Melbourne Framed by Food

The classic city shot.

I began and ended my stay in Melbourne with fabulous meals. The first was on Lygon Street, Melbourne's "Little Italy." As you walk down the street, the hosts stop you on the sidewalk and try to convince you to come into their restaurant. We were finally persuaded by a charismatic man who promised us complimentary bruchetta. He said he was the Legend on Lygon Street, and showed an award that his restaurant had won. He was a great salesman. Throughout the dinner, he would come out and chat with Alex in Italian, often bursting out into song with him. It was very entertaining.

When the waiter came out and I ordered my food, he looked at me for a second and said, "You're from the States. Eastern seaboard, right?"I was stunned.

"I used to live in Boston. You can tell that from my accent?" I don't think I have a Boston accent at all.

He told me that he was from Boston. His accent was not Australian, but not American either. It decided to give him a little test.

"Can you believe the Red Sox are already out of the Series?"

"Yeah, but at least the Angels beat the Yankees. That's all I care about." Hmm. Maybe he really is from Boston.

The dinner was really nice and involved five bottles of wine and lasted nearly five hours which, according to Alex, is the Italian way.

When not eating, I spent some time looking around the city. It is very clean feeling, perhaps because the sky is so bright.

Some cool looking buildings.

I spent a good portion of one day on Brunswick Street. This is the arty, alternative area (for lack of a better way to describe it) full of organic shops and funky clothing stores.

Brunswick Street

I love train stations.

There is a museum in Chinatown dealing with Chinese Australian history that I would recommend going to, if you ever get the chance. The intro was fantastic. You start of by walking down a narrow, steep, winding, dark staircase to the basement. There is only enough light to see a few feet in front of you. Once you reach the corridor, you follow a winding path that suddenly brings you to a statue of a Chinese man standing in front of a ship to Australia. His voice-over begins, and he talks about how times are very bad in China, so he is going to Australia where people say there is lots of gold to be found. He is worried about having to leave his family, and he is nervous about living among people who have been known to be violent toward the immigrants.

The voice-over stops. The only ways out of this darkened room are the entrance you just came through and a burlap curtain. When you pass through the curtain you find yourself in the belly of a ship. It is crowded with bunks on either side, and it is musty. The ship creaks and moans. There is another curtain ahead of you. Through this is the deck of the ship, with the sounds of seagulls.

After this, it turns into basically every other museum. But man, that introduction was brilliant. It actually makes you feel some of the uncertainty and trepidation they must have felt embarking on this unknown voyage (a much smaller scale, of course).

Many Chinese people came to Australia in search of gold during the mid-1800s. These immigrants met with a great deal of prejudice (which seems to happen a lot in these situations). There was a section of the museum that had some drawings run in newspapers during that time:

The insert in the lower right-hand corner has a sifter that says, "The Law" and these serpent people are slipping through.

"Multiply and replenish the earth and divide it among you."

After this I went to the Immigration Museum which was actually quite similar, but bigger and more polished. It also dealt with why people came to Australia, and how they were treated throughout history. One very interesting and dark (no pun intended) portion of Australian history began in 1901 when they brought in the Immigration Restriciton Act, better known as the White Australia Policy. Under this law, immigrants had to pass a dictation test. They gave an example of it at the museum, and it was pretty ludicrous. The examiner would read several sentances in English and the immigrant had to write them. I found the sentances themselves somewhat confusing and strangely worded, and English is my first language. The most ridiculous part about the test is that they could choose what language you had to write it in, cycling through as many as they liked until the immigrant failed. There was a story about a man who spoke several languages fluently, and eventually failed the test when asked to write in Gaelic.

The museum had tons of information and I wish I had had more time to spend there. As it was, I just got an overview and couldn't read everything as I like to (I'm a bit obsessive in museums).

On my last night in Melbourne Kerensa, Max (another friend of Raf's) and I went out to dinner in Chinatown. It was another great meal, and Kerensa and I spent some time recounting family stories. She told me one that I had never heard before:

Our ancestor was a guard for the Emperor (this I knew). One day when he was on guard, a vandal came onto the property. Our ancestor could tell by the way he tied his belt that he was an excellent martial artist. The vandal approached and attacked him. It was a close fight, but the vandal made a few errors, and our ancestor was able to get the upper hand and defeat him.

Months later, he gets an anonymous invitation to a party. When he arrives, he realizes it is the vandal that he fought months ago. He turns to leave, but the vandal stops him, saying that this dinner is a peace offering. "Since you are such a great fighter, you must also be a great healer." (When studying martial arts you also had to learn Chinese medicine along with it.) He went on, "The injuries you inflicted upon me will not heal. Only you know how to help me."

