The Didgeridoo Diaries

I’ve been gone for TEN MONTHS now. Wow. That is a long time. Almost a WHOLE YEAR for those who aren’t so great at counting. I am really great at counting.

Actually, in this whole unintentional process of learning about myself, I have come to a vry obvious conclusion: I really appreciate routine and stability. This might have been well-known to all my friends for years, but until now had really harboured this bizarre idea that I was a very go-with-the-flow people who enjoys frequent change. Surprise! I’m not.

I love my new monotonous job that revolves around entering data into Microsoft Excel and SAP. I like my routine of getting up, going to the gym or walking to work with the cohort of trainer-clad Sydneysiders in suits and backpacks power walking downtown to Darling Park.

I head home at 5:00 PM, to be in on time to manage the hostel from 5:30 PM onwards. I have my workout routine back on as well. My gym, the best gym I’ve ever been too (Fitness First — a big chain in Australia), has a great view of the Opera House and Sydney Harbour Bridge.

Life is good.

However, I have missed a lot of stuff since I left home. As the title implies, four weddings and a funeral to be exact.

When I graduated university, everyone just did the same old thing for a couple years and life was fairly uneventful. But now, everyone has gone a changin’! I told one of my friends that I take full credit for this and coined myself the Catalyst for Change (TM). Like the initial force that got everything moving along a different inertial path. (I’m aware I am in no way related to the following events, but claiming full responsibility gives me that warm fuzzy feeling that I’m still connected.)

I didn’t just miss weddings and a funeral either. A friend of mine moved to Saudi to be amongst the ninjas. Another friend moved to the UK. THREE of my friends now live with their boyfriend/girlfriend. A couple of my more acquaintance friends popped out babies. And my grandfather died… but that was the funeral I missed.

I’m going to go home to a completely different world where everyone has gone and got themselves crazy grown-up lives and I’ve taken one really long vacation and accrued a few more wrinkles. I’m homeostatic.

And along the lines of health, as I’m so wont to always obsess about… If you’re Canadian, you should note that you do in fact need your provincial health care to be extended to qualify for travel/health insurance abroad. This is a point that has become REALLY inconvienient as I’m past the 6.7 month limit of extending it, have no insurance, but now have a painful cavity, another eye issue, chronic bed bug bites, and a mole I’d really like removed. (Last, but not least. I hate that mole.)

So it’s a really good thing I’m making $25/hr and living for free or else I’d surely be broke just trying to get my old-ass fixed. Another reason to travel while young, because I’m betting getting my cavity filled (which I should have done in Bangkok) is a heck of a lot cheaper than getting a hip replaced.

Last fall, while I was still planning my whirlwind trip to Asia and Oceania, my anal-retentive researching led me to believe that Melbourne would be the ideal Australian city to settle in for a bit and get a job on my Working Holiday Visa. But low and behold, I found Melbourne to be exactly like Toronto (with the exception of having very cool secret alley ways), which pretty much defeated the purpose of travelling to the other side of the world to experience something different.

I high-tailed it back to Sydney after catching some flicks at Melbourne’s International Film Festival, and within three days had landed a job doing Sales & Promotions for one of Australia’s leading telecommunications company. I was pretty stoked. I got a free laptop, free wireless broadband to ease my internet addiction, and best of all, a coworker I met in training offered me a free place to stay down in her three bedroom house on the beach. Free accommodation in addition to a wage that was TWICE what I anticipated making! I was on that deal like white on rice.

Life, I felt at this moment, just couldn’t get any better. But, as they the omnipotent say, there truly is no such thing as a free lunch…

In the off chance that I have any regular readers left after my long quasi-hiatus from updating and posting any photos… I am now about to dish the true dirt on my most recent three months living and working in and around Sydney. I felt reluctant bagging out my job and coworker on the internet, but since I resigned well it’s fair game now! Of course, names will be changed to protect… well really to protect myself.

So here goes. The next series of entries will be back-dated to chronicle my past few months of utter terribleness.

AUSTRALIA IS FAT!

Now, I’m still holding true to my prediction that China is not far behind, but getting back to this fat Aussie thing…

It’s hard to believe. I mean, America has people who are so fat that they are lifted out of their homes with cranes, through there roofs. How can Aussies possibly get fatter than that?

Well, they’re already the SECOND FATTEST NATION. (Go Canada, I thought it would be us, but rest assured, we’re up there too… it’s probably that scientific researchers just have taken surveys in Canada yet. It’s too cold. “Hey boss, I want to go find out how fat people are in other countries… right now I’m thinking I’ll poll Australia, Mexico, Italy, France, and anywhere else that I’d like to get a grant to go to for vacat…errr, work.”)

I haven’t seen any mondo mondo fat people in Australia… except Melbourne. But everywhere else seemed normal. And by ‘normal’ I mean, North American normal so a little bit chunky. No offence, but lets call a spade a spade here. Spade.

I’ve gotten fatter in Australia, and now I know why. It’s not my fault. Australia just makes people fat. I bet we could sue them. Hmmm…

Anyways, I’ve often thought that the image of Aussies we get on tv in North America — the hot, sub bleached hair and tanned beach body in Roxy ads — is not quite right. In fact, I haven’t met too many true Aussies who I’d even consider moderately attractive. And now the proof is in the proverbial jiggly rolly polly pudding. With the sole exception being surfer dudes.

As alluded to in my last post, I had to find a new place to live rather urgently last weekend when my coworker/roommate/lunatic exploded with craziness. She took the company rental car we were (supposed to be) sharing to pick up some prawns with her alcoholic ex-boyfriend who just moved back in by surprise and in that time, I packed my bags and made a run for it like a refugee.

