From: Jhalpert
Sent: June 21, 2006 11:30 PM
To: Pbeesly
Subject: Cairns Day 4
Dear Pam,
You can be my personal assistant anytime! Congratulations on your promotion! And a whole dollar raise...can they spare it, do ya think?
All of your plans concerning my homecoming sound fine to me. Are you absolutely sure you don’t mind trekking to Kennedy Airport? It’s an awful trip, but I really wouldn’t mind not spending money on the limo. When I get home, I’m going to be pretty broke. My vacation paychecks were direct deposited while I was gone, so I at least have money to live on, but I’ve pretty well run through my savings. And if you can take Monday off, that will be even better. Yes, I do have to work on Monday, but at least then we’ll have Sunday night. If this jet lag works the way I predict, I should be pretty frisky at night…it’s just the mornings that are going to be a problem. Maybe you can help make sure that I actually get up on Monday morning. After that, I’m sure I will be able to fend for myself.
Okay my flight Info is this: Flight 107 from LAX which should arrive in NY at 5:20 PM on Friday the 23rd. Remember that Friday that I lost when I arrived? Well I get two Fridays in a row this week to make up for it. Good thing it’s not Monday, right? Who needs two of those? I will go through customs in LA, so unless I am caught smuggling penguins, I should have no problems once I reach NY. Of course I do have to leave Cairns at the ungodly hour of 6:30 AM, and have layovers in Brisbane as well as LA, but this flight was a lot cheaper than the more direct one.
I will come to Scranton the following weekend and do the parent thing. At least I should know what’s going on with my Dad’s tests by then. I hope he’s not going to need oxygen. My Uncle (the one that owned the beach house) had emphysema and dragged around an oxygen tank the last year of his life. At least it got my Dad to stop smoking. I just hope it wasn’t too late.
So today was the last organized tour of my vacation. It was an odd combination, too, from the sublime to the slightly ridiculous. I took a bus to the Kuranda Scenic Railroad which is a small railroad that goes up through the rain forest to a town called Kuranda. Kuranda was originally founded by logging companies, and in the 70’s, when the wholesale logging of the rain forest was banned, the loggers left and hippies moved in. It became a kind of craft village, with the hippies and their descendants making a living off tourists visiting the rain forest. There is a butterfly zoo, and the succinctly named Venom Zoo, filled with poisonous bugs and snakes. There are restaurants and all sorts of shops. It has gotten somewhat commercialized over the years, but there are some nice things too.
The train was incredible, even though my weather luck had run out, and it was raining. Okay rain in a rain forest isn’t exactly big news, but it did reduce the visibility a bit. Still we wound through the rain forest travelling only 21 miles but going up 11,000 feet into the mountains through tunnels and over gorges. There were some amazing waterfalls, and a lot of interesting trees, some with orchids growing on them, and some with very weird roots coming out of the ground. There were some beautiful birds that flashed by, and the whole place seemed very spooky, and mysterious, maybe because of the rain. At any rate, the trip up the mountain lasted about an hour and we got out at Kuranda, where I had lunch at a pie shop…some kind of a meat pie with bacon and cheese in it. Not bad. Then there was the truck selling homemade ice cream, so I had some of that, too. He had 38 flavors including things like Passion Fruit and Mango. I had Rocky Road, but it was quite different from American Rocky Road. For one thing, it was pink. It was vanilla ice cream with cherries, chocolate chips, nuts and marshmallows. I also went to a very nice Aborigine craft shop, but I won’t tell you what I bought there. But the items were all labeled with who made it, and what tribe they were from, and where they live. It was very interesting. There was one artist that I really liked, and I bought a couple of her things. I would have bought more, but that’s all she had. They had a lot of crocodile related items…belts, hat bands, wrist straps, etc. that Dwight would have just loved, but they weren’t quite wedding present material. But maybe one of the things I bought might work. Quite seriously…you can decide.
Coming down the mountain was even more fun. I took the Skyrail Rainforest Cableway, which consists of gondolas, which go down over the rain forest. It was awesome. It was still raining, but I could see quite a lot and there was interesting low-lying fog obscuring the bottom of the forest. One of the men in the gondola with me said it reminded him of Vietnam. I’ll be interested to see what my Dad thinks when he sees the photos.
We had to change gondolas at Barron Falls in order to continue down to the bottom. At the end of the line, we walked over to the Tjapukai Aboriginal Cultural Park for dinner and a show.
