And by rock, I mean I'm awful. The good news is that this post will probably be a novel since I have bunches to report. For lack of better organization, I'll try and start from the beginning!
FOOTY! I went to my first footy match two Sundays ago (Hawthorn Hawks vs. Richmond Tigers) and I loved it. I also now can officially call myself a Hawks fan as I feel like I have been "inducted" into aussie rules football.
It all goes back several weeks when Brendan visited Melbourne and brought me a Hawks scarf back to San Francisco. For lack of other loyalties, I thought that I would become a Hawks fan, although based on what I heard and read about footy fans, I was being very careful with how I threw that piece of information around. And I definitely wasn't wearing my scarf. I could just imagine myself walking into the wrong bar at the wrong time with the wrong colors around my neck... But then I saw that the Hawks were playing the Tigers on a Sunday afternoon at the MCG (Melbourne Cricket Grounds). Brilliant! The Hawks and the MCG were two things on my list to see! So I set out for the match... with my scarf in my bag.
I had not been over that way yet, so I went a bit early so that I could walk around, perhaps grab a beer. Brendan mentioned the location of a pub that he called a "Hawks stronghold," so I thought I would check it out. I did the walk-by-and-look-through-the-open-door to see what colors were occupying the bar. I saw brown and gold and felt safe enough to go in and have an $8 pint. I still held off on the scarf as not to draw attention to myself... and what a good decision! Did you know that black and gold look amazingly like brown and gold through the door of a dimly lit bar?!? That's right!
The colors actually tricked me again as I was headed into the stadium - or perhaps the group of Hawks fans I was trying to stay close to got swept up in the sea of Tigers fans as well. Either way, this is when I became a fan as I took my position in the Tiger crowd scarf on. This is also when I learned that the MCG is located in Richmond and that everyone was predicting that this would not be much of a match (Hawks trumping Tigers), which might explain the overwhelmingly one-sided turnout.
Then the match started and the Tigers took an early lead, then made it bigger, then continued to make it bigger, until they completely ran away with the game - a huge upset! Here I was trying to understand this crazy sport with guys dressed in short shorts and tall socks running around along with guys in neon green and other guys in red doing a crazy pointing thing where none of the quarters are the same length and none of the calls seem to be the same... and the verbal abuse is getting worse as the guys around me get drunker. And somewhere in the middle of the second quarter, the Richo Army creeped into my section, so not only was I criticized 
every time Richo scored, but I was surrounded by awful, awful singing (think 'Richo man' to the tune of 'Macho man').
Anyways, long story short, I had a great time and tomorrow I will be in attendance, scarf proudly on, at the Telstra Dome when Lance Franklin boots his 100th goal this season! Go Hawks! Also seen that day - bike polo.
POISONOUS SPIDERS! I was trying to think what I did the week after the footy match and the most prominent thing that came to mind was me seeing a poisonous spider and then me hearing about all of the other poisonous spiders in this country. It's not enough that Australia has something like 9 of the world's 10 poisonous snakes, but they have poisonous spiders too! The one I saw was either dead or sleeping, so it's not like it even moved, but it was real and that's scary! I saw it when I went out to the core shed for work (shed where rock core is stored for observation) while Isabelle, a coworker, was giving the safety talk.
Isabelle: ... and make sure you look before you lift anything as spiders like to live in here. Last time we saw redbacks all over the place. Redbacks are horribly poisonous...
Me: Do they have red backs like say that one?
Isabelle: Yes indeed! That's a redback! (which was said far to gleefully if you ask me!)
It turns out the big ones are the females and the males are actually so small you can hardly see them. Surely the males are not also poisonous if you can't even see them, right? Needless to say I was very careful and actually let the blokes do most of the lifting. I hear that one of our job sites is covered in roos. Why couldn't I work there?
BRENDAN ARRIVES, which also coincides with DRIVING ON THE WRONG SIDE OF THE ROAD!
I'm going to start with the driving, but only because the hardest part of this happened before Brendan even arrived. I picked up the car Sunday morning from Mark's apartment so that I could drive to the airport and pick Brendan up (since I'm such a nice person, and I made Brendan schlep down a bunch of my stuff).
Thank goodness it was a Sunday morning! It took me probably 3 kilometers through downtown before I realized that I was probably taking both lanes. Do you know how hard it is to judge where your car is when you are sitting on the right?!? After that, I stuck to the right lane (which is probably the fast lane, but I'm not sure) just so I could use the line as a guide of where the stupid car was. Due to it being Sunday morning though, I didn't have much traffic and made it to the airport uneventfully. Trying to circle the airport... yeah right (I can't do that very well in the US), so I decided to park. Parking from the right... HAHAHA! It took me probably a 20-point turn and just as many minutes to put a not-so-large car in a not-so-small parking spot! Then I walk into the airport only to discover that I didn't check on-line to see if his plane was even on time. It wasn't, so back out to the car figuring that it would be cheaper for me to drive around and waste petrol than rack up time in airport parking.
