The Trip: Part One, Sydney And Melbourne
Oct. 15th, 2010 07:13 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
craigoxbrowI already covered the journey out in undue detail here so anyway...
Where I was sitting.
Amusing interface moment for the entertainment system.
First couple days in Sydney, sunny, lovely, everyone mildly stressed but brave-facing it. I'll endeavour to hammer out a Joss Whedon talk post sometime soon.
A smallish Georgian city with gargantuan vertigo-inducing skyscrapers bursting out at random.
Museums and galleries and shopping and trying not to be underfoot too much, and volunteering to go elsewhere before too long.
Melbourne, feels a bit more like home due to grey skies and rain, but a bit less like home since it was obviously built after Sydney when they realised they had an entire continent to play with and didn't need to build on the old British scale. So there's an exhibition hall up a hill that goes on for two blocks' worth and isn't even used any more, massive train stations, a huge museum with an IMAX cinema off to one side...
(The rain was apparently the first of several near-misses with newsworthy disaster on my trip, as some of the surrounding region flooded but the river in Melbourne right next to the conference centre didn't quite burst its banks.)
And I'm far too amused by Batman Avenue.
This amused me too for some reason. (It's actually the gaol where Ned Kelly spent his last days.)
As did turning the TV on in my hotel and being greeted by the news in Turkish.
The exhibition and conference centre is similarly monstrous, the lobby taller than the historic ship moored outside and big enough to take Teviot in quite easily, it takes three minutes to walk past the exhibition hall to get to the conference centre for WorldCon.
WorldCon is a bit odd - apparently four thousand people but it never feels like more than a few hundred and then only for the keynote speakers. One of the panels I attend has three panellists and five audience members. With twenty-odd hourly events there's clearly too much going on at any one time.
(As an aside, I also saw the Tim Burton exhibition at the also-huge Museum of Moving Image in the city.)
And I spent an alarming amount of time listening to British people. China Mieville, Paul Cornell, Rob Shearman, even Norman Cates from WETA appears to be British. I knew to say hello to him from Morgue, who we'll be seeing in the next instalment. My main experience of seeing actual Australians was going to a pub on the other side of the city centre to see Patrick (and less Australian-ly Sadhbh) so I got to see a wee bit of the city by night, its oddly New Orleans style low buildings with ironwork over balconies, bats and the like.
Where I was sitting.
Amusing interface moment for the entertainment system.
First couple days in Sydney, sunny, lovely, everyone mildly stressed but brave-facing it. I'll endeavour to hammer out a Joss Whedon talk post sometime soon.
A smallish Georgian city with gargantuan vertigo-inducing skyscrapers bursting out at random.
Museums and galleries and shopping and trying not to be underfoot too much, and volunteering to go elsewhere before too long.
Melbourne, feels a bit more like home due to grey skies and rain, but a bit less like home since it was obviously built after Sydney when they realised they had an entire continent to play with and didn't need to build on the old British scale. So there's an exhibition hall up a hill that goes on for two blocks' worth and isn't even used any more, massive train stations, a huge museum with an IMAX cinema off to one side...
(The rain was apparently the first of several near-misses with newsworthy disaster on my trip, as some of the surrounding region flooded but the river in Melbourne right next to the conference centre didn't quite burst its banks.)
And I'm far too amused by Batman Avenue.
This amused me too for some reason. (It's actually the gaol where Ned Kelly spent his last days.)
As did turning the TV on in my hotel and being greeted by the news in Turkish.
The exhibition and conference centre is similarly monstrous, the lobby taller than the historic ship moored outside and big enough to take Teviot in quite easily, it takes three minutes to walk past the exhibition hall to get to the conference centre for WorldCon.
WorldCon is a bit odd - apparently four thousand people but it never feels like more than a few hundred and then only for the keynote speakers. One of the panels I attend has three panellists and five audience members. With twenty-odd hourly events there's clearly too much going on at any one time.
(As an aside, I also saw the Tim Burton exhibition at the also-huge Museum of Moving Image in the city.)
And I spent an alarming amount of time listening to British people. China Mieville, Paul Cornell, Rob Shearman, even Norman Cates from WETA appears to be British. I knew to say hello to him from Morgue, who we'll be seeing in the next instalment. My main experience of seeing actual Australians was going to a pub on the other side of the city centre to see Patrick (and less Australian-ly Sadhbh) so I got to see a wee bit of the city by night, its oddly New Orleans style low buildings with ironwork over balconies, bats and the like.
