“What is it,” I mused to myself, “about warm climates and white people playing in reggae bands,” as we listened to four sunburnt gents with Hawaiian shirts and beards amble through “Waiting in Vain” on the patio of a restaurant beneath the iconic Sydney Opera House. Breaking my vegetarian edge, I was scarfing down a proper British meal at the restaurant, a Shepherd’s Pie (all food should be topped with mashed potatoes) and grooving to the official soundtrack to white people sitting next to large bodies of water in the sun.

It’s winter in Australia, and in comparison to Chicago, winter here is characterized by a light breeze, an average of 68 degrees (F), and inevitable complaints that the weather is too cold. Downtown Sydney is reminiscent of an Architect’s fever-dream mash-up of Seattle and Battlestar Galactica’s Caprica. Businessmen and tourists alike travel by ferry to visit pop-futuristic buildings and skyscrapers that look like they’re about to take off into space. This shiny newness is buffered by Victorian-era buildings that reveal the country’s stiff-upper-lip Brit roots. The juxtaposition works nicely.

One of the pleasures of the trip so far has been spending more time with my wife’s grandmother, who has a charmingly crotchety worldview that is similar to my own. I spent most of the day at her side, bemoaning the sorry state of the English language (“like” used instead of “as if”, the bankruptcy of contemporary English as a result of pandering newspaper writing and blogs, etc.) She also taught me a whimsical British poem about hating most of the human race (which I asked for a transcript of; hopefully I will be able to share it with you all, dear readers,) and we reveled in our shared misanthropy while eating proper British meals and ice cream.

A late-afternoon stroll up “the rocks” section of Sydney, the oldest part of the town, which is a bit reminiscent of New Orleans, revealed a fantastic facade of retro-futuristic apartment buildings that looked as if they’d just been transported from Logan’s Run. Also, wild cockateels.

Some quick observations:

1) Coffee shops are everywhere, but almost no one is carrying a drink to-go. Instead, they are drinking coffee on the decks of the coffee shop. There is a grand essentializing comparison between the U.S. and Australia here that I am not going to spell out.

2) Sydney has honest-to-god public spaces, such as a building that operates as an extension of the library and offers free Internet, magazines, and newspapers from around the world, along with ample seating and a large outdoor seating area. It would be wonderful to have such places in the United States, but of course that would be communist unless it was grandfathered in (libraries and parks) or owned by Starbucks or McDonalds.

Enough for today. Photos to come soon, once we buy some batteries. Today, off to see the wallabes and wombats and panda bears at the zoo.