the library, art gallery, and things i wish i'd studied

sorry it's been a few days. i've been busy.

on friday, we had our first field trip to the new south wales library. it's amazing place-- the main library room is kind of like something out of beauty and the beast, except the room is square and only about four layers up. yeah, that kind of amazing. funny thing is, you can't take books in with you--just paper and pencils. also, you're not to retrieve books yourself. you fill out a request receipt or something, take it to a librarian, and they'll get it for you. i think i heard that only 20% of their holdings are displayed in that main room--there are floors and wings of the library that only librarians have access to. it's crazy.

the librarians gave a presentation, but i saw a photo and proceeded to retreat into my own thoughts. (sorry, gotta be honest.) it was a photo of one of the first aboriginal authors ever published. it looked like a black and white tintype, so i'm going to place him in the late nineteenth century or thereabouts, wearing a nice suit and the haircut of a white man of his time, perhaps a pair of spectacles. he had every dressing of an intelligent man, and i considered how absurd it was for anyone to ever consider this people group subhuman, or try to deny them the rights that the aborigines were denied as late as the 1970's.

but i looked again. how easy it is for me, a white girl from one of the most privileged countries in the world with my globalized and multicultural mindset, to look at this photo of a man dressed in a way different from his heritage, and think it would take a fool to not know him for a human.
i can't write this next thought without feeling awful about it. this is a much less artfully done version of the thought, straightforward and boring. sorry:
sometimes i wonder: if i hadn't been raised in a world where cultural diversity was a good thing, where the awareness of other peoples and places was a necessity for understanding the world around me, where standards for acceptable human behavior were extremely specific, would i think other peoples and cultures in- or subhuman, or simply as lesser people, as well? am i so arrogant to think i would be above every standard my culture has impressed on me? it's easy for me to look at the photo of the aborigine in western dress and say, well duh, of course his life and experience is equal to mine. but what if that man had appeared in front of me in the dress of his culture , when i'm used to human beings behaving in such a way and only that way--what would i think? how would i respond?

then we went to the art gallery and filled out a worksheet given to us. i never thought i liked art museums much, but something about this one i liked. see, i'm an art minor, but i'm a design person. i have no idea what makes fine art "art", and museums often just frustrate me. but something about this one got me humming iron and wine tunes (iron and wine is a band), missing people from the states, and unusually present.

one thing to study before visiting a new country is the currency. especially australian currency, my goodness. i've never felt like such a tourist! see, different values are different sizes and, most notably, colors. a native can tell straight away which note is which by a brief flash. us americans have to pull out the entire thing and look for the number. so study these things! it will save you loads of time and make you look so legit. also: study the basic geography of sydney's suburbs. namely drummoyne, concord, leichhardt, ryde, gladesville, paramatta, burwood, the like. know where they are in relation to each other and to the city--NOT to the harbor. bridges will pop up where you don't expect them and all of a sudden you're on the south/north side.

have a wonderful night.