and I petted a koala, and said hi to a kangaroo

I have only been to Australia once, and I went by myself. It was years ago.

On the flight from LA to Sydney I sat next to a guy who was returning home from a six months long trip around the world.

He told me he worked at the Sydney Opera House. "But we refer to it as the Hanging Gardens of Babylon", he said. "And I visited Torquay on my trip. I had to see it."

That's a reference to the John Cleese TV series Fawlty Towers. The series is set on the south coast of England, and Cleese plays the erratic hotel owner Basil Fawlty. When a guest complains about the view from his room, Basil goes off in a tirade: "May I ask what you were hoping to see out of a Torquay bedroom window? Sydney Opera House perhaps? The Hanging Gardens of Babylon?"

So I laughed at the Hanging Gardens of Babylon joke. I thought that was funny.

The point though was that the guy used the phrase ironically. He didn't like his job at the opera house. He did either lights or sound, I don't remember which. He said no one liked working there. They all took turns traveling around the world for months at a time.

And I was thinking, isn't it funny how someone working inside one of the most famous buildings in the world can't wait to get away? And go see for himself a Torquay bedroom window, out of which you see nothing. Not even the slimmest strip of the sea.