Post Christmas

Southbank City Beach. The water you can see in the background is the Brisbane River.

A very strange but cool sight with the buildings and beach.

The after Christmas period was a very poor time for me. I sort of miscalculated my pay and forgot that I was paid a week behind leaving me with not much left of the money I had saved coming into Christmas to live on for that week. Thanks mostly to 2 minute noodles though I somehow managed to survive. I went back to work the Tuesday after new years on day shift as opposed to the afternoon/night shift I was used to working. This turned out to be a negative for two reasons; first, I had a drop in pay and second, I was now restricted to calling home only on the weekends as the (Australian) morning is the only time that both countries are awake. Bummer. I was told that it was only supposed to be for the first week but it ended up being a permanent switch. I still was enjoying the people that I was working with though and truth be told, the work on the day shift was quite a bit easier. I was more or less expecting the weather to completely change (read: stop raining) once I started back at work as is usually the case, but we weren’t even that lucky. It just kept right on raining. Sure a couple weekends it wasn’t and we went to spend the day at Surfer’s Paradise, but I’m looking for sympathy here and I’m sure if I talked about that I wouldn’t really be getting much. Any day that it wasn’t raining the sun was really strong. I mean really strong. I’m sure not many people reading this have felt totally unfiltered sunlight before. Because one of the biggest holes in the ozone layer is right over south east Queensland the sun is, at times, unbearable. You can feel your skin burning the moment it comes in contact with the sun. There is no forgetting to put sunscreen on because the sun reminds you right away. So my weekends were spent usually either at Southbank City Beach or Surfer’s Paradise depending on who wanted to go and when. Unless it was raining - the beach is a lot less fun in the rain we have found. So, life sort of bumped along like that for a couple of weeks until one day I arrived home from work and was greeted by our landlord telling us that we all had one week to pack up our stuff and find another place to live. He had no real reason other than he said that we were not respecting the place. I have no idea how he got that idea as everyone did more than their share of cleaning and helping to fix up the place and very little got broken or damaged excluding a window from a water balloon that I threw. But, come on! When has a water balloon ever broken a window before? I didn’t even throw it hard. Plus, I paid for it in full and in a timely matter (part of the money miscalculation I was speaking of earlier). So I don’t think that one incident should count. We found out a little bit later that the week after we moved out he filled the place back up with different backpackers and charged them $20 more rent per week than us. A real nice guy. Because of my financial situation at the time my only option was to move back into the hostel, which everyone else in the house did too. It was kind of fun moving back in there with the housemates but at the same time we were all pretty bitter about the whole thing and didn’t really feel like meeting anyone new. A little snobbish maybe but we had just moved out of a beautiful house and back into a dirty hostel. Once again life stabilized for me there for a few weeks and that is where I will leave it for this installment.
I hope it gets warm for you guys soon,

HAPPY NEW YEARS!

This was our view of the firworks. Note the umbrellas.