That's all Kerensa remembers of the story. I don't know how much of it is true, but it is a pretty grandiose story.

For part of our dinner we ordered a fish which they bring with the head still attached in Chinese restaurants. Kerensa asked if my family ate the head, and I said that I remembered as a kid being told that the eyes have lots of nutrients and would make me smart. Neither she nor I had eaten this in our memories, so we decided in honor of our Chinese blood we should continue that tradition. It was pretty good, and the eye was remarkably crunchy and fairly dry.

I liked Melbourne, it was a decent city, but to be honest there was nothing about it that really stood out and made it unique. Brunswick Street was cool, and it reminded me a lot of Hawthorn Street in Portland, OR. The Victoria Markets were fun, basically an outdoor market with a variety of clothes and food for sale, and it was a lot like the Waterlooplein in Amsterdam. Chinatown was, you know, Chinatown, like the one in Boston but without the seedy underbelly feeling. Are you sensing a trend? I think I'm just burnt out on cities. There was one cool thing that stood out, though, and that was this kid who busks outside the Flinders Street Station. He looks like he's about 13, and he strums random chords on his guitar while screaming really inflamatory things about John Howard and the government in general. I really enjoyed seeing that.

Back in Time

Of all the places I saw in the outback, Watarrka National Park was my favorite. It contains the George Gill Range and Kings Canyon.

Here is a picture of the range from a distance.

Here it is close up.

This place was totally fascinating (and beautiful of course). The rocks are sandstone, and hold the very limited water like a sponge. Vegetation grows out of the stone, sending its roots deep into the cracks and crevices.

The strangest thing was that where the rocks had broken apart, you could see that they were made up of the white sand that covers Australian beaches. They think that millions of years ago there was a sea in the center of Australia (where the outback is now), then as the global climate changed it turned into tropical rainforests. Today, those rainforests are now only in the northern parts of Australia. The center still has remnants from those days, such as the palm trees and what they speculate could be an old coral reef (see the picture below).

They call that place "Lilliput." I kept imagining, thousands of years from now people walking around on the Great Barrier Reef with a guide explaining how this used to all be under the ocean. Crazy.

Supposedly during the wet season, one of the cliffs turns into a waterfall. (I definitely need to see that to believe it). The water runs down into the canyon and there is enough moisture that it maintains a waterhole all year round. It is quite green and lush in that area, so it has gotten the nickname "The Garden of Eden."




It was a magnificent place. We began our hike up to the rim of the canyon at sunrise, which is really a good thing since it gets very hot by midday. The hike began with a steep climb up the side - surprisingly nice despite having just woken up. The air was so clear and even a bit cold. I like that about the desert. No matter how hot it gets during the day, it always cools off once the sun goes down.

During the five hour drive back to Alice Springs I sat up front by our guide and asked him a gazillion questions about the area and what life is like there. It sounds like such a strange mix of people. One fourth are aboriginal, and from what I understand they hold most of the land rights now (sounds a bit like in Fiji). Another quarter are Americans involved in the Pine Gap project. I didn't know what Kevin (our guide) was talking about and I felt too ignorant to ask, but I just googled it and it is some sort of military base that is run primarily by CIA agents. Woah. The rest are Australians, plus lots of tourists passing through, with the largest groups being German and Japanese.

Add all of this into some of the most beautiful landscapes I have seen, and it becomes clear that Alice Springs is a town that I must get to know better.

The Heart of Australia

I took my nephew Michael on a trip to the outback. Alice Springs is the town right in the heart of Australia, and it serves as the hub of the outback. Yes, it is not "a town" in the outback, but rather "the town." It wasn't until the 1980s that there was even a paved road into Alice Springs. The isolation is incredible.

We took a flight to Alice Springs from Sydney (which is on the coast and in New South Wales, which is the state where Rachele's family lives, for those of you who don't know about Australian geography). The flight took three hours, and throughout the majority of the flight Michael and I looked out the window and marvelled at the fact that all you could see was a huge expanse of red, dry, cracked earth. You really feel like you are going out into the middle of nowhere.

When I stepped off the plane in Alice Springs, the first thing that hit me was the intense heat. It was about 1pm, and the sun was beating down. Even the wind was hot. The air was so dry you could almost feel it pulling the the moisture out of you. You don't need to bother drying your hands after you wash them, just step outside the air does it for you. The earth is bright red, and it gets into everything and leaves its mark. My formerly white sneakers will now forever serve as a reminder of this trip. Worst of all are the flies. The place is swarming with flies that are not shy about crawling all over your face, into your ears, nose, mouth and eyes.

