After an email from Dr Richard Cook from Chicago, I got my ass busy and have just put up my Sri Lanka gallery. Mostly images of city life in the capital city Colombo. The page's loading up real slow....I better cut the file sizes down a little....more images will be uploaded over the next 2 weeks after I finish editing the images.

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Its 2.15am in the morning and I'm in trouble.

I'd just bought me a new digital camera barely 12 hours ago......my flight's 9.40am (less than 6 hrs away) and I'm still trying to figure out how the damned camera works. Only got through inserting the memory cards and how to turn it on. Boy.....I'm in trouble.

Lesson here....... NEVER EVER buy a new digital camera with the intention of bringing it along to shoot in another city 6000km away for the next 5 days.

I'll be seeing some clients and attending the Hedge World Conference at the Westin in Sydney.

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Touched down in Sydney 4 hours ago and without a friend in sight, I'm now sitting down at a A$2 an hour internet cafe in King's Cross.

At 8.40am, after checking in at the airport, I woke up Dinesh who owns the same camera and he ran through some of the more vital functions of the 5060.

Now, I just realized something about different digital camera brands......after getting used to the operating system of one brand (Canon G5 for me), moving on to a different brand's operating system is almost like moving over to another planet. The 5060's got less buttons and alot of its functions are worked off the thumbwheel.

Functions that I'd taken for granted like Custom White Balance, Exposure Compensation, Macro and even file size settings are done differently on the Olympus. Seems like holding down 2 buttons while twiddling with the thumbwheel on the Oly might be some kind of secret handsignal system known only to the Brotherhood of Oly users. They llike to have tiny icons and abbreviations compared to the G5....... I can barely operate some of these tiny little buttons without the use of reading glasses!

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So, my $190 hotel room faces the back of another block 5m from my window. I thought they'd advertised a great view of the Sydney harbor.

The beer's cheap and Victoria Bitter a pretty good brew. One of my stereotypes of Australia and Australians got thrown out the window this evening....... Yes, they were nice to me at the airport, at the immigration counter, at the hotel and in the airport taxi.... but they were part of the hospitality/tourist industry and I thought they were being paid to be nice and smiley. I was wrong and I'm glad my short hop into a neighborhood bar away from the hotel proved me wrong.

"G'day mate! Drinking alone's a crime in here y'know?" A group of roughish fellas called over to me as I nursed my beer. They pulled me over as if we were old neighbors and the warmth was genuine. Ralph operates a road-cleaning machine in the mornings, Bob was taking a couple of hours off from his taxi, Rus works in an Adult Book store and Pete's a bicycle despatch rider. These were a good mix of guys in their 20's and 30's. ....and I love them.....they paid for my beer!

I was made to feel at home and the bar was a regular watering hole for them. Now here's a group of regular Aussies that epitomizes the city spirit of Australia. I'm beginning to really warm up to this city.

Really got to love these regular Aussie bars.....they've got 1 cent one-armed bandits (fruit machines) and horse/dog racing on tv and a regular betting station.

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19 March 2004

My first day back at the office this week and I'm flooded with 500+ emails and quite a few other follow ups from last week's trip to Indonesia and this week's Sydney trip.

The humidity and warmth greeted me with open arms as I stepped out of Changi Airport. The lifestyle and pace was markedly slower and easier going than in Singapore. Other observations and comparisons about Sydney :

- Taxi drivers know exactly where they're going and they obey traffic laws

- Taxis were mostly operated by Indians, Greeks, Chinese, Arabs, Turks, Viets and Eastern Europeans

- apart from 'G'day' the other more commonly used phrases are 'Luv' 'Darling' and 'Not a Worry'

- Chinese fast food restraunts give customers LOTS of rice

- any restraunt without non-immigrant labor was posh

- ALL their notes were plastic paper and A$5 was their smallest bill

- Thus,its normal for one to be carrying 1 to 2 kg (2 to 4 pounds) in coins

- you could smoke on open train platforms

- EVERY tourist visiting Sydney is obliged to take a photo of the Harbor Bridge and the Sydney Opera House

- EVERY tourist from Asia brings home at least 1 or 2 kg of the local candy.....nougats...while Aussies dont even know
what they look like

- Tourists seem to be buying more boomerangs than Aussies

- A beer opens many doors in Australia

- Australisns seem to be great dog lovers. No rats were spotted in the alleys.......didnt see any cats either

- Sydney looks to have the highest number of knockout drop-dead gorgeous blondes per capita in the world.....period

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I am honored to have received notice that my image 'All Teeth #3' was accepted into the ContaxG Hall of Fame in Jan 2004. http://contaxg.com/folder.php?id=1696 This is a record 3rd time my images have made it into such fine rarified company.

Its an image of refugee Mon refugee children waiting for school furniture to arrive before classes to begin.


to be continued..........