A Day in the City

For a little country girl such as myself there are many different things to think about than just spiders and snakes ... although walking into a random web in the dark does incite a whole alternate perspective than doing the same thing in  Canada.  With one I go “Gross!  Gross!  Gross!”  I hate the webs worse than their makers at home.  With the other my heartbeat kicks it up a notch and I think “Where is the bugger, and what does he look like?”  But, so far, so good.  No anti venom needed.

There are also the different perspectives of very rural - what I’m used to - and very urban.  I spent a good part of today seeing a world renown city through the eyes of a country girl.

For starters, even though we are only an hour from Sydney’s city center we did not drive there; that would just have been silly.  We boarded a train, sat back and relaxed while the well oiled wheels of mass transit took care of the trip.  No traffic worries.  No parking problems.  A wonderful view of the Opera House when we crossed the Harbour Bridge.  Who could ask for anything more?

Next was the tour of the Queen Victoria Building.  Built in the 1800’s to be a shopping center and refurbished in the ‘80’s and ‘90’s for the same purpose.  The architecture is beautiful, the patterned tile floors and three story stained glass windows are exquisite.  The shopping was out of our league there though - shops selling estate jewelry, art work with price tags starting in the four digit range and climbing, dress shops displaying only twenty or so examples of their designer wares.  Even a cup of breakfast tea was $18.00: we passed.

Where we did spend our time and money was on the street malls.  As has happened with many city centers, certain sections of streets have been closed to traffic so that pedestrians can wander from store to store (in Australia it is from shop to shop) without the hindrances of traffic or traffic lights.  A single food court with more ethnic options than I’ve ever thought about serves the whole area.  Here and there are street buskers selling their pencil drawings or singing for pocket change.  Some shop signs are names I know, some I’ve never heard of.  The ones I know are the ones that surprise me; being so far from home I seem to expect everything to be different.

As the day wore on it was only the teenager who felt she hadn’t spent enough money.  Or maybe she just had more energy.  At any rate her mother and grandmother found themselves a shady place to sit as she investigated more shops.  To the uneducated eye our seating arrangements were blocks or balls of concrete seemingly scattered helter skelter along the edges of former streets.  Anyone who pays attention to world news stories knows that they really are strategically placed crowd protectors should evil climb into a truck and try to mow down as many innocent bystanders as possible in a bid to be the leading news story for the next day or two.  When they first became necessary these terroist deterants were huge and ugly but city planners have now integrated them into street furniture, a very smart move.  People appreciate the seating, and achieving this safety feature without constantly reminding the public of the danger they are in makes for more leisurely shopping.

It got me thinking about where I was, though.   When I’m watching the news in my safe little living room at home the horror stories they tell are worlds away.  No terrorist is ever going to target a tiny prairie town; how safe I am!

The shoe was on the other foot today.  I was on an open street shopping mall in a famous city.  I travelled there and back on mass transit.  While we were buying my ticket for the ride home four policemen quietly raced through the station presumably answering an urgent call we never heard about.  Was it a false alarm?  Or something so serious the public was better off not knowing about it? That probably is over the top paranoia, but like I said ... it got me to thinking.

At the end of the day I was struck with the irony of it all: here I am on guard for poisonous spiders and snakes when the most dangerous animal on the planet is the two legged kind.