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walking west

Saturday, August 19, 2000

Further evidence of confused American ideas about Antipodean climes: the label on Kiwi Strawberry bottles of Snapple features... a koala. Clinging to a tree covered in very un-Australian flowers. So, we've got a quintessentially Australian animal sitting on an un-Australian tree advertising a drink containing a fruit originally from China now grown in New Zealand where it was renamed after their national bird, the kiwi, which is not found in Australia at all.

Still, that's nothing. Try telling an American nurse that you got bitten by a lemur in Madagascar.

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So, rabies shot number five has finally been, um, shot. At a cost of US$183, or three times as much as in London. Does this mean that (a) three times as many people in the UK get bitten by rabid dogs, thereby increasing demand for post-exposure rabies vaccine, in turn leading to an increase in production, an oversupply, and a consequent reduction in costs, or (b) health care prices in the US are freakin' insane?

No more injections for now, thank God. I don't have a particular problem with them, but I've had more needles stuck into me this year than the latest stompin' 12" dance-floor hit. I've also taken my last Doxycycline tablet (the malaria prophylactic), so now I can finally forget about medication and concentrate on the important business of getting sick.

Anyway, San Francisco. Great town. I'll look at relocating there from San Jose before long; at the moment I feel like I'm in Wollongong when I was aiming for Sydney.

That analogy, of course, will mean nothing to Americans, as I realised while flipping through Bill Bryson's In a Sunburned Country in a bookstore yesterday. A better title than the UK edition (boringly called Down Under), and by the looks of it a slightly different book, because Bryson introduces the US version with some very basic background on Australia for American readers, pointing out that the number of New York Times stories on Australia one year was slightly more than for stories on bananas, and less than for ice-cream.

Bryson talks about the book in this interview. Interesting to see that A Walk in the Woods was the book that broke him in the US; The Lost Continent is better, I think, and Neither Here Nor There better still, but they're all good. This American review of the book chronicles Bryson's rise to stardom here. Also worth a look is the Guardian's review of the English version, displaying a more critical attitude born of longer familiarity with his work. (Maybe that reviewer should read Dave Eggers' comments on critics.)

Not that I've read the book yet. At twenty-five bucks US, I'm waiting for the paperback.

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Thursday, August 17, 2000

A new item of collaborative webness instigated by James Bachman with occasional interjections by yours truly. To quote my first post, 'this will mean yet more time spent posting to blogs. Is this a productive way to spend one's day? Is it worth staying up until four o'clock in the morning to do? All these questions and more will be answered in the next thrilling instalment of etc.'

Never mind, let's put it in the menu on the right-hand side anyway and see how it goes.

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You wouldn't think it would be that hard to get a post-exposure rabies shot in America. This is, after all, the land of coyotes, bears, and large St Bernards called Beethoven, any one of which could infect you with a bite, nip, or slobber.

But after eight drawn-out phone-calls this morning to various San Jose medical establishments looking for someone, anyone, to give me my Day 28 shot, I was starting to get desperate. I could get pre-immunisation shots, apparently, but post-exposure shots were beyond their capabilities. What, doesn't anyone in California ever get bitten? (Actually, yes, they do.)

So tomorrow I'm catching a 90-minute train to San Francisco to get a shot at a traveller's medical centre there. (Sorry, a travelers' medical center. If I'm going to live and work here I really should start spelling like an American. After all, I have to try and talk like one, or else I keep getting blank uncomprehending stares from people.)

I suppose I should tell you what bit me, rather than being all cryptic about it. I'm not being secretive, I just hadn't wanted to recount the whole saga here in great detail, or I'd be typing all night.

It was a lemur. In southern Madagascar. It wasn't like it was foaming at the mouth or anything (I was, erm, feeding it a banana, and it missed), but I still had to fly all the way to Johannesburg to get a first shot of Human Diploid Cell Vaccine, and then carry the second and third doses in a cold pack back to Antananarivo to get them injected there. Needless to say, there's plenty more to the story. But you'll have to wait for the book for that.

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Wednesday, August 16, 2000

One reason why I stopped over in London after Madagascar was to give me a chance to readjust to the western world before coming to SF to look for a high-tech job. (The other, of course, was to see some of my family and good friends.) It worked pretty well, I thought, partly because I know London pretty well by now. No culture-shock there.

But now I'm in San Jose, where during a visit a few years ago I walked into a supermarket and felt like an Eastern European pre-1989. Around these parts they sell bagels by the crate and maple syrup by the gallon. And even though I've been here before, it's still pretty staggering. Case in point: the local corner store near my friends' place.

In Australia, corner stores are little more than a place to buy bread and milk. Their supermarket offerings usually aren't too super, with a heavy emphasis on generic brands and cheap tinned goods from Thailand.

Here, you're out of luck if you want a tin of tomatoes. You can buy a tray of sushi for five bucks, though. You can buy creamed honey blended with cinnamon. You can buy protein-enriched health-bars with 'protein' written so large on the wrapper that for a moment you suspect you're in the pet-food aisle. You can buy premixed Chocolate Chai, a blend of chocolate, black tea, spices and sugar (just add milk). And you can buy corn chips in every colour under the sun.

That's if you're after the essentials, of course. If you want something fancier you have to drive two miles to the 'proper' supermarket at the mall.

As I walked around I kept mentally superimposing what I was seeing on images of the shelves of the Champion supermarché in Tamatave, Madagascar. There, five US dollars would buy you a small tin of pears from South Africa. Tea came in leaf form, and sure tasted like it. The water was sold separately, in bottles (not mineral water; just water). The popular fried snack was deep-fried strips of dough, with peanuts (seven peanuts, in the bag I bought). And the rice was sold loose by the kilogram, not precooked and wrapped in seaweed.

So... it might take me a little while to adjust completely.

The trouble is, once I do I'm in real trouble. Because wherever else I go after this, I'll never be able to find a cup of tea with chocolate in it.

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Hmm. Annoying that Blogger retrospectively changes all the dates and times in your blog when you change the time-zone in the settings. All those non-SF posts below were done eight hours ahead of here... (not that it really matters to anyone else reading this).

Even more annoying: for some reason Blogger keeps dropping all my archives from the archive index, except the most recent. So I'm having to keep adding them back in myself. The joys of automation.

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So, at last I'm in San Francisco. Actually, San Jose, where I'm staying with friends. I'll pick up my pan tomorrow, and head out for the nearest stream. (Oops, wrong gold rush.)

Curses. Now this is just an ordinary ol' San Francisco blog, which are a dime a dozen...

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Monday, August 14, 2000

My last day in London. Back to the wandering life tomorrow. San Francisco and/or bust.

To keep you busy in the meantime, here's a site that will interest fans of current British comedy. Plenty to agree and disagree with in its editorial columns, and to spend endless hours reading. It's also home to little-known Blackadder pilots and lost Python albums, in RealPlayer format.

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Old West