Day 2: Sea for Yourself

8:00am - 

This morning Suny and I woke up naturally around 7:30am which was so nice because we were able to reset our internal clocks to the local time here. Before going to sleep last night, we literally hadn’t laid down in over 48 hours, since I don’t consider how we slept on the plane “laying down”. Our dad was up at 3:30am for whatever reason, and he decided it would be nice to knock on our door, come in and wake us up, only to tell us it was 3:30am and we still had a few hours to sleep.

…? Thanks, Dad!

Today we’re planning to go to the Australian Maritime Museum which offers free admission on the first Thursday of every month. I have no idea why they do that, but I feel like I’m going to be seeing a lot more Indians today.

Speaking of Indians, I’ve also observed how they’re always in groups – either families, groups of women, or groups of men – not too many mixed gender groups though. When I grow up and create my own Kingpin Bowling Lounge and start rolling around in money, I’d love to bring my friends out here for a week or two of fun. If that’s not an incentive to stay friends with me for the next 20 years, I don’t know what is.

Time to eat breakfast, shower, and get on with the day!

4:30pm – Only done with half the day! Right now I’m sitting in our apartment with Suny, watching cricket and eating Cadbury chocolate that I got out of the refrigerator (makes me really miss you and your frozen chocolate Neerali!) Instead of going out to watch Cricket in the stadium in the blazing heat, and because my parents were really tired, we decided to come back and rest up for a bit before heading out tonight. Besides, going there to support India would just be embarrassing at this point.

This morning we went to the Australian Maritime Museum, which is also along the harbour here and it was so neat! As soon as we got there, a showing for this 360 movie called “Aqua” was about to play, so we didn’t have too much time to explore the museum before heading upstairs for it. Suny and I took a few goofy pictures and then we went to join the rest of the group. We still got there about 10 minutes early and they had this super cool KIDS ACTIVITY AREA with tiny tables and tiny chairs (which fit me perfectly) and I made one of those fortune-teller kind of things (folding paper etc.) and it had all these questions/different facts about Australian wildlife and water consumption. Do you know how many litres are in a megalitre!? One million. I’m totally keeping this forever. After that I made a puzzle of a cow…and then all the real kids started showing up with their parents to play on the toys…so I just waited outside.

Puzzles!

I'm cool.

Just for the record, my brother likes to put my parents in this pose...all the time.

The “Aqua” exhibit was really interactive and thought-provoking. They basically showed us how much water is used for the simplest things we do, and how we not only really need to conserve it before it’s all gone, but also how to use it properly so it doesn’t become contaminated. In fact, every 20 seconds, a child somewhere in the world dies from a disease due to water contamination. It got me thinking about how much we take for granted and how much the people on this planet (me included) SUCK for taking so much from this planet and not giving back enough. And instead of giving back positively, we give back negatively. (Sruthi, if you’re reading this blog, you would have LOVED this exhibit.) One quote that stuck out to me was an AmerIndian (their word, not mine) proverb: “After the last tree has been cut down, the last river poisoned, and the last fish caught, you will then realize that money cannot be eaten.” True story. It’s ridiculous how much we waste, how much we use, and how greedy we have become for our planet’s resources – definitely something to think about.

At the end of the exhibit, we were taken to a room where we were asked to “make a pledge” about how we are going to conserve water or help the cause. I chose that I would “use both sides of a sheet of paper” while printing or writing, since it takes 2 litres of water to make a single sheet of paper. My parents said they would “spread the word” about how important it is to conserve water -__- and my brother pledged to “wear clothes more than once before washing them” in an effort to save water and energy. Brilliant. Some of the other options included taking only 5 minute showers, reducing bottled water consumption, turning off the tap while brushing teeth or washing hands, returning unused drugs to the pharmacy (…what!?), and collecting rain water in buckets to water plants instead of fresh water from the garden hose.

Suny's pledge to wear clothes more than once before washing them (which he already pretty much does by himself).

My pledge to use both sides of a sheet of paper - which I've actually gotten really good at doing.

Moving on to more upbeat topics. We toured the museum after the show, learned a lot about Australian maritime expeditions, as well as Australian-American relations. They even had an entire exhibit dedicated to America and how President Theodore Roosevelt initiated the U.S. Navy’s world travels/domination with the Great White Fleet. We also saw a lot of models of helicopters, ships, submarines, boats, and the like. There was also a really cool display of a boat made out of aluminum cans!

Aluminum can boat.

This pose is beginning to get as awkward as Angelina Jolie's at the Oscars this year.

