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Once upon a time a.k.a last Saturday, Min’an and I went to the annual International Speech Contest held by the District 70 Toastmasters Club. Toastmasters, or let’s call it toasties, for everyone who has never heard of it, is a public speaking club which I’ve been going to for the past three years or so – no, it’s not a drinking party! District 70 represents half of Australia, so any winner from this level of competition will go to the States to compete in the world’s International Speech Contest.
[][3]This is not what we do in toasties
The competition is held in Bankstown Sports Club every year, about 30 minutes drive from where we live. When we first entered the Grand Ballroom that Saturday, we weren’t so sure we’ve arrived at the right place, because it felt like stepping into a seniors club. I saw an old guy in a wheelchair, an old lady in crutches, white hairs everywhere, just no one like us. As we walked further towards our table, only then it started to resemble some toatsties gathering. Lots of people wearing the DTM medallion (the highest achievement you can get in toasties) around their neck, some girls wearing cocktail dresses and gentlemen in nice suits, including my hubsy too, such a rare delight to be enjoyed throughout the night heheh. Our table was near the front of the stage, unfortunately just a little off to the side, but still enough to enjoy the show without suffering a neck ache in the morning after.
Soon after, the show started. The first speech I thought, was a slab of overly theatrical show from Tony Frizzo. It was a speech on the unforgiving tragedies happening on his life – first his son had an accident, then his daughter had skin cancer, only to find out that he had also contracted it. The speeches afterwards covered different topics, from football fever to likening a love journey to a rollercoaster ride.
[][4]Nup, Frizzo doesn’t have a frizzy hair
I had two favourite speeches from the night. I like one given by Matt Tonkiss on 95% confidence. He raised the question of having 100% confidence – why do we nod in favour of famous people trusting their 100% confidence motto, while we cringe in disbelief when a dud wannabe singer who shows up in Australia’s Got Talent mentions about being 100% confident, without any talent that is. Matt thinks it’s better to reduce the 100% level, to… maybe around 95%, and leave 5% for self doubt. I liked this speech a lot, I can take something home after listening to it. The 5% self doubt is useful to generate a list of action items to tick, and to ensure all that confidence does not go to waste.
Another one was by Bernie Albano, on the art of giving way. He told his story from his childhood in the Philippines, all those times when he was driving along a one way street, only to find a tuk tuk, a local public transportation, driving against his direction. The traffic then, as you would expect, would come to a standstill, with both sides arguing, and yelling, from inside each other’s vehicles. The story then shifted to his dealings with his daughter, who wanted to quit school to pursue her dancing passion. He forced her to continue school, to the point where he would banned her from going to any dance lesson. She cried and cried, and asked him why he wasn’t able to give way.
This awful situation continued for a prolonged period of time, until he relaxed his ban on the daughter, and she progressively offered to do home schooling. The speech then shifted back to the one way street in Philippines, maybe those yells from the tuk tuk is just a request to give way, that’s all they asked for. So he did, he moved to one side just a tiny bit more, to find that the small alleyway is big enough for both directions to continue. The deadlock ends, no more honking, people in both directions are able to pass, smoothly. What a powerful metaphor between the one way street and his personal experience, transcends into a simple but insightful advice.
[][5]Tuk tuk is still going strong, although slightly imbalanced
Unfortunately none of my favourite speakers took the highest honour of the night. The guy who won was Colin Emerson, and his speech was about being a superman. I won’t talk about it in this post, so if you’re interested to see it, go check out d70 toasties website yourself. Not to say his speech wasn’t wonderful, but it was just the content is not as gripping as the two I’ve told you above.
In fact, the speech content from one to another followed a pattern, they were mostly about dreams, dreams and dreams. Believe in yourself, believe in your dreams, it is not too late, and it will never be too late, motivational raising speeches that were sometimes too much for me. It was nice to hear one, but probably not seven consecutively, as with what happened. Apparently, however, this was the kind of topic that the US judges love, and that was probably why the pattern was so obvious. In the division level contest that I went to last year, the speeches had more variety in terms of topics.
[][6]Hey, I know this dude!
In one of the breaks in between the main course and dessert, I went over to have a look at the Wollongong trophy (pictured above). It had the winner’s name every year from the 1960s, decorating the surroundings of the big medal centred. For year 2008, the plaque says “Mark D’Silva, Westpac City” – this is not news for me, I knew this, but standing there, seeing his familiar name awed me. Mark D’Silva is one of the veterans in my club. He’s been going to TM for more than 15 years, he even wrote a book about public speaking. More importantly, he is real, he knows me and he has even evaluated my speech, and he didn’t think they were that bad! Maybe next year I can be bothered to enter the club contest, all in the name of self improvement.
