Paul Goes Scuba Diving!

I learned how to scuba dive last week! By the way, this is a special Mother's Day episode of Complete Tangent (even though I'm putting it up on the Monday). Mum, my gift to you was not telling you I went scuba diving last week. I hope you enjoyed your worry-free days.

Yes, my mum would have worried, and so would I. In fact, I did. To be honest, I have never been all that comfortable with the idea of scuba diving. As you all know, I'm quite macho. I've wrestled a few grizzlies in my day, fought a crocodile or two; but hey, who hasn't? Despite that, the idea of going under water away from the sweet breath of life was never something I felt comfortable with.

I do realize that you have a bunch of equipment when you go down, and it's all explicitly designed to keep you alive. There's a lot of it too, as you can see from this diagram:

Still, it's one thing to tell someone this gear will help, it's another to actually make them believe it. I mean, when I look at that picture I don't see a bunch of stuff that will keep me alive, I see this:

It's safe to say I wasn't entirely bought-in. That said, I pride myself on being someone who can suck it up and look at the numbers, and the numbers say scuba diving is actually quite safe. Add to that the fact that a) Erika is a highly-certified diver and b) We're in one of the best spots in the world to go diving; well it would be a shame not to give it a shot. On top of that I got a deal on the course so it was only around $150 bucks and my cheapness overrode my fear.

That said, it's a 2-day course. When Erika got her PADI Open Water cert it was something like 3-weeks of training. Which is to say that I still had some nerves about the whole thing.

After Day One though, I was... really not thrilled. My chest hurt, I felt nauseated, and didn't really get the impression it was all that interesting to begin with. And I still thought I was going to die the next day. So big win for Day 1! I did admit to myself that I held my breath a bit though, which might explain why I had some chest pain. Oh by the way, they say that the most important thing to remember in diving is that

IF YOU HOLD YOUR BREATH UNDERWATER YOUR LUNGS WILL EXPLODE AND YOU WILL DIE!!!

I'm paraphrasing a little but that's the gist of it. So I'm going to take a bit of the credit for not feeling so hot that night. You'd think I'd have gotten that message.

Fortunately one of the things it says in the PADI manual is not to let a bad day scare you off diving. Sometimes the conditions just aren't right. So I sucked it up (and remembered to exhale) and went to Day 2. I must say that Day 2 was much better. It was a lot easier to chill out in the water, I barely used any of my air, and we actually saw some stuff. This specific stuff actually:

That's Bluey, a Grouper that hangs out at Bare Island in Sydney. It's tough to get a scale of reference so let's just assume he's roughly the size of a Clydesdale horse. Actually he's closer to the size of my leg but wouldn't it be cool if he was the size of a horse? The thing is, there are things the size of a horse, or that are just interesting to look at, or that will eat other animals while you watch. I'm particularly interested in that last one, animals eating animals is just fun. Bluey jammed a sea urchin down his urchin-hole while we watched which was enough to hook me on diving.

I don't know how often we'll go but I'm pumped to go again. I doubt I'll ever shake that 1% feeling that I'm about to die, but logically I do know that I'm more likely to die on the way to the dive site than in the water itself. So I can rely on that logic. Hell, I also feel like I'm going to break my neck every time I go skiing but I still do that too (Side note: How the hell did I ever do judo? People were deliberately trying to hurt me, up to and including cutting my air off to the point that I would pass out. I never batted an eye at that, why would diving bother me?).

So yeah, I'm in on diving now. Next stop, the Great Barrier Reef. AKA, the place where Paul gets eaten by a shark...


COMPLETE TANGENT:
This is legitimately the worst boxed wine on the planet:

Look, I'm not going to stand up and shout that I was robbed. It's not like there weren't warning signs right there on the box. For instance, "Fresh" shouldn't be a marketing point for wine. Also, I love how they do the math for you on how many bottles of wine are in 4 litres, as though they understand that math isn't a strong suit for their audience. As for their claim of being the "2010 Winery of the Year"? Well, you'll notice that accolade doesn't factor in this box of liquefied rabbit turd. It's the winery that's good, not the swill contained therein. But hey, let's not rule out this ogre piss as being a key factor to the winery's success. Maybe they just extracted all the liquid hate from the rest of the wine and jammed it into these boxes.

Ugh, we barely drank the whole thing.

A Zooper Awesome Day

Last weekend we made an awesome discovery. Do you know when the best time to go to the zoo is? When the weather is crappy! I was very hesitant to go on Sunday because it looked like it was about to rain. Super cloudy, muggy… not sure it was going to work out. The thing is, two important things happen when it’s cloudy and looks like it’s about to rain:

1) People don’t want to go, and thus the crowds are smaller
2) The animals aren’t sweltering in the heat, and are thus more likely to move around and be active.

