Where are my 'tatatoes'?

I did my first piano recital, that is, in public, today along with the other students of my teacher.  I played Prelude 1 in C by Bach from Book I of the Well-Tempered Clavier.  I ran into several rough spots but, overall, did not embarrass myself (too) badly in front of all these grade school kids and their families.  On the surface the piece may not look so difficult to play, but to play it well is not a simple matter.  It's like trying to achieve the precision quality of Glenn Gould and the hypnotic quality of Philip Glass, while at the same time to sound as serene as possible, in short, it is a very tall, or next to an impossible order.  My teacher, to help me get into an even rhythm, used to count aloud while I played, "one tatato, two tatato, three tatato, four tatato, one ..."  They got so drummed into my head that lately I dreamed about them at night.  Here is the video of my recital; for the professional pianists out there, my advice is to skip this to save the suffering of your ears.  

Architecture Downunder, Trip to Australia, Part IV

Contrary to my custom, I have saved the post on architecture on this trip for the last, partly because I knew very little about the history and major figures of Australian architecture before our trip and I wanted to do some more research on what we saw.  The only Australian architect that I learned about in architectural school is Glenn Murcutt, who won the Pritzker Prize in 2002.  I was not able to see any of his buildings on this trip however, for most of his works are residential and are for the most part not open to public. It was a bit hard tracking down information about Australian architecture, that is, architecture by Australian architects.  There's not a lot known about it, it seems, outside of Australia.  Some of the most famous works of architecture in Australia are not, strictly speaking, Australian.  The world renowned Sydney Opera House was designed by a Dane, Jorn Utzon; while its famous National Capital, Canbarra, a planned city from scratch, tabula rasa style, was envisioned by an American architect, Walter B. Griffin.  So to begin.

Souvenir from Sydney

First: the phony souvenir picture of us with the Sydney Opera House in its grandeur in the background!  We failed to resist buying into the whole commercial scheme when a "Memories from Sydney Opera House" package was offered to us after our tour at that iconic building.  At least it gives you a good view of the front of the halls at night.  In any case, it was a real treat to have seen the building and have attended a concert, Mozart's Requiem, in its magnificent Concert Hall.  It is a great pity that we will never know what Jorn Utzon's vision was like for the inside of the building, for he abruptly left the project and the country, after a prolonged and painful series of irreconcilable conflicts with the Australian Authorities regarding its construction time and budget, after only the main structures, the plinth and shells of the building, had been completed.  Here is a retrospective video about Utzon and the Opera House, as well as a link to the Guardian's website about the building - 

The best way to see the whole of the Opera House is to go on board one of the ferries either to Manly or Taronga Zoo.  When viewed from the water side, it looked to me like a line of medieval knights' heads in armour with their visors drawn down.  

It is almost impossible to take a bad picture of the Sydney Opera House.  We took so many pictures of it that you would think there would be some bad ones among them.  But its shape and profile, from every angle, seems to be just perfect. 

Knights in armour

Iconic profile

Silhouetted against the night sky

Mythical creature taking flight

Harbour Bridge all lighted up

Ferry docking at Circular Quay

We went on a walking tour, sponsored by the Australian Architecture Association, of the Central Business District (CBD) in Sydney and saw some historical buildings and skyscrapers designed by eminent Australian architects from the mid 20th Century which we wouldn't have known otherwise.  Here are some of the buildings we saw on the tour -

MLC Center

      

      Australia Square Tower

Capital Center

All three skyscrapers above were by Harry Seidler (1923-2006).  I can't say that I'm enamored of them.  Then, there were some more recent skyscrapers which have sprung up around the hottest commercial property in the northeast quadrant of Sydney's CBD area overlooking the harbour.  I was not able to get a good picture of Aurora Place by Renzo Piano and substituted one from the web -

Governor Philip Tower

  

1 Bligh Office Tower

Aurora Place

I also ventured out of the CBD area of Sydney and went over to the west side to check out the new Law School building at Sydney University.  The students there seemed to have the best of all possible worlds!  The library of the Law School is situated under the plaza with the cylindrical-shaped-but-sliced-on-top-at-an-angle, "light tower" illuminating the reading room below. 

Lounging in style

New Law Building, Sydney U.

