My Sydney trip: Part II (The best bit)

So...on with the rest of my Sydney visit then. No more messing about! Mark Forsyth's show Around the World in 80 Etymologies was an enjoyable etymological jaunt from England to Sydney, with a brief stop in Melbourne to consider the glory that is Batmania. Much to my delight, of course.  

For those who don't know, Melbourne was once briefly known as Batmania, after one of its founding fathers, John Batman. The settlement was eventually named after William Lamb, 2nd Viscount Melbourne, some poncey English bloke who'd never even visited the place.  

The mention of Batmania was my favourite part of the event. I would share some other snippets with you except that my fatigue and migraine had severely diminished my brain's capacity to retain any information. 

Oh, I just remembered (go, brain!) that when asked to nominate his favourite etymological connection, Mark mentioned that 'shit' and 'science' have a common word ancestor. Don't tell that to the climate change deniers, OK? Don't ask me to explain it either. 

After we'd been around the world in 80 etymologies, I nipped downstairs and nabbed a spot  right at the front of the book signing queue. *fist pump* I had Mark sign The Etymlogicon  "To Jayne from Batmania...". Naturally. 

At around this point Miss Jane (fellow Melburnian and word-nerd blogger at Six Degrees of Sir Thomas Urquhart, who was also in Sydney for the Writers' Festival) tweeted me and invited me to come for a drink with Mark after the book signing. She's a friend of Mark's you see. *gulp* I was going to decline since I was already thrilled to have my book signed and because I had started to entertain the idea of catching an earlier flight home on account of feeling quite rubbish, but in the end, I thought, "Ah, what the hell. You've been to work feeling worse than this dozens of times! Harden up! To the bar!" 

So, off I went to hang out with Jane and her mother, Mark and a few other friends, fans and associates. We whiled away a few pleasant hours sitting in a nearby waterfront bar, sipping on champagne as the sun set (and developing a raging face full of rosacea if you were me. Mental note: No. More. Champagne. Again. Ever.)  

I didn't have much of a chance to chat to Mark, but I didn't mind because I probably would have been rendered completely dull merely from being in his presence -  or my pounding head would have actually exploded from the awesomeness of it all. He was apologetic about not having had a chance to talk to me, which is rather lovely, isn't it?  

I did have a chance to chat with an older Irish gentlemen in our party. As a tall ship sailed past us, he told me he once used to work at sea. I commented that it must have been a hard life, but he said it wasn't and told me that he once saw the captain have a poop overboard. 

I only realised later - as in half an hour ago, by accident when I was looking at the Sydney Writer's Festival site - that he is Dermot Healy. The festival guide introduces him thus:

Described by Roddy Doyle as Ireland's greatest writer, the poet, novelist and playwright Dermot Healy is an unconventional and original storyteller and a master of character.

Oopsie.  I'm a philistine. 

Oh, by the way, Mark has another book in the works. Hurrah! 

I headed back to Circular Quay a little before 6.00 to get a train to the airport. I was just in time to see the kick-off of the Vivid Festival, Sydney's festival of light, music and ideas, which lit up the Opera House and buildings around the Quay. It was very pretty, but I didn't linger. I was desperate to get home to bed. 

I slept long and well that night. 

My Sydney trip: Part I

I've been very slack blogger the past week or so...actually,  a very tired blogger to be precise. But tonight I'm going to push through the fatigue. Lots of gleeful stuff has happened and I want to get it out there. 

First up, my much-anticipated day trip to Sydney to see Mark Forsyth, author of The Etymologicon, at the Sydney Writer's Festival.  I arrived in sunny Sydney at around 11.00am, giving me 3.5 hours to fill before seeing Mark.  I had originally planned an inner city ghost sign hunt, but I was exhausted (partly due to excitement-induced insomnia) and my head was aching quite badly (confounded noggin!) so I just um...wondered around the city for hours instead.

I did find one ghost sign in the city, on George Street, if I recall correctly. Well, a tiny bit of a ghost sign. 

Life?

I also came across the graveyard of a demolished building like the one in the Carlton Gardens in Melbourne where fragments of the Colonial Mutual Life Building now lie. I couldn't find anything on site to say what this Sydney building once was. Anyone?

 Thanks to Luke's googling, I now know these things, 

usually found at the top of columns, are called 'capitals'

An old YWCA building?

I eventually made my way to Walsh Bay, nestled near the base of the Sydney Harbour Bridge. I even knew where I was going since I'd wandered about the area when I was in Sydney in  December. 

There's something about this woman that makes me 

suspect she came up from Melbourne too  

Sorry, but I'm going to leave this here without telling you about the Inky Fool event because it's taken me ages to write this and now my brain is worn out. Next time... 

Bonus Sunday post: Sydney signs

I forgot to post the photos of signs I took in Sydney! Here they are: 

 My first sign spotting: looking out the window of my hotel room

Johnson & Sons Pty Limited...something & grindery merchants

...wholesale and retail. I think it was on Elizabeth Street

 Can't remember the location. Bathurst Street maybe?