And for some reason, I fell in love with this place. It might have something to do with the beautifully bright sky, the crystal clear air, the stunning sunsets and sunrises, and a night sky that is so thick with stars you feel like you could reach out and touch them. It is a place where you can literally drive for hours and see nothing but the little two-lane road you are on and land rolling by on either side. You pass at most a handful of other vehicles, the drivers of which all smile and wave. Of course they do; who knows when you will see another person? It is like no place I have ever been.

A glimpse of the outback.

Check me out - I'm petting a dingo!

(Please ignore the fact that it is chained up, tame, and asleep.)

Alice Springs is home to two unique and quite impressive systems developed to deal with the isolation of the people living in the outback.

There is the "School of the Air", which consists of teachers instructing students all across the outback via radio. They have recently started doing it by satellite so for the first time these students are actually able to see their teacher. On standardized testing these students score well - usually in the top 10% - then often go on to boarding schools for high school.

Alice Springs also serves as a base for the Royal Flying Doctors Service. This was started in 1928 to provide emergency care for people in isolated places. I read a story about a man who was in a farming accident, so they brought over a neighbor who had done a first aid course. This man then contacted his first aid teacher in Perth who instructed him how to do surgery through morse code, using only a pen knife. The man actually survived the surgery, but died of a burst appendix during the many-day trek to the nearest hospital. It was stories like this that prompted the development of RFDS.

Here is the Alice Springs base. Inside there is a small radio control room where they take the emergency calls. They have doctors and nurses on call to fly out and help these people, treating them in the on-board emergency room then taking them to the closest hospital. The RFDS services an area the size of western Europe.

Many of the homesteads have a medical kit which contains a chart to help the patients describe their injuries. There is also a medical chest that contains a variety of medicines which are each assigned a number, so the physician can easily prescribe the medicine they need.

This is the body chart. In addition to the grid, it lists words to describe the kind of pain they are experiencing (sharp, throbbing, etc).

This is a medicine chest from the 1960s. There was a joke in the museum about a man who said they had run out of #9 pills, so he just gave his wife a #4 and a #5 and she was just fine.

Needless to say, I really liked Alice Springs. I will write about all the adventuring into the outback in the next post.

Hiroshima and Nagasaki

. . . . .

What is there to say? Anything I write attempting to describe what it was like going to these cities sounds trite.
Perhaps I should just tell some of the things I saw.

There were displays of the remnants.
The tricycle that a 3 year old boy was riding.
Pieces of glass that, 30 years later were still working their way out of the bodies of the survivors.
A schoolgirl's metal lunchbox and the charred remains of her lunch inside.
A rooftile on which a mother had written a note to her missing son. "Father - dead. Mother - burned. Brother - missing."
The image of a man carrying a ladder, forever burned into a wall.
A man's helmet with fragments of his skull fused to the inside.
The wall of letters that the Mayor of Hiroshima had written to the leaders of nations who still test nuclear weapons. The letters pleaded with them to stop these tests, that they showed "utter contempt for the survivors."


And there were the photographs.
The woman trying to nurse her infant who was too weak to suckle.
The young boy who was carrying his badly burned little brother as they searched for their parents.
The young girls, faces blank with shock, standing among corpses.
The people with their skin falling of in strips.
The boy whose entire back was one open wound.


The A-Bomb Dome.
The A-bomb Dome is the ruins of the former Hiroshima Prefecture Industrial Promotion Hall which was destroyed by the first atomic bomb ever to be used in the history of humankind on August 6, 1945. The atomic bomb was detonated in the air at an altitude of approximately 600 meters almost right over the hall. The explosion by a single bomb claimed the lives of over 200,000 people and the city area of about 2-km radius was turned to ashes. In order to have this tragic fact known to succeeding generations and to make it a lesson for humankind, the reinforcement work of the ruins has been done by the contributions of many people who desire peace within and out of the country. The ruins shall be preserved forever.
August 6, 1967 Hiroshima City


Children's Peace Monument
This monument stands in memory of all children who died as a result of the atomic bombing of Hiroshima. The monument was originally inspired by the death of Sadako Sasaki, who was exposed to radiation from the atomic bomb at the age of two. Ten years later Sadako developed leukemia that ultimately ended her life. Sadako's untimely death compelled her classmates to begin a call for the construction of a monument for all children who died due to the atomic bomb. Built with contributions from more than 3,200 schools in Japan and donors in nine countries, the Children's Peace Monument was unveiled on May 5, 1958. The inscription reads: "This is our cry. This is our prayer. For building peace in this world." On the surface of the bell hung inside the monument, the phrases "A Thousand Paper Cranes" and "Peace on the Earth and in the Heavens" are carved in the handwriting of Dr. Hideki Yukawa, Nobel Prize Laureate in Physics.


