Craig's Blog: Sydney

I'm in Sydney

I'm working in Sydney, Australia for the next three months. In addition to learning what it's like to have to walk on my head, I'm Down Under to help with the Google Sydney office. It's been around for a few months now, and has grown to the critical mass -- maybe 8 or 10 engineers, and 20 or 25 people total -- where I figured they might benefit from having an old-timer come to visit, share experiences, help make contacts to our main headquarters, etc.

That said, I came to Sydney with no particular agenda. Each startup office is different (this is now my third, after New York and Zurich) and can benefit from different things. I first had to get settled in and look around, before I could decide what I was going to try to achieve while I was here.

As it turns out, when I was rereading my Zurich blog, I was struck by the similarities between my early days in the Google Zurich office, and my early days here in the Google Sydney office. Like then, I've been working (relatively) hard, to make time for when friends come to visit. Another similarity: all the engineers are guys, with some native but many not, and most folks go home to families at the end of the day.

Also like Zurich, the office is about 20 people, small enough for everyone to eat lunch together. But, unlike Zurich, that doesn't mean we do, because while the office space we have has impressive views, it's very badly laid out, with no single room big enough for more than like 5 people. Our 'office' consists of 5 rooms along a corridor, in a 'rent-an-office' building. Even the kitchenette area, where the catered food lives, is only big enough for a few of us to get food at a time. Then everyone brings their meal back to their desk.

So I've come up with a preliminary agenda. First is to figure out a way that at least the engineers (half the office) can have lunch together, through creative squeezing, or eating out, or something. Ideally, the whole office would eat together; I'd love to get the Engineers and Sales folks hanging out more. We're starting up a TGIF -- in a rented conference room -- so maybe that will help.

Another goal will be to try to hire women engineers for the office here -- Google believes strongly in 'diversity hiring' (in CS, 'diversity' means 'women'). This appears to be very difficult: there are just so few women computer scientists in Australia. To fix that the whole culture here may need to change. I was hoping to have something to show by the end of my stay, in two months 27 days, but the deadline may slip by 15 years or so.

The final project I've figured out so far, will be to just help integrate the Australia office with the rest of Google, giving talks, organizing TGIF presentations, and so forth. I'm just assuming that kind of thing will be helpful, Australia being so far away and all. I'll find out for sure over time!

Even with all this, most of my day will be spent pretty much the same way it would be in Mountain View: reading email, reviewing other folks' programs and designs, even having meetings (over videoconferencing). In the end, I'll be leading two lives: my online worklife will remain based in Mountain View, but my 'regular' worklife will be mostly involved with Sydney and the folks at the office here.

Sydney First Impressions

My visual impressions of Sydney can be seen at the Complete Sydney Photo Album. Here are some other impressions:

1. They speak English here! I can't express how happy I am to be able to go to the grocery store and ask the stockboy what aisle the salt is in. And to read the packaging. Sure it's not as exotic as speaking German or Tagalog, but they make up for it by saying "cheers" and "no worries" in an endearing Australian accent.
2. It's a good restaurant town. I have a list already of 30 places I want to eat in the 3 months I'm here.
3. Syndey's best feature, by far, is the Harbour. It's a stunning and beautiful mix of beaches -- 169 named beaches in Sydney alone -- and cliffs: it's just as good to swim, surf, sunbathe, or hike. Best, though, is to go out on a boat.
4. I'm staying at the Google corporate apartment, which is in a giant tower managed by a furnished apartment company. With hundreds of rooms, you'd think they'd be be pretty good at it, but no. The place is spacious but very awkward -- no shelf space in the bathrooms, no electrical outlets anywhere you'd want one -- and the furnishings lacking, with no bowls or glasses larger than a coffee cup. I'd like to turn this into a metaphor for Australia ("really big, but not usably so"?), but I can't quite pull it...
5. Australian culture is quite similar to what I'm used to, but does have differences, some of them trivial. My favorite results from the fact that the smallest coin here is the nickel, but supermarkets still price things to the penny. So when they finish toting your bill, they add a final 'rounding' charge, bringing your bill to the nearest 5c. So every time you shop, you may end up scoring a few pennies -- or else having to pay a bit extra.
6. I love the town-names here. The commuter rail's station names come straight out of a fantasy novel: Riverwood, Panania, Yerrinbool, Fairy Meadow.
7. No, I haven't seen any kangaroos yet. But an acquantaince of my roommate (another Googler visiting sydney from the US) just got stung by a jellyfish today; does that count?
8. And because everyone asks: I don't know if the toilets flush counterclockwise in Australia, or not. Every place I've been has had a low-flush toilet, which flushes straight down. (That said, snopes.com says it's all an Urban Legend.)