Now, to expose my ignorance of Australia's vernacular architecture - on the way to Sydney University, I noticed some striking, so it seemed to me, narrow buildings lining tight up against one another on both sides of the street.  Each had a narrow, perhaps no more than 4 to 5 feet deep, strip of fenced front yard or porch, with a balcony on the second floor above, the space of both, in most cases, was taken up with tired old couches or by trash bins. The last made them resemble poorly maintained apartments like any student ghetto, but on a second look, there was something about them that attracted my attention; each individual building looked quirky and slightly different from each another.  

Student Ghetto

"gentrified"

I thought I had discovered something very special and mentioned it to somebody whom I met at a social gathering.  "Oh, sure," he said, "they are called Terraced Houses, and they are everywhere!"  I must not have been paying attention, for my impression of Sydney was all skyscrapers and dirty streets in popular tourist hangouts.  These terraced houses, I later learned, were the Australian version of Victorian or Edwardian row houses!

Hexagons and circles

Griffin's vision

Fast forward: we spent the last few days of our trip at Canberra, the National Capital of Australia, a little self-governing inland territory, called ACT, Australian Capital Territory, located roughly midway between Sydney and Melbourne.  Like Washington D.C., it is chock full of federal government buildings, foreign embassies, national monuments, museums, gardens, and universities.  While researching about the place before the trip, I noticed the rather unusual grids of the city--instead of the more common rectangles, there are hexagons and circles here.  I have read about examples of large scale urban planning and transformation in the history of human civilization, Haussmann's Paris modernization plan in the Napoleon era comes to mind, but this is something else--some architects from Chicago, Walter Griffin and his wife, Marion Mahony, actually dreamed it up, guided by their Utopian visions and democratic ideals, from empty fields of grazing sheep, when they participated in and won an international competition sponsored by the Australian government in 1913 to design the Capital City.  However, facing many of the same bureaucratic and political obstacles and setbacks as Utzon did for the Sydney Opera House, the Griffins were forced to resign from the project after a few years.  In consequence, their vision for the capital city was never fully realized.  (There seems to be a pattern here: Announce a competition to secure the most visionary architect, sign him or her up, and then sabotage them by substituting one's own more meager vision after the fact.) 

Axial obsession

A man-made lake

Our experience of Canberra, from being driven around a bit, however, was not completely satisfactory.  For one, it is a city built for automobiles.  Though the major landmarks all cluster around the two central foci, City Center and Capital Hill, which are not far from each other, it is actually not possible to walk from one part to the other for they are separated by an artificial lake, Lake Burley Griffin, with only vehicular accommodation across two bridges but with no provision for pedestrians or rapid public transportation such as raised train service or subway.  Furthermore, the city, though rational and geometric in plan viewed from above, was difficult to navigate, even for those who've lived there for a long time; our host, Frank, had a hard time finding his way around.  Another un-pedestrian-friendly characteristic we noticed there was what we called the disappearing sidewalks.  For no particular reason, sidewalks along the streets would just disappear, leaving one no alternative but to risk one's life (especially since they drive on the wrong (left) side of the road, so that we were always looking in the opposite direction from which the cars were coming) to cross the streets to get somewhere.  

The style of public buildings in Canberra are rather too monumental and masculine for my taste and the city planners down there are excessively obsessed about axiality.  The new Parliament House, for example, which you can see in the left-hand side picture above, sits above and is aligned in an axis with the old Parliament House, and across the lake with the Anzac Parade and the Australian War Memorial.  It is a result of another international design competition, this time won by an American architectural firm and an Italian landscape design firm.  Large portion of the compound is buried underground, carved out of the Capital Hill, the soil of which was then re-deposited over the building when it was completed.  We drove around the complex, and saw quite a few tourist buses parked on the outskirt; though the building is mostly open to public, it is not a place that one can just walk to, unlike the U.S. Capital in Washington D.C. which is within walking distance of the subway.

To close our architectural tour of Canberra, we went to visit the National Museum of Australia.  It is located at the tip of the Acton Peninsula, surrounded by Lake B. Griffin, and a short jaunt from the campus of ANU.  You can faintly see it on the right-hand side picture above, marked by a giant roller-coaster like object.  The complex is composed of a collection of buildings in fantastic shapes, volumes, and colors.  To our dismay, it also suffers from the "disappearing sidewalks" syndrome; there is no direct paved pedestrian route or even foot path to its gigantic portal.  The inside of the building, however, is well laid-out, with tons of objects and information about Australian history and culture. 