I’m not sure how I feel about the Cultural Park. I had wanted to learn something about the Aborigines and how they live, but this whole place was a bit too touristy for my taste. I had read something about the history of the Aborigine people and it is a tragic story, and the Australian government has a lot to answer for, very much like our own history with Native Americans. They are trying to make up for it now by giving the tribes huge land grants, etc. The guides and performers at the center are from the Tjapukai tribe, and the Cultural Park is part of one such land grant. The guides gave demonstrations of outback food, which is basically hunting and gathering....no bloomin’ onions here. They demonstrated fire making, spear throwing and didgeridoo playing, and there was also a multimedia History Theater and Creation Theater, using laser lights and special effects to tell the story of the history of the people. There was lots of music and dancing and audience participation. It was all very interesting, but also kind of theatrical, and probably not all that authentic. It was kind of the Disney version, if you know what I mean.
I know that there are actual tribes of Aboriginal people still living in the Outback, much as they have for centuries, but I’m also pretty sure that the Tjapukai people who work in the Cultural Park don’t live like that. I have this image of them coming to work every day, looking much like we do at Dunder Mifflin, punching a time clock, and then changing into loin cloths and face and body paint to spend the day being Aborigines. Then at the end of their shift, they change, clock out, get into their cars, and go back to their apartments in Cairns and watch TV or surf the net, just like we do. A couple of the dancers were really good, but the one woman in the group seemed bored, and there was one guy who spent the whole time trying not to crack up. Basically, they were performers, which is fine. And they were showing the tourists what they came to see. But I suspect that they were also laughing at us…just a little.
The tour included a huge buffet dinner, which was perfectly nice, but not even vaguely authentic. Not that I really wanted to eat roots, or grubs, but it wasn’t even Australian food either. I swear…I could have had this exact same buffet dinner in Scranton, PA. There were a few Chinese and Japanese entrees, as well as Italian, but I didn’t necessarily come all the way to Australia, to an Aboriginal Cultural Park to eat Baked Ziti and Miso soup…am I making any sense? Anyway, I found myself a bit disappointed with that particular experience. Especially after that magnificent rain forest.
Well, anyway, that was it. Tomorrow I’m just hanging out again, going to the beach if it’s not raining and getting my act together since I leave at the crack of dawn Friday. If I don’t get eaten by a shark tomorrow, I’ll consider it a successful trip…I think I am pretty much officially out of my rut. But I sure can’t wait to get back to you.
Love,
Jim
From: Pbeesly
Sent: June 21, 2006 10:30 AM
To: Jhalpert
Subject: re: Cairns Day 4
Dear Jim,
The funniest thing just happened. Michael called me into his office with that “Oh shit...I totally messed up, and now you aren’t going to like me anymore,” look on his face…you know the one I mean. It turns out that when he told Jan that he had promoted me to Personal Assistant, she had a total fit. “There are no Personal Assistants at Dunder Mifflin! What do you think this is…Hollywood?” That is an exact quote, by the way, because I just “happened” to overhear their phone call.
Anyway, it seems that the PC term for Secretary that Michael was looking for was Administrative Assistant, so that is my new new title. But the best part is that Michael gave me an additional dollar raise for all of the “emotional distress,” he caused me. I mean, he really doesn’t want me running off to Stamford. I tell you…for the first time in my life, I feel like a have a little power and it feels really good.
Anyway, Dwight is much happier with my new title, also. I mean, Personal Assistant is a title he probably craves for himself, but Administrative Assistant he can live with. So we are back to being BFF. But I’ll be happy to be your personal assistant, any time you want.
So you weren’t too impressed with It’s A Small Aboriginal World, huh? Well, at least no one threw up in your boat. You can’t really expect authenticity in a situation like that. The Center is probably a really good source of income for the tribe, like the Indian casinos in the US. Hopefully some of that money trickles back to the tribes who do live in the Outback.
When I was in high school, I had a friend named Kyoko who was half Japanese. The summer after HS, she went to work as a waitress at Gasho, a Japanese steak house, which was supposedly this authentic Japanese farmhouse, blah blah blah. The waitresses were all Oriental and wore kimonos, etc. The funny thing was…she was the only waitress who was even half Japanese. All of the others were Chinese or Thai or Vietnamese, but in their kimonos, nobody ever noticed that they weren’t Japanese. People see what they expect to see. I’m sure that 99% of the tourists you were with came away thinking that they had experienced the real thing.
The rain forest sounds wonderful, though. I’ve read about that railroad, and the gondolas. I looked it up on line.
I can’t believe that you are finally coming home! I know it’s only been two weeks, but it seems like forever. I hope that everything is okay at the Stamford Branch, when you get back. Downsizing rumors are going around again. But that’s been happening ever since I started to work here, and so far we’ve only lost one employee, and none of the branches has been shut down. I hope that it’s just talk again. I also hope that my big $80 a week raise isn’t going to throw D-M into a financial tailspin.
See you soon!
Love, Pam
