Big Day Out

A fantastic weekend, which started on Thursday with Big Day Out. (Actually, that’s a lie, it started Wednesday night with a barbeque next door). The 5 day holiday effect was somewhat spoilt by the fact that I had to work Friday, but hey, beggars can’t afford to take extra days off work.

So…headed off to BDO on Thursday with Andy, Laura and Laura’s friend Pete, who’d been working at the festival (painting scenery). Arriving at the huge queue outside Sydney Olympic Park reminded me both that I love festivals and of how annoying they are – grr, endless queuing. Security was extremely tight – you emerged from the station to a crowd of police and a pack of sniffer dogs, and all bags were searched. As my friends and I were (maturely) sneaking in our own alcohol (look – we’re really broke, ok?!) this added an element of danger to the proceedings, but we got through the bag search with no problems at all.

It was an excellent day, but the Olympic park was a strange venue for a festival: rather than the usual field with stages/tents/stalls dotted around, the main stage was inside the actual arena, which was lame: there was no grass to sit on and it felt weirdly like a stadium gig. There was way too much concrete and security was really ridiculously tight: it was no-moshing, no-crowd-surfing, no-circle dancing, no-chucking bottles around or fun of any kind, and there was an additional security barrier that you had to queue to get through in order to approach the area up close to the stage. So irritating! I queued for about 40 minutes in the hope of getting up front for Franz Ferdinand, and in the end had to accept that it was futile and resign myself to standing further back. Obviously it is concerning when there are accidents at gigs, but they’d really gone over the top.

Anyway, I was happy to discover that the smaller stages were in a park area and had a much more natural festival feel, so spent a lot of time there – watching Sleater-Kinney (cool), The Magic Numbers (ok, but they’re both just SO ANNOYING to watch!) and The Go-Team, who I hadn’t heard of, to the astonishment of this Australian guy (“But – they’re English!”) Then there was a lot of sitting in the sun soaking up the atmosphere (and the smuggled-in drinks). I got so sunburnt. I was wearing elbow-length fishnet gloves (er, as you do) and when I took them off I was sunburnt in fishnet pattern, tiny diamonds, like fish scales. It looked quite cool, but that faded by the next day, unlike my horrible neck and back-burn.

Festivals are always more memorable for what you miss (i.e. Leeds Festival 2003, sitting on the grass way back talking whilst Beck was playing – “It’s Beck-tacular!”) and I think we did pretty well this time, sitting about in the sun whilst Kings of Leon, The Mars Volta, AND the White Stripes played. We were back in the main arena for The Living End, Franz Ferdinand and Iggy Pop in between, all of which were wicked, and I did manage to leave Mary Morris a White Stripes voicemail message which she apparently didn’t recognise AT ALL. How ungrateful.

We then got lost/distracted and failed to locate 2 Many DJs, which was a shame. We did find some crazy electronica which involved people in masks playing toy instruments, including a FisherPrice guitar, so that was…entertaining.

Getting up for work on Friday was HORRIBLE, and I was most upset that NOT ONE SINGLE PERSON asked me how my Australia Day was or what I’d done. Grrr. The weekend was totally awesome, however. Rachel and I had a charmingly civilised day together on Saturday – lunch at an outdoor food market in the park (it’s part of the Chinese New Year celebrations) which was yum, then Memoirs of a Geisha, which I really enjoyed – I’ve read the book, but a lot of it’s just so culturally alien that I couldn’t visualise it properly – followed by a glass of wine. Then I headed home to find my housemates getting ready for a night out, so of course I joined them. Loving my French housemates at the moment: they’d been swimming in the sea, and when we asked him about it Ludovic replied “It was ok but there was too much salad.” Took a while to figure out that he was complaining about the seaweed in the water.

We hit the Kings Cross Hotel, which was great – we met the tallest guy in the world, 6’11”!! He had to bend down to talk to ME!! – until Ludo got kicked out for being too drunk. (They’re so strict about that here – it’s basically illegal to be drunk in a pub/club, which strikes me as not a little ridiculous). We tried to convince the bouncers that he came from a different culture and they were discriminating: “It’s a cultural thing, he’s French, they drink all the time over there.” Amusingly, instead of telling us to F*** off, the bouncer replied in all seriousness “I understand that it’s their culture. However, I still can’t let him back in.” Haha.

