"We Germans aren't all Puppy Dogs and Rainbows"

The fun never stops down here. By 'fun' I mean good stuff and bad stuff.

I'm quite frustrated with young children these days. They walk slow and link their arms together and block off entire sections of the sidewalk. Thanks guys. I guess that's my only gripe. It's just annoying when you're running to get a train and you have a 'red rover' style line of people in your way and you can't get around them.

Last gripe then on to some good stuff. Both my brothers, Steve and Matt, have similar views on this action as I do. We all recently learned that my Aunt out here as Lou Gehrig's disease and her vocal chords are paralyzed now rendering her unable to speak. Now first off, my mum sent this to me in an email..... an EMAIL!! Jesus. She knows my phone number, this is something that is phone worthy. Steve put it best when he said "I'm afraid to come home drunk one night and open up my email to see it say dad was gunned down by mob members. Also, some magpies made a nest under the deck and the weather is still holding up. love mom" Leave it to my mom to be very subtle about stuff like that. Secondly, I feel pretty bad because I haven't gone out to New Castle to see my aunt and uncle yet and I guess I should have before all of this happened. I am for sure this week. Gonna give my uncle a call tomorrow and set up a time to visit.

Time for some happy stuff. I recently switched up hostels and went back to Kings Cross. Which is the single best move I've ever made. Luck just seems to be on my side in this upside down country. The night before I actually move up to the hostel (the same one my buddy Adam is staying at) I'm there with Adam and some of his buddies. We're waiting on a few of them to get changed so we can head up to a small Irish pub called "O' Mally's". Just before we leave a cute girl comes by and sits down in the small courtyard area and starts smoking. I can't help but ask her for a name and where she is from. Her name is Freja and she is from Germany. She knows a fair bit of English, but gets lost on larger words and slang words. Other then that she has the cutest accent. I can't resist to extend an invitation out to the pub with everyone else. She tells me it's her first day in Australia and could really use some company, so she agrees.

Up at the pub we scored some free drinks through another guy from Manchester (Those English guys I tell ya. They can get anything they want.) Just after getting a drink Adam and I see our good friend Elodie (I recently found out how to spell her name) from France. So we talk with her for a bit then I put all attention and effort in Freja. For the first bit things look great. Not only did I get her email address, but I got her phone number (a German number for now. She'll get an Australian one eventually) and her room number as well. Things couldn't get much better, could they? Well being the man whore that I am I get my tongue action in for the night (I'm a horrible person I think) and for the rest of the night at the pub it was a make out session. Not my first choice of places to have one, but it will do. Most memorable part of the evening was when the live music started, the big aboriginal guy was singing to classic songs like "lean on me", well he eventually comes to the song "my girl" and I don't take much notice since I'm still face pressed against Freja. About half way through the song, two drunk guys come up to me and Freja and start to Serenade us. They even change the words to "your girl" and would point at me. I was so embarrassed but I laughed it off as I noticed that entire section of the pub watching us. I thanked the guys afterwards and we had a good laugh about it. Adam eventually tells me to save his chair for him. He never came back. I figured everyone had left and not told me and Freja because we were a bit 'busy'. I end up walking Freja back to the hostel where she seems reluctant to let me go home. I seriously needed to go if I was going to catch the last train of the night, but she kept grabbing my arm and pulling me back for another kiss. Now you may think it's romantic and kind of cute (which it is) but not when I rely on this last train to get me home. Sure enough, I missed the last train. Taxi time for me. I take the taxi to the 24 hour Kebab place (perfect after drinking food. I'm addicted to them.) and walk home. Thus the end of Sunday night.

