Cloverbee, Androkles and Currawong - See below!

[susandennis]

There was the most fun little piece in the morning's paper by a Seattle-ite spending Christmas in Sydney. Thinking of both of you... Rather than make you go linking,

Thursday, December 25, 2003

Go Away: Down under, life's a beach at Christmas

By WINDA BENEDETTI
SPECIAL TO THE POST-INTELLIGENCER

SYDNEY -- How anyone can get into the Christmas spirit while wearing short-sleeve shirts and flip-flops is beyond me. It's like trying to wear a tutu to get in the mood for football. I've tried for over a week now and I swear I just can't do it.


After spending the past 12 months traveling around the planet, my husband, Richie, and I have decided to kick back for the holiday season in Sydney. It's summer here, which means that when Australians see Santa's red nose they blame sunburn, not eggnog. Meanwhile, I'm starting to think it's a sign the fat man's about to collapse from heat stroke. I mean, it's 90 degrees here and he still can be seen sporting his fur-fringed red suit.

For the most part, I've come to think of Sydney as Seattle's Southern Hemisphere doppelganger. Like Seattle, Sydney has a Space Needle (only here they call their rotating-restaurant-on-a-stick the AMP Tower). Sydney also has a monorail, which, much like Seattle's one-track wonder, does a better job trapping tourists than it does transporting the public. The Seattle and Sydney skylines both glitter above ferry-infested waters. And although this Australian metropolis doesn't have a caffeine fueling station on every street corner, it does have one on every other.

But Australia still can feel decidedly foreign.

For instance, I recently had my first close encounter with a real live kangaroo. Imagine: A rodent the size of a ninth-grader goes hopping past you ... boing, boing, boing. It was both wonderful and disconcerting and I squealed like a 5-year-old who's just seen her first pony.

Australia has a whole assortment of creatures that make me feel that, like Alice, I've just stepped through the looking glass. Outsized lizards roam the land and fruit-eating bats flit about the trees, not to mention platypuses with duck bills and spiders so aggressive they actually chase humans.

Speaking of the humans, although they do speak English down under, Australians are so fanatical about shortening their words that translations are frequently required. So far, I've been able to determine that "bikies" are motorcycles and "mozzies" are mosquitoes. A "postie" is a mailman and shouldn't be confused with a "pokie," which is a poker machine. A "rellie" is a member of your family (i.e. relative) and an "esky" is a cooler (i.e., an Eskimo cooler).

More than anything, though, the thing that I find most peculiar about being in Australia is that I'm supposed to be celebrating Christmas. While strolling around Sydney yesterday I came across a group of children merrily singing, "It's beginning to look a lot like Christmas," and it was all I could do to keep from retorting: "No, it isn't."

Downtown, a squadron of short-sleeved Salvation Army trumpeters were playing Christmas carols for spare change while shoppers scurried from store to store in shorts and sandals, their flower-print shirts flapping in the warm breeze. At Grace Bros. Department Store they were selling "sunnies" (that's Australian for sunglasses) at 20 percent off. At Bondi Beach the crowds were literally burning off their holiday stress by lying in the sun. (Hello, people, last I heard you had an ozone hole the size of, well, Australia right above your heads.)

It's like these people don't understand what Christmas is really about. It's about bad weather.

Rain. Snow. Sleet. I've lived the majority of my life in the Northwest USA, so Christmas always has meant crappy weather. What holiday season is complete without at least a sore throat and runny nose? Check your caroling lyrics and you'll see these time-honored songs come down solidly on my side: "Dashing through the snow" ... "Let it snow, let it snow, let it snow."

"The weather outside's delightful"?! It just doesn't work.

When I'm at home in Seattle I enjoy whining about how much I hate the rain and bone-deep chill. I like to fantasize about spending a tropical holiday sunning myself. And now that I'm here, well ... it's not that I don't want to join in the kangaroo games, it's just that, much to my horror, I've discovered that I need to be cold, wet and miserable to really enjoy the holidays.

I can hear you now: "Oh boohoo. Go peddle your sob story to someone who didn't just find new windshield wipers and studded tires under the Christmas tree."

I don't expect you to understand. The Australians certainly don't. Hilary Sheppard, a waitress and student from Sydney, concedes the caroling bit. "We go on singing 'Dreaming of a White Christmas' even though we know it will never ever happen," she says. She insists that the holidays are all about picnics and barbies at the beach. "And everybody gets absolutely totally sunburned. That's Christmas."

Sydney cab driver Brinko Gligorov agrees. He immigrated to Australia from Macedonia in '69 and has never looked back. "This is the best country in the world! When have you ever seen such a beautiful sky and the people here are so nice!" He and his rellies celebrate Christmas with a camping trip to a beach (beachie?) south of Sydney.

I was harrumphing along Bondi Beach when I finally found a kindred spirit. Kieran Scott was staring at the surf and the people basting in the ozone-free sun. He hails from a place called Little Cornard in England, where, apparently, the weather is so consistently dreary it makes Seattle winters look downright balmy. He'd donned a jaunty Santa hat to get himself in the mood, but it wasn't working.

"It definitely doesn't feel like Christmas," he says. After all, he points out, it's Frosty the Snowman, not Frosty the Sandman.

Sheppard says that if I find Christmas in the summer disconcerting I should try Easter down under. She says most Australians consider rabbits pests in need of eradication and are loath to portray this fast-breeding virus as a cuddly and benevolent chocolate deliveryman.

Enter the Easter Bilby. The bilby has large ears. It's cute and fluffy and it hops. Of course, it also possesses that ever-so-Aussie twist: the marsupial pocket.

All the better for delivering chocolates, I'll admit.

Former P-I reporter Winda Benedetti traded her Seattle job and Fremont apartment for a backpack, a passport and a ticket around the world. Contact her at ProjectGoAway@yahoo.com.



cloverbee, you will not believe the muffin news. I'm in shock, frankly... (For you others, Cloverbee mentioned in her journal this week that she had been stressing about the muffin list I wrote about last year... Be nice to her - she's whacky!) Anyway... I opened my door this morning and there were no muffins. Sigh. But that's not the end of the news!!! I pulled on some sweats and grabbed my camera and went hunting for someone else's muffins to shoot so I could post a picture and NO ONE GOT MUFFINS! No one! No pet toys, no cards, no muffins. I'm in shock. The women who do this are getting ready to do some major condo renovations (read this in the homeowners' minutes), maybe they just decided this was the year to quit. It's shocking, though, I tell you.

Time for a walk... later