Try and try as you might, you can never get away from the United States.

After exploring the museum, we ate lunch at its restaurant, solely because of two words: Fish and Chips. I’ve been dying to try some authentic Australian Fish and Chips while down under, and although we were contemplating other options for lunch, as soon as I saw the sign, I knew we had to try them. There are two ways you can get fish: grilled or battered. We got one of each as well as some flambéed prawns. ADVICE: Never ordered grilled fish instead of battered (fried) fish with chips unless you’re on your death bed and can’t stand the fried food or something. As unhealthy as the fried fish might be, IT IS SO DELICIOUS! The fish came with chips (fries) and this amazing tartar sauce that was freshly made. I was very impressed with the quality of the food, particularly because the restaurant was right adjacent to the museum. I guess with so many other options available at a short walking distance, they really had to up their game and couldn’t just serve crap food in the hopes that people would walk over simply out of convenience because there are SO MANY restaurants within a five minute walk from the museum. Talk about stiff competition.

Okay so that was delicious…and then we went to go tour two of the ships in the harbour as part of the Maritime Museum. One was a submarine – omg. I felt so seasick and claustrophobic in there, holy GOD. I wanted to die. The ceilings were probably like 5’8’’ max, Suny had to stoop pretty much the entire time, the hallways are so skinny, and everything is packed so compactly that I could just feel the walls closing in on me. I have no idea how anyone bigger than me could handle being in there longer than 30 seconds. Not to mention the boat was IN THE WATER so it was rocking slightly the entire time. The beds, about a foot and a half wide and about five and a half feet long, are stacked in threes along whatever walls they can fit on, and in between each of the beds is no more than about a foot of space vertically – meaning, if you get in that bed, there’s hardly any room for comfortable movement. I have no idea how people did this for a living! About 68 people were crammed into that tiny boat and forced to live for weeks or even months at a time. They also only showered about once every ten days.

Down the submarine hole...

Pretending to be a sailor living the hard life.

Pretending to know how to captain a ship.

We learned how the torpedoes were loaded into their…cannons? (I don’t know.) But this sexist old volunteer man was explaining the process to us and about what a pain in the ass having women in the Navy was/is. It took four men to slide a TWO TON torpedo (about 4,000 pounds) into its proper launching thing, and having a woman take on that role meant that they needed more people for the job because women apparently aren’t capable of the same work. He also explained how before women came into the forces, all the responsibilities of the men were so much higher, like how they had to be able to carry 90kg loads of whatever, but then when the women entered, the requirement was lowered to 30kg, so the men would inconveniently have to make three trips instead of one. He continued to joke/talk about how women were weak and how he would never trust them to be able to load a torpedo cannon correctly or whatever those things are called. The man was old and probably a Navy veteran himself, which is admirable, but I was about three seconds away from kicking him.

We finally got the hell out of the submarine (after what seemed like FOREVER but was probably only an hour) and went over to the HMS Vampire, a destroyer ship. It was huge! I think it was 113m or something around that, but I remember Suny saying it was larger than a football field. Both of these ships were sitting right out on the harbour, so the views from the ship were again spectacular and since we weren’t cramped in a tight little toilet paper roll of a ship (the submarine), this one felt a lot nicer. It felt so good to be able to see sunlight and feel the nice breeze. This ship also had much cooler gadgets, like huge guns and cannons and fun things like that. The captain’s quarters were so nice and posh – he actually had his own room with separate dining room and lounging area for his guests. The crew and the captain were never allowed to be friends apparently because it would compromise their professional relationships, but the captain would sometimes invite first class guests to join him on the shorter journeys. I guess that’s why the crew’s conditions were so crappy – they were meant to keep those scrubs in their place, but if you ask me, giving them such poor living conditions was just creating breeding grounds for mutinies.

I'm pretty much the last person anyone should ever rely on to ever fire off one of these things.

After exploring the gigantic HMS vampire, we went over to the last ship which was kind of a cross between something the pilgrims would’ve come over on, and the Black Pearl. At first glance it was like a pirate ship, but it was run by Australian merchants (who probably stole it from pirates). The ship was small, made for only about 25 people, and not entirely interesting, besides my fantasies about Jack Sparrow and Will Turner flying out of nowhere and commandeering it. One interesting thing though was that in the bottom level of the ship, the floor was covered with loose bricks. The reason for this was to help keep the boat down in the water. On that ship in particular, we were walking on four layers of bricks beneath our feet, and when the merchants would trade with Indonesia and East Asia, these bricks would be sold for lots of money. Some of the most affluent people would buy the bricks to build their houses, many of which still stand today.