Monday morning I pack up all my stuff and move out to the Jolly Swagman in Kings Cross. I splurged a bit and decided to get a double room in case I could get some more action off of Freja (best decision ever). That afternoon I found Freja and she invited me to go out and show her around Sydney. I took her out to the botanical gardens and then to the Opera House. She was tired (already?) and wanted to sit down by the ocean front. She curled up and buried her head into my chest and looked like she was going to fall asleep. After a few minutes she looks up at me and kisses me. The next 10 minutes are going to go down as the most romantic 10 minutes of my life thus far. Or at least of my Australian adventure. What's more romantic then sitting outside the Opera House looking out at the ocean and harbour bridge while making out with a cute blond German girl? After I finally got her moving again we walked down to darling harbour and took the train back to Kings Cross. I'd been bugging her all day to teach me German and she said she'd give me a lesson when we got back to the room. I'm thinking, "sweet, hopefully she'll teach me some useful phrases like what Gidda taught me." Freja had other ideas instead. Adam told me to come back downstairs and then we'd go out to trivia night at the pubs. I didn't think I'd be too long so I said I'd be about 20 minutes. How wrong I was. Instead Freja and I had a 2 hour sex session (sorry for the mental images, I wont go into details.) Adam knocked on the door twice. The first time Freja told me not to answer it even though I knew what it was about. We both got dressed eventually and headed downstairs where I was greeted with grins and comments like "The infamous Mike" from some of Adams other friends. Nice to know that everyone knew what Freja and I were up to.

We went to trivia night and got our asses beat down. Freja and I turned in and went back to the hostel and hung out in Adams room with his roommate, Clement from France, and exchanged good music. Freja was tired (again!) and wanted to go to bed. Just before going to bed she got a phone call from home and she seemed pretty upset. She told me that she didn't know the English words to explain the problem and when she tried to I couldn't understand it anyways so we gave up. I told her to just go to bed. So she slept in my room cuddled up with me.

Today we got off to a late start. She wanted to go to the Aquarium, but I had some other stuff I needed to do today and told her that we'll meet up tonight back at the hostel. I think I may try to take her out for supper at a place called "Thai Power" that Steve told me about.

The next few days will probably be quiet ones for me. Laundry day tomorrow me thinks.

Germans, Polish and French, Oh my!

On Wednesday I was happy to have my camera in working order again so I figured it was time to head out and get back to to taking pictures like crazy. I happened to be out on the perfect day as well for everything just worked out perfectly.

First off, when wandering up the street towards the bridge and opera house I noticed that there were two helicopters in the air just hovering. 'That's weird' I thought, but kept going anyways. Eventually I saw a third Heli move into formation and started to notice police officers all over the place and they had blocked off a huge Portion of George St. to traffic. Pedestrians were still aloud to go through, so I kept moving and figured it may have been some kind of big accident. In fact, it was the parade for all the Australian Olympic athletes. Good for me and being out at the right time. So I got a picture or two of all the Athletes lined up on the steps of town hall. I thought that was a stroke of luck that I was able to take that in.

Next up, I figured I would backtrack a bit and take a water-taxi from Darling harbour over to the Circular Quay and go to the Opera House from there. It would be a good view from the boat of both the bridge and Opera house. Well I had just missed a taxi and it would be half an hour before the next one. I was better off walking anyways. I cut a path through the parks around Darling Harbour and went over Pyrmont Bridge where I continued my trek northwards to the Sydney Harbour Bridge. I didn't make it too far until I heard someone yell my name (even being fully aware that I don't know anyone here I looked anyways) and saw my buddy Adam, from the bus from Melbourne to here, waving at me from across the way. This worked out great since I hadn't seen him since our first night in Sydney and he didn't come out with Sandy and I on Monday night. I was now able to catch up with him and now that I have my cellphone we swapped numbers. Yay. He introduced me to his new friend, Christi, who hails from Vancouver. Then they both invited me on a small pub crawl. I could go see the Bridge anytime. I wanted to hangout with a friend instead. So we hit up some places. 3 wise monkeys and Cheers, Around this time Adam is getting a bit hungry and so was I. We headed over to Ali-Baba's (think of Subway only with Kebabs in a wrap. Great food.)

