Inconvenience Stores

Practically every corner in downtown Sydney features a convenience store. Some of them are 7-11's (and I have to say that it's a disconcerting feeling to spend 29 consecutive hours traveling only to step out of a taxi half-way around the world in front of a 7-11), some of them are tiny airless tombs (with the proprietor sealed behind industrial glass) which look as though they belong in the South Bronx rather than cheerful sunny Sydney, and some of them are just "City Convenience Store"s, whose incredibly generic logo looks like a cross between movie set dressing and... the 7-11 logo, suspiciously. The latter are the most common, almost reaching the density of Duane Reade's in Manhattan (although not quite). On one corner we came to, there were actually two of them, diagonally across from each other, in the grand Starbucks marketing tradition. L. went into them both, as part of his ongoing personal quest to find a Dr. Pepper in this strange, yet familiar land. The first "City Convenience Store": nothing. The second (diagonally across the street): the only Dr. Pepper to be found in the entire country of Australia.

While he was jousting at prune-juice-flavored windmills, I made a few observations of my own:

#1 - Australian commercial contests are not quite as challenging as American ones, apparently.



Wow, Rock Paper Scissors! That's a tough one. What are the odds against me, 200,000 to one? Say, what do I win if I can crush you with paper twice in a row? Take that, giant-with-hands-of-rock. Nobody expects the paper ninja!


#2 - Australia is approximately 60 years behind the American South with respect to racial stereotypes.



Um, is that... are those... chocolate candies... shaped like... little black babies? Holy crap, they are. And are they really... they can't seriously be... named... "Chicos"? Can they? Oh dear lord. They are and they can. Obviously this isn't considered horribly racist here because... because why not, now, exactly? Because they don't have any hispanic people to speak of? Oh right, sure, because the name is the worst part of this, obviously. Okay, deep breaths. I just need to see something familiar to make me feel better, I need something comforting to snap me out of this knee-jerk liberal panic, where is it....

Aaaaah, there we go. Same great (chicken) taste, but better (chicken) for you! That's better. I feel much more at home now. These people are just like you and me after all!

The period of nothingness is regretted.

So, apparently the way to abandon a blog without guilt (well, without excessive guilt) is to blog while travelling, then you can tell yourself that it's a travel blog, so therefore you only have to blog while travelling. This system works beautifully for a while before inevitably breaking down when you don't blog the next time you travel. But I am nothing if not perverse, so I will now proceed to blog retrospectively about my travel now that I am safely home (and no longer faced with hotel charges of $29.00 AU per day for internet access).

Mission statement: there will be no big, sweeping social and political generalizations about Australia (not that I could stand to read myself blah about them if there were). Besides being seriously beyond my pay grade, those types of semi-profundities are hard to come by when one is in a country that's just similar enough to the US to feel vaguely familiar. Now, I can only speak to my own experience, but I have been on trips where I felt as if I had been dropped on the surface of the moon and this, sir, was not one of those trips. Instead of being another world, Australia is an absent-minded walk down the wrong cul-de-sac in your suburban development -- everything you know is there, but the proportions are all wrong plus which you have a nagging feeling that something is... off, for lack of a better word, but you're not sure what. In that situation, what stands out are the details. Chicken-flavored potato chips, for example. High-end gourmet honey-mustard-soy-sauce-chicken-flavored potato chips, even. It's all details, baby, here in the world of non-travel travel blogging.

To start, here's Detail #1 -- the full text of a correction published in the August 23rd issue of The Cairns Post (Cairns is a medium-sized city in sub-tropical northern Queensland -- the Fort Lauderdale of Australia, basically):

"An article in Tuesday's The Cairns Post incorrectly stated that the suspect in an attempted abduction at Edmonton was driving a four-wheel-drive with a black boar tied to the roof. The vehicle actually had a black boat on its roof. The error is regretted."