Friday 07Aug2009

Today’s Aussie Pronunciation Tip: it’s not “Aw-see,” it’s “Awz-ee.” Hard z sound instead of an ess. It really bugs them when you get it wrong, much like it bugs Canadians when foreigners ask them if they're American, or so I've heard. Although honestly, any country that willingly refers to itself as “Oz…”

Sunday is the City2Surf, Sydney’s 14km race from the heart of the city, east beside the harbour and south along the coast to Bondi Beach. Your Favorite Blogger—er, except for Uncle Mark, and Jessie, and Yasmeen, and…um…well…One of Your Favorite Bloggers signed up. Why? Peer pressure and a desire to belong, I guess, because I will be racing along with seventy thousand other people. Yayyyyy!

I am signed up in the Back-of-the-Pack, a cheery euphemism for the Toddler, Pregnant-Women-with-Strollers, and Those-People-Who-Drink-Beer-While-They-Walk, Group. I think this will be fun! Seriously, I am ready for a nice day in the sun with free Gatorade. It will essentially be a guided tour of the city, with lots of cheering fans and people dressed up like gorillas.

I haven’t been preparing, unless you count the last month as preparation: every day I have walked between two and six hours, which is what happens when you live in an expensive suburb where everyone has a car except you. I am forty minutes from everything: the shopping center, the bus station, the library, the grocery store, the cinema, and the university. However—gloriously—I am a six-minute run downhill to the Beach. Twice in the last week I have run the 9km from Clovelly Beach through Bronte Beach, Hunter’s Park, Tamarama Park, and north into Bondi. Who needs a gym membership when you have an ocean view??

An Aussie friend once said that Sydney would be just like everywhere else, except that it happens to be on the beach. Certainly, the City Centre consists of businessmen, Versace, several breweries, Chinatown, two customs houses, a score of cafes and a few parks; if you lose your way you can find North by locating a wing of the Opera House, whitely fluttering beyond the dozen or so skyscrapers that make up the City Line. The sun shines and the buses run mostly on time and the population gets deeply involved in television series like Masterchef, and once in a while Cate Blanchett puts in an appearance in the muesli aisle at Cole’s.

But considering Sydney in this light doesn’t do it justice…because it IS on the beach.

The Coastal Walk is one long boardwalk, mostly pavement, sometimes wood or natural stone, running 100km along Sydney’s coast. The Walk plunges and slopes and rolls along hundreds of jutting headlands and natural bays. Join the dozens of Sunday strollers leaning on the fence, and you can gaze for hours as the surfers work their way out to sea again and again, falling silently through waves, as the wind and the heave of waves on rock below drowns out any human noise. Walking out on a promontory, looking to left and right, you feel that you can see the entire sloping coast of a continent in an endless ripple of cliffs and inlets. Perhaps the most remarkable part of the walk is where the pavement turns east and runs briefly inland through historic Waverly Cemetery (no, seriously, it’s historic, I just Googled it…established 1877 and turns out that Henry Lawson is buried there, and he must be important because there’s a street named after him…ok, he’s the famous Australian poet whose works included the collection “While the Billy Boils” (he he he). And according to Wikipedia, the cemetery was briefly featured in a scene from Mel Gibson’s movie “Tim.” Nope, I haven’t seen it either.) The cemetery is vast, the graves are packed like so many bathtubs side-by-side, their lids caved in, grass and weeds poking up at the feet of stone angels. The names and dates are remarkably well-preserved, despite the centuries of exposure to salt breezes; many of these patrons were dead before the 20th century.

Anyway, the view is incredible and the wintry sun has given me a deep tank-top-shaped tan. I plan to rest my legs Saturday; I am confident about the race: it’s just an extra-long walk. The only pressure is the pressure I put on myself to finish (OK, and also I want to finish relatively soon because my Fulbright friend Craig invited me to a real-life Australian Barbie afterwards and it only goes til 3 and I want to get there before everyone else eats all the food).