This food chain offers those scratch cards where you win free stuff so when we were in line for our food a girl comes up and gives me the card she just scratched for an order of free chips (fries) and says that if I want to I can keep them or share with her. Hmm, cute girl wants to share? Sure. We join her and the 2 friends she's sitting with and ask them their names and where they are from. The girl who gave me the free chips is Alexa from Poland, and her friends were Tina from Germany and Elody from France. Luckily for us Adam knew some German so he tried talking to Alexa and Tina as best as possible in their native language. I talked with Elody as best I could. She doesn't understand some of the words I use, but she got the gist of it for the most part. When we were about ready to set off Adam was saying goodbye when I give him a nudge and ask him if he knows how to ask the girls out for a beer in German. He didn't know all of it so we just asked if they'd be interested in getting a drink. Surprise, they said Yes. The 6 of us headed to Scruffy Murphy's and had a drink or two while getting to know each other. By the end of the night when they were turning in they asked us what we were doing the next day. We got invited to go on a bit of an adventure, a Walk from Manly to Spit bridge (a 3 hour walk as we learned later) and Alexa wanted to go to Bondi beach to see the Sunset. Heck, why not. They asked us to meet them at their hostel the next morning at 10:30am. Done and done. I made a note of it and we bid girls good night. Adam, Christi and I continued onto another pub which I didn't catch the name of and then back to the bar below my hostel. When we got there Adam was shocked to see the type of people that stayed here and asked me "How many friends have you made here?" to which I replied, "none really. Look at these people They aren't backpackers." Adam: "You need to switch hostels real soon. These aren't your type of people." I thought about it and he's right. Everyone here looks like they are ripped right out of a fashion magazine. I need to get back to the backpacker community like which I had when I was in Melbourne. We had a drink then called it a night, especially if we had to get up early the next day and meet up with the foreign girls.

The next morning I had to figure out the train system without the help of Sandy. Now this usually wouldn't be a problem, because most train stations only have 3 or 4 platforms. I'm lucky enough to be right beside Central Station which has 25 platforms of pure train goodness. After drifting from platform to platform looking at the different routes I finally find the one I need (platform 24 of course.) and proceeded to meet up with Adam in the Kings Cross area. We walked our way over to the girls hostel and waited....and waited... and waited some more.

By 11am I figured this was the girls way of standing us up. Adam kept telling me to have faith and he went in and asked the guy who runs the place if he knew where the German, Polish and French girl were staying. Not only did he tell him but he let Adam go bang on their door (I'm surprised he didn't just give us the key while he was at it.) The girls had overslept and Adam had the pleasure of waking them up. Apparently they still wanted to go do this, especially as how it was Alexa and Tina's last day in Sydney before Tina goes back to Rockhampton(where she lives with her boyfriend) and Alexa goes back to Germany (she goes to school there). Back to the waiting game. At 11:30am Elody comes out and gives us the customary kiss of the cheek good morning (I love France) and tells us that they're just going to have some breakfast. Being the gentlemen that we are we tell her to take her time and we'll wait outside. After another hour the girls finally join us outside and we are on our way. For the record it is now 12:30pm and Adam and I just spent 2 hours sitting on a sidewalk in the hot sun. I'm not sure if we're gentlemen, desperate, or that sad of people for waiting so long. The entire time I was assuming the worst and just figured they weren't interested in going with us. Adam told me to keep the faith and all will turn out well. His goal is to restore my faith in women.

