3x3 Animal Style

Redwood City :: USA

I ain't getting out of my damn car for no-one!

Places: San Francisco Bay Area

Coolest thing I did: Found out that there was a whole garden full of Rodin bronzes in the grounds of Stanford University. UTS didn't even have grass.

Coolest thing I didn´t know: You can buy an iPod from a vending machine. You know something is a commodity when you can get it out of the same machine that sells you M&Ms and bottled water.

Due to some wonderful wrinkle in how training gets organised at my company I managed to get myself a 4 day trip out to the San Francisco Bay Area, not knowing I was going on Tuesday and landing on Sunday. It’s pretty easy to say ‘yes’ to these kinds of things on the spot when you don’t have spouses or kids to worry about.

It’s interesting to come back to this part of the world, which was my first taste of America and pretty much how I saw the country in my head for years, a nation completely made up of low-rise office parks and freeways. As a tourist you probably would never venture this far south of the city, except perhaps driving through on your way to Los Angles and to tell the truth you wouldn’t be missing much. Silicon Valley, that stretch of the east side of the bay between South San Francisco and San Jose is what I thought America was. It’s been almost a decade since I first came here, at the height of the dot-com boom when people actually walked the streets with the initials ‘MOP’ on their T-shirts (Millionaire On Paper) and the banks would lend people money against their unvested stock options and right now as a second boom comes to an end (for the whole country this time) the mood is nothing like it was back then. For the second time in 10 years there seems to be some questioning of whether working constantly for the promise of stock that may be worth something by the time you can sell it instead of having a life is a good trade off.

This trip was really too short to spend more than a little time in the fine city of San Francisco itself, having only a single jet-lagged Sunday to be a tourist before having to spend three days in the office. I took the hire car out to Half Moon Bay, where I went to last time I was out here but have since learned overlooks Mavericks, one of the world’s heaviest (in the sense of volume of water, as opposed to 80s surfer talk) waves. The wave breaks offshore, over some rather pointy looking rocks that give it the nickname “the meat grinder” so it’s hard to see but looking before I left on Google Maps I reckoned you could drive right up to the headland and look down on it. The trouble was the day I showed up was completely flat, enticing no surfers out that far and the bluff overlooking it is also a US Air Force missile tracking station, crowned with massive golf-ball antenna. You could kind of see something that might have been waves crashing over rocks, but it wasn’t all that spectacular. It looked better on YouTube. However, it was a very nice afternoon and lunch at the microbrewery set me up well for a long afternoon of trying not to fall asleep at the wheel.

I’d forgotten how stupidly small the micro-climates are, the fact that it could be 30 degrees at the hotel in Redwood City, 25 at Half Moon Bay and 19 and foggy in the city. I decided a good way to stay awake would be to drive up and have another look at the Golden Gate Bridge, because you know, that’s what you do here. By the time I’d driven up to the Presidio, parked the car and walked up to where I should have been able to see it there was fog so think you could consider it a landmark. I then got back in the car, drove under the bridge to the other side and the sky was blue again. Behind me you couldn’t make out the bridge, but the fog seemed to be fairly heavily sticking to it. I imagine if this was the first time you were seeing it you’d be as annoyed as I was when the only time I was in New York they had scaffolding over the Flatiron building and a picture of it painted on a canvas hung over it.

Sydney is a city that is rapidly being rebuilt around the car, however the Bay Area has been like that forever. Bar the inner city of San Francisco itself I have no idea how you’d even attempt to get around on public transport. Having said that, the city is a bit of a nightmare to get around when you’re driving an unfamiliar car, on the wrong side of the road and in serious need of sleep. I kind of decided on skipping all remaining sightseeing opportunities before I got pulled over for drunk driving while sober.

I had made a promise before I left that I would attempt to keep burgers and chips out of my diet for as much as possible, kind of as a challenge. This forced me to dig around in Google a bit for places to eat that weren’t the hotel bar and I got to look at some of the other towns in the Valley, most of the best places I found keeping me returning to Palo Alto and the area around Stanford University. Palo Alto is kind of like a Disneyland version of America in the 1950s. It’s disgustingly clean, the concrete is white, the roads are a contrast of flawless jet tar with perfectly straight lines painted on them. There’s no rubbish, no gum stuck on the footpath and the trees are all identical. While I imagine if you were teleported there from a village in Africa you’d have think you had actually died and gone to heaven I kind of found it a little creepy.

