Sydney is a beautiful city; I’m having a lot of fun exploring and wandering about here. In the spirit of tradition, here are a few early observations and random fun tips, from my first week of living it up down under.

The downtown area of Sydney is called the CBD, for central business district. To my North American ears, this abbreviation sounds annoying and unnecessary, but Wikipedia informs me that it’s actually much more universally used than downtown. So adapt I must.

They all drive on the wrong side. I actually knew this already, because I knew that The Matrix was filmed down here and that one of the bloopers is that you can see cars on the left in the helicopter scenes. However, I had completely forgotten about that. Indeed, the roads inside the airport are all one-way channels, so the first time I realised something was fishy was when I hopped in a cab, and the driver was seated over there on the right.

The interesting thing about this is the—perhaps unexpected—impact it has on non-automotive transport. Trains and the subway, of course, are on the left, and generally people on the sidewalk veer to the left rather than right. However, this is not always the case. Near where I work, people always veer left; south a little bit, in Chinatown, they veer right. I’m not sure if that’s a cultural difference or just a coincidence, but it was very noticeable and I could picture it creating uncertainty on whatever the geographic border is between the two approaches.

One other thing about the roads that’s noticeable is the naming. It’s sooo European compared to the States. No Washington– or Pennsylvania Avenues here, nope, it’s all Liverpool, Sussex, Kent, Clarence, George, Elizabeth, and King Streets.

The power is 240 V at 50 Hz. You can buy transformers, but they’re expensive. And they still don’t adjust the frequency, only the voltage. However, it seems that many (perhaps all?) electronic devices that use a DC transformer provide one that accepts either either of the standard voltages. There were four plug-in devices I brought with me: my laptop charger, my camera’s charger, my NiMH double-A charger, and my LaCie storage drive. In all cases, the transformer’s label is clear that it accepts 240 V—so far all have worked fine.

The wall receptacle here is different, mind you, and I did have to purchase an adapter for that before I left. It’s kind of a sketchy one, though—it grips the wall tightly, and grips your device loosely. I think the intention is that you leave it plugged in, and then take turns plugging different things into it. My usage pattern is more about leaving it plugged into my laptop adapter, and plugging that in in different places, though. The end result is that it falls off a lot in my bag; I’ve already shocked myself by trying to grip it and having my fingers slip and instead grab the half-inserted pins of my laptop’s plug. There’s really no excuse for this, though; as you can see in the picture on the left, all the wall sockets here have built-in switches to turn them on and off. I don’t know if this is an acknowledgment of the danger of higher voltage, or just an encouragement to conserve, but there they are.

The other interesting consequence of the 50 Hz power fluctuation is that the CRT televisions refresh at 50 Hz, which is mind-numbingly horrible. The first hotel I was in had an LCD TV, but the room at World Tower had a CRT, and it was awful. I spent fifteen minutes trying to adapt to it and then gave up and took an Advil. I think it will be international markets that drive LCD adoption for home-theatre.

Coles here is not a bookstore, it’s a supermarket. And they sell things like Vegemite, Kangaroo mince, Dijonaisse, and American-style mustard. We actually have Vegemite at work, to spread on your toast in the morning if you want it. I haven’t been ballsy enough to try some yet.

Apartments are rented by the week. You’re still expected to put down “four weeks bond”, which is like last month’s rent, but prices are all quoted by the week. I’m not sure what the rationale is for this, but it is more precise than by month, since a week is consistently seven days and a month is variable.

The big thing to watch out for with apartments in Sydney is super-shares. Sharing a bedroom with someone else is cool; most of the places I looked at were arrangements with four people in a two-bedroom flat or six people in a three-bedroom place, but there were a couple that were… more dense than that. One was something like eight or nine folks in an apartment, spread between a three bedrooms and several living-room couches. Again, this may be catering to tourists or whatever, but I wasn’t really interested in the security or hygiene implications of that many bodies in the same place. As with anything, if the price looks to good to be true, it probably is.

The train isn’t that great. Despite having thousands of kilometres of track, the CityRail service in New South Wales is not very good. I have a pretty high tolerance for confusing public transit systems (hello Washington DC regional buses), but the system here is a mess, and widely acknowledged to be so by the locals. The biggest fault seems to be that rather than having localized lines that you transfer between, they want every station to have a single train connecting it to Central. This is absurd—the consequence is that instead of having to wait two or three times for trains that come every couple of minutes, you have to wait once, for a train that might take half an hour to come. The other problem is that there are so many overlapping lines that a busy station like Central or Redfern might have seven or eight different trains leaving from it, each in a different direction and each visiting a subtly different bevy of stops. Example announcement: “Platform seven, departing in two minutes, stops at stations X, Y, Z, Q and then every station until R.”

