The little things...

It's funny to go to a new place and notice all these little things about everyday life that are just a tab bit different from your country. So I decided to do photography project #2 on those little touches that I've noticed.

My new favorite snack, marmite on toast!

You can turn the individual outlets on and off.

Butter in a square plastic tub, instead of sticks.

If you don't wear a helmet when you're riding a bike, you will definitely get a ticket.

You almost always get the option to half flush or full flush here. Ask yourself the next time you get off the pot: what kind of poo was that? A half flush one or a full?

I find the light switches funny looking.

To open the door you need a key and there's no door handle, where oh where did my door handle go?

The sidewalks, or footpaths as they call them here, are  slanted. I find it makes walking a bit uncomfortable.

They have giant recycle bins! I think Canada needs these.

EVERYONE grows roses. They're everywhere, all different colours and scents.

I asked my housemate what these funny lines on the road meant. It's a school zone and you're meant to slow down when you drive on them.

I noticed this one in New Zealand when I lived there, grocery stores sell eggs on the shelves instead of in the fridge. Why do we sell them in the fridge?

       This is the world that I currently live in. I've stopped noticing that people drive on the 'other' side of the road and have started to remember where the passenger door is located. It makes you question why you we do things the way we do. Why are Aussies more concerned with bike safety? Why do we put our eggs in the fridge? It's a huge waste of energy. Why do Aussies get the option of a half flush? Are they more conscious of water conservation?

     On another note, life's been pretty busy. I've joined an ukulele group that meets every Wednesday and have a performance coming up, which I have been happily invited to join in for, but I don't really know the songs all that well. We'll see. Practice makes for good uke playing :)
    The owners of The White Rabbit where I work are a couple and the male half died earlier this week. I worked at his wake yesterday, serving nibbles to all his family and friends. It was a lovely  affair and I really enjoyed myself, I felt like a hostess and it reminded me of when I was little and my parents would have dinner parties and I would serve dessert or whatever. It was a nice memory. I found my emotions a bit confusing. I never met Mark because he was sick when I started working at the rabbit, but I was quite sad and quite stressed about his death. I think I absorb other people's emotions because I am a very empathetic person. I care very deeply and strongly. It has it's benefits and it's negatives, but it is one thing I've learned about myself in the course of life. All in all it was a really nice feeling to be at a family affair. It's always one of my favorite things when I'm not at home, is to attend other people's family events. It makes me feel part of a family for a moment again. Makes me less homesick.
   Otherwise I've been spending my time gardening, doing schoolwork, yogaing, friending, and hopefully soon badmintoning, and all those other wonderful ings.

Another day in the life.

Love to all.

A self inspired photography project

I was walking home from work one day and I was noticing that every mailbox had it's own character. I remember someone once showed me a collection of park benches that they had photographed around the world, so I thought I'd do my own collection just on the 8 minute walk to work from my house....

They come in camo...

 Or just plain camouflaged

 Some look like birdhouses.

 Or are just metal boxes.

 Or metal holes.

 Sometimes the mail is just put on the ledge....

 This seems to be the most standard, the top is for mail and the bottom for rolled up magazines or newspapers.

They've got hats.

 Or noses. The owners must be away or have a good sense of humour, because it had a nose when I walked by a few days previous.

 Brick post.

 Then I got angry and did a super hulk punch and tore them a new mailbox....

 Sometimes they're shy...awwww.

 This one used to be a ballet dancer, but her partner dropped her.

 This one still is a ballet dancer :)

Everyone put in your ideas for the next photo exhibit! What would you like to see a lot of pictures of?

The White Rabbit: Record Bar AND an aussie's favorite breakfast

I've finally brought my camera into my glorious work. I love it. It is cool. It is hip. It is delicious....

We have the bar where I'm learning to cook up many a concoction by the glamorous Rabia.

She wouldn't let me take her photo so you'll have to pretend.

And the front of the kitchen where I cook glorious concoctions and customers walk by and say hello to you through the window.

The courtyard where many a groups of people hang out.

Or there's inside tables.

That's ned during closing time, trapped in a chair barrier. Ned is so cool! I wish I were just like Ned.

There's my boss, Annie, pretending to play records at the record station for my photograph, but you'll often find her in this exact position.

And there are lots of interesting records. Apparently a former employee walked around with this one sticking out of his pants for a day :) 

So that is my job. I'm enjoying it a lot. All the people are fun to be around and the music is always bumping. And it's about an 8 minute walk from my front door. And it's so colourful...I love colourful things.