It’s the same kind of creepy that all those perfectly manicured business parks have. The Openwave office is in a complex at the end of 3 miles of salt flats and the port of Redwood City, however it juts out into the bay with its polished glass and exactly 1 inch long lawns. There’s a beach volleyball court, gym, pool, basketball court and countless other leisure activities I can’t quite bring to mind right now because there are simply so many of them. The hotel I stayed in was in a whole bunch of similar parks, EA being right over the road and the imposing towers of Oracle’s headquarters being the first thing you look out over at breakfast. I went running around the place and it was the same thing, lawns that look like they’ve never had touch or soccer played on them, empty basketball courts. It’s like the companies are saying “if you become a fat slob because you’re at work all the time don’t blame us, there’s a tennis court right out the window”. You really do accept that work is going to be your entire life when you come to work on these campuses, and the scary thing is they’ve attempted to export this model overseas. The Sun campus they were building in Surrey while I was working there worked on the same principle, with the only problem being no-one wants to play volleyball when it rains 9 months of the year.

With all this technojiggery going on you forget that long before the nerds spread out from Menlo Park and Stanford all of Northern California was the domain of the counter-culture revolution. Occasionally you’re reminded, like when you’re in a restaurant where steaks are $40 a go and two 60 something ladies are all overjoyed to have just discovered that they are both Virgos. Another time I overheard a slightly younger bunch of high powered business type women have a serious conversation about how someone wouldn’t work on their project team because he was a Sagittarius. I wonder if you can take them to court for unfair dismissal for Zodiac-based discrimination.

When you travel for work and you’re the only out-of-towner you do spend a fair bit of time sitting at bars to eat. At the hotel on the night I checked in there was a wedding going on and occasionally the guests would come out to the hotel bar to jump the queue at the actual wedding bar. Not one of them ordered beer. I think this is why we don’t understand the Americans as drinkers, it’s all those heavy spirits they insist on drinking. No wonder they only have two speeds, sober and drunk – without beer it’s very hard to take a meandering journey towards being blotto. It probably doesn't help that the vast majority of their beer is, as the French would say ‘merde’.

You can do everything in a car here, get coffee, pick up your dry cleaning, even get money out of the ATM. Add to this the fact that McDonalds are currently advertising a 1/3rd pounder (no, really) and the mystery of why the average American is large than the average Frenchmen becomes apparent. Having said that, I did break my no fries rule for my last meal on this trip in order to experience In-N-Out Burger. It’s a California-only burger chain with practically nothing on the menu. You can have a cheese burger or a double cheese burger. Unless you know the secret code. One of the guys in the office told me to go in and ask for a 3x3 Animal Style with Onions. It’s as wonderfully filthy as it sounds and I suspect I might be skipping the first 2 meals on the flight back. Any chain that lets you pick the exact beef patty:cheese ratio on your burger is strictly for the discerning, you won’t get that happening at Burger King.

So my one real cultural experience came by accident. During one of my crazy awake-at-strange-hours-of-the-morning periods I was flicking through the supermodel-thin guide to the highlights of being a tourist in the San Jose area. Wedged in between the descriptions of restored historical down town areas and shopping centres (which apparently double as tourist attractions here) I saw that Stanford University has a whole garden full of Auguste Rodin bronzes, including his famous Gates of Hell, the original backdrop for The Thinker. I've managed to see quite a few of these before around the traps (most notably at the Rodin Museum in Paris) but they're always pretty good and there's something different about seeing them outside in that soft Californian light, totally different to mid-winter London or Paris. Some people get a bit annoyed to discover that Big Rodes' (as he was known to his mates) work was copied fairly liberally and there are actually several copies of the big name works like The Thinker or The Burghers of Calais (which I personally like better) around the various art galleries of the world, like they aren't looking at the original but "just a copy". You get the same thing with Edvard Munch's The Scream but I guess both these dudes came up at a time where mass production was already the norm in industry and publishing, so why not art? Big Rodes was a genius full stop and it's always pretty damn cool to see his stuff out in a park somewhere. You miss that kind of stuff in Australia.

Leaving London

London :: UK

The Home Office decides it's time for me to go home.

Places: London

Coolest thing I did: Spent the last night living it up in the Waldorf. It's been a long time since I stayed somewhere and been called 'sir'.

Coolest thing I didn´t know: London can still snow like it's 1991. I personally blame global warming.

It’s somehow fitting for your last day in London of have the soggy consistency of a chewed up cigar butt. If you averaged out the weather in London whilst I’ve been living in the city then cold, constant drizzle would probably be the closest possible. In a week that saw a couple of days with weather more suited to Switzerland than the South East of England it was a better reminder of the time here. Luckily, I was never here for the weather.

In both the weeks I’ve been back here (with the exception of that week out in The Real England) I’ve spent a fairly large chunk of my time wandering around various parts of the city and looking back through the photos on my camera I have been muy touristico. That was never my intention, I guess now that I’m faced with the fact that I will very likely not be back to this city I’ve called home on and off for almost a decade I wanted to just get out and feel the texture of it under my feet again. I don’t doubt I’ll be back one day, as this place has had a disproportionate effect on who I am, but I might be quite old by then.

