Entry 46:Take the Long Way Home

I’m at home on a Wednesday afternoon because it’s Australia Day. According to Wikipedia, Australia Day “commemorates the arrival of the First Fleet at Sydney Cove in 1788 and the proclamation at that time of British sovereignty over the eastern seaboard of New Holland.” According to all my colleagues, it’s just a day off to have a good time. It’s like Columbus Day in the US, if Columbus Day were a bigger deal. (Off the top of my head, I can’t even tell you what month Columbus Day is in. I’ll guess May… Nope, October. Way off.)

It’s a beautiful day so I’m probably going for run soon, followed by a quick plunge in ocean. That sounds very refreshing. I also have to stop by the supermarket, even though I went yesterday, because I forgot to buy a few items. I hate it when that happens. I think what I’ll do is incorporate my trip to the supermarket into my run. I’ll run to the store, quickly purchase the goods I need, run back to my apartment, make a quick drop off, and then run to the beach. That way the shopping won’t take up much extra time. That’s good thinking D, good thinking indeed.

So, I went to my first Cricket match this Sunday. It was a great (and long) experience. The sport really isn’t that hard to understand if you can sit and watch an entire game in person. There were eight of us at the game total, including three of my coworkers, T, H, and F. We certainly drank enough beer for eight people (but it was just me, T, and H drinking it). I won’t bore you with the details of the game, other than to say Australia beat England. I really wanted to take pics, but I forgot my camera. I’ll post a few from the Internets instead.

[A few shots of Sydney Cricket Ground I pulled off the Net.]

Although the match was entertaining, the real story occurred afterward. T, H, F, F’s cousin, and I arrived at Central Station about forty five minutes before the departure of the train back to Newcastle. F saw his cousin off (she lives in Sydney), while the others of us went to get food. Remarkably, the only thing open was Hungry Jacks (aka Burger King). I say remarkably, because, what the hell? A major event in a city of 4 million people ends, and there is exactly one establishment open in the main node of the transportation network? You could have wiped your ass with slices of Wonder Bread, sold them at five bucks a pop to the drunken masses, and made a small fortune. I couldn’t believe none of the other proprietors at Central would have opened up shop for a few hours to capitalize on this market.

[The Hungry Jacks at Central Station.]

Back to my story. Since we have ample time (so we think), we go to Hungry Jacks. T is very hungry and H wants to eat as well. I’m not particularly hungry. (I point this out to add a bit of irony to the narrative. You might be able to see where this is going. We miss the train, and I find myself sitting in a nearly abandoned train station at midnight eating shitty food that I didn’t even really want in the first place.) The line at Hungry Jacks is super long and the whole operation is complete chaos – too many customers, not enough workers. They can’t pump out the food quickly enough, and although we place (and pay for) our orders a good fifteen minutes before the train leaves, by the time we get our food, the train is gone. We just miss it. It left five minutes before we expected (at ten after, instead of the usual fifteen after), which really screwed us. F made the train and confirms that we missed it in a text.

It’s now 11:15pm and the station manager informs us that the next train doesn’t leave, until 1:45am. That’s right. We have to wait two and a half hours to get on a train that takes three hours to arrive at our destination. I’m beside myself. I know deep-down that the only realistic thing we can do is wait it out, but I’m not ready to accept it yet, so I do that thing where you pace around for twenty minutes and check and recheck the schedule fifty times. Eventually, I sit down by T and H and “enjoy” a subpar, lukewarm chicken sandwich, which, of course, isn’t even what I ordered.

The normalest people in the world don’t ride the train from Sydney to Newcastle at 3am on a Monday morning, I can tell you that much. At one point during the ride, I have to walk through a few carriages to find the bathroom, and it’s like a scene out of the movie Jacob’s Ladder (a creepy, mindbender from the ‘80s). The train is a bit rundown and dim, and the way the light is hitting me I’m making two shadows, so it looks like somebody is following me. I walk by an old, smelly, toothless woman (who may or may not be a demon) and she just gives me the evil-eye. Then, I walk by a woman who’s probably in her early twenties. She’s massively overweight and her face is puffy and red like she’s been crying for hours. She quickly looks down to avoid eye contact and then promptly leaves the carriage. It’s weird. I half-expect to suddenly come to in Danny Aiello's chiropractic office.



I go back to my seat and try to sleep, but it’s hopeless, so I turn on my iPod. I downloaded a bunch of podcasts earlier, but I can’t get into them. No offense to Terry Gross, but her low-key, probing style is doing little for me at the moment. I switch it to music and watch T and H try to sleep.



Eventually, just as day is breaking, we do arrive in Newcastle. Walking to my apartment, I notice the café owners making their morning preparations and a woman jogging down the street. (Is there anything worse than seeing somebody up and jogging before you’ve even gone to sleep, by the way?) Once I get home and lie down in my bed, I have some sort of weird restlessness going on, like my body figured I must be in trouble since I’m still awake, so it started pumping out adrenalin. I think I finally doze off somewhere around 6 am.

Anyway, the one good thing about an ordeal like this is that once it’s over, it’s over, so it’s not a big deal now. However, this might be the last time I use public transportation. From now on, it’s chartered limos, helicopters, and jets for me.