By the time we finished up with all of the boats, my legs were like jelly and really needed to get on solid ground. We walked back over to Harbourside to get some Swiss-made ice cream at a small shop called Movenpick. I cannot even begin to describe how heavenly this experience was. (Not as heavenly as Serendipity Neerali, don’t worry, BUT given the right proportions, it sure as hell would have come close.) I got a scoop of the Cream and Meringue ice cream in an upside down cone in a cup. When I explained how I wanted the ice cream to the girl working behind the counter, she looked at me like I was nuts. I hope people saw me so more people can pick up on this trend of how to get the best of both worlds: you can still get the crunchy yumminess of the ice cream cone without having to let it melt all over your arm in the process of eating it. The ice cream was so pure, fresh, creamy, sweet, delectable…I could go on but won’t. It was IRRESISTABLE – okay I’m done. But what was cool about the process was that most of the ice creams were swirled together in different colors, like mine was white with a brown swirl. Fancy shmancy. :P Also, the utensil was unique in itself as well – rather than a spoon, they gave us kind of a thin, small spatula-like thing, with a curved end that could be used to scoop up the ice cream. It was quite dainty if nothing else haha and since I could only get a little bit on my spatula at a time, I could appreciate/savor the flavor a lot more. My parents got mango sorbet and Suny got a Caramellisimo or something like that, both of which looked delicious.

My neat and innovative way of eating ice cream.

After devouring that decadence, my parents headed back to the hotel/apartment to rest up since my mom’s still not feeling too well, while Suny and I stayed at Harbourside to find more information about what to do in the coming days. We asked about cricket and the lady there was pretty unhelpful since what we wanted to do wasn’t one of the main “tourist attractions of Darling Harbour”, so after checking out a few sales we also headed back. On the way out we went past this huge candy bar (literally, a bar filled with different kinds of candy), and they had this pretty pink box filled with all these CHOCOLATE COCKTAILS (Nicole...:) ) Oh! Another observation about the way they do things differently around here: when you pay by credit card, they ask you “sign or pin?” and you have the option of putting in a pin number or signing the receipt. I know you can put your pin number in with debit cards in the states, but I’ve never heard of that for credit cards. In any case, we just sign.

We’re planning to go out to Chinatown tonight to explore and eat since we’ve never really been to an authentic Chinatown. I highly doubt this one will be as authentic as I would like, but anything beats DC’s. We were going to see Shakespeare’s Hamlet tonight, which is being performed live in Centennial Park by a Shakespeare company, but I decided to take that off the agenda just because I don’t think it’s something ALL of us would enjoy. Even people who are 100% American have trouble understanding Shakespeare, and I wouldn’t want to put my parents through a foreign film with no subtitles. So, instead we’re going to explore the culture of Chinatown and hopefully see some fire-breathing people or something cool like that. The Chinese New Year is coming up in a few weeks, so I’m sure they’ll have something interesting going on. Plus, right now these Aussies are on holiday since it’s technically summer time here, so everywhere is pretty crowded.

My dad finally woke up! Which is great because Suny’s now asleep. It’s a good thing we didn’t go see the Cricket match at the stadium, or Suny would probably be sleeping there too. GET IT TOGETHER, INDIA! My dad has to go print a few things at the mall, so I’ll probably head over with him now so I can put this online for your reading pleasure. I really hope reading all these thoughts/activities isn’t getting too boring…I’m sorry if it is but I hope this blog is worth it and thanks for reading! 

10:00pm – Turns out my dad didn’t want to go to the mall earlier because his feet were bothering him, so I didn’t get a chance to update like I thought I would. I’m at the mall now but only for a few more minutes because my parents don’t really feel like sticking around for an hour to supervise me while I update my blog with tonight’s activities…so while they get their coffee I’ll just post what I’ve got for now, go back to the room and write,  then finish up today’s post tomorrow. Yup, I just said that my parents feel the need to “supervise me”. Oh and Suny and I got in a little bit of a tift earlier so he didn’t want to come with me to the mall. Three guesses as to what my next update will be about...might be a borderline Littleeen post that’s bound to be packed with emotion and not a lot of sense – just a heads up.

Another observation from the day: I haven’t seen a single homeless person during my entire time here, and we just went to downtown to Chinatown.

Okay gotta go, adios for now!

Side note: I've noticed when I copy and paste things from my word document, my smiley faces turn into J's? So if you see a random J here or there, it's meant to be a smiley face! Okay bye.