(Sydney – Los Angeles – Chicago – Buffalo – Niagara)
Sydney.
Saturday Night:
In the city, Brandenburg`s seasonal `Noel Noel` concert was EXCELLENT, and the French meal much the same. As to the wine: a mistake.
Sunday Morning:
Delivered back home at 1am, dispatched the fridge contents to the generous Ranieris and slept fitfully and crapulously til 6am. The kookaburras did their awful work, so I showered myself to ugly semi-hungover consciousness and got an early train.
Sunday Afternoon: SYD
Airport checkin was very chatty and all was friendly in various passenger-departing queues until the Customs Duty Refund office. Perhaps it was designed to reflect the personality of the (then) Minister for Border Protection?
Finding the well concealed doorway was a bit of a challenge (after all, it was never going to be easy to get any kind of tax refund from this government) but this was nothing compared to what awaited. From the doorway there were no signs or hints as to what to do. An Aggressive Man at the counter near the door yelled at milling persons of various nationalities, making no sense. A few of us found forms on benches to fill in and were yelled at by an Officious Blonde woman the we needed PINK AND WHITE!!! So an American bloke and I asked how to get them and where was the sign and instead of yelling at us maybe a sign would help or maybe she could actually assist. So we took our semi-filled forms to Aggressive Man and got new forms and I had mislaid my pen on the bench and most of the pens on the counters didn't work and we filled in our forms and took them back to the Officious Female who then told us to take them away and address the envelopes and put all the WHITE forms in there and KEEP the pink forms. We did. She took them. My new American best friend muttered that this was excellent practice for what awaits us in LAX and I thanked him for the warning and went looking for a strong and not usuriously-priced coffee.
Off to a good start, non...?
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Sunday (again): LAX
In a surprising move, the US Border Control officials turned on the charm to welcome we passengers in the `fast track` lane to the US, with even a very cursory wave through from the bag searching guys who were manufacturing appropriate charm.
Brightening up the cavernous baggage claim was a family with a very professional looking 4 year old girl who had brought her very own trolley of stuffed toys and was trailing it along as her `permitted hand luggage`. Obviously well travelled, she lined the stuffed animals up in the white plastic tray to be security screened, with the head of `Eyeore` staring lugubrously out as he was submerged butt-first between the black rubber flaps...
Once your bag is `dropped` for a connecting flight from one of 7 LAX terminals (leaving in just under an hour) you are through the doors to NO information about how to find Terminal 7, or even where the desk might be to get the information. A walk the length of the not-quite-completed International Terminal found the desk. A brisk 400 metre walk around Terminal 3 found the shuttle bus which eventually rolled into a stop 100 metres from the United terminal. There in the cramped lift lobby, were `lost international souls` struggling with children and hand luggage and not quite finding their way to where they needed to go. A short grey-haired lady took each of us in turn and gently stroked and patted the backs of our hands while she soothed and directed us to a well concealed escalator just outside of the building.
United Airlines threatened `Food For Purchase` on the flight to Chicago. So there I was, standing in the constipated queue at The Coffee Bean with 10 minutes to the flight. The only sandwich-like items available were Tasty Kale and Egg White and Tomato and neon orange Cheese, or Tasty Tuna and Kale Salad `Just Like Mom Used To Make’: not bloody likely! This was all according to the package, under a vast amount of small printed numbers called `nutrition facts`, on the `brown bag`. Nice. And the two large, aviator sunglassed 40-something-designer-label-everything blokes in front of me were loudly competing in their stories about their last difficult ad shoots with problematic `extras` in other cities.
On the United `Food For Purchase` flight to Chicago: the squat and very be-ringed flight attendant fella flogging food packs rejoiced in the name of `Cha Cha`. The Kale `Just like Mom Used To Make` was looking good with airline cranberry juice. The friendly electric transfer van from Chicago O`Hare to Downtown was looking even better.
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Monday:
Chicago: waking from deep post-jetlag sleep to hypermanic local TV: a dubious programming shandy of `Let`s Make A Deal`, the Martin Place Seige (live coverage of the final minutes at about 4am Australian time), relentless advertising of graphic prescription drugs including extended scary lists of problematic side effects to soothing background muzak, and FOX News arguing that if all Australians had the right to bear arms then Martin Place wouldn`t have happened. Sadly: not a bad dream. Showered and vile coffee`d to something less than comatose I spent the day surrounded by the lilt of lightly mellifluous and slightly flattened Illinois accents being charming to a somewhat dozy visitor. Avoiding bus stop advertising inducements to sample `A More Mindful Burger` or featuring the leering faces of Craig Ferguson, I travelled to the Museum of Science and Industry spend the day with industrial icons such as the Spitfire, primitive railroad engines, a 727 airliner dangling from the ceiling, and, lurking in the dark recreation of a dingy railroad terminal, the Burlington Zephyr.
So why does this `Zephyr matter?
