Let me paint you a picture of words

It’s been raining horribly here in Sydney the last few weeks and the temperature had dropped. At one point you’ll have the blue skies, bright sun combination then the rain comes, just like that. Two days ago, though, I happened to look out my window after a particularly bad soak, and I saw this sight:

I felt incredibly gratified. There’s actually two rainbows there: the very visible one and a bigger arc above it, if you can see. It’s rather faint.

I was reminded of something that happened to me during my first days in Sydney. I was still in the dumps about leaving Beijing then, and I was walking down the road next to the VG back to the College. You can see the road in the picture. It was at night and I was walking alone, pretty lost in a depression that kept throwing me back to memories in Beijing. I was wondering if I could ever get the same sense of belonging in Sydney and if I could live without it after all.

Then for some reason I just looked up, and I saw the Southern Cross for the first time in Australia. I had seen the constellation for the first time in my life when I went to South Africa, and it had been an amazing experience because I had never seen so many stars so visible in one single place before. And seeing the Southern Cross here just evoked that same awe of beauty from me, and I was suddenly reassured that everything would be fine. Now I see the Southern Cross every night I walk back from my classes.

Cheesy, perhaps? Well, we all carry our own cheese.

In any case, I’m posting a few night photos I took of Sydney Harbour during my second week. That had been more than a month ago.

This is the famous Sydney Opera House. Sometimes it still takes time for me to get around the idea that it’s just a bus ride away from me.

This is the Sydney Harbour Bridge. I plan to walk across it on the last week of September to the other side. There’s actually a tour where you walk on top of the bridge, on the railings, but it’s heaps expensive. My parents stayed in a hotel next to it and you could see the little people on top of the bridge in their gray-blue suits.

That’s the Museum of Contemporary Art on the left. Read my lips when I say: free entrance.

Sydney Opera House again, from a point of view not usually seen in postcards.

Why am I taking all this effort to put this in my blog? Because I just discovered how useful it can be. I’m working on a new story to be workshopped next Wednesday, and I’ve based it upon my life in Beijing last year. And I’ve been referring a lot to my Beijing blog. I have discovered that I’ve actually forgotten things I never knew I would be able to forget. The palest ink is still stronger than the strongest memory, that’s for sure.

I’ve been listening to the Chinese pop songs I heard on the streets when I was still in Beijing while I write my story, to make me remember even fiercely all the detail. Makes me miss it so much. And I was practically salivating in remembering what’s it like to eat malatang in the dead of winter.