I have actually been surprised at the places I’ve ended up, some of which I never thought necessary to visit even when I was last living here. The jaunt through the pubs around Hammersmith and Brook Green opened up a whole lot of important memories for me, as the year I spent living in an over-crowded house of Aussies on Blythe Road was probably one of the happiest years of my life. Even though it’s gentrified out of sight in Ws 6 & 12 in the intervening 6 years the memories still lurk around every corner, just waiting to jump out at you. I imagine walking around Dublin or Toronto would be very similar experiences.

The Mayor of London recently likened reading the Financial Times to spending an hour with a doomsday suicide cult and you do get a far greater feeling of depression here than has been true watching the collapse of global finance from the warmth of a Sydney summer. Walking down from Liverpool Street into the heart of the city feels a bit like visiting the ruins of a defeated empire, some of the flashier bars and restaurants are empty, even on Thursday lunchtime. Some are even shuttered for good. That’s not something you would have seen a couple of years ago. Even if it is just a mood, something that may not be reflecting the actual facts you do feel the London of the Russian Oligarchs and the Hedge Fund managers may have been and gone, with what’s replacing it more suited to grey skies and cold rain. I’m still waiting to watch them burn the chairmen of HBOS and Barclays at the stake at Charring Cross, but I might have to leave before that happens.

The fact I’m thinking like this makes me believe I’ve been watching the BBC too much since I got back.

As I said, I was never here for the weather. London over the last decade has been incredibly good to me, and through my tastes in nightlife may have morphed from Walkabouts and super clubs to gastropubs and proper food this is a city that still has a variety that hasn’t been matched by practically any other city I’ve been to (the only possible exception being New York). No matter what you’re into, be it art, culture, nightlife, food, poetry readings, whatever it’s possible to find it here. (OK, I admit if you’re into wind surfing that may be a bit of a stretch…). If I have one complaint to make about returning to Sydney over the last 6 months it’s been how completely stagnant it feels, as if no one has had an idea and opened a new pub or restaurant in the last 5 years. I know that’s not 100% fair, but compared to how constantly shifting London’s scene is Sydney may as well be the same as it was when I was at Uni.

Visitors to this great city often go looking for the traditional, trudging around in the grey rain, looking at grey buildings, eating grey food and drinking warm beer. You know, in search of The REAL London. The trouble is, the real London for me is the living one, the one that can accommodate both the British Museum and a tiny gallery in Bethnel Green displaying pictures of pierced eyebrows to the sound of whale song. That’s the same London that can serve up fish and chips in a pub that hasn’t seen a lick of paint since the 1940s as one that dishes up food from every country in the world, and some that are found nowhere else and quite often at prices found nowhere else. It’s the same city where you can find old me in flat caps grumbling about football into their pints of warm beer in a pub named after the head of some dead royal right around the corner from private clubs filled with mass produced Eastern European models still angling for a partner from that rapidly shrinking pool of bonus-fuelled City boys. It’s simply a city like no other, one you couldn’t re-create if you tried.

This is why I’m in two minds about my Home Office-incompetence-enforced exile from this great land. This city has been very good to me, offering me somewhere ever impressive to live combined with the money and location to travel far beyond what I could have achieved had I never left Sydney. I’ve always maintained that I’d always return to Sydney one day, but the trouble is, that one-day has always been at least 12 months down the road. Perhaps this is that push I may have required to try my hand back in Australia again, to see if am just calling Sydney home out of habit or if that’s where I really belong. It’s hard to see how it would have happened otherwise. I guess we’ll have to see what tune I’m singing if the Home Office do actually turn around and grant me a work permit after all, whether I’m tempted back.

This is England

London :: UK

A lucky escape in Postman Pat country.

Places: York, Middleham, Semerwater, Aysgarth, West Burton, Swaledale, Hawes & Hubberholme.

Coolest thing I did: Sat looking over the glacial lake of Semerwater out towards the snow-covered peaks of the Pennines.

Coolest thing I didn´t know: The Vikings didn't have horns on their helmets. Apparently they were buried with their drinking horns and when the Victorian archaeologists found them they put 2 and 2 together to get 5 and decided they'd just fallen off.

During my on and off time living in the UK over the last decade I've been telling people at home that I've been living in England. While this is strictly true in a geographical sense, I've really been living in London. London may as well be a different planet to the rest of England and while I've visited quite a few of the provincial cities in England in my time here, I've never really seen much of the countryside. This doesn't seem to bother anyone from London itself, but if you ever meet people from the land outside the M25 (not a given by any means if you restrict yourself to the capital) they will be aghast that you've never seen THE REAL ENGLAND. So now that it looks very likely like my stint in London is over, I've been and gone to see the Yorkshire Dales, which I'm reliably told is part of said Real England.