And it didn’t rain! Well, not until later that night when we had the storm of the century, but who cares. We had the best day at the zoo in the history of days at the zoo.

Sure, let’s get the obligatory “Oh, zoos are cruel and the animals shouldn’t be penned in like that yada yada” disclaimer out of the way. Whatever, Taronga Zoo is the best zoo in the world. You need to teach people about the dangers animals face, you need to make kids grow up into adults who care about animals, and you need to carry out breeding programs for endangered animals. And on top of that, where else can you put an expression like this on a grown man’s face:

Also, this is the view from the zoo. Tough to argue that the animals don’t get a good view:

As a last point before I start talking about the visit itself, it was $44. And worth every penny.

Special thanks to Martha who was visiting when we went and took all these photos because I’m a dumbass and forgot my camera.


So let’s talk some animals! Did you know that Koalas jump? I had no idea. I thought they just slept (saw that), ate eucalyptus (saw that), and looked cute (check). And then we saw a Koala that was on one branch who decided he wanted to be on another one. And he jumped! Really didn’t see that one coming. It’s like being in South America and looking at a sloth when it suddenly flips up into a handstand and starts doing pushups.

Very cool.

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We hit the tiger enclosure by chance right when it was feeding and were fortunate enough that there was a large rock we could stand on so we had a clear view of the action:

That’s the flesh of the zookeeper it’s licking off its lips. You’d think that would make it hard to find zookeepers but it’s more a matter of people really want to work at the zoo, they just don’t want to get assigned to the tiger cage.

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One of the highlights for me was this snake:

It’s called an Inland Taipan and is the most venomous land snake in the world. Seriously? This guy? How can someone so dangerous look so innocuous? It should really look a lot more deadly than it does.

There, much better.

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Aren’t elephants fantastic? Just look at this guy:

One caveat I’ll throw out there… this guy does NOT like people. I say this because the first thing he did was back up into the crowd, take a gigantic leak, and fart in everyone’s faces. Oh yeah, and he dropped his dink out before taking the leak:

Yeah… I’m pretty sure I got the gender right this time. That’s quite the ugh, package. Some observations:

1) As Martha said, you don’t need a fancy car when you’re hung like an elephant
2) Even controlling for size, that thing is pretty damn big
3) I can’t be sure, but I think he’s circumcised

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Ok, there was a lot of animals at the zoo, so I’m not going to bore you with every one we saw. So this is going to be the last one, and it was the animal that I was strangely pumped to see. Meerkats:

There’s only a few in this shot, but they live in these big communities of burrows in the Kalahari desert. They don’t have any body fat so they have to scrounge on the surface every day, which means they’re pretty vulnerable to predators as they’re looking for food. They’ve coped by having at least one member of the group always on lookout for predators, standing up on its hind legs to get a better view. Here’s a shot from the wild:

This guy is pumped for action. He knows the team is depending on him, and is ready with constant vigilance to identify a threat the moment it presents itself. As a result, I thought it would be cool to see that community at work in the zoo. Instead, what we saw was this:

What the hell? Where’s your concern for your brethren? You’re on duty for god’s sake, show some intensity! Sadly, here is the real sadness in the zoo. Regular food and water just can’t help but take away some of that natural instinct. So while the wild Meerkats get this:

The zoo Meerkats get this:

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All in all it was a great day at the zoo. Topics not covered include seeing a Snow Leopard jump around, Kangaroos cruising, a Komodo Dragon looking like the badassest of all badasses, and coolest of all we saw a platypus doing barrel rolls in his tank and swimming around like a madman. Amongst other things. Long story short, definitely check out the zoo if you go to Sydney.


COMPLETE TANGENT:
GO CANUCKS GO!!!

Visitor update #4: Martha rolled into town for a visit! She’s off elsewhere right now but will be back to hang with us again next weekend. Dave was also supposed to come, but he thought he was Spiderman and broke his ankle. Smrt move Dave, we look forward to seeing you when you heal up.
#1: Sylvia
#2: Timmaaaay!
#3: Amelia, Daniel, and family
#4: Martha

For the Love of God, Someone Please Just Get Me the Internet

Going to be a short post today, and I’m sure you’d like to know why. It's because I’m tired of having to post these things from a pub. Do you know what I said to Erika this morning? I said I would check my email at work. At work! I’ve started to refer to the pub as “work”? That’s unacceptable. WHAT IS SO DAMNED HARD ABOUT GIVING ME THE INTERNET! It’s 2012 for crying out loud. I’m not asking them to breed me winged white rhinos that will fly about the country with packets of ones and zeroes. Just hook me up with the thing that already exists, thank you very much. I’m 100% certain that I would have an easier time getting the internet in rural Afghanistan than in Sydney. I’m also 99.99% certain that the preceding sentence contained no hyperbole.

