welcome to the new town

On Friday, I moved to a new part of Sydney. Newtown is incredibly diverse and vibrant. Coldplay even filmed a video here on King Street.

I'm staying at an AirBnB run by Ravi, who several years ago, alarmed by the plight of immigrants, turned his family living room into Parliament on King, a bookstore, cafe, salon, art studio, and community center. It's a modern-day Shakespeare & Company, and everyone wanders by in the course of a day.

The cafe is literally a social enterprise. You can rent it out. 

You can request a private catered dinner for 20 of your friends from an asylum-seeking chef.

Or just come drink iced coffee and housemade kombucha, and learn all the neighborhood gossip. Random people drop by, some of them regulars, others for the first time. Bebe might turn the disco ball on. Hani might start to dance.

If you sit still, Chin Chin the parakeet will perch on you, or take a bath.

There are bands playing on street corners. You can get your hair cut at Mister Hipster or drop by the button store or any of the lash salons.

King Street in Newtown is like Fitzroy in Melbourne or the East Village or Bermondsey, a combination of funky and up and coming with already arrived.

The neighborhood is adorable. Yesterday we dropped by a garage fundraiser for the firies: shockingly, the Rural Fire Service in Australia, fighting unprecedented blazes in the mountains to the west and south, is largely staffed by volunteers.

I'd never seen pink plumeria before. Everything is in bloom here.

Wish I had a neighbor with all these avocados. The house itself is very peaceful. Shades of Turrell.

Like the bookstore, the rental is full of books and Corningware my mother had.

Sacks of coffee beans get a new life in the yard.

You can feel the neighborhood evolving in real time. They have fantastic vintage shops, as good as Artifact in Portland, which forced me to buy a whole new suitcase.

Come. Take a stroll. Stay a while.

You'll never get bored.

Some newcomers have objected to bars staying open all night. The neighborhood pushed back.

There's terrific streetart and murals everywhere you look.

I don't know why MLK is here, but he is. The smaller dream mural to the right alludes to the aboriginal concept of dreaming.

Despite the name, Newtown is old. Lots of good bones for that Thai restaurant or record store or sound healing studio you've always dreamed of opening.

There are Instagram kids following the mural trail and stopping at their favorite bakeries. Okay, so one of them was me.

The best/most ridiculous of all is Black Star. 

It's not like I too didn't want to try everything in the case. But I had to get what we'd all come for: the strawberry watermelon slice.

I got it to eat in, but there wasn't anywhere to sit, so I found a bench. Two Japanese girls of no more than 22 sat next to me and unwrapped their black star boxes like Christmas presents from Tiffany. Truly from the sublime to the delicious.

Today I headed downtown to see the Powerhouse Museum, a collection of science and design. On the way, I discovered a food court and several blocks of restaurants that felt like I'd been transported to Singapore or Shanghai. The building above is one of a series of new library branches!

 Combo laksa for the win.

Unable to resist a machine, I put my $4 in and got a fabulous fresh-squeezed juice.  When can we get one of these in San Francisco?

Darling Harbour is in fact darling. Filled with fancy donut shops and cafes and dumpling providers and concoctions of yogurt with black sticky rice. It's the new boba, or so I hear.

The Powerhouse Museum was inspiring. I made my way to Newtown on the bus, wishing for a few more stomachs.

I stopped by the cafe where there'd been some commotion. A neighborhood guy had pushed Mother Yen, the beloved owner of the Vietnamese restaurant across the street. No one was having it. Police were interviewing him and all the witnesses, which was clearly visible from Parliament's picture windows. I ate dinner at Mother Yen (banh xeo plus a refreshing soda lemonade) in solidarity.

How many hours a week do we bemoan San Francisco no longer being the boho town we moved to years ago? Parliament on King is a chance to rectify that, a way to return to that moment when we too were new in town, and everything was possible and pay it forward. 

Meet brilliant new friends from Iraq and Somalia and Saudi Arabia and Japan and Ohio and Sydney, while you're at it.

The year is coming to an end, but as a guy on a scooter reassured me tonight, that's just an arbitrary demarcation.

Learn more about Parliament on King and how you can support their mission. Or if you're in Sydney, drop in for a drink and stay awhile.

fim do mundo

Nunu delivered my Smart car at 10, and I set off toward Capelinhos, where a volcano erupted 61 years ago from 1957-8, partially burying a lighthouse and setting off a wave of Azorean immigration to New England.

Capelinhos is at the very western end of Faial. It's an easy drive from Horta on narrow roads with lots of hydrangeas. The approach to the lighthouse is bleak and the entrance to the subterranean museum is austere, like you're entering a bunker.

The volcano was offshore, but after it erupted, lava flows connected it to the rest of Faial. Refugee visas for 1500 families were approved in a bill sponsored by then-Massachusetts Senator John F. Kennedy. Eventually that was raised to 2000 heads of household. New England has had a centuries-old relationship with families migrating to and from Portugal.

Here's what it looks like today. You can climb the steep cliffs, but wear closed-toed shoes if you do. It's windy out there!

The fabulous sunken lobby. I meant to return for a drink at the sleek bar but forgot.

First stop is a 3D movie about volcanoes and how the Azores were formed. When the continents were all one mass, the Azores were the center of civilization. Atlantis....

The display of lava rocks, petrified wood, and semi-precious stones was lit like The Shape of Water.

This rotating globe shows the ring of fire and all the active and submerged volcanoes in the world. That's Hawaii on the left.

Climbing the 140 steps to the top of the lighthouse.

On the way back from the volcano, I passed Bar Fim do Mundo, the bar at the end of the world. Somehow I resisted stopping. Who needs the end of the world, when you have Twitter?

Here's how I imagine the end of the world. At least here air and water are clean and the soil is fertile.

Wildflowers in an explosion of colors.

I drove on a ridiculously foggy road up to the caldera, the crater of the main dormant volcano. It's in the national park and filled with hiking trails. But it was freezing and windy, with no visibility, like walking into a cloud.

This was the view as I descended.

Even the rest areas have hydrangeas. That's Pico in the distance. Still haven't seen the top of it.

The famous windmills! And a lovely view of Horta coming around the bend.

Another decaying house. Not sure if the women in the paintings are historic figures or working girls.

I'll leave you with a poem by Veiga Simões, posted in the restaurant where I had lunch. I can translate it in butchered Portuguese, but here's a better version.

At dinner, I sat next to a Belgian couple I'd run into looking for the Smart car agency yesterday. They're trying to visit all the European islands in search of Atlantis! (Which reminded me I haven't finished my 50 states quest.) We talked about the sad state of democracy, in English because I don't pretend to speak Flemish. When dinner was over, we realized we're on the same ferry tomorrow to Pico. Also that we are staying at the same lovely guesthouse....It's a small world, after all.