I should probably explain that around Christmas just about everything shuts down for three weeks. Well, all the shops and restaurants stay open but that’s about it. So for three weeks I wasn’t working just hanging out at the house. The weather was terrible for the three weeks so I wasn’t able to go on any trips or do anything touristy that I wanted to do. After new years, Rob, a friend of mine, and I tried to plan a camping trip to Moreton Island, one of the islands off the coast of Brisbane. As keen as we were we were unable to go because it rained solidly from Christmas up until when I went back to work one week after new years. Moreton Island was even evacuated because of multiple cyclones that hit around Brisbane in the space of one week. Like I said, the weather was bad. New Years was a pretty lame edition for me. The initial plan was to have some drinks at the house then head out to Southbank to watch the fireworks and then head back to some friends’ place to finish partying. What actually ended up happening was rain all day leading up to the fireworks. I don’t remember who but one of the housemates heard that because of the rain, the fireworks were cancelled which threw a major stick in our plans. We decided just to spend the night at our place, watch the fireworks from Sydney on TV an hour later (because NSW has daylight saving and Queensland doesn’t) and then, if we felt like it, head down to the other party. Well, at 11:30 we got a call from another friend saying that the fireworks were obviously a go and why weren’t we in Southbank to watch them? Well plan change #3; we ran up to a little park close to us and by the river where we could just barely see the fireworks behind the Story Bridge. And yes, it was raining. Pretty lackluster I have to say. After that we decided not to go back and watch the Sydney fireworks at our place and instead just head straight to the next party (less time spent walking in the rain…) Once we got there everyone started playing drinking games and pretty much drinking more than they should, me included. This is probably why I don’t have too many details from the party to discuss and the ones I do are best left to the imagination. I will just say it was a fun night once we got out of the rain and everyone lived through it somehow. Because of the time that New years eve finally finished not much happened on new years day. And being raining again, everyone just had a lazy day around the house. Rob and I were looking forward to the camping on Moreton Island with all the sand and nice water for swimming that we had heard about. Yet another plan was thrown away due to the rain. It rained solidly from Boxing Day until I went back to work the Tuesday after new years. That sort of foiled any plans to do anything fun and exciting. We pretty much spent the days inside and went out a lot to the restaurants, bars and clubs close to our house. It was pretty fun but ultimately not very exciting and very expensive. So I ended my three weeks of Christmas holidays without having done much touristy and poor. That may make it sound negative, but I really did have a lot of fun hanging out with all my friend/ housemates eating and drinking well. It was just a very different holiday season for me and I think I enjoy it better back home.
Until next time,

Christmas in July (like temperatures)

Oh ya, that's Christmas alright

Our Christmas feast
Our little Christmas tree

Ok, so I know that I always start my blogs by “wow, I really haven’t updated in a long time” but I think this time it is actually true. If anyone is still checking this, yes, I am still alive and healthy. The problem with letting so long pass in between entries is that even I don’t really remember what I did so it makes it hard to pass along to you guys who are living in the warm climate of Australia vicariously through me difficult. (Run on sentence? Maybe.)
So Christmas was fun but really not the same. Christmas eve almost everyone in the house was working so I pretty much just hung out on my own, had a beer and watched The Nightmare Before Christmas. I figured I had to watch some sort of Christmas special and I had never seen it before, plus it was on sale at Target. It is really difficult to get into the Christmas mood when it is 30degrees with long summer days. I’ll put in a picture that I took in Surfer’s Paradise to show this point. Giant Christmas trees, palm trees and bike racing really make a strange mix. Christmas day was lots of fun. I woke up early in the morning as always on Christmas morning and jumped on Gaelle and Celine’s beds to wake them up. They were sooo pleased. Then we headed down to the Charlie Brown-esque Christmas tree and opened our airmail boxes. Gaelle, Celine and I also exchanged gifts with a $15 cap just to enhance the Christmas spirit. After that I’m not really too sure what the others got up to but I hopped on a train down to the Gold Coast. Kevin and Estelle had invited me for Christmas brunch/lunch which is the traditional time for the big meal. I was explained that it is because Christmas day is historically one of the hottest days of the year and it is too much to have the oven running all day – so they have a cool lunch. And what a lunch it was! There was plenty of everything. Different types of salads, cold turkey, 2 types of pork and fresh prawns. Prawns are kind of like shrimp but roughly three times the size and twice as delicious. Sort of like little lobsters, you have to crack the upper body off and eat the tail. Everything was so delicious and I was seriously full after my 4th plate. I hung around for a little bit and had some beers and chatted with everyone but then, unfortunately, had to head back up to Brissy. All of us housemates had a big night planned. Everyone signed up to make a different dish so we would have a big Christmas dinner. I signed up to make Mexican dip as well as crab dip both of which always go over well. I had prepared them both Christmas Eve so I only had to heat up the crab dip and I was set. Our landlord had promised us that we would have a kitchen by Christmas, but it really didn’t look like that was going to shape up so we bought some bbq chickens beforehand. Christmas day he came over and told us that we could just lift the stove into place and plug it in. Thanks for that, we could have had an oven this whole time if installing the stove was just us lifting it into the hole and plugging it in. It turned out later that it really wasn’t that easy as the girl who signed up for making potato casserole couldn’t get the oven to go over 180deg without the power in the entire house going out. Excellent. The neighbors graciously allowed her’s and a few other’s dishes to be cooked in their (working) oven. We heated up the bbq chickens in the microwave and everything wasn’t ruined and we managed to have a really nice dinner which included more wine than we needed. It was a very strange Christmas for me but it was nice. I think if I am still in Australia next Christmas I will try to get home. Christmas just isn’t Christmas without family and friends.
I know I am well behind in my updates but I will hopefully try to catch up now.
Miss you all,