Can you believe they give a timeframe of 10-20 business days? That’s a month! It’s ludicrous, but I’m patient. I think: “I’m going to wait until I’m entirely justified in screaming my head off” (which I’ve been assured by multiple people is the only way to get internet around here). So I wait. And I call. And the guy says that my request was entered but never processed. Are you kidding me?

PAUL: Are you kidding me?

GUY: Uh, no. We’re really sorry about that. What would you like to do?

PAUL: I want the express 1-3 day setup, and I don’t want to pay for it. I want the internet in my home, this week.

GUY: Well, that’s usually an extra fee on top of the regular installation costs.

PAUL: So you want me to pay extra to get my internet in 1-3 days when I’ve already waited 20 days? You have to agree with me that’s ridiculous right?

GUY: Umm… I’m going to go talk to someone. Do you mind if I put you on hold?

PAUL: Yeah, go ahead.

MUSAK: Doo dee doo doo… love you baby… doo doot doo… hold me… doo doo… we hate customers… doot doo be doo… lovin’ yoooouu

PAUL: …wait, what?

GUY: Hi sir. We can do all of the installation for $79 and have it in 1-3 days (normally $225)

PAUL: Fine, whatever.

Please note, that was a week ago and I don’t have internet yet. If it isn’t hooked up by the time the NHL playoffs hit I’m going to head down to the iiNet headquarters and start throwing people off the roof.


COMPLETE TANGENT:
BMO can also go hump a moving Buick for their complete inability to wire money internationally. I’d get more competent service from a room full of monkeys hucking feces at a fax machine. That is all.


UPDATE:

It's over. I finally lost it. After a few choice words regarding sex and travel I am now in the search for a new internet company and will probably miss the first round of the playoffs.

I called Erika after getting off the phone with iiNet, still swaddled in rage. We have a rule around here of "no drinking before 5pm" but I asked Erika for an exception. We agreed that this was an appropriate situation for it. She said that I had to limit myself to one glass though, which I did:

Thank God she didn't ask me to limit myself to a standard drink:

At any rate, this is the last you'll hear from me about the internet. It's not funny anymore.


BTW, if you want the full story here's the email I sent to Paul Cahill, the General Manager of Customer Support for iiNet. I can never resist trying to be a little tongue in cheek, but it's not exactly a humour piece:

Dear Mr. Cahill,

I just wanted to send you a note about how catastrophically bad my experience with your company has been since I first signed up. To summarize:

- I signed up, asking for 1-3 day connection

- A month later I still had no connection or contact from your company
- I called and was told that the order had never been processed. It was agreed that I would be given the 1-3 day service for free and half the regular connection waived
- A week later I still had no internet
- I called and was told that they had checked and there was no phone line installed, and that it would be $300 to do so.
- This is ridiculous by the way. I live in quite an old building with established jacks in the walls. The concept of it not having a line makes no sense to me.
- I then asked when this fact was going to be shared with me since nobody had been in contact, to which I was told the technician had been trying to get in touch but was unable to
- I pointed out that I had not received a single email message or phone call from anyone, to which the person on the phone asserted that the tech was right there and had definitely done so. This assertion is tantamount to claiming I was lying, something which I am positive the tech was doing themselves.
- I then proceeded to lose my freaking mind.

Mr. Cahill, I encourage you to listen to the phone calls I placed to your company. Up until the end of the last call I was reasonable and clear headed. When you get to the point where I fly off the handle (something I have never done before) don’t think of it as just an angry guy being angry. Ask yourself “What could my company possibly have done to drive a person to this point?”

I can’t believe the difficulty I have had with your company. I sincerely hope this is the worst customer service I ever experience in my life, it has certainly been so up until this point.

Paul Parsons

The Wonderful Animals of Oz

There’s a lot of animals right around our place, which I guess isn’t surprising. To most locals they’re probably no more exotic than I’d find a crow or a raccoon, but it’s still pretty cool given that I’m not a local, so they’re all new to me. Let’s start with things I have actually seen in my backyard:

BACKYARD:

Mockingbirds are all over the place. Having just read The Hunger Games while here, it’s pretty cool to have these around since they’re the template for the mockingjays that feature heavily in the book. As a short sideline, The Hunger Games is fantastic, please read it before you see the movie if you can. And if you can’t then read it after. It’s an incredible piece of writing, although if you actually think it clocks in as a “Young Adult” novel after reading it you might as well break out Grimm’s fairy tales for your 5-year old. The movie leaves some of the grisly out, for sure.