So I went for a drive and ended up driving through my first Australian roundabouts. There seem to only be stop signs and stoplights in downtown areas. All of the residential/rural type areas have roundabouts. How fantastic, except for the fact that two lanes enter, one lane leaves... And all of this with the stick shift on my left!
Back to Brendan! He came and visited last weekend! Unfortunately, he was only here for two full days, but Australia was so much more fun with him. We decided to head back to the apartment and drop stuff off and let Brendan get cleaned up before heading out again... and then I missed the exit. And then I missed the next turn, and the next (don't judge until you try driving on the wrong side of the road)! So, we went to Acland Street for some cake before heading to the apartment. We decided to park the car and head out on foot once I realized there was no way that I going to be able to parallel park that thing. We spent time walking through Carlton, North Carlton, North Fitzroy, Fitzroy, Richmond, and then back to Fitzroy for dinner and bars with Mark and Lisa. As a side note, Mark knows some fantastic bars! I'm not sure if I wrote about this or not, but apparently in Melbourne, the more dumpsters you have to walk by to get to the bar, the better the bar.
The next day we finalized our visas (I have a visa in my passport!) and then did some more walking through the CBD and back out to Fitzroy. The previous day was a bit of investigation of potential neighborhoods to live in and Fitzroy fell high on the list. We stopped by a real estate agent and realized that renting in Melbourne is every bit as crazy as renting in San Francisco. Yay! After some walking, we went back to the CBD for bars (I was actually able to find one of the dumpster bars) and then to the grocery store for dinner supplies. Brendan had a great idea for dinner until we realized Australia doesn't sell artichokes, at least not this season. Dinner changed. The next day, I tried to make Brendan miss his bus due to my limited knowledge of the trams, but luckily it all worked out.
EL FIN! This last week after Brendan left has basically been me working my butt off trying to make sure that my company doesn't deport me. And with that, I leave you with some more crazy signs! At least I didn't have to do a hook turn while i was driving!
I hope that all is well in the US. I miss you all! Cheers!
FOOTY! I went to my first footy match two Sundays ago (Hawthorn Hawks vs. Richmond Tigers) and I loved it. I also now can officially call myself a Hawks fan as I feel like I have been "inducted" into aussie rules football.
It all goes back several weeks when Brendan visited Melbourne and brought me a Hawks scarf back to San Francisco. For lack of other loyalties, I thought that I would become a Hawks fan, although based on what I heard and read about footy fans, I was being very careful with how I threw that piece of information around. And I definitely wasn't wearing my scarf. I could just imagine myself walking into the wrong bar at the wrong time with the wrong colors around my neck... But then I saw that the Hawks were playing the Tigers on a Sunday afternoon at the MCG (Melbourne Cricket Grounds). Brilliant! The Hawks and the MCG were two things on my list to see! So I set out for the match... with my scarf in my bag.
I had not been over that way yet, so I went a bit early so that I could walk around, perhaps grab a beer. Brendan mentioned the location of a pub that he called a "Hawks stronghold," so I thought I would check it out. I did the walk-by-and-look-through-the-open-door to see what colors were occupying the bar. I saw brown and gold and felt safe enough to go in and have an $8 pint. I still held off on the scarf as not to draw attention to myself... and what a good decision! Did you know that black and gold look amazingly like brown and gold through the door of a dimly lit bar?!? That's right!The colors actually tricked me again as I was headed into the stadium - or perhaps the group of Hawks fans I was trying to stay close to got swept up in the sea of Tigers fans as well. Either way, this is when I became a fan as I took my position in the Tiger crowd scarf on. This is also when I learned that the MCG is located in Richmond and that everyone was predicting that this would not be much of a match (Hawks trumping Tigers), which might explain the overwhelmingly one-sided turnout.
Then the match started and the Tigers took an early lead, then made it bigger, then continued to make it bigger, until they completely ran away with the game - a huge upset! Here I was trying to understand this crazy sport with guys dressed in short shorts and tall socks running around along with guys in neon green and other guys in red doing a crazy pointing thing where none of the quarters are the same length and none of the calls seem to be the same... and the verbal abuse is getting worse as the guys around me get drunker. And somewhere in the middle of the second quarter, the Richo Army creeped into my section, so not only was I criticized 
every time Richo scored, but I was surrounded by awful, awful singing (think 'Richo man' to the tune of 'Macho man').Anyways, long story short, I had a great time and tomorrow I will be in attendance, scarf proudly on, at the Telstra Dome when Lance Franklin boots his 100th goal this season! Go Hawks! Also seen that day - bike polo.
