Around the world. Perth, April 2007

Perth 29th March, 2007 - Electronically speaking

After a pleasantly eventless flight from Sydney I arrived in Perth. The capital of the Wild West of Australia.

I left my house in Green Point in the capable hands of a distant relative, also called Jochen, who will be ‘relieved’ from his duty today, by Hans and David from Amsterdam/London who will be looking after the house up until a few days before I return.

Why am I telling you this, you might ask. Well it demonstrates very nicely the way we are interconnected these days.

What happened was, that another friend of mine Alex from Uganda who is currently in India tends to send me messages around 18.00 hours in the afternoon via g-mail talk and we have a little chat electronically.

I told him that I will be leaving Green Point and start my trip around the world. But being the sometimes dizzy queen he is, he obviously forgot my exact departure date.

Anyway, he contacts me – my computer to be more precise – and Jochen – the relative – polite as he is, just quickly answers the message when he gets to the computer.

The first confusion obviously sets in when there is another ‘Jochen’ on the line. I think Alex thought that I was the only person in the world with that name.

And how could he access my e-mail conversations
And was he really who he says he is

These thoughts crossed Alex’ mind somewhere in far away India. So he asked Jochen some “test questions”, like questions about Paul.

At the end of the day relative Jochen must have been reasonably convincing. But I had to send a re-assuring e-mail to Alex saying that everything is OK and paletti.

And when I was writing this e-mail it suddenly occurred to me that I would have to incorporate something which would authenticate me as the writer Jochen Holzrichter. After all, any Jochen could have used my e-mail account by the looks of it.

Well he could not really, unless he tried – not too hard I might add – given the fact that e-mail program start sites allow ‘remembering’ a few things on your home computer, your password amongst other things.

To somebody like me who usually does not even lock the house, unless I go away for a few weeks with nobody there, it’s all a bit weird.

Now sitting in Perth with e-mail access only via an extremely user-unfriendly e-mail machine in the lobby of the hotel or the internet café just some meters down the road this otherwise most welcome communication system can become a right royal pain in the proverbial arse.

Under normal circumstances – Jochen at home minding his own business – I get about 5 to 8 e-mails per day. I tend to see them more or less immediately, respond to them in a similar manner, and - bob’s your uncle.

All of a sudden I sit in the silly internet café, access with some difficulty my e-mail account and what do you think – 12 of them waiting eagerly to be responded to!

There are obviously a couple of problems involved as far as using an internet café is concerned. First there are the other users. That is the people who have used the computer before you. More often than not, they leave their stuff hanging around like the smell of dirty sox with no regard to subsequent users.

Today I was initially confronted with a g-mail spreadsheet. Lots of very interesting and intriguing figures about something I was not the least bit interested in. However, whenever I fired up the browser, this bloody spreadsheet appeared. Since the owner of the internet café did not seem to know how to get rid of it and neither did I, I was directed to a different computer to try again.

Here, very conveniently, a curriculum vitae popped up from a poor little sod trying to secure a job somehow. Mind you, I could have helped him to improve a bit on the writing and spelling but a life is a life, what can you do about it? At least I was able to shuffle this one aside and make some electronic space for my own musings.

The problem with accessing your e-mail on a foreign computer is the fact that you need to transfer things to a memo-stick in order to take them home and then work on them on your trusted laptop. For that very reason I have created on my memo stick two files at the very opening page which are called “empty words” 1 and 2. Those people communicating with me under these aggravated circumstances are asked for forgiveness for the disrespectful file name.

The obvious technical reason is that I need to copy the text of an e-mail into a word file in order to be able to marvel at it after the visit to the internet café. And my memo stick does not have all the world of MS word on it. So I need to be prepared. Why I called it empty words, don’t ask me. And be careful in drawing your own conclusions!

“Empty words” than gets filled up with all the messages of the day in order for them to be diligently processed when their time comes.

Wild West here we come

After arriving at about 12.30 afternoon I made my way to the city per taxi and checked myself into the Good Earth Hotel on Adelaide Terrace.

When I did my booking for the hotel a few days earlier I did not go into details about ownership, business philosophy etc but being the cheapskate that I am at times, I just looked for central location and reasonable price. On these two items the Good Earth performed as expected. But my lack of regard for business philosophy brought about some minor problems with smoking.

The name of the Hotel, 'Good Earth' should have triggered warning bells!! Funny enough it reminded me a bit of the Demeter Shops in Germany. Do they still exist or have they all been displaced by ECO and BIO shops??

I usually reserve a smoking room for obvious reasons. Here in this establishment with some 100 rooms they had only set aside about 10 rooms which allow for such filthy habit to be indulged in. And those were all rented out in an otherwise by no means fully booked house.

The helpless girl at the reception tried to explain to me that their number of smoking rooms was roughly in line with the proportion of smokers in Australia. I had to disagree with her there, since the rate of smokers in Australia – whilst low compared to many other countries – is 18% of the adult population, But the more important thing is that the majority of travellers gracing the Good Earth with their valued presence, are not from Australia but foreign countries, in particular Japan, China and other South East Asian countries, where the proportion of smokers is significantly higher. Hence a total mis-match between demand and supply.