And then someone pointed out that these are actually Magpies not Mockingbirds and totally ruined for me.

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Our tree filled up with Rainbow Lorikeets and they were swooping and singing all over the place. The written medium may not be the best place to convey the moment but I’ll try anyway.

Cawoot! Woot! Woot! Tweee… tweee… tweeeoo! Tweeeoo!

WHOOSH

Cawootwee! Cawootee! Tweetweetweeoot! Cwa! Cwa!

REPEAT

I think you get the point.

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This is a mosquito that I crushed. Eff you mosquito.

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Geckos are awesome because they:
a) Eat bugs that annoy me, and
b) Move faster than I thought anything was capable of. 100% fast-twitch fibers these guys.

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Yes, that is a whole tree full of bats. Flying Foxes to be exact, and they all have bodies about the length of my forearm. These suckers are so big that they actually glide. I didn’t know bats could glide.

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These guys have only showed up in our backyard once, but they were pretty cool. Some kind of woodpecker? No, it's an honest-to-god Kookaburra! Did you know these things eat meat? I thought they just chewed gum or something like that. Regardless, they clearly have a sense of style. Judging from the thickness of their necks they need to spend a little less time in the gym though. C’mon guys, maybe take a spin on the elliptical next time?

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This is our neighbour’s cat. Although we haven’t seen our neighbour in a long time, and he lives on our porch, and he tries to come in, and he meows at us when he’s hungry. So maybe he’s our cat now. I call him Cat, although we’ve since learned his name is Natasha. So I’m mulling over the idea of referring to him as her now. Anyways, we’ve only fed him once when we had some extra prawns, but I’m hesitant to let him get too attached since the possum controls him with its mind at night. Seriously, I’m not joking:

It’s fucking creepy.

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Speaking of creepy, we have a wormhole to another dimension in our bathroom window:

Actually, it’s just this crazy spider who started to build a web in our bathroom window (which doesn’t close, but that’s another story). At first I didn’t know what he was doing, it looked like there was no rhyme or reason to the web and I’ll admit, I thought that maybe he wasn’t as far along the evolutionary chain as the spiders back home. But who cares, if he protected me from mosquitos I’m on board. Then after a while I realized that not only was his web not random, it was freaking complex:

He’s built a damn tunnel to funnel bugs into our home so that he can catch them en route!

Hmm… funnel web. Where have I heard that before? I should look it up. I’ll try “funnel web spider” and see what comes up:

#4 Deadliest Spider in the World - Funnel Web Spider
Funnel-Web spiders are found in Australia close to Sydney. The bites from these spiders are dangerous and can cause a number of frightening symptoms in as little as 10 or 15 minutes. Of greatest concern are symptoms such as difficulty breathing and coma. Lesser symptoms include chills, fever, vomiting, numbness of mouth and lips and drooping eyelids. If bitten by this spider, seek an antivenom.

Hmm… the 4th deadliest spider in the world? Well that’s grossly inconvenient. Sure, I enjoy not having a mosquito problem but isn’t that like preventing mosquitoes by throwing some DDT in my drinking water? I figured I should take a picture of him up close so I could verify the identity:

Well THAT didn’t calm my nerves. Fortunately for us, when we sent a picture of the guy’s nest to the natural history museum (who is amenable to this kind of thing) they said that he’s actually a black house spider, which isn’t dangerous. They also eat red back spiders which ARE dangerous. So that’s good. In fact, the only problem we've encountered is that he laid an egg and we spent half an hour the other day squishing dozens of baby spiders all over our bathroom ceiling. I don’t think I’m very good at guessing animal genders.

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Speaking of spiders, some of the ones kicking around here look extremely badass. Probably the most badass one of the lot is this crazy web-spinner guy who does the job of orb spiders back home:

If they made tiny Harley’s this guy would drive one. And their webs aren’t small either, they’re about 2 feet tall and 3-dimensional with all sorts of different planes to catch bugs. This guy knows his shit.


NON-BACKYARD:
Crazily enough, everything I've shown up to now we’ve seen in our backyard. Maybe the bats weren’t hanging there, but they’ve definitely done a flyby. So here’s some things that we saw elsewhere.

This weird curved-bill guy is an Ibis, but I call them “banana storks” which I think we can all agree is a better name. You only see them along the shoreline or on the part of the grass at the university that students aren’t supposed to walk on, so I assume they have PhD’s or something. Which would make them Dr. Banana (yes, I know it should actually make them “Dr. Stork” but work with me here).

