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.

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.

Four More Days of Temporary Bachelorhood

In eagerly waiting for E's arrival on Monday, work has really picked up and that's all I can say I really get to do during the week. It seems like I've fallen into the roll of taking charge of designing the tunnel portals, which is quite challenging in several respects, but the biggest being that the portals (there are nine of them) are always where our contract meets a different one (seven of them), and I spend a lot of the day trying to figure out who is who in the office. Considering that there are a couple hundred people in the office, plus some in Sydney and Melbourne, and people come and go every week, I meet a ton of people just to get to the one person who is in charge of interfacing the corresponding contract. Much more interactive than my work back in Seattle, though, so I get to work on my people skillz.

By the way, we have a second bedroom here, so feel free to come visit in the next couple of months if you feel like crossing the globe.

Here are some more photos, plus I figured out that you can assign them to a Google map in Picasa:

Move in day

After a week of scrambling to find an apartment for the time I am here, I moved into a place in the West End on Sunday and love it. It is probably way fancier than anywhere i will ever live again, and the neighborhood seems really interesting too, sort of the Ballard of Brisbane if you are familiar with Seattle or the Jamaica Plain of Brisbane if you are more familiar with Boston. Sort of sketchy but with a hefty dose of yuppie mixed in. I can't really walk to work (walking anywhere more than two blocks here results in profuse sweating), but each day this week I've chosen a different mode of transport. Monday I took the bus, which is very easy, Tuesday I biked which would be easy if it weren't so hot (luckily there's a shower at work), and today I walked the mile to the subway station and took that. They all take the same amount of time so I think biking will be my default.

I've also tried to be good about exercise by getting up early to run. Since there is no daylight savings in Queensland it's completely daylight by 5am, and it only took one day to learn that you can get plenty sunburned running at 6:30 in the morning.

But the big news is that I went to the cricket match on Sunday, Australia vs. West Indies. I made a friend at work from Bangladesh and he and his girlfriend took me and spent hours explaining. International matches last about eight hours and it took me five of those to understand what was going on. I'd put it on par with football in terms of interest. I'd watch it if other people are but only on tv from now on because it lasts too long and you can see better from your couch.

Here is a good website that shows what I am working on, and here is a map of the project.

Longest...day...ever

First of all, thank you for checking out my blog. I figure that I have a little time here before E joins me to do get things like this together. I promise that the posts that follow this one will not be a comprehensive history of our three months in Australia but rather a collection of randomness. Here we go...

First of all, I am dedicating this blog to Sven. The day I got here he was hit by a car and E had to put him down. He was really an incredibly fun cat, the best to come home to, and it's hard to believe he's gone. And poor Junebug lost her brother. They were independent from each other but relied on one another for warmth and play.

The flight from LAX to Brisbane was better than I thought it would be, thanks mostly to the empty seat next to me and the good luck to have switched to the back of the plane at the last minute. It turned out that 80% of the plane was filled by college juniors headed to Australia for a semester abroad, and free alcohol on the flight for anyone over 18 meant it was probably not where I wanted to be.

After arriving at 7:30 am, I took a cab to my hotel downtown and immediately realized why I was here. The traffic between the airport and downtown was horrendous since there is no highway, just surface streets. The project I am working on here is designing the final lining for a new tunnel that is being built from downtown to the airport, which along with a different bus tunnel and surface improvements will cost upwards of $4 billion dollars.

I am finally enjoying my first weekend here. I spent most of the week looking around for an apartment and finally get to move in tomorrow. I also found an old bike today that I got from this crazy German that fixes them up. Perfect.

OK, that's probably enough for now. I have a lot of random observations I'm itching to share with someone, like how books seem to be a luxury here because I've seen exactly one bookstore and they are quite expensive. But plenty of time for that.

Here are a few photos I've taken so far (and one of me washing Junebug cause she stank)