Familiar in the Far Antipodes

So here I am in Sydney. Not quite as exotic a destination as the last couple of trips. In fact, my first impressions have been based on a surprising sense of familiarity.

I landed at 0630 on a Thursday, which seemed to be a very busy arrivals time in Sydney. Overnight flights are apparently very popular. Large planes flying many different flags had disgorged their passengers seemingly simultaneously into the International terminal. My Delta 777, a Lufthansa 747, an enormous Emirates A380, a United 747. In the Immigration line, we were tired hundreds, single-filed, murmurring in hushed foreign tongues as we shuffled past the agents. The immigration line is the great equalizer of our day; economy, business and first class passengers must endure the same line. Even the flight crews were stacked up in their own queue.

By 0800 I was on the train heading into Sydney’s Central Business District, coincident with the morning rush. Among the business suits and rumpled tourist clothes, I glimpsed a familiar sight that overwhelmed me with a bittersweet nostalgia for my distant youth: the school uniform.

I flashed on my school years at in Hong Kong; Kennedy Road Junior School, Quarry Bay Junior School and King George V, where I spent my middle/high school years. The very British tradition of uniforms is alien to American culture (save for the military and Catholic School tradition) and, for me, it was a seemingly small but striking emblem of my uprooting from California to a very different culture in Asia. The transition was not easy for me and I treated it somewhat akin to exile, until I was able to integrate into this system.

Drab, dark-colored blazers sporting curiously ancient heraldic pocket School patches; somber dark grey or blue trousers often hemmed embarrassingly high, an impossibly maintainable line on a growing boy, and the ubiquitous white collared shirts, long-sleeved, but inevitably rolled up.. The tie, often the only opportunity for color in the ensemble, is the signifier of the students’ personality. The good (or fearful) student sports the Full Windsor cinched tightly to the buttoned collar with correct lengths. Non-conforming, rebellious or ‘cool’ students express themselves predictably with less correct variations.

What did I do with my tie? The correct, suck up, don’t-rock-the-boat way, of course.

I followed the masses of suits and blazers off the train at the Town Hall station, emerging from below on George Street, the main thoroughfare in the CBD. I watched the students disperse towards their schools whilst I thought back some 30 years ago of my similarly daily amble down Argyle Street towards KGV.

But enough nostalgia. I’m tired and grungy. Where’s my hotel?