POISONOUS SPIDERS! I was trying to think what I did the week after the footy match and the most prominent thing that came to mind was me seeing a poisonous spider and then me hearing about all of the other poisonous spiders in this country. It's not enough that Australia has something like 9 of the world's 10 poisonous snakes, but they have poisonous spiders too! The one I saw was either dead or sleeping, so it's not like it even moved, but it was real and that's scary! I saw it when I went out to the core shed for work (shed where rock core is stored for observation) while Isabelle, a coworker, was giving the safety talk.
Isabelle: ... and make sure you look before you lift anything as spiders like to live in here. Last time we saw redbacks all over the place. Redbacks are horribly poisonous...Me: Do they have red backs like say that one?
Isabelle: Yes indeed! That's a redback! (which was said far to gleefully if you ask me!)
It turns out the big ones are the females and the males are actually so small you can hardly see them. Surely the males are not also poisonous if you can't even see them, right? Needless to say I was very careful and actually let the blokes do most of the lifting. I hear that one of our job sites is covered in roos. Why couldn't I work there?
BRENDAN ARRIVES, which also coincides with DRIVING ON THE WRONG SIDE OF THE ROAD!
I'm going to start with the driving, but only because the hardest part of this happened before Brendan even arrived. I picked up the car Sunday morning from Mark's apartment so that I could drive to the airport and pick Brendan up (since I'm such a nice person, and I made Brendan schlep down a bunch of my stuff).
Thank goodness it was a Sunday morning! It took me probably 3 kilometers through downtown before I realized that I was probably taking both lanes. Do you know how hard it is to judge where your car is when you are sitting on the right?!? After that, I stuck to the right lane (which is probably the fast lane, but I'm not sure) just so I could use the line as a guide of where the stupid car was. Due to it being Sunday morning though, I didn't have much traffic and made it to the airport uneventfully. Trying to circle the airport... yeah right (I can't do that very well in the US), so I decided to park. Parking from the right... HAHAHA! It took me probably a 20-point turn and just as many minutes to put a not-so-large car in a not-so-small parking spot! Then I walk into the airport only to discover that I didn't check on-line to see if his plane was even on time. It wasn't, so back out to the car figuring that it would be cheaper for me to drive around and waste petrol than rack up time in airport parking.
So I went for a drive and ended up driving through my first Australian roundabouts. There seem to only be stop signs and stoplights in downtown areas. All of the residential/rural type areas have roundabouts. How fantastic, except for the fact that two lanes enter, one lane leaves... And all of this with the stick shift on my left!
Back to Brendan! He came and visited last weekend! Unfortunately, he was only here for two full days, but Australia was so much more fun with him. We decided to head back to the apartment and drop stuff off and let Brendan get cleaned up before heading out again... and then I missed the exit. And then I missed the next turn, and the next (don't judge until you try driving on the wrong side of the road)! So, we went to Acland Street for some cake before heading to the apartment. We decided to park the car and head out on foot once I realized there was no way that I going to be able to parallel park that thing. We spent time walking through Carlton, North Carlton, North Fitzroy, Fitzroy, Richmond, and then back to Fitzroy for dinner and bars with Mark and Lisa. As a side note, Mark knows some fantastic bars! I'm not sure if I wrote about this or not, but apparently in Melbourne, the more dumpsters you have to walk by to get to the bar, the better the bar.
The next day we finalized our visas (I have a visa in my passport!) and then did some more walking through the CBD and back out to Fitzroy. The previous day was a bit of investigation of potential neighborhoods to live in and Fitzroy fell high on the list. We stopped by a real estate agent and realized that renting in Melbourne is every bit as crazy as renting in San Francisco. Yay! After some walking, we went back to the CBD for bars (I was actually able to find one of the dumpster bars) and then to the grocery store for dinner supplies. Brendan had a great idea for dinner until we realized Australia doesn't sell artichokes, at least not this season. Dinner changed. The next day, I tried to make Brendan miss his bus due to my limited knowledge of the trams, but luckily it all worked out.
EL FIN! This last week after Brendan left has basically been me working my butt off trying to make sure that my company doesn't deport me. And with that, I leave you with some more crazy signs! At least I didn't have to do a hook turn while i was driving!
I hope that all is well in the US. I miss you all! Cheers!
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