It was back to Sydney (again) for me and now I know never to make the mistake again of leaving. The only issue with living in Sydney is that it’s expensive. We’re talking about $150 per week to share a room in an apartment downtown. Not share the apartment, but share the room. No good.

I booked myself into the Blue Parrot, a cozy ’boutique’ hostel in Potts Point. I liked it so much that I took an evening manager position working 5:30-8:30PM from Monday-Thursdays in exchange for a private room. It’s a nice deal. It feels homey and comfortable here, but best of all they have a strict no-crazies policy and everyone here is pretty chill and relaxed.

The job is finally going well too. Meaning, I made a lot of sales when I headed up to the Penrith Caravan & Camping show this weekend to promote wireless broadband to retirees with lots of coin to burn. I like them. And they like wireless. Plus I got to stay in a cottage. Only unlike at home the cottage was not on a lake but moreso like a trailer park, but still, it was my own whole mini-house for three days and that is cool.

Where have I been? Living in a loony bin for the past 4 weeks, that’s where. But I finally fled the coop last weekend and am now safely back in Sydney central.

As it turns out, my ex-roommate (who is still a current co-worker) was a little… hmm… how to put this inoffensively? Crazy. Yes, that’s about the most descriptive and tame thing I can say after four weeks of sheer madness.

It was an experience. A learning experience. As they like to say in ‘corporate’, there were some factors that combined ’synergistically’ to create an ‘unfavourable’ situation. I have made note of these factors to never again mix them all together at once. Please run from people who exhibit all of the following all at the same time:

• Pregnancy
• Anxiety disorder
• A recent break-up
• A career in theater (we don’t want no drama, no no no drama)
• Money and spending issues
• A strong desire to make racist comments
• General smelliness

Run from a person who combines all of these traits into a toxic soup and please avoid, at all costs, even if it means moving back to an expensive city that will make you broke on your traveler’s budget, avoid spending 24 hours a day with them 7 days a week.

Well, it’s been both a busy and not busy past couple of weeks. After landing my job and doing two days of training, I moved in with a coworker who has a spare room down in the Wollongong area about 80 km south of Sydney.

We’ve been on our own as far as work, so we canvassed the Wollongong area searching for customers for wireless broadband. To me it’s a product that should sell itself. Who doesn’t want constant access to the internet everywhere? If Muslim martyrs get 70 virgins in heaven, I’m pretty sure the deal for Agnostics like myself involves an eternity of high speed wireless broadband. And anyone who has been following this blog for the past 7 months knows I really mean that. It appears, however, that I am in a slim minority of people who think this is paradise as we have had no call backs yet.

It’s surprising to me that we’ve had no bites yet, Wollongong being a big university town. When I was in uni (as they abbreviate it here), I would’ve loved to be sitting on a laptop in a coffee shop researching my projects. And by that I mean downloading music, movies, and tv shows.

And you want to know what’s crazy about internet in Australia? They still pay for bandwidth so most of their ISPs meter usage! Blasphemy! Some plans start as low as 200MB per month… imagine a dude trying to download porno on that plan! Unpossible.

We have a bit of an advantage with our product, BigPond, in that they have their own unmetered content site where you can download all the usual stuff without it counting towards usage. I think that’s the best selling point in this crazy Australian ISP market.

Anyhow, tomorrow we head up to the Sydney area where I hope folks are much more keen on the idea.

alright so the video file from the girl singing and dancing to kangaroo songs at karaoke didn’t load because it’s almost a gig. (see last blog) that’s no good so I’ll see what i can do about reducing it’s size as it truly is awesome.

Happy Birthday to me, Happy Birthday to me. Want to know what you do in small-town Australia when festivities come your way? You hit the only local pub your roommate is not banned from and you get sloshed.

Your local pub will have a few key features that make it a popular choice for residents:

• Everyone who lives there will know each other and their business to the grittiest details
• There will be some sort of campy local tradition such as karaoke that brings back the regulars week after week
• Everyone will have a short-form name that likely ends in two consonants and a vowel. Observe:
  • Terrence == Tezza
  • Warren == Wozza
• Everyone will get their above-named friends’ attention by first shouting “OI!”
• The oi shout will be followed by a true shout (read: a round of drinks) of the ever-popular Jagerbomb. (Which at $12 a pop don’t come cheap.)

We began our night at a cafeteria-style restaurant attached to a gambling establishment full of pokie machines. Gambling on slot machines is very popular in Oz. I wasn’t all that keen on spending time there but the food was alright. I had a big bowl of gnocchi and bread on the side to sop up all the alcohol consumption that was to follow. You just can’t get away with not drinking in Australia if you go out, and if you try you will be called “soft” and be generally regarded as a huge disappointment. It’s go big or go home here, so I’ve had a lot of nights in.

(Which reminds me: Australia has turned me into a far classier version of myself than ever before, and I don’t mean that sarcastically. Whereas initially I thought I’d bask in the brashness of Oz, taking my sometimes offensive sense of humour to the maximum, instead I’ve taken the opposite route.)

The main event for the evening was The Harp for karaoke night. Now, if you want to know what it’s like to be Aussie, this is probably the most “full-on” example I can give you:

She’s singing about a kangaroo

That’s right my friends, mark up one point for my bitchin’ new heels. I landed that job with flying polka-dotted colours.

I now work for Australia’s largest mobile & broadband provider, selling and promoting broadband. Can you imagine anything more suiting? I love the internet so much, ever so much.

I’m going to catapult Australia into the 21st century. Forget dial-up, cable and wireless are here! My employers describe it as an “exciting new technology”.

The best perk? I get to stay in a 5-star hotel in Sydney tomorrow FOR FREE as part of my training course. Oh yes oh yes oh yes. OH YES. I’m so having a bubble bath. YES!