My moderating words that I could have a puff on my pipe on the balcony was flatly rejected, explaining that there was no way I could smoke anywhere on the fifth floor without attracting the argus eye of the anti-smoking gang, fighting the good fight equipped with $100 invoices for breach of contract.

The nearby bottle shop, which I visited shortly after checking in, had a similar attitude. After browsing for a few minutes the white wines on offer, comparing prices and qualities, I was seriously reprimanded that smoking was strictly forbidden. I had not even thought about the pipe in my mouth which, however, was not lit and did not emit any smoke what so ever. However, the strident bottle shop employee, alarmed by the offending object, insisted that he could see the smoke and smell it. And there was no way of convincing him otherwise by explaining the plain technicalities of pipe smoking. The end of the story was that this bottle shop lost a sale which another one around the corner made.

In the evening, sitting in my room with balcony door opened, the unmistakable waft of cigarette smoke came across from the neighbouring balcony. I could have demanded money for my silence, but I exercised pity towards my brothers in smoke.

After a very meagre dinner – just a salad – I ended up in the local Irish pub, just down the rood from the Good Earth and the world was still spinning around in the fashion we have become accustomed to. And being the Irish pub, smokers everywhere, at least on the outside veranda which was a very pleasant place for having a beer and a pipe and some chat with the locals.


30th March, 2007 - immer der Nase nach

On Friday I made my way to the nearby el chipo car rental and got some little Toyota to move around for a day. At $48 Dollar including all insurance and 100 km a reasonable vehicle for the day….but don’t dare smoking in the car!!!… It costs you $100 dollar extra if you are caught offending!!

Having observed the signage during my taxi trip from the airport, given the prominence of some landmarks and the river, I decided to follow my nose and my instinct and dispense with the use of a map. As some of you might know, my instincts in relation to geography details are not necessarily crash hot, but with the help of the other stuff, signage and landmarks, I got around reasonably well. In particular given the fact that by and large I did not really have a specific destination in mind other than wanting to go to Fremantle.

As we say in German, Reisen bildet (travelling educates) and thus did I learn to my amazement that the good people of WA spell Fremantle with one ‘e’ rather than two as in ‘free’. For close to 59 years I have been unaware of that peculiar spelling and I bet that this would be a winning question in any trivia quiz for you, my dear reader, should you indulge in such spare time enjoyment OUTSIDE W.A. and with no sandgropers in sight.

The way to Fremantle was easy and the place much closer than I originally anticipated. And this old colonial outpost does have some charm and attraction. Many old sandstone and brick buildings in quite good condition. Pleasant inner city street scapes which invite wandering around. Some quirky shops and an endless number of open air cafes and restaurants. Traffic density which is extremely modest, particularly when compared to Sydney. But even Perth seems to lack almost completely the kind of gridlock which we have become accustomed to in the inner city of Sydney. All in all quite relaxing.

I took a drive along the foreshore around the large and expansive harbour. A pleasant mix of industrial and pleasure use on the water and that extends also to the built up environment which again is a pleasant mix of business and residential. Had a little lunch at one of the many outside cafes dotting the coastal road and basically took in the scenery on a very sunny, warm and all in all most pleasant day.

On my way back to Perth I took the road along the swan river. Here a fantastic old and huge Morton Bay fig close to the old Swan Brewery caught my eye. A very majestic specimen which offered itself as a beautiful backdrop for some photos of the Perth Skyline.

On my way back to Perth I also passed through Cottesloe Beach. I was very certain that it was Cottesloe because every sign in the little hamlet said so. Every shop was the Cottesloe something and I am sure that even the local convenience – the dunny – is called the Cottesloe dunny. It had a bit of a Sylt feeling to it (which only means something to people who know the Island of Sylt in the far north of Germany), but more Kampen than Westerland.

Former neighbours of Ute in Flying Fishpoint most recently moved to this part of the world and I might consider a visit next time, should the opportunity arise again.

Arriving back in Perth proper I drove around a bit basically in search of my landmarks but with an open eye for the immediate surroundings and thought that in some of the places MacMansion must have had its birthplace in this part of the world. It is, I must admit, a type of architecture which tends to be a bit hard on the eye and, I suspect, on the soul as well. And no number of Corinthian pedestals or Tuscan urns can compensate for the intrinsic harshness.

Allowing myself a late afternoon nipple from my bottle of WA white and an extensive afternoon nap I returned the car and got back on my feet, wandering for a while the streets of Inner City Perth. With the Friday Afternoon hustle and bustle in full swing the city had a remarkably relaxed feeling and the traffic on the main thoroughfares was approximately comparable to the traffic on an early Easter Sunday morning on Pitt Street. A fact which makes sitting in an open restaurant on or close to the footpath and in close proximity to the main road quite an acceptable proposition.

During all this relaxed meandering around town and every now and then popping into the hotel room I also managed to get some work done, resulting from my numerous e-mails which I caught up with on my day of arrival.