I hung out with Ned and Rabia the other day from work and spent the night at their house, the next day we went to a cafe called Le Chien. Which of course reminded me of Montreal and made me feel right at home. We went there with a mission:

THE PROMITE SPECIAL

And we got 3 and we ate them all..numnumnumnum. You may be asking what is promite. It is the sweeter and more liquidy version of marmite. I am now in love with marmite, we are destined to get married next week. I eat it on toast when I get home late at night, in the morning and at random times during the day. I may just go make myself a slice now. The key is butter first and just the slightest smudge of marmite. I recommend all to try it. I haven't had peanut butter in months, ...until yesterday when I was feeling nostalgic ;)

A lot of green and a tinge of blues

Halrightythen. So I have decided that giant festivals of 50,000 in the searing Australian sun are perhaps not for me. It was a good experience though and I did see a few good acts. Props to The John Butler Trio, fabulous musicians, excellent drum duet, they're playing actually made me want to cry because Johnny was so amazing. Tools performance was absolutely beeeyootiful, of course, how could we expect any less? Rammstein was very theatrical and entertaining, and I do admit I enjoy their music, although I tend not to like so much noise usually. And last Bliss and Esso had a great show, the best audience I saw all day, and even did a wicked encore. Fun stuff.
I must've applied sunscreen about 20 times, refilled my water bottle about 40 and had to take periodic shade breaks, plus I spent a monstrous amount of money on food. I had a huge floppy hat that made my head feel in the shade all the time :) Unfortunately I have no pictures because I didn't want to worry about carrying around my camera, there was lots of wetness. You could stand under sprays of water in order to cool off a bit around the fairgrounds.
I did have my second run in with a random as person. 2 1/2 years ago I lived in Wellington, New Zealand, and I happened to be standing in the drink line at the festival with a friend of mine from that time. Hello Alastair. Really funny.

Now my veggie garden. I'm getting really into it. I play my uke and sing to them every couple of days and I know they're loving it...

Here we've got lettuces, strawberries, spring onion, garlic chives, zucchini, basil, parsley and you can't see the little guys so I took a couple more photos.

Rocket, aka arugala.

and BEETROOT! Isn't the colour just gorgeous?

I ran out of room in my little veggie plot so I had to plant a few around.

Here's my eggy plant. I also have a jalapeno in the works and a few more zucchinis. 

There were a couple of things already growing....

Some tomatoes that I think my housemate is setting out to kill, but I am secretly nursing them back to health with my ukulele :) and I'm sure the fertilizer I put on it doesn't hurt ;)

AND an olive tree! It's actually much bigger than the photo but I wanted to get those olives in, aren't they pretty? I'm not exactly sure what you do with them when they're ripe or how you know they're ripe. I've never had fresh olives before.

And if I haven't uprooted, hardy har har, you from the post from all these planty photos, I have just one more that I picked up yesterday...

Isn't she just lovely? Brenton and I fed her a moth yesterday, but I can't tell if she likes it yet. Hopefully it's not a poisonous moth. Could I have just killed her?

So those are all my lovelies! They make me very happy. They don't poo or yell or fart, well maybe the occasional fart...as I am in charge of the composting.

Otherwise, work is going well. I've already been put in charge of cooking up some specials for the special board, and I mean literally and in my head. I panicked a bit, but I had just looked through the cupboard and I got a little help from my friend Rabia and we made pumpkin daal and salmon fishcakes, which I was proud to see on the board yesterday! I will have to post some photos of the place. I'm working bar tonight so I'll bring my camera.

Life has been pretty quiet otherwise. I miss my friends :) I love you guys. It's hard at times being in a new place, as much as it's exciting at times to be in a new place. I get through it though and I've been working really hard on music. I'll have to set up a myspace so I can put up a few tracks sometime when I get a few more recordings in. I've convinced my housemate to go to some open mike nights in the coming weeks as well. So more adventures to come. Love to all my avid followers and everyone else too.

Alilaussiecalchafoyall

I have been thinking and dreaming about blogging for a few days now, so I had to jump on. We're just headed out to the Big Day Out Festival in a couple of hours, should be good! But in the meanwhile,

I have a new bike! It's shiny and it's blue, and and it's BEEyootiful. I'm excited to take it for a spin when I get a few moments to myself. I got a job! I know am a kitchen hand at a sweeet cafe/bar/music shop that is a 5 minute walk from my house, they play really awesome records all the time and serve delicious food and drinks, all of which I will be learning how to make. I have already learned how to make the perfect spencer martini, as we had a couple of ladies last night that had a few...or so :)

I went to a rubics cube party the other night and half of the people there were kiwis, which made me feel right at home. For those of you that don't know a rubics cube party is, it's where you go wearing as many colors of different clothing as you can find and you swap with others so that you try to end up in one solid color by the end of the night. I ended up white, but did not show up to the party wearing any white at all, lol. It was a good time.