Whither the Weather?

My friend Tessa was here last week, along with her sister Katie, and we went to discover Sydney together. Now Sydney has indoor things and outdoor things -- well, actually, it only has outdoor things, but it has outdoor-things that need sun and those that are ok with a bit of drizzle -- and the key to planning it all was the weather report.

I looked at the weather website for Sydney, and uh oh, rain all 5 days Tessa and Katie are here. This clearly called for a second opinion. So I went to another weather website. Glory be! -- rain only on Monday. A third website, which I had hoped would be a tiebreaker, promised rain every day but Monday. In the end, I got six websites with six different forecasts: the week getting hotter as it went along, or colder; drier or wetter; thundershowers or just a drizzle.

In the end, all the weather reports were wrong: while it got cloudy, it never rained at all. So weather was fine for the zoo, the beach, the mountains, the bats. In fact, we concentrated less on our raincoats than on that most Australian of activities: putting on sunscreen.

I've only been here a week, and I was glad to have company as I explored Sydney. I'm now quite familiar with both the downtown streets and a few of the more restaurant-heavy suburbs. We took public transit in order to be able to mill with the locals, but how many locals are able to beg off work and go to Bondi Beach on a wednesday afternoon? So, probably, we milled with other tourists. It still felt like Sydney, though.

I have more pictures available at the katie & tessa photo album. Oh, if you're looking at a sisters picture and wondering, Katie was adopted from Korea when she was very little. This fact was quite striking to a Korean man we met on the train to the Blue Mountains. "When you get to Korea, you come visit, yes?" Sure, why not? Traveling is fun when you have good company.

Setting Bangalore on Fire

You find out very quickly the differences between the developed and the developing world when you wake up to find your hotel room on fire. Actually, I'm not quite sure how things would go in the developed world, though I bet it would involve a fire extinguisher. In India though, or at least at the Bangalore guesthouse where I was staying (that was otherwise small, cozy, and charming), fire extinguishers aren't really part of the furniture. Large buckets, those are part of the furniture. So it was that huge buckets of water got thrown at my curtains (the curtains being what was on fire), and also on the generator that lives right outside my becurtained window. In retrospect, even discounting the generator water might not have been the best thing to throw on an electrical fire, but it all worked ok. I survived unscatched, and so did all my stuff except my laptop.

The laptop deserved the damage, perhaps, since our best guess is it caused the fire. Electricy in Bangalore is not so reliable as all that -- hence the generator -- and a power spike probably caused the laptop's power charger to overheat, setting the nearby curtains aflame. The heat woke me up, and despite the cheerful crackling I relatively quickly realized it wasn't caused by a campfire. I stepped outside to tell the night porter, and before I knew I was being ushered outside while my room got sprayed with water.

The reason I was in Bangalore in the first place was to spend a week at the Google office here; originally when choosing where to spend my spring it had come down to Syndey and Bangalore, and this way I'd get to do both. The office here reminds me more of early Google than any other remote office I've been to. The office is buzzing at 9pm at night, with some folks working, some chatting, some playing games. Everyone eats lunch together. The engineers know each others' projects and sometimes pitch in to help. Folks are smart and idealistic and -- I think this explains the 9pm part -- predominantly young, single, and just a little bit nerdy.

All this makes the office a really pleasant place for me to hang out and work. That's a good thing, since Bangalore itself isn't the most exciting of cities; it's the San Jose of India, but with much more pollution. In fact, my predominant association of Bangalore is with car exhaust. Traffic-wise, Bangalore has too-quickly overgrown its village roots: It took me an hour to go the two miles from the airport to work, and all Google employees get a driver to take them to work and back, since driving yourself is dangerous. Combine that with no emissions controls on all the rickshaws and the motorbikes, and it makes walking hazardous to your health.