My New House

Front of our house

The back yard

I have realized that I am addicted to the beach. The first couple of weeks staying at the hostel I went back on the weekends to visit Mellen, Bendon, Kevin and Estelle and then head to the beach so that fed the addiction. Then the third weekend I skipped my trip to go to the beach and I was in a terrible mood all week as I went through beach withdrawal. The weekend after I went back and feel a lot better now. The beach is a great place and you always feel better after spending some time in the sun, on the sand and in the waves. It is really rejuvenating. My life has become pretty scripted living at the hostel. During the week I wake up hang out go to work, come home have a shower and go to sleep. The weekends I am pretty lazy. If I am not going to the beach I hang around the hostel. Hanging in the hammock reading a book is my favorite spot. But reading the newspaper and talking to the other residents at the picnic table is also a pretty good place to be. I have been fairly lucky with my roommates so far. There are 3 people in my 6 person room who are there for an extended stay. These people are fairly quiet and considerate of others so there really isn’t much trouble. Because I am living in a 6 person room that means there are really only 2 people switching in and out. We have had a few snorers and a few people who come in late at night drunk and make a lot of noise but most of them have been ok too. I was starting to get restless living at the hostel though. It was really fun and a great way to meet people but there comes a time when you want to live in a place where the kitchen is open all the time and you don’t have to share a single kitchen with 50 other people. Lucky for me just around this time I was hearing rumors that one of the guys who worked at the hostel had some apartments and a house that he was renting out. The apartments were just at the bottom of the hill where the grocery store was and the house was just around the corner from the hostel so I knew moving wasn’t going to be a trouble. I went to talk with Andy and he said for sure there was room for me. I decided that the house sounded more to my liking so I put my name in there. He only wants responsible people who are going to take care of the place living there - I am clearly a choice candidate. The house is not finished but he said we can still move in if we want to. This sounded good to me because it was only $5 a week more expensive than the hostel but much more luxurious and I would only have to share my room with a maximum of 2 other people. So the next week I forgot to book into the hostel for the week after and because the hostel was fully booked I had no choice but to move into the house as my bed was let out from under me. The apartments weren’t ready anyways even if I wanted to move into them which I didn’t so everything worked out ok. When I moved in there was only one other couple living in the house. They both had early morning jobs and with my afternoon evening job it made living in this giant house pretty lonely. A few days later the people started to move in. By the end of the week I was returning home from work to a party outside in the garden with people who were staying at the house and friends from the hostel and people who weren’t really staying at the house but were staying at the house. At this point here was no electricity on the upstairs floor except the one light in my bathroom that never went out. (I picked the room with the on suite bathroom and walk-in closet - score!) Having light in the room or not was decided by opening or closing the bathroom door. Our kitchen also consisted of a Gorge Foreman grill, a toaster and an electric frying pan. Luckily for me with eating dinner at work I didn’t do much dinner cooking. The landlord sort of caught wind that there were people sleeping everywhere in the house without paying and had to crack down on it. It was pretty funny, for a while it was the first ones to go to bed who got mattresses because there weren’t enough to go around and people trying to sleep on box springs and in the kitchen. No one put up a tent on our patio but I think that is only because it wasn’t raining. Needless to say I was much less lonely. I never got my mattress stolen either because I had been there for a while so I was the only one with sheets and I think that acted as a bit of a deterrent to the mattress thieves. Slowly less and less people were staying over and the faulty wiring upstairs was fixed. This house is beautiful. It is a giant old house. It has a balcony that runs around three sides of the house, a pool, and nice interlocking brick garden area with a gazebo and big old palm trees everywhere. The rooms inside are really big too. As people moved in my room was the first to fill up (obviously because of the bathroom and closet plus the awesome roommate). At one point we had four in the room but I though that it was pretty cramped. Before I could bring that up with Andy, our landlord, he and one of the girls had a falling out and she was asked to find other accommodation and I simply moved her mattress into another room and that problem was solved. So now I am roommates with two really nice French girls. I don’t know what you are thinking but if it’s something above PG-13 you’ve got it all wrong. The both have boyfriends and we get along like siblings, which makes things a lot easier when staying in the same room. Gaelle is from Lyon and Celine is from Grenoble. I especially get along well with Gaelle we have the same sarcastic sense of humor and have had similar schedules so we have had a lot of time to get to know one another. Across the hall is a weird Dutch guy named Stephane who sometimes prefers to sleep in the back of his Toyota LandCruiser than in his bed – weirdo. Down the hall is a really funny German guy named Chris who has a Canadian girlfriend from Kalona who is usually hanging around and is really nice. It’s fun to talk to someone who has the same accent and uses the same words as you for a change from time to time. Across from him is Aaron who is from New Zealand and is deaf and like 12ft. tall. Downstairs are the couple of Andy and Monika. Andy is from England and Monika is German. They are a very rock and roll couple who are fun to be around but kind of scary when they get into arguments. And that is my house. We all get along really well and have a lot of fun and usually on the weekends go out to the bars all together. That is actually untrue. Aaron doesn’t usually join us and makes it his personal mission to inform the landlord every time something bad happens in the house. He is starting to grate on the rest of us. Other than that though it is great and Aaron, over time, is slowly loosening up. It is a very fun dynamic with lots of different accents and levels of English comprehension. There is a lot of explaining and one person translating for others when they still don’t understand. It’s a fun place to live for the moment and nice to get out of the hostel. I am working on an update for Christmas and new years as we speak and then I think my blog should be just about up to date. Sorry for all the reading with this one but there was a lot to catch up and lots to talk about it seems. I hope everyone had a very merry Christmas and a great new years.
Ciao,

