Jews in Sydney are Pretty Nice

Shana Tovah (Jewish New Year) to all of my Jewish family and friends.  There is a reasonably big Jewish community in Sydney with roughly 40,000 Jews.  Over 90% of them live in the eastern suburbs, near where I live.  So, there are a few synagogues and temples I can take a quick bus ride to.  I found a progressive (reformed) Rosh Hashanah service being offered at a Emanuel Synagogue, so I went there on Wednesday.  

I was kind of wandering around the block because I couldn’t find the synagogue so I asked a nice older lady and two younger girls with her if they knew where Emanuel was.  It turned out that they were going to services as well and invited me to follow them.  I told them I was from America and they invited me to a dinner at their house afterward.  The older lady was the grandmother to the younger girls, Natalie and Natasha.  Nat and Tash are my age and also studying at the same university as me.  The service was really short and the building was very beautiful.  The congregation probably had about 125ish people.  

So I met them after schul and we drove over to their friend’s, the Newman’s, house. The Newman's had a really nice home and eventually after all 50 relatives and friends arrived, we started eating a delicious dinner.  I got to sit amongst 6-7 Jewish girls between 20 and 25.    I was introduced to everyone, even though I don’t remember any one’s names, and I felt very welcome at their dinner.  I sat next to Jenna who is the daughter of David and Nadine Levine, who invited me to a luncheon they were having the next day.  The family was absolutely and ridiculously nice to me.

Tash was nice enough to give me a ride halfway to the Levines’ house after I met her at Bondi Junction.  The Levines live in an area called Point Piper which is a fairly wealthy neighborhood overlooking Double Bay, (which is gorgeous).  Most of their 150ish friends and family there at the luncheon were from South Africa originally.  The South African Jewish community in Australia (supposedly around 10,000) mainly boomed in the years during the revolution in South Africa.  

Anyway, a lot of them know each other from back in South Africa and so now that their kids have grown up knowing each other, there is quite a close-knit community.  I met a lot of cool people including a family with the exact same last name as me.  I met Clyve and Brett Isenberg who are originally from South Africa.  My great grandfather lived there for several years and there is a chance some other family immigrated there that I don’t know about, so it’s possible that I’ve found some relatives!!  I will update as that situation develops…gotta love Sydney :)

Australian Election, John Butler, and Inception

The Australian public went to the polls on August 21^st to elect their representatives in their electorates to government office.  I have been learning a lot about Australian politics because I only get to watch a couple channels at home which are mostly news, and the elections have been dominating the news cycles for the past month.  They have a really different system on all levels: preferential voting, compulsory voting, constitutional monarchy (still under British rule), the queen is the executive power etc...  

What resulted from the election was a “hung parliament,” which means there is no government formed because the election has not resulted in one party having a majority of the seats.  There must be a majority to “form government” here.  Only after two weeks did the former Prime Minister (Julia Gillard) finally form a ‘minority government.’  It’s probably too hard to explain, but I wanted to mention the election because it has absolutely funny to observe and it makes me appreciate the American political system A LOT more, even though it often seems frustrating.

So I’ve been hanging out with my good buddy Kurt Nehrenz from Norman, Oklahoma for the past couple weeks.  I went to school with Kurt’s younger brother, Mark, for about 10 years.  His mom also works for my family’s dentist, so she connected us before he came over here.  Kurt moved to Sydney about a month after me because he’s been transferred here by his company.  He lives on the other side of the harbor from me.  

We went and saw INCEPTION on IMAX.  That movie was so intelligent and so thrilling that it’s now one of my favorite all-time movies.  Just the 45min ending or whatever that had like 4 different climaxes at the same time (if you haven’t seen it, you don’t understand, but you will once you see it), and I’m so happy that Hollywood was confident in the American audience being sophisticated enough to like this sort of film.  Kurt and I also saw the John Butler Trio in concert a week ago.  

John Butler is an Australian guy who started out as a ‘busker’ and has recently released a badass album.  We had awesome spots, only about 15 people back from the stage.  Here is something to hook you on the music: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6VAkOhXIsI0.  He played a different type of guitar on every song.  Instead of using a guitar pick, he plays with his long fingernails, which makes him insanely fast.  I’ll try and post some of the videos I took on Facebook as well.  