But I walked anyway, and it was worth it to me for what I got to see. There was the robust melange of traditional and modern fashions that impresses me so much about India: it's the only country I've ever been where Western clothing is popular, but is obviously not crowding out more traditional dress. There was the botanical gardens, which was less impressive, as it tried to hide its flowers behind a tall fence. There were kitschy prefabricated temples; I still don't know what that was about. There was the bowling alley that had two(!) attendants per lane, just to hit the start button on the bowling computer: a typical example of the extravagant make-work that permeates India. And there was yummy yummmy Indian food.

    Full Bangalore photo album

Ignoring the Magic 8-Ball

I want to see every state in Australia, but I particularly wanted to see Tasmania, which seemed the most exotic. But on closer inspection, the exotic parts turned out to involve lots of hiking in remote areas, and who wants to do that alone? (Answer: not me.) Go or not? Not or go? I drove my friends crazy debating. Finally, in desperation, one of them suggested I consult a magic 8-ball. Genius! I would delegate my decision! Three 8-ball websites and three "definitely not"s later, I had my answer: I was going.

So, you are wondering, what happened? Was the magic 8-ball right after all? Did I regret my rash decision? The answer, one might say, is "reply hazy, try again." I had a good time, and met some fun people, but Tasmania -- or at least the parts I saw -- wasn't as amazing as I had expected. Perhaps my expectations were too high, or, more probably, I didn't go to the most spectacular places. Overall, I'm glad I went, but one day I'd like to try it again.

Still not liking to travel alone, I decided to join a tour group for a 2-day tour of the east coast. They promised quaint towns, fantastic beaches, and Australian wildlife: kangaroos, koalas, emus, wombats, tasmanian devils, even penguins. And I got all that. But the towns and beaches were pretty empty, most of the animals in captivity, and I never got a good feel for what it's like to live in Tasmania, either for animals or for people.

One reason for this was that the tour group catered to backpackers, and that's what we got on this trip. Mostly this was a big positive: the group wasn't too big, and everyone was adventurous and up for a good time. I liked the lot of them, and we had fun hanging out. It was interesting to see the social groups break up along country lines: the two Italians hanging out a lot, and the two Brits, and the two Germans, and me with the New Yorker (in this picture, right, left, bottom, and top, respectively). But the flip side of all this is that this trip, while geographically in Tasmania, was socially in Backpackerland, with the same hostel decor and conversations and preoccupations that you'd see among backpackers anywhere. Overall, I feel I got much more of a sense of Backpackerland than Tasmania.

But that's a new experience for me too, and I enjoyed it. The beaches and animal parks were certainly more fun with them than they would have been alone!

Most bone-headed part of the trip: failing, even after my experience in China should have taught me better, to bring a towel. Favorite part of the trip: finally, for the first time since I've been in the southern hemisphere, getting to see stars. And how: possibly the most I've ever seen in my life, including the milky way and the southern cross. I'd need a much better camera to have captured that, but to make up for it, here's an admittedly less inspiring view, as promised by my hotel in Hobart:

->

For all views, including one of my nascent goatee, check out the Full Tasmania photo album.

Further South Than Ever

New Zealand was as promised: beautiful lakes, brilliant fall foliage, remarkable mountains, enchanting and primeval forests that look 150 million years old, and more waterfalls than I've ever seen in one place. Queenstown, likewise, lived up to its billing as the adventure capital of the world. I rode the luge, did 360s in a jetboat, and, yes, bungy jumped off a bridge -- in fact, the bridge, where the first commercial bungy jump ever was done. So why, then, was my favorite part of the trip sitting in a sports bar in Queenstown watching the NCAA basketball Final Four on TV?

OK, this exaggerates a little. But hanging with some fellow American basketball fans, tipping back a few, was particularly nice after a few days of wandering Queenstown alone. Later, when I was on the Milford sound overnight cruise, I was entranced by the waterfalls and rainbows and nighttime stillness, but what made the trip really fun was that Tati and I shared it with a group we met while hiking the Routeburn Track. Any group that decides their "girls night out" should be three days of hiking through the wilderness, without showers, is ok by me. I guess what I'm saying is, this vacation showed that maybe I'm not so much an introvert.