Living in the Hostel

My first Monday in Brisbane I knew that I needed to start looking for work pretty quickly. I had watched my account balance slowly dive during my stay on the gold cost - definitely worth it though but it was time to start working. I had talked pretty seriously to a guy working at an employment agency when I was on the gold cost so I figured he would be a good place to start. So I set my alarm to wake up, and called him at 7AM to let him know that I was now looking for work in Brisbane. At 10:00AM I got a call back saying that I had a job that started at 2:30PM for $20/hr if I wanted it. It wasn’t really what I was looking for but it was a job. I felt that that was too good to be true having a job just fall into my lap like that. Definitely a good break for Shawn. The hours are 2:30 to 10:30 and the location is a 5 min walk from the Yeerongpilly train station which is about 20minutes down the line from my closest train station (Brunswick St.). The job is working in a warehouse for scaffolding. Trucks come in with scaffolding from buildings that have been built and we take it off the truck, count it and put it away. Then we count out the pieces that we just put away and make up another order to go out to a building that needs to be built on an empty truck. It isn’t the kind of job that gives you a deep level of satisfaction but I can work one day and pay for my entire week at the hostel. With the hours too it will allow me time to look for a more machining oriented job. Instead of doing that right away though I figure I’ll just take a break and relax for a bit. I have a job, a place to stay a way to meet new friends I don’t really see the need to push my luck at the moment. I’ll just settle, get on my feet, and then go looking. Since I have started working at the scaffolding place I have bought a bike which has turned my 35minute walk to the train station from the hostel to a 7minute ride to the train station. For the bike nerds who read this I bought a Scott Sportster P2 which is a either flat bar road bike with full Shimano Deore and LX or a mountain bike with 700c wheels. I love it and it is definitely helping me get around the city. Biking on the left hand side of the road is definitely strange though. I have it down pretty well though now. I only have trouble when doing lesser used maneuvers like coming off a sidewalk and onto the road or pulling out of a laneway I still want to start out on the right hand side of the road. An oncoming vehicle usually reminds me pretty quickly what side to be on. I am working with some cool people. There are a bunch of Australians with a few of us foreigners thrown in. The job is pretty easy on the brain but fairly demanding on the body. As long as you can count to high numbers and lift metal tubing you will have no trouble working in a scaffolding warehouse. So that is how most of my days are filled. In the mornings before work I will get up, eat breakfast and then maybe get a chore done before getting ready for work. And by chore I mean pick up some groceries or look for bike stores. It really isn’t a very difficult life but I am pretty busy. Internet at the hostel is pretty sketchy. They have a built in computer where you can pay $1 and get 16-25mins on it which includes internet so you never know when it is going to boot you off. The other option is that you can leach internet from some unknown source if you sit on one seat on a couch in one room. No other seat works and the signal is very weak. If someone moves the couch to watch movies it may take a couple of days to find the sweet spot again. But hey, at least it doesn’t eat through all your $1 coins that I need to do my laundry. Everything at the hostel takes $1 coins. It takes $6 to wash and dry cloths in the pathetically weak washer and drier and both only accept $1 coins. Do you have any idea how long it takes to collect $6 in $1 coins? About the same amount of time as it takes me to dirty all of my clothes luckily enough. The library where I am at right now is closing and the librarians look really mean so I am going to have to end here and I won’t be able to upload any pictures this time but I will hopefully have another post soon so keep patient. I am having a good time but still miss you all very much. Merry Christmas to you all as you enjoy your white, snowy Christmas. I am very jealous – although not too jealous as I will be on the beach on the Gold Coast.