For the English, England is a land of green hills, pubs with fireplaces and sheep. This is pretty much the description of the Yorkshire Dales. You look out a softly sloping valleys of pure green divided by the unnatural harsh lines of stone walls used to keep sheep eating the particular grass you want them to be eating. Off in the distance you see the snow-capped peaks of the Pennines, a low range of mountains (though I'd imagine most Europeans or North Americans would call them tall hills) that cuts through southern Scotland and much of England. It's all very pretty to look at, and it fulfils the English idea of what their country looks like.

That idea that the real country is where your farmers live is an idea that's shared by lots of Western nations, Australia being no different. Even though most of our population lives in cities on the coast we go and make movies called "Australia" and fill them with drovers and farmers and the like. The English, like us, also seem to be an urban population who yearns for a rural setting, until of course they realise that there's no amenities and walking around in the rain and mud isn't all that much fun.

Having said that, there was a lot of walking around in the rain and mud. From our base in Middleham, a horse breeding town with far too many pubs than necessary to water the local population, we struck out on several day trips into the Dales themselves, climbing hills, walking around lakes and dodging sheep. For someone from Australia, where walking mostly involves National parks and well marked tracks through the bush, walking in England can take a bit of imagination. Most of the time the footpaths you're following don't really exist, they're just agreed routes you can take through someone's farm. Stiles and gates have been provided where possible to allow you to climb over stone walls without knocking them down and letting sheep test the theory of whether the grass is greener but if you, like us, have trouble following the maps then you can sometimes find yourself crossing paddocks full of sheep trying to find where the bloody path went. And sometimes climbing those stone walls you're not supposed to anyway.

Having said that, the scenery is as beautiful as you're led to believe. We were exceptionally lucky with the weather, with a few days of mild fog, one of light rain and even one of blue skies and warmth (!). The day we tried to cross the hill between Keld and Muker the fog was so thick up there that once we got past the road we really couldn't see more than 50 or so metres ahead of us. This meant that while the view was probably spectacular, on our trip it was more spooky. There was also quite a bit of snow up there, which wasn't something I'd expected.

On the return to London just how lucky we were became apparent. It was freezing over Saturday night and Sunday morning and right now (Monday afternoon) I could be looking out the window at Canada. It hasn't stopped snowing for 24 hours or so and is probably far worse up in Yorkshire. We had a freakishly warm week for this time of year and I'm thankful for it.

York itself is one of the oldest cities in Britan, having been founded by the Romans and variously been in the hands of Vikings, Anglo-Saxons, Normans and the rest. It's restored walls are an anomaly in modern Britan, though the traffic in York itself is a testament to why walls went out of fashion quite some time ago. Unlike most other smaller English cities I've been to it has a certain level of affluence meaning the menace that can sometimes come with gangs of young unemployed men hanging around the middle of your town is missing to a certain degree. It's maintained it's cobbled centre and due to some threatening looking traffic controls (our hire car was almost impaled on a post rising out of the ground to block a street once the bus in front of us had passed) it's almost car free. It's one of those places you'd find full of Americans in summer wandering around yelling "ISN'T IT PEACEFUL?!?!?!" at the top of their lungs. However, in winter they seem to be out of season and it really is ye olde and peaceful.

We did some cultural things but I can safely recommend avoiding both the Viking Centre (complete with costumed staff and faux-time machine) and the Castle Museum. I don't really want to go to these places to listen to manikins moan about the woes facing them in their day-to-day lives. I really couldn't care if Yorik the Blacksmith stiffed you on some horseshoes, as you are made out of plaster-of-Paris and don't exist.

I did like the York Minster, especially going up on the roof and looking down at the city below. I think I've discovered I have a bit of a problem with needing to take every opportunity to see cities of the world from a high vantage point. Perhaps I burnt too many ants with magnifying glasses as a kid and require therapy. Anyway, I've seen shed-loads of churches over the last decade of my life but I must have been in a bit of a lull over the last half year or so, because I'm surprised at how impressed I was by the one in York. It's big, which is always good, has loads of stained glass windows and could probably hold more than a couple of thousand people when there's a blockbuster sermon going on. I'm not 100% sure how having to leave through the gift shop and camels-through-the-eye-of-needles co-exist but they did have some nice gargoyles for sale.

My biggest failure of the week was taking 5 days to finally get a proper fire going in the fireplace of the cottage. It was only on day 5 I discovered kindling in the outhouse, meaning I no longer had to attempt to get it going with wet logs and pack upon pack of fire-lighters (the place reeked of kerosene by the end). Lucky there were lots of nearby pubs that could do so much better.