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I don’t know what this is called, might be a Noisy Miner? That's not a joke by the way. We saw it in the Blue Mountains, it dive-bombed Erika, and she freaked out a little. Then I laughed and she hit me so I filed a spousal abuse report. It’s the only protection I have.

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Let me tell you, did this guy ever catch us by surprise. In retrospect I can't believe Erika even got a picture off. We were just walking along the shore and BOOM, he tries to take Erika’s leg off. Obviously I pushed her out of the way but he got her purse (probably because it was leather) so I had to dive in after him. I’ve seen Crocodile Hunter enough times that I figured I could handle it. Still, it’s harder than you think. If you don’t grab the snout juuuust right you can get a finger caught in there. Which sucks I might add. If I had to do it again I think I’d do a much better job, mostly because I don’t have that finger to get caught.

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This is a Purple Swamphen and if you didn’t believe that birds descended from the dinosaurs you’ve never seen one of these guys walk. It looked like a friggen velociraptor. And c’mon… doesn’t that thing look like a dino with feathers?

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Really cool and REALLY flat bug.

Yep, so those are the animals we’ve seen so far, or a reasonable chunk of them anyway. There’s also lots of ants, but you’ve seen ants for crying out loud. If you want to know what they look like just do this: Close your eyes… now picture an ant. That’s what they look like. Oh yeah, and Erika saw a spider the size of a dinner plate.

See you next week!


COMPLETE TANGENT:
I say “see you next week” because we still don’t have internet. They say it takes 10-20 business days. Yes, a month to get internet. Tomorrow is Day 20, and they also say that billing begins when service starts, or at 20 days. Whichever comes first. So if they think I’m going to pay a dime for internet that I haven’t gotten that I waited a month for they can kiss my rosy red behind. Which means that I’ll probably have to cancel my order, swich companies, and wait again. It’s FANTASTIC! And this is why I only get internet on the one day a week that I walk down to the pub and check it. I like Sydney, I really do. But the companies here couldn’t give a popcorn fart about customer service. I think every call center has a poster on the wall that says “Always remember: The customer can go fuck themselves.”

Sigh.

Sweet Merciful Crap!

Did I ever tell you about the time I dropped my asshole off a cliff? More on that later.

Last weekend Erika and I went to the Blue Mountains so Erika could catch fish for her research as well as doing some sightseeing. This is what we knew about the Blue Mountains before we left:

1) They are blue in some manner
2) They are a mountain of some sort

We’d also been told that they were an awesome must-see but we really didn’t know why. It had also been noted that when they say “Blue Mountains” what they actually mean is “Blue Hills” by Canadian standards, so in general we expected to be underwhelmed by the scale of things. With that in mind, off we went.

It was wet, and apparently far wetter than it normally is, which is to say that it was Vancouver wet. The morning we left it was actually raining so hard in Sydney that we didn’t bother leaving for several hours, so I guess the fact that it was wet in the Blue Mountains hardly qualifies as surprising.

We stayed in a place called Wentworth Falls at a little hotel above an Irish Pub. On St. Patrick’s Day nonetheless, which was cool.

*SIDE NOTE: It was so busy that we ended up waiting an hour and a half for dinner. Actually, it wasn’t – our order never got put in by the bartender. So when I told the server we’d been waiting an hour and a half for dinner she gave me this “Why the hell didn’t you say anything?” look, to which I responded with a “Lady, I’m Canadian. I didn’t want to bother you” shoulder shrug*

We figured that since we were in Wentworth Falls and had a few hours to kill before dinner we should at least go to check out these alleged falls, and conveniently there was a trail that led from right next to our hotel down to the falls.

Let me tell you about hiking the Darwin trail in the rain:

PROS:
1) No spiderwebs across the trail.
2) Did not get bitten by snakes.

CONS:
1) Got soaking wet despite my craptastic gore-tex jacket that can just go fuck itself already.
2) Had to take four lateral steps for every one forward to avoid the mud.
3) Was following Erika who is about a hundred pounds lighter than me, meaning she just skips over ground that I sink up to my ankles in.
4) Being at the bottom of a ravine with houses on either side the entire way, which is an oh-so magical experience.
5) Getting slapped in the face like a Japanese game show contestant every 8 steps by some spring-loaded Eucalyptus tree that is trying to violently moisturize my face.

To say my expectations were low when we finally got there after an hour and a half of hiking would be an understatement. And then we were rewarded with this:

ISN’T THAT SPECTACULAR!

Wait, let me put Erika into the shot so you have some perspective of scale:

Not exactly worth our effort. Dejected, we set off to return home. Along the way though, we saw a sign that said there was a scenic view ahead. Or we could walk to the carpark and call it a day. We figured meh, what the hell. Let’s check out the view.