Most of my not-being-alone was being with my friend Tati, who flew all the way from Florida to spend 6 of my 9 vacation days with me. Some of that time was in Queenstown, and a bit was in Auckland (just like any other city; my least favorite part of the trip), but the meat of the trip was hiking the Routeburn Track, one of New Zealand's "Great Walks." We camped and everything. I ran around crazily right before the trip, frantically buying air mattresses and thermal underwear, while Tati just calmly collected her well-worn tent and stove and everything else needed for a happy life in the outdoors. Due to her experience, and probably some luck, everything went totally smoothly. We got to wake up to colorful sunrises right outside our tent, and kept a pace that let us carry all the stuff with ease. It was so nice to be able to concentrate on the views and not how much I was hurting.

Sometimes, the rain interfered with our view viewing, but Mother Nature was forgiven we got to Milford Sound, which had particularly active waterfalls as a result. Since we did the night cruise, we got to see the sound all still and peaceful and beautiful, and even go for a swim. Though it's hard to compare, this was probably my favorite part of the trip.

I know, I know, what's really on your mind is this: how did it go with the goatee? It grew a little wild on the tramp, I admit; to the point that one fellow hiker called me a Leprechaun (the rainbow probably helped as well). Hmm, I guess that's not so bad. OK, I'll keep it. You can judge for yourself the wisdom of this on the full New Zealand photo album.

Touring Australia

In my mind, when I was reckoning how to spend the 10 days my friend Julie would be visiting, I figured there was (barely) enough time to visit every single one of the places in Australia I've been meaning to get to before I leave (in just a few weeks!). What I hadn't taken into consideration is that maybe Julie would want a relaxing vacation, and that maybe she'd want it to include Sydney for more than, say, an hour. We ended up with a tripartite vacation: 3 days in Sydney, 3 days out at the Great Barrier Reef, and 3 days in Australia's Red Centre, at Uluru.

Actually, "we" didn't really vacation in Sydney so much. I went to work while Julie met up with another friend of hers, kinda-coincidentally in Sydney at the same time, to do all the touristy things I've already done. She got to ride in a jet boat and pet a koala, and overall was very happy. I climbed the harbour bridge with her and went out for drinks on more than one of the nights, and was happy as well, even with the going-to-work.

But I was happier when we were on a boat, headed out to -- as we locals call it -- the GBR. The reef is 3 hours off the shore of Australia, so multi-day, live-aboard boat trips are quite common. Admittedly, they usually take scuba divers, which neither Julie nor I are. But they were happy to let us snorkel instead -- 9 dives over the three days -- and if we were somewhat second-class citizens, we still got to see plenty of corals and fishes (including clownfish, which are now known in the reef community as "Nemos") and even a shark. Julie got to not only see but pet a turtle, and was very happy.

Overall the boat was full up, with 30 divers/snorkelers. Given the cozy quarters, this seems like it would set up quite a lot of socializing, and the mandated recovery-time between dives would seem to set this up even more. But to my mind, the group didn't mix all that well. Or maybe they did mix well, but just not with me. In any case, there seemed to be lots of reading and napping, and not much talking and story-swapping. It's the only thing that kept the boat trip from being a truly wondrous vacation.

Uluru was exactly the other way around. Watching the sun set over The Rock (no, not the wrestler), or the sun rise over The Rock, didn't really do it for me. And frankly, the Olgas got a bit repetitive after a while. But the busmates in our tour group were lots of fun, and we stayed up until all hours (if you're curious, "all hours" is 10pm, at least when you're in the desert) talking by the campfire and laughing at how bad we are at playing the didgeridoo. Best of all, the tour company I picked offers the opportunity to sleep outside, in a traditional Australian swag. What this meant is that when I woke up every two hours, I got to look up at the most extraordinary night sky I've ever seen. Yeah, I saw the Milky Way in Tasmania, but I didn't see it so thick with stars that I originally mistook it for a string of clouds! I was cold and sore and tired and (literally) in heaven. What more can you ask from a country?

For all three parts of the trip in pictures, check out the "Julie's visit" photo album.