Wandering Around in Moree

Because I arrived in Moree on Wednesday evening, I was left to my own devices for Thursday and Friday. Not everyone leads a life of leisure like me. So I took a wander around the bustling little metropolis of Moree. Ha ha, got ya. But this is a view out into the bush from in town.

But, despite having eight thousand or so people, very few seemed to be about. I was certainly in no danger of being run over when I jaywalked.

From end to end, walking through Moree takes about half an hour. There are a couple of supermarkets, a few cafes and shops. Moree even has a Subway, but again, there seemed to be few people who go there. There are also lots and lots of motels. I guess Moree is a good stopping point for truckers who start to be tired about this point between somewhere and someplace else. I presume the motels are partly for them. Moree also has some therapeutic hot pools. They are currently under renovation, so we didn't go, but during some seasons people flock to Moree to recline in the soothing, healing waters of the thermal pools.

After Sharon finished work, she took me to one of her favourite parts of town, a walking track on the northwest side. It looked remarkably like the photo I took on the southwest side earlier in the day.

The next day I took another walk. I found the horse racing track, and a nice looking horse. I wouldn't have thought Moree big enough to have a racetrack, but maybe it's a nice central point for horses from both Sydney and Brisbane to meet and battle it out for interstate supremacy (Sydney is in New South Wales and Brisbane is in Queensland). They already have a strong rivalry in rugby.

I also saw some wild parrots. I know they came from somewhere, but it's still a bit odd to see birds, that I have only ever known in cages or in people's living rooms, flying around free in the wild, if Moree can be considered wild.

And then, I discovered that Moree is far more than I had been told. I found this street.

This street was the best decorated street at Christmas in 2003. Now I remember some of the streets in Calgary at Christmas, so this must have been one well-decorated street. Oh. Maybe it was just in Moree. :)

The Train to Moree

It was time to go and see another friend from Korea. Sharon is a friend that I met in the hiking club in Korea. We got along famously. She is just as bitter and twisted about life as I am, more probably. We had great fun hiking together somewhere in the pack of people on the mountain and in the club, and cutting them down. About 2 and a half years ago, Sharon left Korea and came to Australia to do a master's degree in education so that she could be a real educator. This, of course, means that she studied really hard to earn a degree so that she could go into a school in New South Wales and “educate” students. Now since she is a new teacher, she couldn't get her pick of schools and with so much competition with many new teachers, she had to get a job way out of Sydney in areas where sane people would rarely go into schools that are generously called troubled with many delinquents and children who abuse teachers in a variety of ways. As a result, “teaching” in such schools means classroom management and trying to cram what can be mashed into unreceptive minds in the hopes that they might not become something a bit more than juvenile delinquents and, later on, criminals of various sorts. This is as opposed to “teaching” English in Korea, where students come to class and actually learn something. But anyone will tell you that that is not real teaching and we were not “real” teachers while we were there.

In any case, Sharon currently lives a 9 or 10 hour train ride out to the northwest of Sydney. And I hopped a train to go and see her. On the train, I saw a really nice sunset, this being the remnants after I got access to the window after the previous occupants left the train. The sky was completely clear and this band of cloud caught the fading sun as it sank below the horizon.