We couldn't have chosen a better day. Not a cloud in the sky, a cool ocean breeze and it wasn't really hot out, just nice. We walked through the botanical gardens which come up behind the Opera House. Even got to see some Bats sleeping in the trees. We made our way to an area called "The Rocks" which is a touristy area which still has a lot of the old brick and stone buildings from long long ago. Adam tells me it's what Manchester looks like. We then caught a ferry at the Circular Quay (where all the ferries originate) and went to Manly. We started our walk which was supposed to be 3 hours but we eventually gave up about 2 hours in. Then became the search for the bus which would take us over Spit bridge and to the train station. We caught one bus and asked the driver where we had to go, He was so nice that he allowed us on without using our ticket (it's part of the whole transit system in Sydney for trains, buses and ferries) and told us when to get off and gave us directions to the next bus stop that would take us into town. What a friendly guy. We finally made it back to a section of town in the far north and got ourselves to train station and took the train over the Sydney Bridge into the central business district (where I'm staying) and switched trains to go to Bondi. After getting off in Bondi we had to take another bus (jeez) which took us down to the beach. We missed Sunset by about 30 minutes. We said our Goodbyes because Adam and I were going to get supper in Bondi while they were going back to their hostel to pack. Elody asked us for our phone numbers so we could get together and go out again soon seeming as how she's staying in Sydney for quite awhile. Yay, another friend.

I was so dead tired that I went to bed around 10pm.

Quite an adventurous last 2 days. Today is going to be a lazy day. I'm hoping tomorrow I'll get out to Paddy's Market and check out what they sell. It's supposed to be similar to the Queen Victoria Market in Melbourne. That wastes a few hours.

mmmmm, Danish

Last night Sandy invited me out to the bar that's in the basement of the hostel that I'm now staying in. It was gonna be a goodbye thing for him since he's going home on Tuesday. Anything with drinking is always a big 'yes' in my book. So I got to the bar about 10 minutes before I was set to meet him and help myself to a drink. I'm patiently waiting at the bar when guess who happens to recognize me and come over for a chat? Gidda and Medda, the cute danish girls from my bus trip up here. Sandy invited them out as well and that works out well in my favour. Sandy was late so I had plenty of time to get talking with the girls. I put most of my efforts into Gidda and it paid off. She's the sweetest, cutest girl I've had the pleasure of courting in quite some time. The conversation was flawless. No silent pauses.... at all. That's kind of a first. We both did our part to keep up the conversation and when one person ends the other starts up something new. I had already learned from the bus ride out here that she has good musical taste, so I tested her on other things. She has excellent taste in movies and TV. She hates reality shows which earns her brownie points. The real test in the TV sector was when I enquired about 24. Success! She watches it and loves Keifer Sutherland. Little things like that continued for 3 hours of us seeming to like all the same things. I thought I had blown it at one point during our music topic when we were talking about bands from our home country and she mentions Avril Lavigne and I say I don't like her music. The look in Gidda's face was what I thought was one of surprise and hurt. I thought I offended her when she tells me she's happy to have met a Canadian who doesn't like her crap. It was a close call and I really felt myself sink in my chair when I thought I hit a nerve. Glad I was wrong about reading that facial expression. The music topic was pretty much endless and even found both of us at the jukebox looking at all the songs and saying 'yay' or 'nay' to what was in there. I would say only about 1 in 10 did we disagree on. I now have the names of some Danish groups that I'm supposed to check out when I get a chance as well.

The evening found us getting closer and closer. I saw where it was going pretty quick and remembered what happened last time I got close to someone who I would probably never see again. It got pretty good during our language lesson she was giving me. I asked her to teach me more Danish and everything she told me was things like "You have beautiful eyes" and other compliments of that nature. The last one she taught me and I bungled up pretty bad and don't remember now (damn) was "I would like to kiss you". So when she has me repeating it back to her she says "yes". Well that's the invitation I was looking for. If anything, she was probably pretty frustrated that I hadn't moved in sooner in the evening to kiss her. So I got my lip action from the Danish now. We were pretty close the rest of the night until we all packed it in. I can only hope that the rest of my trip proves to be this fruitful or better.

Today was much more calm. I went to darling harbour and explored a bit. Got some information on taking a water taxi tour around the Opera house and the Bridge. I think I'll do that sometime within the next few days. I also have to continue my search for a camera battery charger. I've hit up a few stores and 2 of them sell it but are both currently out of stock (of course) and I was told to check back later in the week. Maybe Wednesday or Thursday will be a day to do that.

