Still Alive (Barely)

Apologies for the long pause between posts. I have a good excuse. Those among my dear friends who predicted that I would get sick as soon as I stopped working will be annoyingly and no doubt noisily gratified to hear that I've spent the last several days doing my best impression of someone dying horribly.

We're not quite sure what disease, or combination of diseases it was that laid me so low. It started with a sore throat on Christmas morning and proceeded rapidly through a dizzying array of symptoms that suggest a combination of Influenza, Malaria, Dysentery, Ebola and Anthrax. I'm calling it Fijian Flu for brevity.

As a very small upside at least this adventure has given me an opportunity to acquaint myself with a wide range of American pharmaceutical products. Reading the labels (because I don't recognise any of the brands) I was surprised to find that Australian over-the-counter drugs are generally stronger. However my symptoms were certainly consistent with that discovery. I felt unrelentingly awful for five solid days. I tucked myself into bed on Christmas day with a mild sore throat, looking forward to a long night of endless tossing, turning, coughing and nose blowing, followed by headachy and feverish birthday celebrations with Dad, Patricia, Scott and Marcus at a local Teppanyaki restaurant. They were all delightful, including the staff who sang Happy Birthday to Me in Japanese. I was an ungrateful, coughing, shivering wreck.

Over the next several days, my symptoms multiplied, my fever climbed and my hydration gained a prefix, followed by a range of increasingly vehement adjectives. I became so sick, self-pitying and paranoid that I started to hallucinate. I fantasised that this was some kind of killer virus that I picked up as I passed through the transfer lounge in Nadi. I imagined that my eyeballs would pop out of my head when the pressure in my sinuses became too great, a state that always seemed imminent. The mysterious stabbing pain in my side was probably my liver breaking down. I could have already infected Fresno and the contagion would spread across the USA like wildfire. I was a breathing (admittedly badly) biological weapon of mass destruction. Scott had already carried my revenge for the effects of Smallpox on indigenous populations back to Wisconsin. Biologists of the future would remember my name as the source of the infection. I was going to die, but at least my death would be remembered.

Perhaps regrettably I appear to be making a full recovery. I am now eating small quantities of solid food and am being a tourist again. I will attempt to catch up over the next few days with a few missing bits of news, like Christmas Day, and how I came to be typing this in a Monterey hotel room instead of from my deathbed in Fresno.

For now, let me just say I am still alive, and Happy New Year to all those Aussies who get to welcome 2007 a whole day before I do!

Christmas Eve

Those of you who know him will be delighted to hear that Dad has maintained his habit of finding a restaurant he likes and then progressively colonising it. He becomes a regular, tips well, makes friends with the owners and staff and before you know it he's taste testing prospective menu items and being grossly undercharged for everything. If he ever lives in a city long enough I'm convinced he'll eventually have hiring and firing rights.


This has had terrific benefits for me. I've been presented with endless free desserts (usually without having to order them). I went out one night without Dad and Patricia and found myself absolutely forbidden to pay for drinks at another of their regular haunts that turns into a nightspot after 10pm.


However, Dad's most impressive conquest in Fresno is probably a restaurant called Parma. It's run by a woman who came from Parma, Italy and still imports her cheeses and pork products from home. Everything on the menu looks delicious and everything I've tasted so far certainly is.


We had a magnificent dinner there on Christmas Eve. Despite the restaurant being packed solid the staff still made time to give us special treatment and the owner greeted us all with hugs. That's impressive enough, but I didn't realise that Dad had achieved unofficial silent partner status until the check (bill) arrived.

Thank you Parma, and Merry Christmas to you too.

Funny Money

One of the most difficult things to adapt to is the US currency. Known throughout the world as the greenback, presumably because it has a green back, it should more properly be known as the greeneverything.

The US dollar is perhaps the most boring and user unfriendly currency I have ever encountered. It's all the same size. It's all the same colour. This makes it simultaneously impossible for blind people to negotiate and extremely difficult even for people with perfect vision. Such thorough inconvenience from one of the great currencies of the world simply cannot have been an accident. They did this on purpose. Admittedly they are trying to make some improvements. There's now a little blush of a sort of pastel orange on part of the background of some new notes. But you have to take the note out of your wallet and look at the middle to see it, and they're still all the same size. I wonder why they bothered.

