Never have I ever, part deux*

-Boarded a three-tiered cruise ship with the sole intent (after forking over $20) of enjoying Sydney Harbor in all its resplendent, nighttime glory. Granted, the free food and drink also caught my eye (if Peter Pan had brought pizza and beer, it would have been college kids, not young children, who would have followed him).

-Thought that a building whose sole purpose is to host ppera would steal my breath. I’ve harped on the Sydney Opera House’s lack of grandeur in the past, but the times, they are a-changin’; whoever coined the phrase ‘familiarity breeds contempt’ had it backward. This structure, under the full, luminous Australian moon, sparkled like the Hope Diamond…like the eyes of a newborn child…like the rims of 50 Cent’s Cadillac Escalade. Couple that with the sheer terrifying mass of the Sydney Harbor Bridge — nothing quite hammered home its breadth like being directly underneath it — and you can see how the cruise went pretty well. And the unanticipated terror quickly erased my dream of joining the homeless youth under the Burnside Bridge, which I'm sure my family thinks is a good thing.

-Witnessed a pair of karate/taekwan do/Crouching Tiger Hidden Dragon talents go to town on one another, all the while trying to keep the beat of a techno-vamped didgeridoo master playing in the background. With China becoming Australia’s biggest trading partner in 2007, this showmanship on the Circular Quay was truly a sign that the Aussies had embraced the Asian culture. And were willing to sell didgeridoo CD’s for $10.

-Felt like my New Zealand roommate, who I knew only as ‘Kiwi’ for the first two weeks, purposely mixed Russian with Gaellic/Armenian, throwing in a dash of Zambian for good measure. Then, I realized that he was just speaking interminably fast. From then on out, I’ve made sure my headphones were on every time he walked by, so he wouldn’t be tempted to make my brain hurt trying to decipher what he was saying.

Actually, this anecdote reminds me of an episode from Flight of the Conchords, an HBO show in which Jemaine and Bret, ‘New Zealand’s fourth most popular folk-parody duo,’ travel to the States. Murray is their agent and Dave is their American friend.

Murray: He may be dead.
Dave: He maybe did what?
Murray: He may be dead.
Dave: I know, but what did he maybe do?
Murray: He may be dead.
Dave: Yeah, maybe he did, maybe he didn't. What did he maybe do?
Bret: No, he may be dead.
Dave: Are you guys fucking with me?

-Yelled at a bat that I’m Batman, and thus he should do as I command. Ok, actually that makes me sound like a lunatic, but in my defense, I was with my friends Steve and Will, and it was midday, and the sheer numbers of these Grey Headed Flying Foxes made me think that I could afford to tick off one. These bats were amazing, by the way. With thousands hanging from trees in the Royal Botanical Gardens, they resembled furry burritos, with a black, leathery tortilla. (If you’re waiting for pictures, I hate to disappoint, but my next bullet — or dash, or hyphen, or whatever it’s called — explains the wordiness of this post.)

-Missed nothing more than my good ol’ American internet. If Australia is five years behind the US in terms of culture, then it is twenty years behind in terms of internet speed. I would never have imagined that my high school internet would trump my college’s.

Then again, the high school I went to required you to buy a laptop, so maybe I’m just not as prescient as most.

-Had a professor haggle for five minutes with the lone Australian student in the class for a ride to the nearby train station. And once she acquiesced, he decided to end class 15 minutes early so her parking didn’t run out. My, what a difference changing school makes.

-Tried pilates. Do I really need to say more? Really? Fine - I sucked at it. Not only did my hip flexors feel like they were being smothered by a hot iron, but my I stayed on my ‘sitting bones’ as well as Mississippi Braves coach Phillip Wellman keeps his composure:



That’s not to say I didn’t get anything out of it — my abs, or ‘TA’ as the crew-cut female director termed it, will be feeling it tomorrow morning. And unlike ‘BodyBalance,’ which I tried a couple weeks ago, I wasn’t forced to metaphorically fingerpaint, turn into a gliding kite, or plant my roots deep into the ground, all the while listening to ‘The World’s Greatest’ by R. Kelly. Now there’s a memory I’ll try to repress.

-Gone so broke I’ve needed to ration my own food. With only pocket change to last me until the end of the month, and a prideful sense of self that won’t allow me to plead with my parents to let me eat, I now need a job like Halle needed Billy Bob in Monster’s Ball (which, upon last night’s viewing, convinced me to never live in rural Georgia). Of course, it didn’t help that I shelled out $100-plus for a Wine-Wildlife Tour of Hunter Valley this Sunday. But as my Dad told me, via paraphrase, ‘You should drink as much as you can, so you can expand your palette.’ (Or something like that.)

-Seen US basketball make the Australian team look like drugged-up dingos. If you’d seen the first half, when the US was only up by one, you’d have thought the game would end close, right? Nope, not when Kobe Bryant is making threes far enough away to be considered the Outback, nor when Chris Bosh is throwing down dunks so hard he could make toilets flush the right way. Now if only they had a spot open for Phelps on the team, the basketball tournament would be ratings gold.

*Until this week…or past couple weeks, I guess