Moving to Brisbane

Wow I really haven’t updated my blog in a long time; and a lot has happened. I have moved from the gold coast to Brisbane. And from a hostel in Brisbane to a house. The lack of updates has come mainly from a lack of internet access and partly from me running like a mad man and not taking the time to upload a blog. So I’ll jump into my time travel machine and jump back in time to my move and catch everybody up. Here we go... So, Kevin and Estelle Ellis (Brendon’s parents who own the house I was staying in) came home from their vacation and it was going to be pretty cramped in the house with all of us staying there. This was a good opportunity to give me a kick to move on to my original plan. The gold coast is like a drug to me it seems. I am addicted to it. I found a hostel in Brisbane that looked nice and it said that it would be quiet which would be good if I found work. The buses stop just outside the Ellis’ house so it was easy to get to the train station and the train runs straight to Brisbane getting there was easy. The hard part was packing everything back into my bags! My plan was to get off the train and call a cab to the hostel. That really didn’t really work out, ah well. I have since learned that the taxis in Brisbane are very under numbered so when I called it was busy forever so I figured I would walk. This was another one of those decisions that we call wrong. Walking for 45mins with 2 large suitcases is hard work. Especially in Brisbane which is very hilly. Between the train station and the hostel are 3 major up hills and down hills. When I finally made it to “The Homestead” there was only one bed available. When I checked on the internet one site said that there were all sorts of rooms available for long lengths of time. I was lucky that they had the one bed in a 4 person room and then the night after I could change into a 6 person room which is cheaper. Lesson learned – book ahead because you never know. I also found out much later that the hostel staff would have come to pick me up for free. But that is all part of the adventure. Whenever something I do doesn’t work out as planned, for me, it just adds to the adventure. My trip won’t be memorable if everything always ran like clockwork. I booked into the hostel for one week. It is cheaper to book a week at a time then go day by day – makes sense. The first night I was big loner and just watched tv and went to bed. The following day was mainly spent doing groceries and getting my self set up in my new room (because I had to change by 10AM which is check out time even though I wasn’t checking out… that was weird). That night I made friends with a sheet metal worker from New Zealand and we had a few drinks with some Germans who were drinking wine out of a box and playing drinking games complete with a board and playing pieces that they moved around. They were much more into this than I am. But it was fun to watch and they all went off to the bars and I went to bed. Sunday I made my way back down to the Gold Coast and hung out on the beach again and stopped in to see Mellen and Brendon who fed me and let me check my emails. I think I will leave my update there and talk about my first week in Brisbane and job searching in my next update. Hopefully we will get internet in our house soon and I can update more regularly. Here is a picture of crossing the river coming into Brisbane on the train and a shot of my bed in the 6 person dorm that I was staying at in the hostel. I miss you all and I will try much harder to update this more regularly in the future.
Cheers,