Surfer's Paradise

So we got a week off from school like spring break back home in the US, except my professors decided to cancel their classes the week before as well.  I had scheduled a concert, a weekend class, moving my stuff, and Rosh Hashanah going on during the week off, so I decided to book a trip during the week with canceled classes.  I booked a hostel and plane tickets on Friday for a 4-day trip to the Gold Coast the next week.  I had an essay over the “Genocide Convention” due on Monday but my flight was leaving at 11:40am……so I pulled an all-nighter at my friend’s apartment near campus (probably would have happened anyway) to turn in the essay to the office at 9:30am (400 words over the required!).   I took a bus home, called a taxi, packed, and left home at 10:35.  The cab driver was Armenian so we talked a little bit about a portion of my essay where I wrote about his heritage hahaha (The Ottomans killed off hundreds of thousands of Armenians in the early 1900’s).  It’s very fulfilling to be able to apply what I’m learning in school. 

I met Pete and Liz on the flight up to the Gold Coast.  Pete is studying law at Bond University and from Toronto.  I had applied to Bond as my second choice to the school I’m at now.  Liz is from Chicago, and graduated from Madison so for any of you who know me, I had a lot of commonalities with them haha.  We became fast friends and they gave me a ride to my hostel: Sleeping Inn Backpackers.  I ended up staying in a room with Korean guy who didn’t speak much English.  HOWEVER, he had about every episode of LOST (how he learned most of his English), which is one of my favorite shows…so we watched 2 episodes before his computer died.  Good to find that when English fails, I can find common ground with American television.

I stayed in an area called Surfer’s Paradise, and you can probably guess the origin of the name.  I started the first full day by hitting up the theme parks in the area.  I bought a pass that gives access to 3 parks because they are owned by the same company.  I started at Wet ‘N Wild which is a pretty cool water park.  I was pretty excited to be in a swimsuit and flip-flops because I’ve been living through 2 months of windy, rainy winter in Sydney.  One lessoned I learned by going to this area in the off-peak season is that the parks plan constructions for this time of year. So, there were three or four rides closed for revamping.  It wasn’t so bad because there were plenty of other rides at my disposal. Off-peak season also means that there are basically no lines so that was the upside.  My favorite was the “Mach 5” which has 5 different slides you can go down at fairly high speeds at different angles.  Note: It is important that you cross your legs when going down them or else you will get the most uncomfortable wedgie you’ve ever had in your life—worse than rock-climbing. 

After a couple hours of nearly empty queues, I moved on to Movie World.  They had a couple cool rollercoasters: Superman and Lethal Weapon.  Superman goes 0-60mph in 2 seconds and hen has a straight drop down which was badass.  Lethal Weapon was a hanging rollercoaster that kinda left me with some whiplash going around the corkscrews but it was worth it.  There was a park I didn’t get to that had electronic queuing so that you could sign up and go ride something else while you’re waiting.  That’s something Six Flags should look into ;)  

I went to Sea World the next day just because I already paid for it with the pass I bought.  I saw a polar bear doing some flips in the water but not much other cool stuff.  I spent most of the second day hanging around the beach and central shopping/hang out area.  That night I went on a pub crawl organized by the hostel.  We paid $30 and got on a bus with 2 other hostels, basically 50 obnoxious 20-something’s, and went around to a couple bars/dance clubs.  I was surprised that the bars were pretty full for being the middle of the week and they had some pretty good layouts too. 

The last day a Swedish girl (Romanian heritage), Lidia, moved into my dorm room in the hostel.  We had lunch together at an Irish pub/restaurant that overlooked the beach.  She’s stopping by on her way to live up north in Whitsundays, which is a string of islands.  I’m hoping to visit while she’s up there.  I never saw Pete and Liz again but I have some friends in that area now, which is pretty cool.  A lot of the businesses had names like “Hats in Paradise” or “Hamburgers in Paradise” or “Paradise Lost” because of the area’s name ya know.  …I thought it was funny.  I met a lot of people who are travelling here from other countries like me.  Australia is a backpacker haven, especially up and down the eastern coasts.