Oddities at the Surry Hills Festival

When I got back from Coogee the park near my hostel was filled with stalls and information stands and lots of people. It was a one-day festival supporting the neighbourhood centre of Surry Hills, though I’m not really sure what that is. There were stalls with clothing and jewelry and your stand fair crafts, but then also some fun stuff, like New Zealand snack foods, good herbal energy potions, henna, and palm readings. The food stalls were so torturous – lots of Indian food, and limeade drinks, and mini-waffles, and ice cream. I broke down and bought a Turkish gholzene (or something like that I’d never heard of) which was like a veggie-stuffed quesadilla except with this dough stuff instead of a tortilla that was flipped over a grill.

And then there were the weird things. A stand sold wax versions of your hand – you dipped it in wax to get a shell and then they filled it with more wax and dipped it in colours (most of the example hands were giving you the bird – for clarification see the Flight of the Concords episode). 

One stand sold mustache sunglasses, which I modeled with amusement.

There was a giant tree sculpture thing with moveable eyes and someone hidden talking for it and I had no idea why.

There was also a giant inflateable Twister game, and lots of people playing it (though I don’t know why they were blue).

Random people were dressed in animal suits or like mimes or zombies, which made me wonder if all the Halloween stuff happened on the weekend. Earlier in the afternoon there was more stuff going on, but I didn’t stay for too long because I was carrying stuff and just wanted to get back to the hostel.

There were a few cool sculpture areas, including this display about energy where you could ride a bike to turn on the lights. They had a whole tent and a few other displays about environmental issues and not using disposable bottles, and even a section on ocean clean-up.

There also were some stages (one was inside this tent and was all hippie and chai-tea based) with bands blaring Jamaican music, funk from Melbourne, and jazz at various points throughout the evening. Though I left a little after 7, the music filtered through the hostel across the street for a while, as a sort of unexpected, though not entirely unpleasant, soundtrack.

Shopping List for Week 1

1. Carrots
2. Spinach
3. Box of kiwis that are still not ripe
4. 2 oranges to eat until the kiwis ripened (haha I wish)
5. Bananas (my new favourite fruit option since they’re really cheap and actually ripe)
6. Head of garlic
7. Plain Greek yoghurt (super tasty)
8. Loaf of bread
9. Pasta ($1 per bag haha)
10. Cheddar cheese (by far my favourite purchase, followed by the yoghurt)
11. Peanut butter (I think I’m a ground squirrel at heart)
12. 2 potatoes
13. Indian korma microwave meal that I took to eat at the beach hostel

Acquired from the kitchen:
1. Salt/pepper
2. Tea/instant coffee
3. Oatmeal
4. Weird bottle of brown vinegar that looks like balsamic but tastes like white

I also succumbed to passionfruit gelato and a Turkish gholzene thing (which I couldn’t pronounce or spell) at the Festival.

Yes, some of you may find this dull, but it wouldn’t really be my blog if I didn’t mention food! Hopefully I can move to a roomshare when I get a job, and have more space to store and cook tasty things.

A Mini-Update

But first, some snatches of overheard conversations:

1. Woman behind me on a bus talking on a phone: “Far ouuuuut!” (said repeatedly and with a strong Aussie accent)

2. British girl sharing my hostel room: “I look like a wollie!” (does anyone know what that means?)

3. Woman walking past me chatting to her friend: “Oh god, I’m not a cougar! I don’t want to scare the poor boy!” (would have loved to see that one face to face)

4. Irish guy in the beach hostel: “sfijouehrmjlgjs” (I literally couldn’t understand anything the flocks of Irishmen at the beach were talking about)

So far I’ve been trying to find jobs, and wandering around the city, and officially killing my feet. I wandered all the way to the Rocks, glimpsing an old haunt: The Australian Hotel. On the way back I got turned around after buying potatoes in Woolworths and walked most of the way back towards the Harbour before realizing my mistake – adding a few extra km to my already-long walk.

I had a trial for a café waitress job in Hyde Park on Thursday, which was fun, although I don’t know when I’ll hear from them. I feel like I should have an advantage with my native English speaking abilities (there are so many European tourists everywhere and some of them are really hard to understand) but then again a few of their hired waitresses were almost unintelligible (particularly the French girl). 

I also wandered around King’s Cross, which is this funky neighbourhood to the east of the main city, that’s got some sketchy bars but then some elite-looking shops and restaurants – weird. They have a library, though, so I rested there. They had a banned books display, which was funny, and included a lot of the classics like Catcher in the Rye, Harry Potter, Of Mice and Men, Farenheit 451, and Huckleberry Finn. I read a lot of the blurbs to see if any had been banned in Australia, but most of them were from the US. There was a really funny one about the post office refusing to ship a certain book to Harvard (or maybe Yale…one of those Ivy Leagues) until someone intervened (if only I could remember what the book was).

I was feeling really sick of the city by the time I get back, so I went to Coogee Beach for Friday. I wanted to go for longer but the weather was turning bad, so even though it was sunny when I was there, it was definitely not warm enough to go swimming. Next time I should rent a wetsuit or something. People were playing some sort of cricket-ish game and volleyball, though.

They have a nice diving bay nearby so I might do a PADI Refresher Diving course there when I get a job or get more settled. There’s a nice walking trail between Coogee and Bondi, and I went part of the way to see some of the bay. If you go up farther there are sculptures on display until next week, so I’ll have to go again soon.

Here’s a shot of one of the birds that frequent my normal hostel looking for table scraps, though here they were in a more natural environment. They’re kind of cute and squeaky, even if they are like cowbirds crossed with pigeons.

