A friend and I tried out Sydney’s N2 Extreme Gelato tonight. They make the gelato “in house” and “on demand” using liquid nitrogen (it seems) for the freezing agent. My friend had the salted caramel; I had the passionfruit bellini. Fantastic flavours. Very strong. Great to watch them being hand-made.
The Museum of Danish Resistance 1940-1945 is surprisingly good. We went along expecting something quite small. I think our expectation was based on some publicity we had read which indicated the museum tour (in English) was less than an hour. In the end, I think we spent well over an hour there, and could have spent even more time visiting.
The museum documents the lead up to the occupation of Denmark by the Nazis, explains some of what happened while they were here, and also covers much of the resistance story. I was particularly interested in the radios and printing presses which were at the heart of how communication was maintained both within Denmark, and with other countries such as the United Kingdon. But there was a lot more to see, including lots of paper documentation, uniforms, weapons and so on.
From there, we wandered down to Nyhavn, the waterfront district of Copenhagen. Although I’d been on the canal tour when I previously visited Copenhagen in 2010, I was definitely keen to go again with Sue and with Aaron (the young Australian guy we had met yesterday). Unlike 2010, there was still a fair bit of ice on the water as we made our way in the boat which took us to both the larger bodies of water, as well as the smaller canals. It was cold. Sue went inside, while Aaron and I stayed outside (along with a few others), as we were both keen to really experience the outdoors, and to be able to take some really good photographs. Although it was undoubtedly warmer inside, I really enjoyed being outdoors in the thick of it. The tour costed about 70DKK ($10-12 AUD) and lasts for about 65 minutes.
Although it was a good way to spend an hour or so, we definitely needed warming up after that, and head in for a coffee at Baresso, described to us yesterday as the Danish equivalent to Starbucks. I’m not sure if I’d agree with the comparison, as I’ve found the Baresso coffee to be vastly superior to Starbucks.
As for the cold? Marian, whose apartment we’re staying in, told us this year has been unseasonably, exceptionally colder than it has been for a couple of years. When I was here three years ago (at almost exactly the same time), it was much warmer, I remember. You can see it in the clothes I was wearing. (The photograph also confirms I’ve lost a fair bit of weight since then, and was complaining I was sick of wearing the same clothes every day.) I wouldn’t say it was warm, but it was certainly warmer than it has been this year.
And finally, I feel inclined to re-assure my family I have brought with me on this trip more than one set of clothing. If you’ve looked at the photographs I’ve blogged so far, you could seriously think otherwise. The warm jacket on loan from Damien has been an absolute treasure, as most days have seen sub-zero temperatures in Stockholm, Berlin and now Copenhagen. But, it is beginning to look like I only have the jacket, a pair of jeans, a jacket and a beanie, and so I risked the cold and asked Sue to take this photograph to prove otherwise.
As I left for work this morning I noticed the overnight emergence of some political billboards on telegraph poles around my neighbourhood. They weren’t there yesterday, so obviously someone’s been busy, as there’s quite a few down my end of Crown Street.
I’ve been through a few federal elections in the seat of Sydney (96, 98, 2001, 2004, 2007), and there’s usually always been a good showing by both the Liberals and the Greens on both street signs and in my letterbox. But in the letterbox so far there’s only been two flyers: both from Tanya Plibersek, the local Labor Member for Sydney. The first was one of those general flyers about how to make a postal vote, the second was more overtly political. So far, I’ve received nothing from either the Liberals or the Greens. And so far, it’s only Labor with street-signs.
I actually had to go searching online the other night to see who the other candidates were. As I recall at the last election “there was just a lone-Liberal in an overwhelmingly Green-Labor conflagration of people offering how to vote cards” at my local school. Also back then, “A sausage with the lot at my local school’s sausage sizzle meant a regular breakfast sausage on a bed of hommous, onion, BBQ sauce and some middle-eastern flat bread.” I’m hoping the sausage sizzle people will be out in force again on August 21.