The Flame of Peace
The origin of the Flame of Peace dates to August 1983, when the Greek Government granted special permission for the Flame to be taken from Mt. Olympus and sent to Nagasaki. It is said that in ancient Greece, all warring parties stopped fighting while the Olympic Flame was lighted during the Olympic Games. Thus, the Olympian Flame is also a symbol of peace. The Flame will be kept burning until all the nuclear weapons in the world are abolished. As long as the Flame burns as a symbol of peace, we pledge that we will never allow a nuclear war to break out anywhere in the world. Within this Flame is borne the pledge that Nagasaki will be the last city to suffer an atomic bombing.

The One-Legged Gate in Nagasaki

Camphor Trees in Sanno Shinto Shrine
These two huge camphor trees stand out among the trees surrounding the Senno Shinto Shrine, sinking deep roots on both sides of the entrance and creating a thick canopy of greenery with their tangle of branches. The ferocious blast and heat generated by the explosion of the atomic bomb at 11:02 A.M. August 9, 1945 destroyed the buildings of the shrine, which were located only 800 meters southeast of the hypocenter, and slapped down one of the pillars of the second gate. These two trees were instantly stripped naked and split down the trunk by the blast and scorched black by the heat rays. Although considered dead at the time, they came back to life and are now natural monuments designated by Nagasaki City. August 1995

As we were standing at the entrance to this shrine, we noticed some young boys practicing kendo in the yard. We watched for a while, and I took this picture as two of them walked off together, arm in arm.

Ah, Tokyo

What a city. Such a huge range of things to do and see. I would need weeks to get a real sense of the place. As it was, I got an overview and a strong desire to come back again one day.

A view of Tokyo from the top floor of St. Luke's Tower.

James' old Japanese teacher Michiko and her husband Hiroyuki showed us around Tokyo.

Some highlights:

We had a dinner of Okonomi Yaki, where they bring you a bunch of ingredients and you cook it right at your table any way you like it.

At the Edo-Tokyo Museum they had a replica of Tokyo as it was during the Edo period.

This was a replica of a Kabuki stage.

Meiji-Jingu is one of my favorite places in Tokyo.

The archway that marks the beginning of the pathway to the shrine.

The path to Meiji-Jingu.

The shrine itself.

James and I did a lot of wandering around Tokyo. We were walking through Yoyogi Park when we heard music in the distance. "Something cool is going on over there." We headed out toward this plaza area and sure enough, there was a hip-hop festival going on with music and - best of all - a break dancing battle.

This was right by Harajuku, which is where the goths and punks hang out. There were some totally fabulous outfits, like a goth girl wearing this long white fur coat and huge fur hat thing. Uh, I'm not describing it well but I was not game to try to take a picture after my subway incident.

Late one night we went to Shinjuku, the red light district of Tokyo. What a place. Historically, this was where the black market sprang up after the end of WWII. People could come here to get anything they wanted. Strange how it has kept that element throughout history. Now they have really stylin hosts and hostesses, I believe they call them. Dressed to the nines and walking around the street trying to encourage people to go into the bars, have a "date", etc. It was a cool place to see with awesome looking people everywhere. As a side note, the majority of the really hip looking people appeared to have their hair done by Jen LaMastra. I guess her teacher was right when she told her she had a very Asian sense of hair design.

Speaking of which, I decided to get my hair cut while in Tokyo. It was a cool experience with lots of pampering. The shampooing was very different. To rinse they used a dish and sort of scooped the water over they hair, and the water was oh-so-hot that if it were one degree hotter it would be too hot but it was absolutely perfect. This reminds me of something I've noticed here. There is such attention to detail. To give an example, we were sitting in a coffee shop and I reached for the sugar bowl. When I picked up the spoon, the way it fit in my hand made it feel like it was created just for me. The balance was perfect, the angle of the spoon exactly right. It seems like such care is put into everthing from the design of a room, to way someone hands you something, to the placement of the piece of tape on a package.

Anyway, the salon was great, and they brought me tea while they were cutting my hair. Here's a picture of my new haircut.

Back when I lived in Boston my favorite restaurant was Roka. Wheneven I talked about how great their yakisoba was, James would tell me that I haven't had REAL yakisoba until I tried it from a street vender in Tokyo. Well, now I have. And it IS really good (though I still think Roka's was pretty good, too).

James eating yakisoba.