Crocodile Deanie

Wake up

A few minutes later, I woke to the soft patter of rain. Or at least I thought it was a soft patter. Exploring outside, I found that the rain was screened by the palm trees overhead, and to step out from under them was to subject yourself to a pelting by the largest raindrops I had ever experienced. It was my first taste of the outsized weather from the subtropical region of this outsized continent.

Since my roommates were still gone, I stayed in the room and organized my things until the rain let up. I took the time to itemize my goals for the day: 1. Food 2. Cell 3. Haircut. In 20 minutes the rain stopped, and I was on my way to my first look at the new country.

Since I didn't have any sense of the place, I let myself be herded onto the hostel's hourly shuttle to the city center. A short and bewilderingly frantic dash through city streets later, I was standing, knees shaking, at a bus stop under a bridge. With Brisbane's mysterious lack of traffic, it looked like a clean but forgotten unplaceable piece of city. Fortunately some pedestrians were walking by, and I followed the crowd to the city's central business district.

At the CBD I found the Queen Street Mall: an intersection of pedestrian streets forming a cross in the middle of 4 blocks of stores. With no map or other indication of the layout of the place, I wandered around the labyrinthine corridors and malls with only my itinerary to guide me. By this point I was ravenous, so I dispatched my first goal in short order with a stop at "Fresh Ones" in the first food court I saw.

I had gathered by the sign that they sold non-ethnic tortilla wraps because the photo illustrations pictured wrap sandwiches, and the "Fresh Ones" logo was unadorned by sombreros. What I didn't realize was that this was a health fast food place, a revelation that came to me when I inspected my "Grilled Chicken" wrap to find that it consisted mostly of grated carrot and yogurt. Still, the entire ordeal had a refreshingly citrusy taste to it, and I was too hungry to care. I later realized that this experience was indicative of a larger theme in Australian cuisine: since Australia doesn't have it's own culinary culture, it brings in other counties' food in a way that can become, at it's most extreme, post-ethnic. Most of the time you just get your choice of all the world's best fare. Also Australia, sporting country that it is, often has a healthier take on food. Barring that, they just serve it with an espresso. Where they concede the saturated fats of McDonald's and the Burger King equivalent "Hungry Jack's", they tack on a "McCafe" that serves cappuccino to go with your Big Mac. Espresso drinks have attained such ubiquity here that, by no exaggeration, some Chinese places have a bar and baristas. The Aussies do like their coffee.

Leaving the food court, I threw myself back into the river of countless stores. This small-town American had never seen such a concentration of consumerism, even in monstrosities such as the Holyoke Mall. It was like they had taken the Holyoke Mall and spread it over four blocks, destroying the roof and making it open-air in the process. Still, I was fresh off the rush of being in an urban environment in a strange country, so nothing seemed derivative to me. All the stores seemed to have daring original clothes, and all the people seemed to dress artsy/eclectic. I was feeling a garish and obviously unsubtle American with my bold one color t-shirt with no artful print as I wandered agog with new experiences.

While I was stumbling about, I managed to direct myself into one cell phone store for each of the competing mobile providers. With no knowledge of coverage, or friends with certain carriers to lock me into their attempts to create a networked economy, I just picked the one that had the best deal on a cell phone with some prepaid minutes. Telstra and Vodaphone came up short when I bought a Nokia from Optus. Now, once I got my account activated, I would have a way to coordinate my campaign to find housing. But I didn't want to think about this frightening prospect just yet: I had a giant mop of hair to attend to.

While wandering the streets I had been especially sensitive to customs and visible culture of the passing Australians. Each style was unknown to my eyes and therefore made a big impression. So far I had seen that they seem to like muted colors with big asymmetric logos and designs splashed on their shirts. Even all the pants seemed to be adorned with carefully considered blotches and slashes in a way that seemed much more... daring than anything that would be acceptable in the US. Maybe this is just my backwater small-town perception, and this is the way with all vibrant, culturally relevant cities. One thing that I noticed for certain was that almost everyone was sporting a short, practical haircut, and I was beginning to feel why. My sweat was now a permanent fixture on my back and face, and my scalp was greasy to the point of feeling crawly. My long locks of unkempt hair were not helping.

Somewhere still in the bowels of the Queen Street Mall, I found my way to an airconditioned salon where the all female hairdressing staff surveyed me with a mixture of pity and trepidation. While hairdressers stood around idly twiddling their scissors and blowing locks of hair out of their faces, I was told that there wasn't a seat at the moment, and that I should come back in about 20 minutes. Indeed all 8 seats in the salon were full of dashing and sophisticated people of both sexes. Feeling sweaty, foreign and out of place, I explored yet another hall of the maze until I found an airconditioning vent to lean into face first.

Returning to the salon I discovered what the extra staff was for, as my "haircut" turned into a carefully orchestrated conveyer belt experience of deep tissue scalp massage/shampoo+condition, plus highspeed sharp scissor attack, plus rapid no questions asked hair styling. Each hairdresser knew their role and waltzed in at the appropriate moment to apply a third kind of smoothing conditioner, or a snip from some lightning-bolt-shaped scissors. All for $21 Australian, and this was no mass produced hack job. Not a single one of my hairs had ever felt more in place.

Feeling highly sophisticated and much less conspicuous, I was still feeling very lonely. Even the conversations I struck up with vendors for a bit of human interaction left me feeling off tempo, too earnest, out of touch and somehow just very American. I wanted to talk to someone I actually knew.

I had been lugging my laptop around all day for this purpose, so I plunked myself down in the one familiar aspect of the landscape: Starbucks. Feeling very sure of myself for the first time in the day, I ordered a "short" soy mocha, only to be told by the barista that their short was a children's size (caffeine for children?! the monsters! ...the short monsters evidently), and I would get what I expected from a "short" by ordering a "tall". She was used to the demands of American tourists, and she showed it by asking me, in a very friendly manner, if I had just arrived today. "Ah, yes," I responded in my crass sounding American accent, "actually just about noon."

Thus reprimanded, I sat down in the only remaining seat in the place, where the uniformity of international conglomerates did not disappoint. A short sign-in and $11AU (*cough*) later, I had an hour of wireless access. Unfortunately, due to the vagaries of international time, it was something like 27 o'clock back home, and neither were any of my friends in foreign countries online. I sent a couple emails and felt just a little bit better.

At this point it was past 8pm Brisbane time, and the effects of my jet-lagged sleepless night were catching up with me. If souls travel at the speed of bicycles, mine is Lance Armstrong. Still, Lance-soul had 10,000 miles to cover, and I was feeling a little empty in the head. I was ready for some sleep. I waited at the shuttle pick-up until I realized I had missed the last bus, then set off to the West End over the gorgeous white-stone arch bridge and past the young men shattering beer bottles on the sidewalk and yelling accented taunts at each other. When my directional intuition finally led me back to the hostel, I was exhausted and I walked past the inert forms of my roommates and dropped directly into bed and deep sleep. Tomorrow I would have my first chance to meet fellow students and my first crack at finding accommodations.

posted by Brendan at 17:38