Speaking of food. Having bought a return ticket to China last night, it was only fitting that I had “Chinese take-away” for dinner this evening: braised pork dumplings from my favourite noodle and dumpling shop in the Burlington Centre in Chinatown. I’ve been going there for almost as long as I’ve lived in Sydney. And whenever someone visits me from the country, and we’re looking for somewhere cheap, cheerful and interesting, I inevitably take them there. It’s one of those great Sydney experiences for people visiting from the bush, along with a visit to the Opera House, to the Blue Mountains, to Manly, and to Bondi. It’s one of those tiny restaurants you find in Chinatown where the food is cheap and tasty, and where the customers are packed in like sixteen dumplings in a plastic takeaway container.
The night ended on a political note, just as it started with #qanda. Tonight it was Julia’s turn to answer questions. Next week it will be Tony’s.
And the posters? Late tonight, and quite a few of them have been removed, and one is now hanging upside-down. No sign of any other parties yet though.
As we made our way into the park hosting Parramasala (the arts festival at Parramatta in Sydney “that celebrates the global impact of Asian arts and cultures”) an older couple with European accents approached us. “Is there anywhere nearby where we can just get a nice sandwich?”, they asked us, almost in desperation. Perhaps we were wrong to assume, but we later laughed about this, concluding they might have found the food on sale in the park a little “challenging”.
We had come to the park to see a poetry slam. My own connection with poetry slams goes back to 2008, when working for 702 ABC Sydney, I was the executive producer for the radio of the National Poetry Slam at the Sydney Opera House. The event was also shown on ABC-TV and was co-hosted by Andrew Daddo (then the 702 Evening Show presenter) and Miles Merrill, who pretty much brought the poetry slam genre to Australia. The winner that night was a bloke called Omar Musa, who has since gone on to fame and success with a book earlier this year that both sold well and was received well by the critics.
Both were at today’s poetry slam. The slam and the poetry were interesting enough, though slightly challenging for us since half the poems were performed in Hindi. It made it a little hard to judge which were good and which weren’t, aside from making judgments about musicality and performance.
Still, it was a fun thing to do, and we caught the ferry back which is a lovely trip.
As I’m in the midst of helping a family member move their website from something created in the 1990s using a form of software no longer supported to WordPress, I’ve reflected on some of my own previous website incarnations. I’ve decided it was time to backup/move over the website for Hawkesbury One, an art collective I was once involved in.
Our initial mission statement was thus…
We are a group of friends who have joined together to collect contemporary Australian art from the first decade of this century. Each member of Hawkesbury One has contributed a set amount of money to buy art each year, the artists and works have been chosen by mutual agreement and the art has circulated around the members’ homes every six months. At the end of the ten years, the collection is meant to provide a snapshot of what was happening in this country politically, socially and culturally in the first ten years of the 21st century. Hawkesbury One is about sharing the decision-making process in choosing and buying art. As each member has the chance to have the works in their own home for a period, the art can be seen in different contexts and by a range of people who might never experience it in an art gallery. In this way, the ideas that the art explores are also shared by new people.
Six years ago, from June to September 2011, we exhibited the collected works at the Newcastle Regional Art Gallery.
In 2011, ABC TV’s Art Nation also told the story of Hawkesbury One in a feature about Citizen Collector groups. The video below will give you a good introduction about how the group operated and grew, co-inciding with the exhibition.
Some lovely memories there, and if you want to know more about how the group operated, and what we achieved, check out the page links on this blog also, now hopefully preserved for the future.
Even though I live only fifteen minutes walk away from work, I usually catch the bus when it’s raining, as it virtually guarantees me cover to cover shelter. As I got in the bus this morning, and as I looked around, you could see the grumpiness about the weather on everyone’s faces. “I thought we’d gotten over winter” was, I’m sure, the thought going through everyone’s minds.
Everyone looked so completely grumpy, which made me observe to a colleague “We really don’t cope with rain very well in Sydney” when I got to work. “No we’d like it to be 24 degrees and sunny every day”, she responded. I smiled in agreement.
With the clearing of the rain, the Sydney transport zeitgeist had improved somewhat later in the day, when I caught the bus to the Lewisham Hotel for our regular Wednesday night drinks.