 Near my hotel - Griffiths Teas

 A closer look

 And on the other side. Griffiths Beverages would

 have been a more fitting name

 The old GPO - Pitt Street side

Also Pitt Street

The Australian Workers Union. I think this was Elizabeth Street too

 King Street, Newtown. Continental delicatessen at the top,

 ice cold on the left. I think it says Shelley's 

in white above the windows, which I only worked

 out after looking closely at the sign below

King Street again.  Shelley's Famous Drinks.

 Icy cold. Refreshes you faster! And a shell 

with an E in it. Shell-ey, I guess! 

Also King Street. It looks like Doumany & Son (bottom left),

  then Kolotex and the nation's great nylons! 

 The Dew Drop Inn seems an odd name for an Asian restaurant. 

It makes me think of the Three Little Bops  

In case anyone thinks I have fantastic eyesight, it's only by zooming in that I can make out many of words on the first three Newtown signs. You can have a closer look by clicking on them to enlarge. 

At last: what I did on my holidays

I've lost enthusiasm for writing a lengthy post about my week in Sydney, but there's a few gleeful things I want to show you, so here's a bunch of photos.

The entrance to Tooronga Zoo

 

 One of the meerkats, pretending he's people

There didn't appear to be any otters in the otter enclosure,
 but there was a duck

It was rather perplexed by the glass. It was paddling like mad but going nowhere. It's pretty funny when you can see below the water as well as above. More zoo photos here 

 

 Matthew Flinders' sea-faring moggie, Trim, beside the State Library of 

New South Wales, near a statue of his owner 

The reading room of the library's Mitchell Wing is a light and pleasant space, but it doesn't come close to the grandeur of  Melbourne's La Trobe Reading Room

 The facade of the Mitchell Wing is not unlike the exterior of the 

State Library of Victoria

This carved inscription on the wall in the foyer of the Mitchell Wing was my favourite bit of my (short) library visit 

I like this sign at the Botanic Gardens, which are lovely

I didn't smell the roses but I took lots of photos of the water lilies

 Lotus pods

Lotus buds

A very tall eucalyptus tree in the gardens

 Iconic Bondi Beach - the Bondi to Coogee coastal walk was my favourite part of my time in Sydney

My first glimpse of Waverley Cemetery. See here and here 

for more photos of the cemetery and the coastal walk

 This SIGN made me CHUCKLE

 Coogee beach, the end of the 6km walk. 

Does anyone else primary schooled in Australia in the 1980s remember the ABC singing books and the song about "chish 'n fips 'n riko cholls, somato tauce 'n raussage solls"? 

 After a few days of stunning harbourside scenery I needed a bit of inner urban grunge. I spotted this on someone's front fence in inner city Newtown.  The cards were just little plain squares with 'To' at the top and 'From' handwritten at the bottom, but still...

A few doors down, I saw this sign

And this 

 And this, I presume, is Florian. Home safe, albeit legless 
and rather pale after his ordeal

While I was in Sydney, there was a report on the news about the corpse plant in the Botanic Gardens in Melbourne blooming for the first time in seven years. The bloom, which is said to smell like rotting flesh, only lasts for a few days, so you can imagine my irritation that it had the audacity to flower while I was interstate. Such impertinence! 

I visited the gardens on the day I got home not expecting to see anything (or smell anything). This is the sight that greeted me (click on the links above for comparison, if you don't know what it looks like in full bloom):

Teehee. Rather flaccid. Coincidentally, I just learnt from Wikipedia that the plant's scientific name, Amorphophallus titan,  means 'large, misshapen phallus". 

Nevertheless, it's still an interesting plant, and some if its neighbours in the tropical hothouse were interesting and unusual too, like this white bat plant. 

Sydney glee

Hello from Sydney!  Guess what l can see from my hotel room? A very large old sign on the neighbouring building! I'll take a photo tomorrow when the light is better.

I'm getting a little excited about going on a sign-spotting jaunt in the next few days.

I had a very pleasant taxi ride to the airport this morning. I was only going to go as far as Southern Cross station to catch the Skybus, but the taxi driver was having a slow day, and offered to take me the whole way for $40 - only a little more than l would have paid for taxi and Skybus, but waaaay less hassle.

The driver was chatty and polite. He's from Bangladesh and has lived in Australia 27 years. He kept calling me ma'am, which made me laugh, and when he dropped me off he apologised for talking too much.

I had almost an hour to spare after checking in. I wandered about the shops...so many bookshops... l told myself l wouldn't go in because l had enough reading material with me. And then l went in and bought a book. It's called Embracing the Ordinary: Lessons from the Champions  Every Day Life by Michael Foley.  Not prizes for guessing why that appealed to me.

I started reading Wild, Cheryl Strayed's memoir of her solo trek along the Pacific Crest Trail on the US west coast. So far, so good, though her account of her mother's death nearly had me blubbering on the plane,  because l've been through a similar experience and it brought back sad memories.

It's good to see my mum again. I last saw her in July, but didn't get to spend a lot of quality time together.

Off to bed for me. (I'm posting this from my phone, so the formatting will be sloppy.)

Below is Sydney Town Hall all tizzed up with a light show.