My 20th 9th Birthday

For my birthday Eirin took me to Wet 'n' Wild on Saturday, a water park down on the Gold Coast. I don't think I've been to one since I was about nine years old, and I don't even remember that one very well. All I can remember is that I loved it, and it seemed a good time to do it again.

Well, I can report that my return to the sport of watersliding was triumphant. Except for the first slide of the day when I bruised both heels after jamming them into the concrete pool floor at the end.

Sunday we went Paddle surfing again in Redcliffe with our friend Tamas. We showed up to meet the guy with the boards at a tiny beach at 8am to find the house across the street taped off and police wandering about. Apparently two guys had a fight there the night before and one didn't make it. Considering there are only about 200 murders in Australia each year I guess it was a pretty unlikely thing to see.

Also finally went up Mt. Coot-tha yesterday:



So Eirin and I are trying to figure out our end game here in Brisbane. My project is going pretty well but things are being drawn out longer than they should so most people are extending their stays. I offered to stay through about May 22, but I have to leave the country by May 5th in order to reset my visa. So Eirin and I decided the right thing to do was book a couple of tickets to Bali! We're going for almost a week and then Eirin will fly home from here on May 8th. By the way, she has a blog too:

http://dspatchesbrizzy.blogspot.com/

Next up: Byron Bay Blues Festival next weekend.

Down in the Mines

I finally got to go out and see what it is I've been working on this whole time. A few of us went down to look around and it was really useful for putting things in perspective, as well as defining scale. I'm guessing they've gone a little less than 1000 meters on the section we went into. Usually they can go about 10 meters in one day, but they were in some really hard rock when we were there which meant they only went 2 meters in the previous 24 hours. I sometimes wish I got to be out on site more, but after being in there for about 45 minutes I was ready to go. The temperature inside was around 110 degrees, and when we emerged back into the 85 degree Queensland afternoon, it felt like the most wonderful air conditioning you've ever experienced. Here are some of the photos I took that were not of cracks or interesting pavement base layers.



Sorry for the infrequent posts, my laptop has more or less crapped out on me. Plus I'm lazy.

New Friends, New Bike

Eirin and I spent a nice weekend hanging out around town this weekend. We decided to have a barbie (no, we did not have any shrimp to throw) for a bunch of my coworkers and that pretty much took up most of the weekend preparing for it. We chose to make all Mexican (or Mexican-inspired) dishes for people since that doesn't really exist here save for the occasional fast-food form. The menu included flank steak tacos and our usual yam taco (yam yaco) recipe.

Luckily we were able to find almost everything we needed at the farmer's market on Saturday including the meat for grilling. The only things that we were not able to find were chipotle peppers for the sauce and decent corn tortillas. They had a couple of packages of Mission at the store which worked in a pinch but they proved to be a little past their prime...tasted like chalk and disintegrated with the slightest human touch. Luckily Eirin's cooking skillz made up for that with excellent beans, guacamole, pico and sweet potatoes. We had a nice turnout...Brits, Poles, Hungarians, Taiwanese, Bangladeshis, South Africans. Even a couple of real live Australians made appearances!

Also on Saturday Eirin bought a bike that I am more than a little envious of. It is an old frame that was professionally sandblasted and repainted flat gray, with all new components and beautiful wheels that feel like you're riding on rails. We checked and it looks like you're allowed to make a bicycle one of your two checked items on Qantas so Eirin will soon have the coolest hipster bike on Capitol Hill. After riding it to the video store last night it became clear, however, that it is geared so high (there aren' really any significant hills in Brisbane) that she will never make it up the hills of Seattle. The bike shop said that they would switch anything out that she didn't like for the first month. I am seriously thinking about having them build one for me as well, but we'll see...Ricardo has served me well thus far.

One more thing we did that keep forgetting to mention was the Phoenix concert the night Eirin got here. She didn't fall asleep at all, which was more than I expected, and they put on a good show. I didn't quite realize until moments before they came on that they are the it band for sixteen year old girls, and en masse, they are one of the most ridiculous demographics that exists. The screaming, the hand flapping, the jumping up and down...I don't get it. Eirin swears that every teenage girl has an obsessive personality, which I suppose is true. Upon exiting it became painfully obvious that we were the oldest people there. I'm not sure weather the experience as a whole made me feel old for that reason, or young for choosing to go in the first place. Probably the former.

The View from Australia...

...looks pretty much the same as America.

Our Pal Minty

Eirin and I hired a car for the weekend (I've decided to start using her name now instead of "E", so much for internet security) and took advantage of the rainy weather to go to the Lone Pine Koala Sanctuary west of the city. It was a little hokey but fun for sure. We got to have "cuddle time" with Minty and have our pictures taken. She is pretty much as soft as she looks.

They also have an open range of kangaroos that you can feed, and was remarkably unsupervised. It was fun to have kangaroos hopping over to you and eating out of your hand, but a few of them get pretty pissed when you try to walk away and one of them bitch-slapped me in order to get my bag of food. Luckily their claws are actually pretty dull.







The other funny thing is that there was a bunch of guys there who were obviously band mates (I asked them, they were the Brian Jonestown Massacre) waiting to pick up their picture. On the wall there are dozens of photos of famous people holding Minty or her friends...The Pope, the Queen Mum, the Dalai Lama, Marilyn Manson, etc.). After informing the clerk that they were friends with one of the bands on the wall, she responded by saying "Oh really? Maybe if you come back someday we'll put your photo up there," and then handed over their freshly developed photo. Ouch.

I also got the opportunity to go down to Surfer's Paradise last weekend with a few Hungarian friends I made at work and had pretty much the worst luck. Not only were the beaches closed because of the Tsunami warning from the Chile earthquake, it also poured rain for most of the day. We still were able to sneak into the water for 40 minutes before being kindly asked to get out, and then drank the afternoon away at a strange beach club where you have to get a membership to enter (a strange phenomenon here). The best part was the meat raffle. When the lady came by with the prize that was up for grabs, I asked if I could take a picture:

Meat Lady: "Why would you want to take a picture of the meat?"
Me: "Because the don't raffle meat where I come from."
Meat Lady, perplexed: "But...then...what else would they raffle?"
Me: "I don't know...trips, money, people"
Meat Lady: "Huh."


Good times. None of us won.