The night continued with drinks and pool games in Newtown, where some guy directed us to a pub that stayed open til 6:30am. At about 6, Laura and I had hit the wall so we walked into the beautiful bright dawn to walk home, only to get hopelessly lost and take an hour to get home! We arrived back to find the others there before us, having got a lift from a “very nice man”. Hmm…

Anyway, back at work now and it’s all about never going out again and saving money for Tasmania and other travel plans.

Big Day Out!! selling my body + plans

Things continue much as usual - work, formatting, getting frustrated with Word, retreating to the office kitchen with the free food.

However, the immensely good news is that I scored a ticket to the Big Day Out music festival tomorrow!!! (see www.bigdayout.com for details). It's Australia day, the celebration of the day Australia was discovered by white people - hmm, dubious cause for a holiday, surely - which is a bank holiday. I wasn't planning on going to Big Day Out, but then I realised on monday that I really did want to go and my ticket is a testimony to my Ebay-ing skills.

So that's tomorrow. Work on friday is going to be...painful.

I'm earning some extra money by participating in a medical trial. Basically...this involves me getting a trial vaccine for Japanese Encephalitis and then keeping a diary for 30 days to see I drop down dead/experience side effects. For this I get paid $250. My friends over here have mostly been very concerned about my doing this: "What, are you crazy?!" being the usual reaction. For those of you out there who are screaming "No! Mary, don't do it, your health is not something to gamble with and there are other ways to earn money!" - too late: I got vaccinated yesterday. So far...I feel fine. Touch wood, fingers crossed, etc.


So given that I'm earning money in this somewhat dubious fashion, I've been planning constructive and positive ways to spend it. This job finishes in just over 3 weeks, and the trial at the end of february, so after that I'll be free to leave Sydney and do some more travelling. I'm thinking of going down to Melbourne from where I could fly to Tasmania and volunteer in an environment conservation project for a week or so(good CV building for when I try to get a place in a Greenpeace anti-whaling boat or whatever). Then back to Melbourne, on to Adelaide via the Great Coast Road, and by then my money will probably have run out again and I'll need to find some kind of work (fruit picking is still on the cards).

A few more photos

Sydney Aquarium is really awesome, although I'm not sure their "Australia's No.1 Tourist Attraction" claim is quite accurate.
Incidentally, as you pay for the aquarium, they ask you your nationality - allegedly it's just for research purposes, though I haven't tried saying "Iraqi" yet...






(That's me with my roommate Laura and her friend Dan who stayed with us for a while over christmas...I think we were standing in front of a tank of really interesting fish).

Finally, some Sydney photos!!

If I get caught doing this at work, I might get into trouble.

I made a cake (note the tiny-ness of our christmas tree in the background!) This is my living room, it's Christmas eve and the TV is displaying christmas songs karaoke, yay.

Me and friends on the beach on Christmas day - I wish I had some better photos and that there were santa hats involved, but there you go.



New Year's Eve

New Job

Sorry I haven't updated in a while, it's been a busy week or so, spent job hunting and then working. The good news is that I have a new job which is fantastically well paid, and, for the first time in my life, I'm NOT employed through an agency!! I was getting pretty stressed out by last Thursday, having joined a million temping agencies, taken a million annoying interviews, and still not found anything, when I got a call from my friend Rachel telling me to come and meet her at work...and I got lucky. She'd gone to this company as a temp, and really impressed them so they'd given her the role of administrator for this project-thing, but then, rubbishly, she found out she has to take 30 days off work while her new visa work rights come through...so she recommmended me to her company and they took me on!!

So now I have a job as project administrator for a facilities management company...it's cool, 6 weeks of really well paid work, and it beats telesales ANY DAY, but it is somewhat more...uh...challenging. I started on tuesday and realised I had no idea what I was doing...talk about a learning curve! it was a pretty stressful week, including a meeting on wednesday in which I had to take minutes FOR SEVEN HOURS, but by the end of the week I was feeling alot better. I think I've been managing to bluff my way through. And thank god it's the weekend.

In other news, I've got lots of new housemates which is interesting, though I miss the old ones. Last week we had a leaving do for my friend Colin and I cooked Thai green curry for 6 people, which turned out fantastic, after a shaky start (the curry paste is so pungent, I added it to the pan and everyone started sneezing and choking from the fumes) and a cake, and was basically a total domestic goddess.

