There Was Something In The Air Tonight
Going to and from Swedish class tonight, there was an uneasy feeling in the air.
As I was waiting to catch the bus down to Goulburn Street, some bloke on a bicycle yelled out obscenities. “What the FGU@ are you looking at?”, he screamed.
And then on the bus, a lot of people were acting very odd indeed. There was one bloke, for example, who kept looking around the bus and giggling to himself.
Swedish class was a little more sensible, though, it was different this week. Our teacher, Marianne is having a foot operation, and so we had a replacement. “Hon heter Matilde”, Marianne told us last week.
“What do you think she looks like?”, I asked Grant over a beer at the pub before class. We were both convinced with a name like Matilde, she was at least sixty years old and probably had grey or blonde hair.
As it turns out, she’s probably about 25 years old, blonde, tanned, and gorgeous. I suspect some of the younger straight males in the class were pleasantly surprised.
Both Grant and I were of the view we might have preferred a Matthias or a Martin or even a Sven, but she turned out to be a good teacher, and we had a great night.
As I came home after class, I noticed further oddness on the streets. Lots of drunken-ness. Snogging on the streets of Surry Hills. Generally oddness. Well, even more odd than you usually find in The Slurry.
In some respects there’s a bit of the “Deep South” about Sydney on these warm, sticky nights. Everyone seems to go a little bit crazy, and often you see some deeply disturbing drunken behaviour on the streets of Surry Hills on such a night.
This was something I guess I first noticed when I was living in Bourke. We had a lot of street drinking during summer which, not surprisingly, disappeared during winter. The arrival of commercial television also made a difference :)
Likewise at work, I can generally pick “the silly season” at work, as behaviour becomes a little bit odd, you might say.
I haven’t checked to see if it’s a full-moon tonight, but even if it’s not it feels like one.
Sydney is full of weird behaviour at the best of times, but those summer nights are the weirdest. And the moon’s a waxing crescent, btw.
A waxing crescent? What does that mean? Here in Sydney, we wax everything :)!!
Why are you studying Swedish? Are you sailing off, then?
I like your stream of consciousness take.
Hi James, nice to meet you. And glad you like my odd kinda blog. I’m a bit Swedo-phile, hence the Swedish language lessons. So mostly it’s for personal stuff, but I would also like to work there at some point before I get too old, to there’s a utilitarian value to it also. James