Last Note From Australia

In a few hours I will be in the sky, flying back home from Australia.

We've been staying in a hotel in Adelaide, actually this is a nice place, the Grand Stamford Hotel at Glenelg, we are right on the beach. The springtime weather has been beautiful and Glenelg is the place to go, it's crazy with teenagers and tourists and folks from the city out to enjoy the day. The hotel is not luxurious but it's nice. The room is just a room, but downstairs there are nightclubs and bars and pokies. What's a pokie, you ask? "Pokie" is Australian for "slot machine." They're everywhere here. I'm told that the government makes fifty cents out of every dollar that goes into one of these things. The hotel has a jewelry store, several restaurants, it seems to be the place on the beach for weddings, conventions, dancing. Walking up to my room just now I noticed that someone has just married a very pretty blonde.

The vice-presidential debate occurred at a time when we are awake here -- we're thirteen hours off from the East Coast of the US, our day is your night -- so we thought we'd watch some of it, but the TV wouldn't come on. It was the first time since we got here that we had tried to watch television, and the stupid thing wouldn't come on.

We called the desk and the maintenance guy came up. We explained that we were Americans and wanted to watch the debate, and he laughed. Turns out he's from Baltimore, married an Aussie girl and moved here four years ago. He'd been sitting in a vacant room of the hotel watching the debates himself, so he filled us in. He got the TV working in a few minutes, and we found the debate on BBC. As the maintenance guy was leaving, he said, "Enjoy your stay and good luck to ... the whole world." This last was said with a sweep of the arm toward the television set where Sarah palin and Joe Biden faced one another. It was a poignant gesture. Out here in the rest of the world, people are watching our upcoming election carefully. They couldn't believe that we re-elected George Bush the last time, they might have forgiven our mistake in 2000 but in 2004 we did it on purpose, we knew what he was and we voted for him again. Now we are considering another four years of Republican leadership, and the people of the world are watching very carefully.

We only caught the final statements of the debates. It was canned stuff, memorized stuff. Then the commentators came on, and even the BBC acted as if the only thing that mattered was that Sarah Palin got through it. The immediate summary: "She didn't look like a deer in the headlights and she smiled a lot." That is almost an exact quote from the BBC. Then they went through every answer she gave to every question and talked about how she didn't seem entirely confused by it all, this wasn't as hard as talking to Katie Couric. They weren't being sarcastic, either; to the BBC, to the entire world, the fact that Sarah Palin survived the debate without a complete meltdown was exciting news. Not much was said about the other guy.

I have noticed that over the following day the tone shifted. People went back and reviewed the tapes, listened to what the two candidates had said, and discovered that one of them was knowledgeable and had answers, while the other was able to recite her lines in a charming small-town way, you know?

We were talking to a guy in a jewelry shop yesterday, and he made an interesting observation. The greenback, he noted, is doing very well against the Australian dollar. This guy was very knowledgeable about our economic collapse, even though, as he put it, "I have no money in the stock market, actually I have no money." A few months ago, he said, the American dollar was about 98 percent against the Australian dollar, now it's closer to 78 percent. So you go into a place and they want ten bucks for breakfast, say, we're really only paying seven-eighty American for it. Pretty nice for us tourists. My wife is looking at opals, which are a big commodity here, she wants to get a ring for her sister. I think the currency difference is going to be very welcome. The jewelry store guy was completely baffled about why the dollar is still strong internationally. Oh, the other effect of all this is the price of gold. That opal ring is going to be more expensive because gold has gone up as the American markets fail.

The guy in the jewelry store had some interesting objects for sale. He makes special riding crops, little whips with tassels on the ends, or leather flaps that sting. He doesn't make the whips themselves, but he makes a silver ornament to go on the head of them. Somebody else makes the whips. One was a braided leather crop with a few strands of leather hanging off the end, perfectly balanced, with a silver head on the top. The other was a shorter whip, a quirt I think, with a silver head on it, too, not so perfectly balanced but very pretty. You'll be glad to hear that I did not buy one of these.

I did splurge and get a didgeridoo. I have been hearing recordings of them, and it is a cool sound. A guy played one for me today in a store and gave me a chance to try, but I couldn't get a sound to come out of it. Hopefully I will, eventually, now that I own one. The didgeridoo is a wind instrument that is essentially a hollow stick about a yard long, with beeswax on one end where you put your mouth. You blow it like a trumpet or a tuba, and they use a circular-breathing technique where you blow out through your mouth while you inhale through your nose to keep the sound going. I didn't realize how they are made. It is a branch of a eucalyptus that has been hollowed out by termites. Eucalyptus is really hard wood, I expect it will travel okay, with airline guys throwing it around.

Strange thing here, one art gallery we went to had signs saying that women were not allowed to touch the didgeridoos because of cultural traditions. We asked the guy about this and he explained some crazy thing about how playing the didgeridoo is bad for women because they injure their diaphragm and that somehow affects their fertility. Let's say, I have searched the Internet for confirmation of this and found none. It does turn out that some aboriginal people believe that playing the didgeridoo is bad for women, and violating the taboo may result in bad things happening to them, including it may make them unable to have babies. A saleslady told me there is no problem with non-aboriginal women playing the didgeridoo, and in fact she had a page of citations of medical research showing that it is good for you. Whatever, it seemed weird to me. I think the Citizens for Responsible Didgeridoo Playing should make sure that women stay away from those things. Otherwise, you know what can happen, pretty soon the family will disintegrate.

The people here have been great. There is a kind of national sense of humor, taxi drivers and people in the shops and on the street have a fresh way of looking at things that just makes you laugh. They are a lot like Americans, and this is the easiest place to adapt to. They pronounce things a little differently from us, which works to our advantage because they immediately recognize that we are foreigners and so we are forgiven for not knowing how to do anything or where anything is. At the same time, their accent is not hard to understand and they understand us perfectly well, so we can do everything including joke around with the locals. If you travel you know that it can be frustrating to try to share a laugh with people in a language that one of you doesn't know.

It'll be about thirty hours flying back. Yes, that's a long time, you feel like you've been in that seat your whole life. This has been a terrific visit, and we will have memories forever. It will be good to get home though, that's always a bittersweet thing when a trip ends and you get ready to leave a place, and at the same time you know you're going to be coming back to your normal everyday routine, family and friends and people who love you.