Being the land of migrants, Oz invites various cultures to congregate, and unavoidably, to clash. We all know how to cook snags on the barbie, to snatch a beer when 5 o’clock comes by or to celebrate new year’s eve. Our “modern Australian” cuisine is a reflection of the melting pot Oz has become: asparagus from northern Europe, leek from Egypt, eggplant from India, zucchini from Italy, bamboo shoots from China, but yet they are familiar to our tongue in more layers than one. I am sure there are plenty of aha moment when different cultures meet up and produce the best bits of every world, and that’s how we got here.
But what happen when they don’t? Like when I stir fry sambal belacan with broccoli – taste bad and frankly… wrong… (kids don’t try that at home, even if someone does it in Masterchef). I’m talking about specific practices that clash and make us uncomfortable, like what happen when you have a burqa-clad woman sitting next to you on the train; or the one thing that have, time and time again, made me uneasy: saying goodbyes. I think this custom deserves one entire post on it, and that will be this post.
Why so hard?
Ninety-five percent of the time, I have no problem with saying goodbyes. I have adapted my goodbyes to suit the other party. This is because, back from where I came from, saying goodbye was as simple as waving your hand accompanied with “dadaaaag” – Indonesian don’t even bother saying “let’s meet again in the future” like how the Japanese do it with their “mata ne!”. The word “dadaaaag” doesn’t mean a thing; it’s just a random noise we like to use to extend the waving session as the two groups take separate directions. No bodily touch in the procession, usually a quick and fail-proof exit.
The majority of Asian cultures dictate hugging and kissing to only be shared within the family circle, and to maybe the exception of close friends. Naturally then, handshakes became the next step after hand waving, especially if a guy needs to say bye to a girl, or vice-versa. A business colleague relationship has always followed this rule regardless how often the group spends time outside office hours. Note that when I grew up in Indo, I hardly feel the need to hug my girl-friends despite how relaxed I felt towards them and I never had to hug/kiss my guy friends, unless they got upgraded to a different status (kaching!). But that had to change when I entered the lengthy and complicated world of western goodbyes.
I remembered my constant discomfort on kissing people’s cheek in the first few months I came to Oz. To start off, it made the goodbyes a lot more staged and requiring more thoughts than I ever had to allocate for. My point is, waving and handshakes allow delayed reaction from the opposite party to be smoothly integrated into the bye-bye proceeding. To respond to a spontaneous wave or handshake, he or she can decide to wave/shake back as slow as half a minute later, and that’s fine because it does not impose your bodily existence towards the other person at all. This is very different to have someone’s body or mouth lunging towards you within a split second, demanding a mirrored response immediately – whether or not we have agreed on what the goodbye ‘protocol’ is.
Nevertheless, I found cheek to cheek hugs between girlfriends to be the easiest to master, and this includes the variety of lips-to-cheek, cheek-to-cheek, as well as the multiple cheek kisses of the European versions. Overtime, cheek kissing male became pretty straightforward, under one condition: I know that I’m expected to cheek kiss at the end of the conversation. That gave me enough time to have a short think about how to do it – yes I am slow at this, coupled with the fact that height difference does increase the level of difficulties.
I devised an adaptation algorithm that, as I’ve mentioned, worked 95% of the time. I wait for some signals first (if they don’t initiate, I would default back happily to waves and handshakes), but I then prepare myself to do the following:
If Asian male: do a wave/handshake – I do not want to make them uncomfortable;
If Asian female: do a wave if I’m not too close to her (for the same reason as #1), otherwise, treat as if she is under rule #3;
If Westerner (gender doesn’t matter): do a cheek-kiss variety.
Brilliant!
Now, what do I do if I need to say goodbye with a banana male? By definition they would look like they fit into rule #1, but I should have prepared under rule #3. Yah, this caught me by surprise ! Recently I had had this awkward moment repeated to me thanks to a banana. He tried cheek-to-cheek hug, and I did the unwanted kiss pose. My almost-healed-hug-wound reopened, and the painful memories of past failed huggies rushed in.
[][2]dog: i wanna hug u - cat: hell naw!!!!! - dog: well im going to anyways lol
I had to take a step back to appreciate the size of the new Samsung 63 inch 3D TV when I went to WTL’s house. It was ginormous, massively oversized TV which gave me viewing pleasure for the next two minutes after the initial impact. Two minutes, that’s all it took for my eyes to adjust to the huge letters and poster-sized ads. The side effect was that watching the “smaller” 42 inch TWO-D TV at home became a suffering.
Look at it, the width of the TV was more than my body length! Ridiculous!
3D Beast!