Melbourne Cup

Tuesday was the Melbourne Cup aka the race that stops the nation. It is true. A lot of businesses don't even open on that day, most businesses are only open in the morning and in the very least every shop closes for 5mins in the afternoon for the race. For those that don't know the Melbourne Cup is a huge horse race. It is really a lot more than that but really that is what it is centered around. It is pretty strange really. There are somewhere around 10 or 11 races during the day but only one race for the Melbourne Cup. We were going to go watch the race in a pub but it turned out that Mellen and Brendon were doing other things. I watched the unimportant races leading up to the big race on tv and then ran down to pub to watch THE race. I ordered a pot of Tooheys because you have to. A pot is smaller than a pint. Think of the glasses you get at the bars that really rip you off when you pay for a pint and they give you the smallest possible pint shape glass that they could find. Except they are cheap here. I think my pot was $2.20. It’s a pretty good size for drinking too. I am told that they don’t really get pints here very much either a pot or go all the way to a pitcher. That sounds fair enough to me. So I had my beer and I spent the 15mins leading up to the race watching everyone laughing and drinking and madly placing bets. I really didn't understand how the betting worked, or really which horses had a shot, and I figured today wasn't the day to learn. Lucky too, because I would have picked Purple Moon, who came second. You don't get any money for second. "If you're not first you're last"
Horse racing has to be one of the most un-american sports I have ever seen. There was no count down or staging time. Once all the horses were in their gates they go. In the pub everyone was talking and drinking and it wasn't until some really loud (probably really drunk) guy yelled that they were racing that everyone fell silent. Pretty weird when you are used to an opening kickoff or face-off to start a game. The race itself is 3600m and it looked like a lap and a half or maybe 2 laps of the track. For the first lap everyone was super quiet but for the last half a lap the noise grew little by little until everybody was screaming. It was really cool and really exciting. The race itself was really exciting too. It looked like Purple Moon was going to take it from 4th spot coming out of the final corner but another horse named Efficiency mad a wild dash for the line from way back in the pack. Coming around the last corner he was probably in 15th-20th place. Was it ever exciting seeing him catch and pass Purple Moon in the last 50m. And that was the race. 2mins of excitement and then nothing. I stuck around to see if there was going to be anything else happening, and nope that was it. Again, very un-american. Some guy on a horse and an antenna sticking out of his riding helmet rode beside the jockey and interviewed him on his way back to the stable but then they were getting ready for another race. So I walked back home. By the time I left, ran to the bar, watched the race and walked home only half an hour had passed. Seems weird to shut down a whole country at 3:00 in the afternoon for a 2 minute race. I really enjoyed experiencing it though.
Watching it on TV was very cool also. It is kind of like Grammy night on the red carpet, but all afternoon. All the big celebrities are dressed in the huge designers and get interviewed all day by network people. The fashion is super cool too. All the women wear big hats with fascinators on the hat or on their hair if they aren't wearing a hat. A fascinator is made up of big flowers and feathers and ribbon. I really am not explaining it very well but it is really cool. Everyone is wearing their very best and drinking champagne all day. It’s like a big swanky party with a horse race thrown it. Very cool. Next year I will have to get all dressed up and watch it somewhere a little swankier (I am told my Microsoft office spell check that swankier is a word).
Cheers,