s rainforests and the tropics, it’s still sunny and swim weather. Cool, no problem there either. Here’s where the packing gets tough – in the south (Sydney, Melbourne, Adelaide) it’s ranging from 65 degrees to the low 40’s at night. So here I am, having to pack for climates ranging from 40 to 90; bringing everything from business attire to casual wear. I feel like a total idiot bringing a wool coat to San Diego in June – especially when it’s packed right between my swimsuit and Tevas.

I actually love those little differences, the fact that the seasons are opposite, that toilet water runs the other way, and the fact that they're a day ahead of us. Actually, the whole time change thing has taken a lot of mindspace lately as it’s made planning this trip with my sister a bit of a challenge, especially as the time difference grew by an additional three hours, despite physically traveling 3,500 miles closer to the country. Got to love that International Date Line. Actually Bill Bryson has a great take on the whole International Date Line thing:

“Each time you fly from North America to Australia, and without anyone asking how you feel about it, a day is taken away from you when you cross the International Date Line. I left Los Angeles on January 3 and arrived in Sydney fourteen hours later on January 5. For me there was no January 4. None at all. Where it went exactly I couldn’t tell you. All I know is that for one twenty-four-hour period in the history of earth, it appears I had no being.

I find it a little uncanny, to say the least. I mean to say, if you were browsing through your ticket folder and you saw a notice that said, “Passengers are advised that on some crossings twenty-four-hour loss of existence may occur” (which is, of course, how they would phrase it, as if it happened from time to time), you would probably get up and make inquiries, grab a sleeve, and say, “Excuse me.” There is, it must be said, a certain metaphysical comfort in knowing that you can cease to have material form and it doesn’t hurt at all, and, to be fair, they do give you back the day on the return journey when you cross the date line in the opposite direction and thereby manage somehow to arrive in Los Angeles before you left Sydney, which in its way, of course, is an even neater trick (In a Sunburned Country).”

Okay back to packing. More when I actually get in country…

Itinerary

6/16 - 6/19: Brisbane
6/19 - 6/22: Melbourne
6/22 - 6/26: Sydney
6/26 - 6/29: Adelaide
6/29 - 7/2: Cairns
7/2 - 7/3: Brisbane