Back from Bali, Eirin home Safe and Sound

I've posted pictures of our trip to Bali.

It was a really interesting trip, an adventure for sure. The landscape is particularly beautiful with rice paddies and temples everywhere you look. I was pleasantly surprised to find that although tourism is the main industry here, there is tons of culture to experience. Most every tourist goes to one of just a few towns, so it's very easy to see the real Bali, and the people there are incredibly friendly and eager to show it to you.

The highlight for me was just walking around (and driving one day, not really recommended), not knowing what to see. We really had no agenda and that was a good thing. Also, I liked that massages are dirt cheap, we got foot massages in our room the last night in Ubud looking out over the rice fields at sunset.

The lowlight (?) for us was probably the impressive line to get your visa upon arrival. Two hours in line with no water or air conditioning. Awful.

In all, I highly recommend going there if you get the chance.

After a red eye home early friday morning, Eirin got back on a plane Saturday morning and made it back to Seattle safe and sound.

Quickie Post

Very busy at work recently so here we go:

1) Went to Sydney. It was awesome, we loved it. Go there, man.

Can you spot Eirin?

2) Went on a three day sailing trip in the Whitsundays (between Brisbane and Cairns, by the Great Barrier Reef). Rained for two days which made it look more like the San Juans , but the third was fantastic and everyone was all the more thankful for it. Broke my little toe slipping down the ships latter and now Eirin thinks I'm a baby. Snorkeled with a turtle and saw a sting ray fly through the air.

Next up: Bali (life's rough)

What's an iPod?

Sorry for not posting in a couple of weeks, things have been pretty busy. At Sarah's request, here is another:

Over Easter weekend (a four-day holiday weekend here) we went with a few friends down to Byron Bay and it was very nice. Surfing, blues-festival-attending, hippie-town visiting, bronzed people-watching and dolphin-spotting. I will refer you to Eirin's blog posting for that experience, but here are a few pictures:

Byron is legendary for surfing and it is easy to see why. Perfect waves just roll in one after the next almost perpendicular to the beach at the edge of the bay, so you just ride several of them in and then walk back.

One thing that wasn't so nice about the weekend was when someone smashed our rental car window in Ballina at 4 in the morning to grab my ipod. We were in the motel room about 20 feet away but when I went out they were already gone. Found the rock in the back seat though. The New South Wales police came and had some good advice. After some puzzled look and a few minutes trying to describe what exactly an iPod is, I asked for some advice on where I could get the window replaced in town.

Male Cop: "Well, I think you could probably go to one of those…" turns to girl cop "What are they called?"
Female Cop shrugs.
Male cop: "One of those car places. You know, a place where they fix cars."

Thanks. I am being unfair though because they were quite nice and genuinely empathetic. I thought this would be an annoyance to them but apparently it was the biggest thing to happen in town in quite a while. Or at least that shift. They even wanted to take fingerprints but decided against it because it was raining.

Anyways, everything worked out fine in the end. I was very pleasantly surprised by Hertz customer service. I had declined the extra insurance, so I called up the next morning, they were sympathetic about my iPod and able to tell me exactly what the window would cost ($400, less than having it done myself), and sent me over to the local branch to get a new car. Done. It's amazing how much good customer service can mean in a bad situation, it was the difference between a ruined holiday weekend and moving on to have a great time.

Next up, Sydney! (preview: it was fantastic).

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.