And that’s when I dropped my asshole off a cliff:

Oh yeah, and those waterfalls? Apparently that was the Weeping Rock. This is Wentworth Falls:

So, yeah. Maybe I shouldn’t be so quick to jump to ornery conclusions.

By the way, you should check out the YouTube video I made, just follow this link. It does a WAY better job of expressing the scale of what we saw, although to be honest nothing can match the real thing. It was friggen amazing.


AND NOW A COMPLETE TANGENT:
You know what else is awesome? Eating at IKEA. You can jam back a plate of meatballs and mashed potatoes for $6, and you can even get them to substitute extra lindenberry sauce instead of the disgusting gravy. And that’s not all… hot dogs are a dollar! A freaking dollar! If this place were in walking distance I’d probably jam back an average of 12 hot dogs per week. Not only would I save money but the nitrates would likely preserve me so well that I’d live past the century mark. Top it off with a 50 cent ice cream cone and you’re golden.

For the record, I’ve never eaten a plate of meatballs & mashed potatoes, a hot dog, and an ice cream cone in the same visit. And a piece of schnitzel. And bought a half kilo of chocolate for $5, which would be a great deal if that happened. It’s all lies and conjecture if Erika tells you otherwise.


More visitors, as Erika’s grad school friends Amelia and Daniel, with their kids Cailin (Kaylen? Caylen? K’aylin?) and Hannah! And these one’s don’t even live in Australia!

Visitor update #3: Amelia, Daniel, and family
#1: Sylvia
#2: Timmaaaay!
#3: Amelia, Daniel, and family

Mmmm… Zesty!

Despite my previous comments about the affordable nature of K-Mart, don’t make the mistake of thinking that impression can be extended out to Sydney at large. Sydney is hella expensive. For instance, our place is $380/week (they do everything per week here). That’s roughly $1680/month for a place that while nice, isn’t exactly the Shangri-La. Granted, we have a terrific view, but considering most of the places we saw were complete hovels for $350 I think it’s more a matter of us having gotten a great deal than anything else.

And it’s not just the housing. Pretty much everything here is more expensive than Vancouver and certainly more than Seattle. For the most part it’s not so bad though, once you commit to living frugally you can get by. Ground beef is $16/kg? We’ll eat sausage for $5 a pack. Coca-Cola is $3 for a bottle? I’ll have tea at home for 5 cents a bag. Cigarettes are $17/pack? Good thing I don’t smoke! Beer is $17 for a six pack? I guess we’ll just… wait, what?

BOTTLE GUY: That’ll be $17 dollars.

ME: Come again?

BOTTLE GUY: Aht’s $17 dollars therer mate.

ME: For a 6-pack of beer? Um, would it happen to be some kind of magical beer where the hops are watered exclusively with unicorn pee and harvested at midnight by pixies? I don’t need that kind of luxury, just give me the “water and migrant workers” beer, where does that get us?

BOTTLE GUY: Well, therer’s Unilever Lite. Tastes like it was filtered through a koaler if you ask me.

ME: How much is that?

BOTTLE GUY: $15.95.

ME: :o

BOTTLE GUY: It’s a little weak through, only 3% alcrohol.

ME: Well that’s just ridiculous, back home we use that for mix. What’s the unicorn stuff clock in at?

BOTTLE GUY: 3.8%

(bry the way, if you want to do an Australian accent yrou need to thrower in a lot of extra r’rs. Ir’m still wororking on irt. Of coorse, if yoo wahnt too doo ah Cahnaydiun ahccehnt yoo joost nehver yoose heyrd vowels, eh? Now brawk to ourer regularly schredruled bloggring)

You have no idea how weak the beer is here. In all fairness, for a mere $17.95 you can get a 6-pack of beer that’s 4.8% alcohol, but the majority of it is 3.5%. I told them that it wasn’t uncommon to see 5.5% at home and they looked at me like I was asking where they kept the rubbing alcohol. Clearly beer is not going to be part of the day-to-day rotation for Erika and I, and hard alcohol is right out of the question. The crappiest vodka you can find is $30 for 700mL (when you buy two at once) and you have to mix it with a dollar’s worth of 7-Up per drink. It’s even worse at a pub or restaurant - check this out:

Don’t expect a classic USA overpour either, they’ll measure that thing out like it’s a uranium shipment to North Korea.

Which understandably leaves us in a bit of a pickle. What are two forlorn globetrotters to do when accosted by high priced liquor on a small bankroll? Enter this bad-boy:

YEEEEAAAAAAAHHHHHHH!