The hostel I'm staying out now is pretty posh and I feel out of place. It's more like a hotel with dorm rooms. I have met my second Calgarian. A girl in my room who is on the bunk below me hails from the snowy city. She's not as fun as the last Calgary girl I met. Nice person, just not very outgoing and kind of boring, so I don't spend time talking with her much.

I'm gonna call up my uncle tomorrow or Thursday and hope to get together with him at some point and catch up on everything that's happened since I last saw him, and see what he's up to these days. Maybe I'll even get a chance to see my cousins and their baby that I haven't met yet. My brother tells me that she's a bit of a spoiled baby. Oi.

Sydney, Sweet Sydney

After 3 long days of bus riding I have arrived in Sydney unscathed and with minor disappointments.

My bus trip is a whole tour thing that goes up the east coast and it promotes a "hop on and off" system where you can get off at any of the stops it makes and catch another bus on a later day. It's pretty good because we get to go to some touristy places and some other not so known places. All in all the actual ride itself was terrific.

The group was pretty small. We started with only 8 people when we left Melbourne, so that made making friends a bit easier then expected. It was a pretty good mix group as well. We had a Girl and 2 guys from England, one Scottish guy, an American, 2 German girls and myself. It was fun being the only Canadian. For the first bit of the trip we just called each other by our countries. I was Canuck until we got around to introducing ourselves properly. The American guy was kind of keener. He kept trying to impress everyone with his vast knowledge of the universe. Whenever he wasn't around our tour bus driver even made fun of him. We dubbed him Captain America in the end.

The first night was spent at a camp site up in the great dividing range. It was fucking cold. We did a cool night tour with a 4WD jeep and a big spotlight looking for animals. We also reunited a baby lamb with it's family after it had escaped from it's pen and couldn't get back in. Got to see a crap load of Kangaroos and even some Wombats. Played some more pool as per usual and tried chatting up the German girls a few times. They both didn't know much English so the language barrier was a bit of a pain, but they did very well considering I can't speak English properly. They both stayed back at the camp for a few days so they wouldn't be on the bus in the morning. Dang, down to 1 girl between the rest of us guys? That was fun.

The second day was to take us out to Canberra. Learned a lot about the history of Canberra which I'm not going to repeat here. If you're interested in it you can go get a book on it. I must say that I found it rather stupid that the government spent over a billion dollars in building their new Parliament building and filling it with 200 million dollars worth of artwork. Plus it has 3000 rooms, most of which probably don't even get used. I think they are just trying to show off or something. Pfft, lousy government. Spent the night at a very cheap hostel and then went out drinking with our bus driver and the rest of the gang. A fun time was had by all. At one point Kirsten (the English girl) said she wanted to go ask Captain America something and he had already retired for the night so she needed my room key. I put it down and in my drunken state completely forgot about it. Scottish (Sandy) convinced me that I had lost it and should go around asking people for it. So I did. I went to the people sitting at the table where we were before, I went to the bar and even asked random women. Convinced that I wouldn't get my key deposit money back I shrugged it off and didn't care too much after drinking some more. In the morning Captain America gives it to me saying that Scottish passed it off to him. We all had such a good laugh about it.

Today was the long trip from Canberra to Sydney and thankfully we were given 2 more girls to add to the trip. Not just any girls though. Young, Cute, Danish girls. I have now discovered I'm in the wrong country. I need to be in Europe. They had the coolest names too. Medda and Gidda. This morning I was at that point which I call Drunk Over. It's between being drunk and having a hang over. I took quick steps to start talking with Gidda the whole trip. I had her teaching me her language for a bit, but sadly I can't remember much of it. Stopped off at the usual small towns and hung out with the Kangaroos and so on. Got to Sydney this evening and 3 of us are staying in the dodgy end of town. Tomorrow I'm moving on up to a new Hostel more in the city center. The cleaner side of town. This place will do for now though.

That's the last 3 days in a nutshell.

Worst part of the whole trip so far is that I can't get my camera battery charger to work. So my camera battery is about to die and I need to find out if I can just buy a new charger out here for it. I have the Canon number for New South Wales and I'll have to do some calling to find out what I can get. There goes more money. I should be happy that it's the worst thing to happen.