Every silvery stainless steel train you have ever travelled on grew out of this one radical design to `kick-start` US railroads out of the Great Depression. From the 1940`s art deco fantasy designs of streamlined trains with vista domes to your all-stations-strap-hanging commuter experiences: the technology started here. Given that I was about to spend considerable hours of the next 6 weeks in the subsequent incarnations of this vehicle, it all seemed to be a good place to start. The on-train commentary by museum staff was `enlivened` by rocking motions, a clickety-clack sound track and an automated talking mule in the baggage car. As you would.
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Tuesday:
A day of much walking followed by a stage-side seat at the Chicago Symphony Orchestra: the applause at the end of a quite wonderful concert of Haydn, Strauss (Don Juan) and Beethoven (7th) was fast, uproarious, standing and stamping. Soloists were cheered like sporting heroes (especially the French horns). Sitting in the `choir` meant that audience-watching was nearly as interesting as the sweeping orchestral performances, especially that of the conductor. As waves of sound swept up and down the orchestra, he was singing every note `ratatatat` as huge low sweeps of his left arm drove musicians ever higher and faster.
It was a gentle walk back five blocks to the hotel in flickering snow past the panhandlers, beggars with their bio written on box cardboard and bundles of materials on the sidewalk with only a glimpse of shoe to suggest that humanity was sleeping there... And around and above us was the ever present rumble of Loop trains rattling around the ironwork of the Elevated, trawling the last commuters from downtown.
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Wednesday:
Out in the sprawling south side Chicago `burbs`, surrounded by clapboard houses of varying dilapidation and desperation and demolition, and declining main streets, a sudden mile-long `farm` of solar panels emerges through the swirling snow. I`m on my way to Pullman (established by the George Pullman whose name is now purloined by everything from hotels to anything wanting to suggest superior service) whose sprawling industrial model `planned company community` is now a somewhat preserved example of schools, factories, businesses, churches and housing-designed-to-income-level-planned around one heavy `rustbelt` industry. (Think: Hershey or Bournville, but NOT Elizabeth in South Australia as similarly successful models...). Pullman was the biggest employer of black labour in Chicago, especially in the hiring of sleeping car attendants on thousands of Pullman cars on luxury long distance trains which were designed, constructed and maintained at Pullman, Illinois, until the catastrophic decline of long distance US trains in the 1950`s. Railroad companies sought to bail out of the unsubsidised long distance passenger market, leaving travellers to the shiny new interstate highway system and burgeoning airlines, sometimes resorting to cancelling some trains in mid-journey, if they could get away with it. That great Socialist, Richard Milhouse Nixon, created AMTRAK as a quasi-government corporation in the mid 70's oil crisis to relieve private railroads of their loss making passenger trains, and to maintain at least a skeleton service between major cities. Pullman (both in name and town site) stands as a stark reminder of what once was.
Adjacent to the remnant green-grey faded Victorian splendour of the houses and churches, and even the still operating Pullman Public School, was the strangest and scariest MacDonalds it has ever been my pleasure to experience.
I could see no alternative food source in the wet, windswept, shuttered and semi-demolished main street of Kensington, Illinois. MacDonalds was heated. So it was busy sheltering those with nowhere else to be at 3pm on a grey afternoon. Was it the warning signs about firearms and soliciting on the way in, the obvious poverty (in many senses of the word) of the largely elderly disabled and/or grossly overweight clientele? Was it the tatty seasonal decore, or was it the competing rants of a ragged, bemused, arthritic old lady and abusive long-bearded and bedraggled man railing against the extreme price of his $5 burger with messianic zeal? We were at least all warm and with full bellies. But that is all. The `hired help` carried on like this was their normal day. Apparently it was.
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Thursday:
Amongst the suburban blight, forest patches, desperate trailer parks, sand dunes, steel works, icy beaches and abandoned industries of Northern Indiana lies Michigan City: a quite charming few blocks of alternate waterfront arty escape from Chicago on the South Shore interurban which crawls down 11th street to the stop outside the abandoned depot. Round the corner from the lurid West Indian restaurant was a better bet than yesterday`s MacDonalds: your suburban diner where French toast and `strips` and bottomless cups of acidic coffee and conversation about everybody`s latest medical tests and surgeries seemed to make it the focal point for the local retired. It was warm, friendly and a bargain at $7. On TV was the usual American afternoon fare: warring underclass banshees demanding and getting lie detector tests to see who or what fathered a 15 year old`s squalling daughter, in amongst cross allegations of cruelty and assault. I didn`t wait to find out the contested result from the grey toupee`d and overly plasticised white grandfatherly figure-host. The rest of the Diner was rapt.
The antidote for these cultural `experiences` was an afternoon at the Frank Lloyd-Wright `Robie House`
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Friday:
A morning of much wandering The Loop followed by a long afternoon with the Impressionists, alienating 1960's US city planning disasters and 'American Gothic' at Chicago Art Institute to prepare for:
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Saturday:
AMTRAK had promised by website and urgent email that the train from Chicago to Buffalo would be four hours late due to `heavy freight movement`. We arrived on time following a hot plastic-and-cardboard breakfast and the Car Attendant Dude apologised for the misinformation as he handed me off the train for a day with a bit of mystery...