4.4 Litre box ‘o wine? Now you’re talking my language!

I would assume that at this point you, the reader, are wondering “What might a box of wine like this cost? Surely a classic dry red which is full of richness and body yet soft on the palate would be at least $50?” I concede your argument, but it is less than that.

“$35?” you say? Nay, lower still.

“$25?” Alas, you are still too high.

“Certainly it couldn’t be less than $20? Below that a merchant would feel too deep a sense of personal shame to sell such a product!”

$12.95

For $12.95, you can get 4.4 Litres of wine. Here, I’ll save you the math on how many drinks that is, it’s printed right on the box:

Mmm, preservative 202,220... gluuahhhh...

Now let’s see… $12.95… divided by 42…

Well then, that’s $0.31 a glass! This means that beer is 864% more expensive than the delicious boxed wine I brought home one sunny Sunday afternoon. That said, I guess “delicious” is a subjective term. When we first had a glass Erika was unhesitant in her judgement:

ERIKA: “It’s awful.”

ME: “I don’t mind it.”

You see, Erika had forgotten the fundamental law of tastiness:

QUALITY / (% OF INCOME) = TASTINESS

Once reminded of this fact, Erika quickly came around:

Yes, that’s her squeezing the last dregs of the wine bag like it’s the udder of the mystical beaux vine, patron animal of poor-assed drunkards. And is a whole lot more affordable than unicorn piss!

Where Humour Comes From

I think I’ve been relying on ranting too much as a source of humour for this blog and as a result have come across as a bit too negative about our experience down here, particularly given how many people are sending messages of a “don’t worry, it’ll get better!” nature. We’re actually having a really good time so far, and with our place all set up now we’ll be able to turn some of our downtime energies towards exploration and entertainment. It’s just that... well, most humour at its root is complaining. Think about it:

Seinfeld: “What’s the deal with…?”

Chris Rock: “You know what the problem is with…?”

Not to mention the gazillion sitcoms that revolve around insecurity, which is essentially complaining about yourself. In general, nice and happy just isn’t all that funny. You need some sort of oomph to push a good joke forward. Now granted this isn’t a universal rule, not all humour needs to be complaining. For instance: Australians want nothing more than to stop for you at the crosswalk. It doesn’t matter where, when, what time of day… they will slam that car to a halt for you in seconds, waving you across with smoke still streaming from their tires. The other day I walked up to the crosswalk and this guy was roaring down the street. He saw that he wasn’t going to be able to stop in time so in desperation he jammed on his brakes and jerked his car into a truck full of kittens. I think his last living act was to wave me across. True story.

That said, I generally do find that if you throw complaining into an otherwise boring anecdote you can really start mining some comedy. In the interest of proving my point I’ve taken the liberty of providing some examples:

Story #1:
Up the street from us there’s an avocado tree, which is awesome because I love avocados and if they’re growing on a tree I get them for free. Just one of the things I love about our place. (Great story right? Not really)

Now add the complaining:

Does anyone have any idea how to tell when an avocado is ready to be picked? I want to pick some of these avocadoes but I’m at a total loss: avocadoes are green when they start growing, green when they’re ready to be picked, green when they’re ripe to eat, and green when they’re past their prime. They spend their entire lives looking exactly the same. Not to mention there’s a 45 minute window where they transition from “Pre-Judge Dredd Stallone abs” to “Bat guano jammed inside shoe leather”; if you don’t grab them somewhere in that timeframe they’re pretty much inedible. Granted you could bludgeon a cow to death with the ones currently on the tree, so I’ve probably got a little waiting to do.

Story #2:
We live in a really pleasant neighborhood with a good mix of folk. It’s not uncommon to wander past a guy in a suit, then a girl with hair dyed pink, and then a young family taking a stroll.

Now my complaint:

Ok. I get it. Babies require a ton of stuff to keep them alive. It’s not the 1970’s and nobody carts their kid around in a stroller that folds up smaller than an umbrella anymore. But when you’re already marching around with your kid in a stroller the size of a pregnant rhino do you really need the extra coffee holder that juts an extra 6 inches off the side? I just want to get past you without doing the steeple chase through an adjacent café!

Story #3:
The University here is really quite beautiful. It has a much more British flair to it than what we’re accustomed to in North America – very well-manicured lawns and majestic stone buildings. It’s kind of neat to see the cricket pitches all over the place as well. I’m sure Erika will enjoy working there.