I've generally been having fun taking the piss out of aussies because of the way they speak. It seems as if they try to combine as many words as possible when they're talking. I probably ask people to repeat themselves about 100 times every day. My housemate has a theory that the drier the place, the less people want to exhale because it releases moisture, so here in the dry, dry outback country they're just trying to preserve their body/water ratios... who knows? Some examples of the slang I've heard so far is they call bed comforters: donnas, flip-flops: thongs, swim suits: cozzies, mosquitos: mozzies, sweaters: jumpers, sunglasses: sunnies, the list could go on. I'm noticing myself talking more and more like an aussie without even trying. Pretty soon no one will recognize me when I call them :P

Life is good, it's supposed to be 40 degrees celsius today :S and we're supposed to be outside for about 10 hours for the festival. LOTS of water, LOTS of sunscreen. I've come to notice that the real danger here in Australia is not the sharks, or the jellyfish, or even the alligators, but the SUN. It is mean here! Super sunscreen applied many times daily is necessary. Plus I picked up a sic floppy sun hat from a garage sale yesterday. I'll fit riiight in.

There's too much excitement in the house. I have to sign off, but I'll Be BAAck.

Settling down and wigging out

So this new couch, an interesting experience I would have to say the least. The guy who I stayed with, Joe, was a really lovely boy, a party animal to the t. He spent the night at a friend's place, so I had his little bungalow out the back to myself, or so I thought. I passed out hard, as I wasn't feeling very well and I was really tired and a few hours later, about 3 or 4 am, this guy that I had seen at the bar a few nights earlier, throws open the door and flicks on the lights. My first thought was "where am I?" He looked at me and I looked at him and we both said, "what are YOU doing here?" Pretty weird. Turns out it's his cousin's place. He starts chatting to me randomly and I'm wondering if it'll ever end so I can go back to sleep. Then he strips down to his underoos and tries to hop into bed with me, there's another bed right next to the one I'm in! I politely tell him that if this is his preferred bed, then I'll happily sleep in the other one. That's not what he wants, but he eventually gives up after more talking, sigh. And we happily go to sleep.

The next morning I got a call from Steve, who was renting out a room in his house, until he gave it to moi! Phew, after the night I had, I was happy to go. Now I live in Kensington, address is:

7 Belmont Road
Kensington, VIC
Australia 3031

In case anyone wants to mail me. Cough cough, wink wink, nudge nudge :)

So now I have my very own room in my very own place that is full of...music and ukuleles. Steve has 4 ukuleles! And he's a guitar teacher. Brenton, my other roomie, is a music student and just recorded one of my songs yesterday. I'd post it if I knew how to, but I don't.

So after I got the call my friend Harley picked me up and we went in search of The Perfect Beach. Now The Perfect Beach is not an easy thing to come by. It takes many hours of seaching, many detours, and quite a few kilometers covered, and of course talking to the locals. We ended up in Torquay (pronounced TOR-KEY) finally. And a lovely Finnish girl told us the best spot to go. It's never going to be a Hawaiian Beach, but salt water and sand was good, minus the biting flies it was a lovely excursion. Harley let me drive home on the freeway, which was interesting, I got really into passing people. Apparently you can get a ticket for going 2 km over the speed limit here and there are speed cameras EVERYWHERE! Crazy, you really have to keep your eye on the speedometer all the time.

After a much needed peaceful and enjoyable sleep, Steve, Brenton and I went about setting up my bedroom. And then I got an ukulele lesson...

I have really enjoyed myself living here so far. Steve and I went shopping at the Vic Market and bought loads of fruit and veg, we've had many good chats about books and music and psychology, and we've even had a jam already, I played the hand drum.

Brent happens to be going to the Big Day Out music festival that I'm going to, which works out well and he took me to a friend's BBQ for Australia Day, I found it to be very similar to Canada Day and felt right at home. So much so that I ended the night looking like this:

I even look like I've got the beer belly to top it off, lol. You can't tell, but the sock has an Australian flag on it, and Brenton and I went to the supermarket and got Australia shaped burgers! I made a joke about how Tasmania was missing and everyone laughed and said no it isn't because 3/4 of the people at the party were from Tassie :)

A crazy, hazy, but never lazy jaunt through Melb

I tried not to let it get to this point, where I don't remember where I left off...but I'm lost.