And yet it was also as thin as two mobile phones stacked together :O Technology these days…
The TV also came with several 3D glasses. Interestingly enough, these glasses have power on/off button, and they seemed to present clearer 3D picture than the cheap glasses the cinema gave out to watch Avatar. When turned off, the glasses appeared to have no effect – but when turned on, the glasses became slightly more tinted, and then the 3D-ness came to live. Amazing! Although 15 minutes of watching Monster vs Aliens 3D was enough to make me sleepy – I was unsure of whether it was the time, or it was the fatigue from wearing the glasses that wore me out, or that this was the third time I watched the movie.
Sadly, with the luxurious TV spoiling my eyes (in a positive way), I was expecting a good night sleep at WTL’s house despite the 42 degrees weather in the arvo. Ooh I was so disappointed. This was the first time I had to sleep without AC in the past two weeks (yah I’m spoiled boo hoo), and it sucked. So bad. WTL had a noisy fan in the bedroom – making a crackling sound whenever it oscillated from side to side. At one stage I was so scared it was going to blow up and send blades flying to hit me. Thanks to my paranoia, I saw the grim reaper next to the bed, I wiped my eyes to have a re-look and he was gone. The noise was getting unbearable, there’s no way I could sleep anymore.
I woke up at 1 am hoping that I could carry on waking up until I went home to my lovely full AC-ed bedroom. But with still 5 hours of sleeping time to go, I bunkered down on the kitchen floor, with just a blanket which I use as a mattress and several pillows. Why kitchen? It’s the only part of the house with AC.
Life is full of disappointments. For me, the most frequent source of my disappointment is Sydney’s public transport.
At least once a month, I hear: “The… next train… to Berowra… is delayed… by twenny minutes”. My heart sinks, and I ransack my bag to grab my mobile. I tell my boss that I will be around 30 minutes late and that it is the train’s fault – although because it’s happening too often now, he probably thinks that it’s an excuse that I use whenever I want few a more minutes sleeping in. Come on, I would never do that…
I live in a special suburb called Carlingford. It is the terminus of the Carlingford Line, the blue line, that you don’t usually see much on the network map – it’s such a short line. The line connects Carlingford to the rest of the world via Clyde, a station near Granville, which is a much bigger station than Clyde. In fact, the two stations are so close to each other that I can see people on the Granville platform from the spot I usually stand for my connecting train on Clyde. I constantly wonder why didn’t they connect Granville to Carlingford instead, wouldn’t that be much better?
Carlingford Line is the least-used line on the CityRail network, which means any upgrades to the line is hard to justify because there’s not enough people to pay for the cost. Which sucks, badly, because it’s an evil cycle, a chicken and egg thing: after one week of using the train, it’s obvious why not many people chooses it as their main method of transport to work. The line, is literally a line, one train line, rather than the usual two lines to accommodate trains going on different directions. As a result, the service provided is limited to a shuttle service from Carlingford to Clyde; And although theoretically they can fit two return trip within an hour (one Carlingford – Clyde journey takes 12 minutes), less patron dictates that there can only be one scheduled service within the hour, even in peak hours.
I suspect the difficulty of serving the line also add unnecessary burden to CityRail to operate more frequently. If you take the common eight carriages train and use it to service passengers on my beloved line, passengers won’t be able to get out from half of the train… Yep, the platform on the stations are mini platform, only suitable for four carriages train to service the line. Hence even though I pay exactly the same amount of fare to people who lives in Parramatta, I get the oldest train every time – the only train where they can chop the length to two and probably not worry about what to do with the other half.
[][1]The end of Carlingford line, platform suited only to four-carriages trains
This did not hold last week. I had a jaw-dropping moment. On one of the mornings, I ran to the station because I was a little late getting out of my apartment, and there it was: a shiny four carriages millennium train waiting for me to depart. The next 12 minutes was the best experience I’ve ever had with CityRail. The train was fully air-conned, clean, big window, very quiet, smells great, and even the door opening sound seemed to be so futuristic! My oh my what a treat, I thought. Then it struck me: the state election is coming up.
This must be one of the political toys that the state government has been playing on me. I bet you they never think about finishing the Chatswood – Parramatta line, because it appeared to be such an effective promise-land to ploy the voters. The later they finish the line, the longer the time they can use it as an election tool. Remember the last fed election? Gillard even joined in, by announcing $2.6 billion to be contributed to the completion Epping – Parramatta line through Carlingford. How they even think to do this to prop up her profile is beyond me, as it was the same Labour government who promised the original line, only to cut the length in half and double the budget blowup.
Enough about politics, I have only one humble request, as a loyal patron of Sydney’s public transport: to have a comparable transport system to other developed cities overseas. Why can’t we have trains that have the same coverage level to the tubes in London? Why can’t we have trains that come more frequently, when Singapore has trains every minute on peak hours? And if those two are too hard, then at least why can’t we have trains that do come on time, just like Japanese trains: on time to the minute, not one minute early, not late.
I hope Sydney will ever reach that level, for now, I’m anticipating that the Epping – Parramatta proposed line will be scrapped again.
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