These problems are known, though, and plans are in the works to reform the system. One guy I chatted with on the train wryly remarked that they had planned to have the ticketing system moved to electronic swipies in time for the 2000 Olympics. Whoops.

Once you’re inside the city (*cough*, CBD), there are a few other options besides CityRail. There’s a one-directional monorail that loops around eight stations in the CBD and an electric light rail line that serves the suburbs immediately west of the CBD. The monorail is a pretty neat service, and since I live just around the corner from the Convention stop, I’ll probably be using it occasionally to get into the city. The biggest downer of the monorail is that it’s an independent fare ($2.50) from the light rail and the commuter trains, so it would be pretty expensive to depend on it as part of a regular routine involving the other services.

Ridiculous pricing for telecom services. I don’t understand the exact history, but it seems that until sometime in the recent past, Telstra was a government-operated telecom monopoly. Under PM Howard, it’s been sold off, and there is now competition on a number of fronts, including companies offering better phone service, better broadband, and better cable/satellite TV options.

Unfortunately, the effect of the long monopoly is that people are more tolerant of high prices for crappy service than I would be inclined to be. Telstra’s own internet service that everyone loves to hate is BigPond, which for 8 Mbps cable is a $190 setup fee, $60 a month, puts you a 12 month contract, and is limited to 12 GB of transfer. Yikes. My current solution at home is an Unwired WiMAX modem on loan from a colleague. The pricing is actually pretty similar BigPond, and the latency is pretty bad… but at least I feel like I’m sticking it to the man.

One other thing to watch out for—payphones. It’s $0.50 for a local call, and it cuts you off without warning after a mere 30 seconds. This is super lame, and when I tried to insert more money (during a call) to extend the time, it just spat it out again and cut me off like before.

Mobiles don’t have area codes. This confused me at first, but the more I think about it, the more sense it makes. All the land-lines are an eight-digit number with a single-digit area code. So a “fully qualified” international number (what you’d use for, say, Skype) in Sydney is +61 2 xxxx xxxx. Mobiles, on the other hand, are not tied to an area code, and are simply ten free-form digits starting with a zero. To dial a cell internationally it’s +61 0xxx xxx xxx.

I’m not sure how billing is handled for long-distance and so-on, but it seems clear that pretty much everyone here has a mobile. I’m still not persuaded that I need one, but during my apartment search, I was shocked at the number of ads that preferred an SMS response to an email. One of the things I liked about using Craigslist to find a place in New York was how that initial email interaction let you filter out people who couldn’t take the time to compose a response involving paragraphs, full sentences, and some correct punctuation. It seems like such a triviality, but a flatmate is a pretty important thing, and how a person interacts by email with a stranger can speak volumes about their personality. An SMS reveals very little in that regard.

Water is expensive here. I don’t know what it costs, but my landlady explicitly asked us to firmly turn off the taps in order to stem dripping and keep costs down. All of the toilets here also have a separate “half flush” button that doesn’t do a full refresh but kind of waters down the bowl a bit to postpone a full flush for later.

The other funny thing I’ve noticed is that the urinals here are a lot different from in North America. North American urinals are these massive flat affairs, with a little lip at the bottom that you kind of hover over. I’ve always had this sneaking suspicion that the North American urinal is designed for you to get much, much closer to it than anybody actually does: the curvature is such that—if it wasn’t so disgusting—you could actually stand right up against it and have complete privacy. Well, the urinals here in Australia are more honest about their anticipated usage. It’s a little porcelain bowl, and that’s all there is to it.

And that thing about the water going the other way? It’s toilet-dependent, not hemisphere dependent.

Oh yeah, also, Canadians have washrooms. Americans have restrooms and bathrooms. Australians have toilets. I got the funny-eye last week when I asked a co-worker where the washroom was. It’s not a washroom, it’s a toilet. Or a water-closet. But mostly just a toilet.

Easy to get a bank account. In New York, I wasn’t able to get a bank account until I had a Social Security Number, which took two weeks to arrive, and I couldn’t even apply for that until I’d been in the country ten days. Ugh. Here, they have special provisions in place for people on the Working Holiday Visa, which is what I have: if you show up at the branch (I chose Westpac) within 6 weeks of arrival, you can get an account with a passport only, no permanent address or other form of ID required. I signed up on Tuesday, and asked them to post my bank card c/o my work address. I don’t have the card yet, but the HR people at work were able to get my relocation bonus to me right away, which was super-nice.

So there you have it. Once it warms up a bit I’ll be taking some surfing lessons, and I mean to get out to the Blue Mountains before too long, so there will be further reports to come!

Mike

← Earlier Later → Posted at 8:39 am to Culture.