I Shall Call Him Twitchy

I made a recent trip to Australia, intending to become an expert at kitesurfing. This did not come close to happening, which came as great surprise both to myself and to the orderly workings of a rational universe. But if Aeolus withholds his winds, you can only become so awesome.

Twitchy

I’m probably looking off at an emu or a duck-billed platypus or Rupert Murdoch.

Oz has only a five hour time difference from San Francisco, so it should have been an easy adjustment, but I never made it. That’s due in no small part to my newly-discovered kryptonite: wine pairings. Both I and my traveling companion, not-quite-Doctor O’Sullivan, enjoy a good meal, and so we had many. I actually have quite a poor sense of taste, but I’m a sucker for presentation, and so we had many a tasting menu. And hey, if you’re on vacation, why not get the wine pairings to go with them? Well, maybe because it’s an easy way to end the evening.

We took one especially interesting meal at a Japanese restaurant in Surfer’s Paradise. If you’re like us, the name “Surfer’s Paradise” conjures up images of little shacks by the beach, hamburger stands, and maybe a sock hop. No, this place had an eighty-story residential tower, a Versace hotel, and many nice restaurants, among them place called Mikado. We ordered the kaiseki, which is pretty much Japanese for “tasting menu”, but decided to skip the wine pairings, since they didn’t offer any. The kaiseki was listed as “set course meal with lobster sashimi.” Lobster. Awesome.

The lobster arrived in the third course, on a big wooden boat. On the boat was a stone, two piles of lobster sashimi, and most of the rest of the lobster. We were quite impressed by this and ready to dig into the sashimi, when our crustaceous tablemate twitched an eyeball. And then an antenna. And then all of his forelegs, as he tried to climb off of his stone perch. It wasn’t working out very well for Twitchy, though, as he didn’t seem to make any progress, perhaps because we were busy eating whatever lobster bits are needed for true locomotion. Actually, I recall lobster’s normally live in water, which might also have been a problem.

Twitchy finally stopped moving as we finished the sashimi, and then we tried to figure out what we were supposed to do with him. “Do we kill it?” “Maybe we break off the tail?” “Don’t you think they would have given us some kind of tool to destroy him with if that’s what they wanted us to do?” “You mean like a boomerang?” We couldn’t find a boomerang, but I picked up Twitchy’s tail with my chopsticks to see if more meat were hidden beneath it, but no such luck. Soon after the waitress came by to pick up Twitchy and his boat, and I said, “What are we supposed to do with it?” She only smiled, because she didn’t really speak English, and I was in no mood to exercise my poor Japanese. Away Twitchy went. Two courses later, though, we were reunited with our dear friend, who had assumed soup form.

WARNING: I spoil an entire opera you don’t want to see

We started our trip in Sydney, where I took the fifty-million photos of the opera house required by the tourist visa. Figuring that any opera company that earned such a cool building must be quite capable of producing a decent opera, we bought ourselves some tickets. They were sold out of The Magic Flute, which I have seen and enjoyed, even though its plot makes stoner movies look sophisticated. Instead, we had to settle for Madame Butterfly.

If you only get to avoid one opera in your life, Madame Butterfly should be it. If that’s not an option for some reason, I recommend you reenact the only interesting part of the opera and engage in a bit of ritual suicide. I have no problem with the performers, and the set design was spartan but unoffensive. But if Puccini ever runs into me in a dark alley, he had better watch his long-dead back. The music is entirely unmemorable, and you could explain the plot in five sentences. Or maybe even a single run-on sentence:

An American naval officer leaves his young bride in Japan, her reputation ruined by her renunciation of Japanese religion and culture, her womb secretly occupied, and her days filled with nondescript arias pining for her husband’s return, which he eventually makes (new American wife in tow) intent on retrieving his son, thereby driving Madame Butterfly to stab herself. When this happens, the audience stands up and claps.

We were quite worried that she would survive, and that Puccini would subject us to a third act, but this turned out not to be the case, so we headed out of the opera house and mosied over to the Opera Bar. I enjoyed this bar very much, with its proximity to the waterfront and the opera house itself. Also, there were a large number of attractive women there (and indeed in all of Sydney), which is never a problem.

After being harangued by not-quite-Doctor O’Sullivan, I approached one such lady and introduced myself. Her name was “Candy.” Or perhaps “Candi.” Quite possibly even “Candi” with a heart over the i. Candi-with-a-heart asked where I was from, and I made the mistake of saying Mississippi and her vacant look made me back down to California. “Where’s that?” “Uh… it’s in the Western part of the United States. It has San Francisco, Los Angeles…” “No, never heard of it… Oh, wait, that’s where the OC is!!” Yes, Candi, I come from where the OC is.

We Did Not See Any Dingoes

I also insisted that we see weird Australian animals during our trip. It may surprise you to learn that koala bears do not roam the streets of Sydney. In fact, they don’t really roam at all, so we had to go find them at the Sydney zoo. It is an excellent zoo, wherein we saw:

A Koala Bear, Sleeping, Because That’s All They Do

A Komodo Dragon, Waiting for Someone To Pet Him

Two Turtles Making Babies

Truly, Australia is the land of freakish animals. One night along the Gold Coast, we decided to make the two mile walk to dinner, during which we made the acquaintance of some of Australia’s bats. I like bats in the zoo, and looking at photos of them, they’re kind of cute. I do not, however, like when we walk under a nest of 30 of them, and they all start swarming about in the dark. We were thankfully not too close to them, but they really looked like large house cats with wings. I would be much more comfortable if I owned one, gave it all its shots, and then trained it to harass people I don’t like. I would, of course, paint little drops of blood on their teeth and not tell my enemies about the shots.

This entry was posted on Monday, March 20th, 2006 at 1:52 am and is filed under Travel. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.