Portal to the museum

Light-filled lobby

National Museum of Australia

 like a monster from the lake 

This concludes the report on our trip to Australia!

05.23.2012
P.S.: For those interested in Australian architectural history, don't forget to check out Castlecrag, a suburb north of Sydney, when you're in that part of the world.  I regret not having done so on this trip.  Castlecrag, another legacies of the Griffin's, is a planned suburb, influenced by the Garden City Movement at the turn of the 20th Century.

Birds' Paradise - Trip to Australia, Part III

Crimson Rosella

Long-billed Corella

Red-tailed Black Cockatoo

Australian White Ibis in the park

Scene from hotel window

On our first morning at Maquarie University we were woken up at early dawn by the shrill cry of birds outside our hotel window and upon looking out of it we were startled to see flocks of large white birds everywhere, on the grass, asphalt, and roof tops. These turned out to be the Long-billed Corella, a cockatoo native to Australia--a large white bird with a red stripe around the eyes and on the chest.  I include the picture of the long-billed Corella above taken from Wikipedia for it shows a good close-up of the birds; the picture to the right gives a sense of what I saw out of our hotel window.   

Birds in Australia make a bold presence in both urban and suburban environments in terms of their brilliant colors, loud cries, and sheer number, more so than they do in America. We certainly felt their presence very vividly in our brief stay there.  The dense vegetation and large bird population give the country an exotic, tropical flavor;  I can easily imagine scenes from Hitchcock's movie, The Birds, taking place here.  Here is a video I took with my phone while strolling back to our hotel from the beach in Port Douglas. 

"The Birds"

We attended a free-flight bird show during our visit to the Taronga Zoo, located just across the bay from the Sydney Harbour, but hidden from view by the thick green foliage on the hill, accessed via a short ferry ride.  Kirk caught a picture of a flock of Red-tailed Black Cockatoos in flight at the zoo-keeper's call.  The Australian White Ibises are a common sight in the city parks, scavenging for food on the pavements and in the trash bins; we were told by the volunteers at the zoo that they are viewed as pests.  

While we were at Canberra, I went on a walk at the Australian National Botanic Gardens with a volunteer guide.  He pointed out to me many Australian native plants as well as birds which happened to be around.  We caught sight of a gorgeous Crimson Rosella; I was able to point one out (see picture above) to Kirk while out walking on the campus of the Australia National University on our last evening in Canberra.

Wollemia nobilis

Bottle-tree

The wood of the Bottle-tree contains a jelly which is supposed to be nuitritious and the sap from the trunk is drinkable.  In addition, I learned that the seeds, young roots and shoots were cooked and eaten in Queensland in the past. Wollemia nobilis, my guide told me, belongs to a 2-million- year-old species of coniferous trees but was only discovered relatively recently (1994).   

Koalas in the zoo

Australian Water Dragon

We saw an Australian Water Dragon sunning himself on a rock in Manly, a beach town on the northeastern coast of New South Wales, a 30-minute ferry ride from the Circular Quay at Sydney.  And, speaking of the flora and fauna in Australia, how anyone can omit to mention koala bears and kangaroos!  We saw several of both in Taronga Zoo, among many other animals and plants native to Australia.  The kangaroos we saw in the zoo, lounging or standing still in the shade, were not particularly lively.  Luckily, we were told by Frank Jackson at ANU that wild kangaroos can be seen at dusk in the Botanic Gardens, which is conveniently located on one side of the ANU campus, at the foot of Black Mountain.  So the evening before we left Canberra, Kirk and I hastened to the Gardens a few minutes before closing time hoping to catch sight of some wild kangaroos. We were told by the gardener we met there that we could definitely see some of them on the "Eucalypt Lawn" near one of the trails, but that we had to hurry as the gate would be shut in 15 minutes.  We grabbed a map and ran like mad toward the area pointed out to us and, lo and behold, a kangaroo, hopping mindlessly along, stopped dead in front of us, with a look of surprise and uncertainty.  Here is a video of our roo-sighting at close range -

Roo-sighting

The Great Melting Pot - Trip to Australia, Part I

Sydney Harbour Bridge

Crowded night scene at SOH

We spent the first week of our trip to Australia in Sydney and one of its suburbs, Macquarie Park, where the Macquarie University is located, about 30 minutes northwest of Sydney by train.  Aside from the two days when Kirk was sequestered at a workshop, we did most of the must-sees and must-dos for the itinerant tourists in Sydney.  Without losing a minute, as soon as we deposited our luggage at the hotel in Sydney after about a 24-hour journey, we went out for a long walk heading toward the popular Circular Quay and Sydney Harbour.