These are a few of my favourite things

At this point I believe it's natural to begin to miss certain things. The most obvious would be family and friends, but I won't go into that. I'm talking about being a bit more materialistic.

Laptop: Poor little guy. He's just gonna collect dust for the next little while.

Cellphone: My god how I miss my cellphone! I know it serves me no good out here except for the use of text messages, but I miss having it clipped to my belt and being able to look at it and see that I have voicemail or messages. It gave me that feeling of importance.

My Music Collection: I wasn't able to burn all my music before coming out here and now I'm really wishing I had an extra week to get the rest and even buy new stuff. CD prices out here are horrible. That still hasn't stopped me from buying them though.

TV: Even though I didn't watch much for TV back home, I think I just miss Canadian/US commercials. Oz commercials are starting to bug me. It's still unknown to me if they show 24 out here. For the sake of everyone I encounter they better air 24.

REAL Football: I can't figure out Aussie Rules Football for the life of me. I've resorted to Soccer and Cricket. Aashish should be proud of me for trying to figure that game out.

Hockey: The only hockey people know out here is field hockey. I have to make sure I say ICE hockey when I talk about the sport. I want to see the World Cup Hockey! Canada is doing so well from what I've read.

I can't say it's all bad though. Out here at Subway they have pineapple as a topping choice. I thought it was strange at first, but then tried it and I'm kind of dumbfounded as to why we haven't taken that up yet. If it's also true that out here the Asians from Japan bring all the crazy fads with them, then the next one to hit north America (if it hasn't already) is going to be video messaging on cellphones. I can't believe at how popular that is over here. Cellphone are also going to get bigger again instead of smaller. Who'd have thunk it?

On the move

The other night my brother went out to some artsy-fartsy movie that I wouldn't enjoy so I decided I'd be a bum and lay around the rez building for the evening. My bro's next door neighbour, Derek, came by and asked if I wanted to go to the pub with him and some other folks from the building and possibly some other rez buildings. I'm not one to turn down an invite so I jumped on the chance and went to the pub and had a great time. I got to meet a few other folks from different buildings and some more Canadians (woohoo). My night ended up turning out okay after all and I suppose I can't write off that day as a total crap shoot.

Friday was interesting. I spent my last day with my bro and in the evening, after we were done with his campus radio show, I grabbed my bag and headed off again into the great unknown. I had already done some research on which hostel I figured I'd want to stay in so I was a bit ahead of the game in my planning for once. I made my way up to Hotel Bakpak and got myself settled. They have a bar in the basement so I quickly made my way down. In the elevator I met an Irishmen named Ray who took me around and introduced me to his crew that he's been hanging with. We played about 10 games of pool and I wasn't playing too horribly until the last 2 games. Soon afterwards another bloke who was watching us play pool started to talk to me. I would end up spending the rest of my night chatting with him. He's a Kiwi named Steve and is a damn funny guy. I continued to get more lucky as I met, amazingly, another Calgarian. Her name's Michelle and we spent most of our time trying to figure out if we both knew any of the same people. It was a long shot, but still provided for some fun conversation.

I was lucky again to get a room by myself and have a good quiet sleep in an actual bed! No more sleeping on the floor for me. This morning I crossed the street and went over to the Queen Victoria Market. It's quite the bustling market. You got everything from fresh Produce and meats, to T-shirts, pants, bags and other stuff. It's all pretty well priced as well. I saw the didgeridoo I want! Too bad it would put me back $150 and then I'd have to carry it wherever I go. When I come back to Melbourne before I go home I'll make sure to get one, a boomerang and hopefully an Australian flag that I can put on the wall of my room when I get back. So many things that I want, and so many things to get for others, but not enough room in my bag, or I don't feel like trucking it across the country. I'll have to figure something out. Maybe buy it and mail some of it home. That will cost more money...... damn, I need a job.