Oh, and we finally went to see Russell Crowe and his band. $20, but oh man it was worth it!! A totally fantastic performance...Russell Crowe is basically a comedian, and in addition to playing some not-bad music (lots of covers, some Nick Cave, some Johnny Cash) had us all in total hysterics. I think he is actually insane, mind you. It was really excellent, and we ended up dancing right by the stage. There was an exciting moment at the end when we stole a setlist and found a mobile phone number written on the back, which we decided must belong to Mr Crowe - but then we called it and got the voicemail of some girl called Jenny. Damn.

Hello 2006

New Year in Sydney was fabulous.

The amazing weather we've had recently, combined with the overwhelming paranoia prevalent among the backpacker community about getting a good spot, turned watching the fireworks on the harbour bridge into an all-day affair...I was out of the house by midday. A big group of people from our street travelled across the bridge to the north shore to watch the fireworks from a place called "Bradley's Head" - it's a really nice place, a national park that leads down to the harbour with a view of the opera house and the city centre on the opposite shore. A bit of a trek from Newtown, but hey.

The day got off to a shaky start since transporting a ridiculous amount of beer, wine and food for 25 people across the city on a very hot day was fairly stressful, plus most people had hangovers since it was my ex-housemate Tim's birthday party the night before. We finally made it to the charming grassy meadow and beach which was our destination, and although it was already pretty crowded we did get a good spot. Then the realisation kicked in that there was 7 hours to go until the first firework display (at 9pm). 7 hours...it was about 35 degrees...there was no shade ANYWHERE...we were all hot, tired, lamed out and beginning to burn. We passed the time huddling into the single tent we had between us (which was mainly to keep the drink cool) and jumping into the sea (which was very pleasant til, whilst swimming, I overheard some guys talking about what a relief it was to wee in the sea. Grrr, that ruined that experience for me). So yes, a bit of a trying few hours: i knew it would be lovely from about 6pm when it had cooled down a bit and we could have a drink and watch the sunset, but the middle of the day was really unpleasant. I managed not to burn, with the help of liberal quantities of factor 40.

Anyway, as I had predicted, by the early evening things had turned around and it was absolutely lovely. The area filled up to a ridiculous extent, mostly with French people for some reason, who spent alot of time having very noisy photo opportunities which we just couldn't compete with. The fireworks at 9pm were fantastic - it's a really huge display, plus the city lights and the lights of the thousand-odd boats in the harbour really set a beautiful scene. Sydney is so strikingly picturesque. Photos will follow but I imagine they will fail to do it justice.

By 11pm alot of us were pretty knackered and ended up stretching out on the grass for a nap. This worked out very well for everyone except Tim - we just couldn't wake him up at midnight, so he missed the (even more)spectacular midnight firework display and countdown etc, and woke up about 20 minutes into the new year, very confused! haha.

I eventually made it home at 4am after a prolonged journey across the city (it wasn't as bad as it could have been as everyone was filled with New Year cheer), met up with my housemates (we somehow magically managed to all arrive home at exactly the same time) and sat about until about 7am. And I went to bed first. I still haven't recovered from the lack of sleep...

So a spectacular New Year. New Year's Day (sic -is that apostrophe correct? Australia's having a bad effect on my grammar) was I think one of the hottest days I've ever experienced...our friend's car measured the temperature at 47 degrees, but the news said 44 so I suppose we should compromise and say 45.5. It was damn hot, basically. I walked round to my friend's house and arrived as a sweaty mess...we spent the day having a barbeque, although how anyone managed to get close enough to the barbeque to actually cook I have no idea. We pretty much just flopped down and sat as still as we possibly could...in the evening I went into the city to meet up with Cath from back home, who is up for a visit from Melbourne, which was great: it was really nice to see someone I've known for longer than a month. The day refused to cool down, even as the sun set - we were sitting outside a bar and it was STILL ridiculously, uncomfortably hot at 9pm! A lovely evening, and it looks as if our travelling plans might converge later in the year which would be cool - we both want to head to Western Australia.

Yesterday I went to the Aquarium. It's advertised as "Australia's no.1 tourist attraction" a ridiculous claim (Uluru? The opera house?!) but it was excellent, with a really amazing shark tank...you kind of walk through, so the sharks and huge stingrays are swimming overhead and on both sides of you. Cool.

Job interviews start today...wish me luck.