The beach hostel was a fun place to spend Friday night (lots of stuff going on, though overshadowed by the many drunk Irish folks) but I wouldn’t want to spend every night there, since it was pretty loud. Met a guy from Nottingham, England who likes the Robin Hood movies, and a guy from Okotoks, Alberta, which is really close to where I worked in Canada (and where we bought groceries). The girls in my normal room are from England and New Zealand. The only Americans I’ve met were from Chicago, Dallas, and San Francisco, respectively. And then there are the uncountable Germans, French, and other Europeans making up the rest of the eclectic hostel bunch!

Things I learned in my first 24 hours in Sydney

1. Hostel rooms can be smaller than college dorm rooms and fit twice the number of people

2. The Pitt Street Mall is actually a maze in disguise

a.       The Prada and designer clothes zone is not on the way to the food court

b.      Concierges at the Pitt Street Mall are cheerful and nice

3. Passionfruit does not exist in Sydney (sad face), but passionfruit gelato does

4. The free shuttle bus stops running at 3:30 pm

 5. It can start pouring at any moment, but especially after 3:30 pm

6. Within several hours of being in Sydney one can develop an accent (according to the hostel front desk)

7. Apparently giving your resume to a café manager earns you a trial period (we’ll see how that goes)

8. Gulls taking baths in street fountains are pretty cute, but street-smart ibises lurking near restaurants – not so much

9. Yes, that super loud squeaking in the trees is in fact rainbow lorikeets

10. Guys running job advice offices are surprisingly interested in caterpillar to butterfly metamorphosis and know all about Silicon Valley 

11. Lunchtime in Hyde Park features lots of school kids in dorky uniforms talking about Facebook statuses

12.  Funky brown birds with yellow beaks love grills and climbing under tables

13. Jet-lag lasts forever…good night!

How I Spent 30 Hours Traveling to Sydney

I’m sitting in my hostel in Australia and trying to recover from a bit of jet-lag (just a bit). I meant to post an intro to this blog before I left, but obviously that didn’t happen, so I’ll just say now that I’m in Australia on a Work and Holiday Visa, which means that I can work and travel anywhere around the country for up to 12 months! It’s been pretty bleh so far, since the travel took a while and now I’m just trying to find a job to fund more exciting ventures, but more on that later. If you’ve seen my Epic Ecological Adventures blog (annimalfox.blogspot.com), then you know that I tend to be long-winded and to basically journal every day and then post it, usually with some relevant pics. I plan to use this blog a little bit differently. First of all, I’ll be traveling for a year, and I don’t think even I can keep a day-by-day for that long, and a lot of if may be kind of dull, depending on the work I’m doing. Anyway, I hope to post as often as possible, but I’ll be exploring the beauty of brevity (after this post, naturally) and will probably be paying for internet a lot so I may not have time to upload a ton of pics, but I’ll try to post lots when the wifi is good. Onward to a little bit about my adventure in flying around the world (or, see title).

In my day+ of travel on Saturday, I first got to fly to LA (watching Hitch along the way) and hang out in the LAX airport, which is always delightful. At least I didn’t have to walk very far to get to the international terminal, which was right around the corner. The flight to Fiji was delayed 45 minutes, which meant that we left at about 12:20, instead of 11:40, so technically I experienced a little bit of Sunday before it was absorbed by the date line. I have officially confirmed that I always get a middle seat when I’m not allowed to pick my own seats, which seems peculiar since there is a 3-way chance of getting either of the seat options, but I always get the middle (I guess people who buy tickets earlier get to pick their seats, don’t know). Anyway the flight was fine, although I was right by one of the kitchen areas so it was noisy. I appreciate them giving us dinner and breakfast, but I would have much rather slept the whole time instead of having to eat at 1 in the morning (although it was good tofu and rice in a soy sauce) and then be woken up 2 hours before the flight landed to have breakfast. Whatever, I watched the movie during dinner that just popped up on my screen. It was “When you’re expecting” or something like that, and had several different couples who were all going to have babies. Almost every actor was familiar (Elizabeth Banks, Cameron Diaz, even Matthew Morrison and one guy who was on Gossip Girl) and the movie was entertaining as far as those types of movies go. My favourite part was the “dudes’ club” which was all the dads bonding and hanging out in the park on Saturday with their strollers and babies. One of the dads-to-be was feeling unsure, so they were trying to help him, while occasionally nodding to this jogger guy who always ran by them at the same time. Anyway, then I mostly slept, I guess.

I got to see out the window of the girl next to me as we were coming down. The Fiji islands were gorgeous from above, where we saw the coastlines and the aqua ocean, including lighter areas with waves breaking on them that were the reefs. The mountains and tropical humidity were also fun when we got out of the plane. The line from the plane to the international flight area was absurdly long, although there was a live Fijian band entertaining us along the way, with ukuleles. Turns out the reason it was taking so long is that every person had to put their bag through the single x-ray, and they didn’t even have a long table to get your stuff ready, so it was a purely individual process. Inside there were lots of island goods and food, and I almost got some ice cream, until I realized that it didn’t have any cool flavours (no tropical fruits or anything) and was really expensive (like 4.50 AUD, which turned out to be normal, ah well). So I just hung out and tried to pretend like it wasn’t lunchtime in Seattle so I would stop being weirdly hungry at 7 in the morning in Fiji.

The last flight was fine (ca 5 hours) and I watched most of Spiderman and ignored my weird tomato bun sandwich that they gave me for my vegetarian breakfast. No cool views of Sydney coming down, though, since I was on the aisle (not the middle, for once!). I got on a shuttle bus to the hostel (free airport transfer), and there ended the saga.

The subsequent shower was glorious!