And then when I caught the bus back to Railway Square, I wasn’t really able to judge things, because I was the only person on the bus. I presume everyone in Sydney had retreated indoors for the evening, as the streets were almost empty at about ten o’clock tonight.
It wasn’t just a day, though, of sitting on buses. I caught up with my friend Yvette for lunch, and I met up with the usual crew at the pub tonight. We celebrated Dave’s 36th birthday with a few beers, as we chatted about life, the universe and everything.
In between time, work was as busy as ever. Although I never talk about work on this blog, I will mention just one thing: The Great Spelling Bee Drama.
For the last few years we have broadcast part of The NSW Premier’s Spelling Bee. As anyone who has ever seen the film Spellbound will know, spelling bees can be extremely compelling. And normally, we broadcast the last half hour, as it gets down to the final half dozen who fight it out for Spelling Supremo.
But today I got an alarming phone call an hour before our scheduled broadcast. “We’ve got a winner”, I was told, making me suddenly go into panic mode about what we will do with half an hour of radio to fill, and a theatre full of people.
A very clever young man from Bundanoon had swept the floor, emerging as the clear winner, in an unassailable position. There was absolutely no way anyone else could win, based on points. “It’s like ABBA at Eurovision in 1974”, I thought to myself.
An “emergency meeting” was held with the competition organiser. In the end, we went ahead with the broadcast as the young kids competed for the as-yet-undecided second and third places.
“One of life’s many challenges I guess…” I giggled to myself at one point this afternoon.
After a late start to the day, I set out to explore some of Tallinn. As I mentioned yesterday, I’ve been feeling a little bit sick. I’m not sure if it’s the day spent in the rain in Stockholm, or being around too many other backpackers, but I’ve been feeling a little congested. Staying in some nice accommodation I decided to make the most of it and stayed at the hotel most of the morning.
Breakfast was nice enough. I especially liked the rollmops. There was also a curried fish dish which was tasty. As with most of these breakfasts, I ate all that I possibly could to make the absolute most of it all.
After breakfast I returned to my room to rest up for a while. The only thing that really made me leave the hotel was an unexpected power outage. “We have a problem with the power”, the woman at reception told me, on my way out of the building. “Not a problem” I replied.
Town was really really busy today. Lots of tourists everywhere.
“50% of all tourists come from Finland”, my tour guide told me on the Official Tour of Tallinn you get with the Tallinn Card. In our case, however, Fins made up 67.3% of those on the bus tour. You guessed it: there was just me and two Finnish girls. As there was only three people it was a very personal tour by the guide who was excellent.
The first part of the tour takes you on a bus around much of Tallinn, an overview more than anything. We were shown the Russian area, remnants of the involvement of Tallinn in the Moscow Olympics and visited the grounds of the Song Festival, an Estonian tradition that dates back several hundred years. The parklands there we also very important to the independence movement that came with the fall of the Soviet Union.
And then we returned for a walking tour around the Old Town.
I guess for me, with an interest in politics, the most interesting parts were hearing a little about the independence of Estonia. Time and time again the tour guide returned to the theme of Estonian independance, noting the country has only had 39 years of self-rule in 800 years. Time and time again she would refer to buildings as being from “The Danish Period” or “The German Period”. The word Tallinn itself means “Danish Town”.
But now they’re independent and you can really sense the pride our guide felt in that independance. “I’ve never seen him before”, she told us, when the President of Estonia appeared on the balcony near where we standing. He smiled for the camera of course.
It was an excellent tour. We had a terrific guide who was very knowledgeable, and who spoke English and Finnish very well. A bus trip. A walk. Two and a half hours in total. And we were lucky, I guess, that ours was such a small tour. And since it was included in the price of the Tallinn Card ($45 Australian), I already feel the card has paid for itself many times over.
I don’t know what the night holds. Although I’m feeling a fair bit better than I was, I still feel a little congested. I think I’ll check out the guide book to see what might be on offer on a Thursday night in Tallinn.
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