Aaaaaand…

Why on god’s green earth would you build a university like a fortress? Honestly, this place is impenetrable. Did Vikings range this far south? Were seaborne samurai a threat from the north? If you’re going to build a University shouldn’t the students be able to navigate it? To illustrate, here is the official campus map, which I assume was passed out to invading forces:

For starters, this map is ungodly hard to read. On top of that, once you go to the school it is also abundantly clear that the map is also totally inaccurate for purposes of navigating the campus. Seeing as how the school of cartography isn’t quite up to snuff, let’s help them get a more accurate representation of the university (click the images for a larger view):

Not only is it virtually impossible to even get into the school, once there you discover that every possible route across campus is cut off. There are no shortcuts, and I’m fairly certain that even if invaders did manage to broach the walls they could just retreat like Russians in winter. I’m surprised anyone even graduates.

So don’t fret folks, the moral of the story is that Sydney is great. We’re having a good time so far, and even though it’s been a torrential downpour the last couple of days it’s still warm enough to sit on the deck and watch it fall, and cools things down enough to sleep well at night. What’s to complain about? Well… there is the internet. Who gives an install window of 1-20 days for crying out loud!



Visitor update #2: Timmaaaay!
#1: Sylvia
#2: Timmaaaay!

My Fridge is Vaguely Racist

It’s incredible the way you change your view of the world along with your income bracket. For instance: K-Mart is now awesome. Do you have any idea how cheap crap is there? We bought a 24 piece dishware set for $15.00. An 80-piece starter kitchen set for $69.00. 80 Pieces! And we only threw out 5 or 6 things straight from the box. Don’t get me wrong, I wouldn’t go serving tea to the queen off this stuff and there’s an 8% chance we’re going to get lead poisoning from it, but a deal is a deal.

Erika and I finally got a place and it’s fantastic. In fact, we were offered 4 of the 5 places we applied for, with the 5th going to the landlord’s friend. Turns out it’s not as hard to get a place as we thought, all you have to do is be so anal retentive that you send a 3-part email with 27 attachments and enough details that anyone in the CC line can freely steal your identity. Boom! Apartment. And we’re pretty happy with what we got. Here’s the view from our deck:

The amazing thing is that this was only $160 more a month than some of the egregious crapholes we were looking at and is in a great area. So that has us pumped. Of course we didn’t have any stuff when we moved in, but that certainly didn’t stop us. In fact, we spent the first night on the floor:

Doesn’t Erika look all cozy with that big sleeping bag? Yeahhhh… I’m a bit larger than her:

In case you were wondering, those are in fact towels I’m lying on (and I’m wearing a Rambo shirt I got for free that’s shockingly comfortable). That’s pretty much all we had until we hit Ikea for a bed and other goods. By the way, going to Ikea to outfit your home is actually not the most depressing thing you can do as a 34 year old professional married to a doctor. In actual fact, the most depressing thing you can do is to find those same items for cheaper at K-Mart, buy them, and then return the other stuff back to Ikea. Little waft of shame there, not gonna lie. But hey, at least we got a bed! Unfortunately, given that we bought it at Ikea we would have to assemble it. With tools. That we didn’t own. That led to this:

Which was great fun. Nothing like a couple of nights on the floor in spiderland to help you sleep right. At least it was only one night; another trip to K-Mart and we set our bed straight:

By the way yes, those shelves in the corner are our only storage. I was going to remove a shelf and hang some clothes up but we haven’t bought hangers yet. I don’t want to buy hangers. WHO BUYS HANGERS?! As an added note, apparently the spiders on the floor create a 2-foot zone where mosquitos don’t fly. Once we got the bed up off the ground they were free to attack me, and I am now harvested for sustenance by my mosquito overlords 3-5 times a night while Erika has yet to be bitten. Granted I sleep virtually uncovered by anything it’s so warm and muggy at night which makes me a much bigger target. I only wear shorts so that the mosquitos don’t get me in any sensitive areas and I’ve started wrapping my hands in T-shirts at night so they don’t bite my fingers. Erika thinks this is tremendously funny but I’d way rather be bitten on the back than the fingers.

The last thing to do was buy the cheapest fridge I could find and this is what we ended up with:

Hang on, let me show you the brand name:

Doesn’t the name Changhong sound like someone making fun of a Chinese company? That’s the first thing that hopped to mind when I was buying it, and it doesn’t help that for the last 3 days I thought the company’s name was Chang Chong, which would really sound like racially insensitive mockery. Heck, I may have been under that impression until the moment I wrote this paragraph. This unfortunately means that for the last 3 days I have been telling people the brand name of my fridge was Chang Chong, which potentially makes me the guy throwing around racially insensitive jokes. Fortunately I have this photo to recalibrate my sense of what constitutes racial awkwardness:

Wow. You just can’t make this stuff up.


To close, we’re going to keep a running tally of peeps who’ve managed to visit us despite our being in Sydney, Australia. First up was Sylvia who was in town for an exam and grabbed dinner with us. Sylvia is visitor #1!