So, it's been crazy obviously. Otherwise I would've been blogging about the boring details of my life, life the marmite and egg sandwhich I had for brekky the other day. And those dogs, remember them?, I have a giant bite on my bottom which is still healing. Ouch. I'm having a hard time bringing myself to going back to Harley's house.

I met up with a guy from couchsurfing that was happy to show me around, but his couch was full, and he is AWESOME. He actually reminds me of one of my favoite people in Montreal, my ex-boyfriend Luke. I find that happens a lot while I'm traveling, where I meet people that remind me of other friends. I'm looking for the familiar, and I find it. Jesse, cs guy, took me to a Hare Krishna place that serves cheap meals for lunch, then we wandered about and saw this sweet graffeti alley, Hosier Lane, where it's legal to paint. In fact there was a german guy painting when we walked through. Then we wandered to the botanical gardens, which I dare say do not follow the signs because when you have to go toilet, because you will fail and fail again. Sat in the park and played some ukulele, apparently Jesse's mum also plays uke so we'll have to have a jam.

Went to Victoria Market, which had on some live music and food and drink. Did some Tahitian dancing, as one of the last bands called up all the travelers to come up to the front and dance with the pros. You know me, I can't miss an opportunity for unusal experiences, plus I'm trying to push myself more and more into a performance setting to get used to the feeling. Went to a sweet bar with chilled out tunes, decided I want to learn how to skateboard, and headed home to pass out. Phew! So much sun.

The Tennis:
The other couchsurfer who was staying with Danni, was a lovely guy from Ohio name Dan and he was into the tennis, oh boy. The Australian Open is currently going on, which is a massive event where tennis pros from all over the world come to compete. I decided I couldn't miss it, despite my lack of knowledge about tennis. Free bands, hot sun, green balls, and the ball kids running around in their funny yellow outfits. Really, you should google one of the tennis matches just to see those kids running after all those tennis balls. It's really quite hilarious to an uneducated tennis individual, aka me. :) I placed some bets, first time, with the extreme guidance of Dan, put on more sunscreen than I use in a year, and was ready for some tennis. I learned about the scoring and the stats and the players from Dan. We watched Isner, which is an american fellow, smash his raquet on the turf, which apparently loses you a point, and I lost $10, but it was all in good fun. Sunstroked and overstimulated by massive crowds I headed home and took a nap. More tennis on the telly that evening cause we hadn't finished watching all the games we had bet on, I think I've had enough to last me for a while. But now I have a slight craving to actually get my hands on a raquet.

The next morning I woke up and created these beautiful adverts for an apartment seach.

Jesse was wonderful and we visited our spot for lunch, the Hare Krishnas, and then headed to Carlton to read adverts and post mine in a few places. We even lined up a flat viewing in Colberg, met a very interesting man who lived at the flat as well as his chook, cat and lovely neighbor who chaffeured us to his door when we got lost. We took the random path back to the main road, somehow ended up with a random business man buying us lunch, with many protests from us and Jesse was reminded of a crazy time he had when he went to Nepal, which he told me over our free kababs. All I can say is it involved burly men, jewels and large sums of money. If I told you any more, I'd definitely have to kill you. We were going to go to a free Australian Hiphop show, but the day had taken the energy out of us, so we watched Clerks. My first time, good movie.

This morning, the craziest thing happened to me. I'll have to travel back in time to explain.

When I was on the plane heading home for Christmas, from Seattle to Honolulu, I was sitting next to this lady from Kamloops, BC. We got to talking and I told her I was soon to move to Australia and she said her friend's daughter happened to be living there, she took my email and told me she'd sent it off to her and perhaps Katherine and I could meet up and have some Canadian bonding time. I completely forgot about it after that.
This morning I was getting on the train, when this lovely girl came and asked me in a distinctly north american accent if the train was going to the city, we got to talking and figure out that she was KATHERINE. We couldn't believe it. She had just been meaning to email me and hadn't gotten around to it. Same place, same time, in a Big big city. Pretty crazy. We might be spending Australia Day together at a BBQ, in replacement of our much loved Canada Day, perhaps we could get people into it and have both :)

Off to a new couch this evening, a friend of my current host, who has been nothing but lovely to me. I really lucked out with Danni, she been so helpful, showed me heaps of maps, let me borrow her bike, and given me tons of recommendations for food, jobs, and living areas. What a blessing! Now that I have to go she's even set me up at a friends of her's house for a bit. Then tonight I'm out to dinner with my scottish friend Isaac, whom I met in Sydney and went to the zoo with, if any of you remember him.

Love to all my readers :)