In June, when I did the rail bookings (and when the AUD was riding high against the USD), I`d gone on line to see what there was to do in Buffalo, New York, for 6 hours in deepest Winter between trains. Not Much. I then emailed a heritage tours company to see what was available for the time: nothing ran in Winter. Back came an additional email from one Peter Green: if I could bring some `cool Australian T shirts` for his 18 year old daughter for Christmas, he`d be happy to show me Buffalo and Niagara. So: with a Dymocks bag full of (hopefully) `cool T shirts, I was looking to be 'picked up' by Peter (`carrying a green clip board`) and Abby, in the thin Winter sun at Depew St.
One long night on the inferior modern incarnation of the Zephyr trains, a `Viewliner` `sleeper`, had left me something other-than-rested as every interior, antiseptic, plastic panel along the clinically lit car corridor rattled and juddered and shook in unison with the rolling movement of the Lake Shore Limited train. Only when, in a moment of resigned desperation, I jammed my boots between the toilet pedestal and the no-longer-lockable sliding door, did some of the banging racket cease, and I could drift into fitful dozes to the sound of the long, lonely growl of the train's locomotive horn, moaning its approach to every level crossing...
And it was a great day shuttling around Buffalo in great company, `doing` the art deco high rises from the boom years in the first half last century and the very quiet down town, more Frank Lloyd-Wright, and an afternoon at Niagara where the icy water-spray-encrusted parklands were almost as spectacular as the Falls. The antidote for these cultural experiences was a brief visit to Love Canal. So: a visionary plan to build a canal between river and lake went horribly bust after about 2 miles were dug. Subsequently, 20,000 tons of industrial chemical waste were dumped as land fill into the dry canal bed. Subsequent to that, local government approved a development of an estate of suburban housing atop the toxic landfill. The extreme illnesses and birth defects suffered by residents due to chemical leaching across the estate led to angry protest and litigation to force the authorities to purchase and demolish the houses of all who wished to leave. Today, only an overgrown, scrubby, landscape of remnant guttering, sidewalks and fire hydrants, and the few shabby houses of the `holdout` residents remains, with weathered warning signs and some monitoring devices. And on the edge of Love Canal Estate, next to a playing field with its chemical monitoring devices, is a very large and very populated set of ``Seniors` Residences``.
As to my taste in `cool t shirts` from Australia, it was pronounced: `stellar`. The same offer of tour-for-barter is available to any of you who wish to shuffle off to Niagara, but possibly not to Love Canal?
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Saturday Night: Niagara, Ontario.
You might say that Canadian Customs more than made up for the `niceness` of the smooth entry to the US at LAX. It was a spectacular public performance which filled 90 minutes VERY entertainingly for those of us with `no other plans`. After dutifully filling out the large A4 `DO NOT BEND OR FOLD` forms on the train from Buffalo, we trundled across the torrent from the Niagara Falls on a spindly steel bridge. The train crew advised us to follow all orders from Border Protection and to `remove yourselves and your luggage` down the carriage steps to the lack-of-platform below...
On entry to the vaguely Gallic Victorian Gothic Brick Revival station house, we were directed to line up against a long wall with our baggage and to stand still. Which we did. Silently. For some minutes. Then, the muttered instruction: `Bring out the dog`.
Around the corridor corner lolloped the most excited, LARGE black adolescent labrador you could imagine, drooling with ecstatic delight at the sundry passengers queued up before it, `controlled` by a severely uniformed and stern faced female officer trying to keep doggie focused on the job in hand. This appeared to be a bit of an ask. Stolid handler pointed low to bags, doggie swooped nose low down into a parabolic arc that then swooped and leapt up to chest or face or armpit height along each of the aligned and now slightly twitchy queue. One slobbery journey along the passengers-against-the-wall completed, more passengers (who had been luxuriating in Business Class) arrived, so doggie got to do the whole line again! More excited drooly leaping about later and doggie took a deep fascination in a clean cut young man`s inside coat pocket, slobbering in there for some seconds. `Take him to the WASHROOM` muttered one of the guards. And young man, doggie and severe handler were never seen again...
The immigration queue was then stop-started so we could all be questioned about our intentions and our weapons under the slightly smarmy portrait of the current Canadian PM, then a couple of us was handed our A4 DO NOT BEND OR FOLD sheets and asked to give them to the man at the door. There was no man inside the door, so we offered them to the man outside the door. He did not know what to do with them, or us. We stood in the light snow while he went inside the door to say that there were foreigners outside the door but there was no one inside the door for him to ask so he asked one of the women doing the `20 questions` thing who didn`t know so he came outside the door to tell us to go inside the door while he asked what to do. A Superior was called. He couldn`t find the inside-the-door-dude but couldn`t let us outside the door and into Canada until the inside-door-dude was found. At this point the outside the door man demonstrated outstanding leadership innovation and said could he could collect the A4 DO NOT BEND OR FOLD forms while standing inside the door (where it was warmer). The Superior nodded yes and left to look for missing officer through a different (inside) door. We were then directed outside the door to outside of the building to walk onto the street to look for and go into the outside door of the station Waiting Room.
And so, welcome to Canada!