Even the units of currency are weird. You can't buy anything for less than 25c and yet they persist in having coins of the tiniest denominations. The unfortunate person forced to spend this currency quickly collects great piles of 1c "pennies" and other useless change because the various taxes ensure that all total costs end up being something like $23.82. I'm sure that is the real reason the USA developed a strong culture of tipping. They just don't want to have to carry the change.

I'm also having a certain amount of trouble understanding the names of the units of currency. Let's consider the nickel. It's worth 5c and is made out of something called Cupro-Nickel. I was willing to see the logic of the name until I realised that the dime, quarter and half-dollar are also made out of Cupro-Nickel. I first assumed that the name was a historical artifact, until a quick trawl of the website of the United States Mint informed me that although there was a period during and after the civil war when the coin was minted from Copper-Nickel, the name "Nickel" actually dates back to a time when the 5c coin was made out of silver. At this point I gave up trying to understand.

Patricia, Dad and I tried to explain to a token US citizen (Marcus) the serious limitations of this currency. Despite being a plainly intelligent and charming specimen of the type, Marcus demonstrated an astonishing resistance to reason. I can only put this down to nationalistic brainwashing from birth having convinced him that any criticism of the US currency is tantamount to treason. Astonished by his determination to defend his dollar against overwhelming odds, I put my money where my mouth is, and slapped some Aussie dollars on the table. Marcus struggled valiantly, although increasingly weakly as I pointed out its security features, the benefits of plastic over paper money, the variations in size and colour for the different denominations, even the sensible strategy of having the 5c coin as our smallest unit of currency. The day was surely ours when Patricia raised the stakes. Marcus finally surrendered, without ever admitting defeat, when she pulled out some Costa Rican currency and found it superior to the US dollar.

Not in Kansas Anymore Toto

The cold grey sky and chilly air quickly convinced me that I should spend as much time as possible indoors. To facilitate this goal, I went shopping for hand weights so that I will at least be able to amuse myself picking up heavy things and putting them back down again.

I went to a sports goods store, like Rebel ... or Paul's Warehouse back home. Just inside the door I had one of those moments where I realised that although Americans look like us and talk like us (kind of), this really is a different country. It's hunting season, so the guns (but not the hand weights or aerobics steps) are on sale.


I was particularly impressed by a woman at the counter. I couldn't hear what they were saying but I like to conjecture about it:

Woman: "Gimme a discount!"

Assistant: "Steady on there Ma'am, let's not do anything hasty"

Arrived Alive!

I have arrived in Fresno! It's not too cold here … kind of like Sydney in winter, which is still plenty cold enough for me.

I’m only slightly jetlagged, despite having been awake for 56 continuous hours "yesterday" shattering my old personal best by a whopping four hours. I'm not sure exactly how many days I actually passed through but I'm pretty sure that at least one of them happened twice. I felt surprisingly alert and animated right up until about 11.30 “last night” when I finally went to bed. I can't vouch for how lucid I actually was, but I felt okay.

In fact, I became quite worried that I might not be able to sleep. So I had a long hot shower, tucked myself in and thought "Gee, I sure hope I'm not so overtired that I can't get to sleep". Eleven hours later the phone woke me and as far as I'm concerned nothing happened in between. Now I'm not feeling too tired and am more or less on Fresno time. That's probably the best possible outcome, although I am rather worried about what kind of impression I might have made on Dad and Patricia's friend Marcus who picked me up at the airport and entertained me until bedtime. I don’t recall a lot of our conversation, but I remember something about American and Australian politics, federalism, cultural imperialism, copyright law, international relations, religion, secular ethics, evil, psychology, information technology, industrial relations, education, bestiality and a particularly long discourse on the subject of cat vomit. I really hope he's still willing to talk to me when Dad and Patricia get back. Next time I go more than 40 hours without any sleep I think I’ll take a vow of silence.

Dad and Patricia will be back tonight, so today I've just been lounging around feeling like I'm on holidays. I stayed in my PJs until noon, eating toast and sending emails. I reminded myself that here the cars drive on the wrong side of the road, the seasons are back to front, the water swirls the wrong way down the drain and the people all talk funny.

I set out on foot to do some shopping and returned triumphant with some fruit, a tub of yoghurt and Christmas wrapping paper. I then had to turn the house upside down looking for a pair of scissors with which to cut the wrapping paper. I finally found a pair in a plastic bag beside the sofa, along with more wrapping paper and ribbons and stuff. In a fit of pique, I confiscated some of the ribbons to enhance my wrapping experience.

More soon ...