Countdown to tropical vacation... twelve days!!!
(Sorry, it's been pretty work-intensive around here lately...)
And yet, still, with all this work getting done1, we've amused ourselves with some nice excursions this past week. On Thursday morning we dragged our sorry selves out of bed at 5:00am to take the AUS$20.00/person behind-the-scenes tour of the Sydney Fish Market, which is not far from where we live now but will be quite out of our way when we move in a few weeks.2 The tour begins at 7:00am, only on Thursdays, and by that late hour, most of the behind-the-scenes action to be toured has already wrapped itself up. Most, but not all. We were the only two people to show up, so we actually got a private tour of how things work at the biggest fish market in Australia. The commercial fisheries bring in their catch Monday through Friday to Sydney Harbour, then the Fish Market conducts a reverse or "Dutch" auction for each bin of the "product."3 The bins of product are all laid out on the auction floor (our tour took us down through them) and the buyers can inspect them before bidding. The bidding actually happens very quickly, which is necessary when the freshness of what's being sold counts for everything. The auctioneers set the opening price at a few dollars above the going rate, and then the price begins to fall rapidly until a buyer bids via the computer interface. Instead of bidding the price up, a reverse auction goes to the first person to commit as the price falls.
Once the price is set, the buyer can buy as many bins as he (or she) wants of the product at the established price. The seafood then goes out with the buyer to be resold to individual customers (like you and me) at a seafood market, or else it goes wholesale to restaurants to be prepared... and then resold to individual customers (like you and me). Our guide took us through most of the auction floor, identifying the various types of fish, demonstrating how to tell the good from the bad, and generally explaining how the whole process works. We also got to tour the sashimi floor, which is sold by voice auction because of the special treatment that sashimi-grade fish get. Interesting seafood fact of the day: "flake," "boneless whitefish," and the boneless fish you usually get in fish and chips is all the same fish-- shark!4
Since we were on that side of town, and since it was still relatively early for us grad students when we finished the tour at 8:45am, we decided to treat ourselves to brekkie out and then spend the day downtown instead of our usual Thursday at Chinatown. D took some photos of the city down on Circular Quay, and we checked out a free exhibition of paintings by artists with mental illness, a travelling international exhibit called "Art Against Stigma."
All in all, it was a nice change of scenery, and we agreed that we should hang out downtown more often. On Saturday, though, we left Sydney altogether, which was equally as nice. We met up with Jonathan, a fellow Fulbrighter from San Francisco, at 6:45am at Central Station, then spent three hours on the train until we reached the Blue Mountains for our day of hiking. Both Chad and D had been out the the Blue Mountains on previous visits to Australia, but we haven't yet made it out there this year.
Our four-hour hike took us on a loop just below Govett's Leap5 that was called the Grand Canyon.6 Marking the outer edge of the basin to the sea in which the port of Sydney is situated, the Blue Mountains are a stunning piece of geography. The differences in elevation easily equal or exceed those of the Appalachian mountains in the Eastern US, but Sydney's mountain range is not the result of two plates colliding and forcing up a ridge in between them. The Blue Mountains are carved out of the tablelands of central Australia-- "carved" in the sense that the "mountains" do not rise up out of the land so much as the land has been worn down, down, down, away from what now seem to be mountains. Much of our hike through the canyon, we were closed in on both sides by cliff walls rising sharply up a hundred meters or more... and below us, the floor of the canyon was hidden in the darkness of a narrow gap that might have cut down for hundreds of meteres more.
Only photos will do it justice, so I'm afraid you'll have to wait until I get them posted in a feature... hopefully before we leave for Queensland on the 12th, but no promises-- we have a lot to get done before then! The climb up out of the grand canyon rose up stairs for over an hour... and we both have been limping the past few days from the strain in our thighs.7 We'll have to get a little more in practice before our next hike!
Hard to believe that four months have passed already... but then, sometimes the six months in front of us seem impossibly long! Hopefully, the changes of the next few weeks will rejuvenate rather than derail us.
You think?
;)
- D
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NOTES
1I'm actually not being facetious.
2Countdown to having our own private, quiet, and clean place in Sydney... twenty-seven days!!!
3"Product," if you haven't been hanging out around the Sydney Fish Market, means "fish."
4And I, for one, am much more comfortable with the food chain going in this direction than the reverse!
5D and her sister Angela hiked along the top of the cliff at Govett's Leap during their Australia trip in July 2003.
6At the completion of the hike, Chad and D agreed that it was definitely a "pretty darn good" canyon, but maybe not quite "grand"... yet. Give it a few more millenia.
7Chad also injured a tendon or a ligament near his Achilles' tendon, which laid him up Saturday evening and most of Sunday. It seems to be 95% better now.
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