Dining at the Studio Cafe

Other than the familiar sights and sounds of any crowded cosmopolitan city, the overwhelming impression we got of Sydney was the size of its Asian population and how well integrated they are in the society.  The metropolitan area of Sydney seems to me like a huge Chinatown, or what I imagine the city-state of Singapore would be like.  In addition to Chinese, who immigrated en masse to Australia during the gold rush era in the 1850s, the population of Australia is made up of immigrants from all over the world beginning in the 17th Century.  According to published demographics of Australia, about 24% of its total population was born outside of Australia, of which those from the UK make up the largest contingent, followed by New Zealand, Italy, and China.  Over 8% of its population is of Asian descent (consisting predominantly of Chinese, Vietnamese, Filipino, and Indian), while the Australian Aboriginal comprises only 2.3%.  To an outsider's eye, all these immigrants, of various colors and stripes, seem to be co-existing well together and to have assimilated seamlessly into Australian society, occupying diverse social roles and stations in life.  In any case, the result is a cornucopia of languages on the streets and of cuisines served in restaurants.  But it is not always what you expect.  I had a very odd but hilarious experience once in a subway car listening to a conversation among some Asian teenagers (ethnic Chinese and Indians) complaining about their teachers and classmates in the purest and thickest of Aussie accents.  For me the incongruity of oriental faces and Aussie accents was both comic and delightful.     

Another aspect of Australian culture that we found striking was their laid-back attitude.  A common response to queries in our dealings with Australians was "No worries [mate]," as the Qantas clerk said to us when we asked about having less than an hour to transfer from the domestic terminal to the international terminal by bus to catch a flight at the Sydney airport.  Another example is their rather relaxed attitude regarding airport security -- nobody checks your IDs or boarding passes when going through security, or when getting on the plane.  I wonder whether this laid-back attitude is an offshoot of their colonial past, when Australia in its great distance and isolation, represented to early settlers a land of milk, honey and sunshine, with the sure prospect of charting a new life.  Only the desperate or the unrepentant optimist would make such an arduous sea journey -- Mr. Micawber and Family, being both, did swimmingly well in this land of new promise.     

Underwater Adventure - Trip to Australia, Part II

Sunset at Port Douglas

To me, and Kirk too, I think, the most memorable part of our trip to Australia was the time we spent in Port Douglas, and in exploring the Great Barrier Reef in particular.  Port Douglas, a small seaside town with a population of about 1500, not counting tourists, is located on a peninsula off the northeastern coast of Queensland.  Amid swaying palms and a lively tourist crowd, with a busy marina on one end and a four-mile stretch of sandy beach on the other, Port Douglas reminds me of the towns in Florida Keys.  

Happy as a clam

We spent two whole days exploring the Outer Barrier Reef and the Low Isles aboard the Quicksilver catamaran and sail boat respectively.  True to the Aussie "no worries" attitude, we were taken down 10 meters (about 33 feet) deep, in full scuba diving gear, by a couple of diving instructors with hardly any preliminaries.  Having done one scuba-diving lesson in an indoor pool beforehand turned out to be crucial; two people who signed up for the dive but had not had any diving experience backed out at the last moment after taking a dip into the abyss.  My brief 30-minute underwater adventure seemed like a dream to me at the time; I was so distracted by all the creatures I saw down there that I forgot to feel any fear or anxiety.  My snorkeling experience in open water, however, was less successful; still not confident in my swimming ability, I was worried that I might be carried too far away by the current and wouldn't be able to make it back to the beach.  Kirk made the most of the time allotted to us on the open water by taking two scuba dives and numerous snorkeling trips and took some amazing underwater pictures.   

            

            

Quicksilver catamaran

piercing the waves

QS Wavedancer

full speed ahead 

Our underwater adventure was captured in the video below:

05.25.2012

P.S.: I forgot to include a picture of some seafood dishes we had at a restaurant in Port Douglas called 2Fish.  There were so many restaurants there, all seemed to be crowded at night, that our picking this one out among the rest was a stroke of luck.  The food was quite good and well-presented that we ate there two nights in a row.  At the top of the picture below is a crusted "baby" barramundi.   

Baby Barramundi & Sashimi