Let the games begin! (Airlie Beach, Australia)

Superstar!

Well, its been a long time since I've done one of these. This is well deserved. So, the last time I've written I was just finishing up my job at Customcall. Bear with me, I'm going to do a bit of bragging. Luckily for me, the last 8 shifts or so I was entitled to do the filing of the employee records. You can just imagine how many employees go through that place!!! I'd say the average turnover there is about 2 weeks. I did such a good job that my boss, the lady in charge of Human Resources, brought me to a weekly "firedown" where they award their employees for outstanding performances and crown them as a "superstar" and give us free beer and chips. I was brought 2 weeks in a row and also one a bottle of wine! Not to mention, the 3rd last week there, I was on the top ten list for selling insurance with the highest average premium. Not bad for someone who didn't really try at the job.

After enduring my 3 months at Customcall and recieiving a $500 loyalty bonus, I moved on. My Irish friend Marc, referred to his job that he was just leaving at AAPT. A telecommunications company. I ended up working there for 6 weeks. I was basically calling up small businesses and setting up appointments for our sales reps to meet with them and try to get them to switch to our phone company. It wasn't as hard as selling insurance, I had to get past a lot of receptionists, but at least they were mostly polite and professional with me. I ended up being the best appointment setter that the AAPT small business had ever had. Wow!! I guess all the weeks at an intense outbound call center really paid off. I honestly didn't think that I was that good, I could have tried a lot more, but in their eyes I was a telemarketing god.

The difference between Customcall and AAPT is that at AAPT, it was an office environment and I was the only one doing the telemarketing. So I actually felt some kind of responsibility there and was able to see a difference. As well the the office was pretty relaxed and I could take a break whenever I wanted to and use the internet as much as I wanted.

I felt bad leaving there, my team that I worked with was really kind to me. They took me out for lunch a couple of times and on my last day bought me a going away gift and a card. I even got to choose what gift I wanted!! I asked for the new Angie Stone CD, and film or batteries. Got it all except for the batteries. I had to give them an excuse that I was leaving Australia earlier than planned, otherwise I'd stay the whole 3 months. I honestly would have if my travel plans didn't interupt. But 98% for sure, I will never, ever, ever do telemarketing again.

Olympics 2004

Okay, another cool thing about my work was that a few days before the games began, my work hired a large flat screen tv for the office. It just so turned out that it was right in front of my desk!! So I was able to watch the games for 8hrs a day, no volume though. The thing is, being in Australia, all I watched was the Australian team, winning medals left, right and center. When I did see it with volume all they ever talked about was how Athens compared to Sydney 2000 games. "Blah, blah, blah, we're so good, we're 4th in the world, blah, blah..." I guess they have a right to be proud, but they could have shown other countries, seeing as though this country is full of other races. I'd say its much more multicultural than Canada. the thing is, in Australia they have free television channels, 5 of them and only 1 out of the 5 was broadcasting the games. Most of the time it was swimming that was on the television. Ian Thorpe (I'm assuming you've heard of him) was winning all the time and they replayed his events all day. He ended up being the Australian with the most medals ever in history.

Guess what? I saw him!! Jenny, Jeremy and I were walking down the streets in the city (downtown) area and him and 3 friends just casually strolled by us. It was a Friday night, about 2 weeks ago now, about 10 days after the games had ended. I bet they were going to go get piss drunk in some bar and pick up some women cause they're Ian Thorpe and friends. Anyway, we were walking and Jenny and I both focussed on his face and he made eye contact with me. I kept my eyes on him until he passed, just thinking to myself "I know that guy from somewhere". Then Jenny and I looked at each other and paused... "That's Ian Thorpe!". We didn't chase him down the street or anything, just though about it but didn't really have the guts to do it. We were surprised that he wasn't surrounded by and fans or whatnot.

Hey! I know you!

I've been waiting for the last 11 months to bump into someone I know from Calgary. It finally happened. Her name's Natasha Quimby. I went to High School with her, she's a year older than me though, but we have a few mutual friends. I actually saw her when I had first arrived in Sydney but never had the chance to talk to her because I couldn't remember her name quick enough and she had then walked passed me and was gone. This time around, I yelled out "Natasha!", that obviously caught her attention. We talked for about 5 minutes, I bet the whole time she was thinking, 'what are their names again?'.

Now that I've met one Calgarian I know, I can relax. I've seriously been anticipating it for the longest time. On another note, its really weird that in a big city with 4 million people you actually bump into people you know every now and then. The weird thing is, I didn't know that many people in Sydney.

Hen's Night BoyToy

Just a quickie on things that kept the 3 of us busy and entertained while we struggled to make a living in Sydney. Let me tell you, its a huge relief to be done working and just back to backpacking. Things became monotonous there and really boring. This sometimes turned into tension and stress. I gotta remember that I'm travelling and should be having a good time. So anyway, we all tried to make the best of our time there. We tried to stay tourists while being locals.

Sydney Aquarium: This place is huge, with platypuses, a crocodile, sharks, manterays, clown fish, blue cods, etc, etc, etc! It was really worth going to.

Harbour Bridge: For 9 bucks you go up a portion of the bridge, its what they call the 'Pylon'. From there you can get a pretty good view of the city and learn the history of the bridge. For 150 bucks you can climb and go across the top arch of the bridge, Justin Timberlake and Cameron Diaz recently did it, not to mention lots of other stars that come to Sydney. J, J and I did the one for $9.

Sydney AMP Tower: This is much like any other tower, Calgary Tower, CN Tower, etc. We had a nice lunch buffet up there and ate camel, emu, lobster and all this other really good food! I don't recommend the Camel.

Sydney Opera House: We were able to go to two different shows there. First one was a Nina Simone tribute concert in a quaint atmosphere, the opera house actually has about 6 different venues inside it. Secondly we watched an opera called "The Mikado". A comic opera set in Japan. First opera I've seen since the Phantom of the Opera when I was about 12yrs old. I enjoyed it.

Lion King: Jeremy and I have now been together for 5 years, come this past July. In order for us to celebrate we went to see 'The Lion King' performed live on stage. All I can say is WOW! That was absolutley amazing. If you have a chance to see it at a city near you... please do.

Vagabond Cruise:

Hen's Night = Stagette = Bachelorette Party

Okay, so around the harbour, you can go around on different cruises and see the city by night or day and have dinner/lunch. We chose to do an evening one with a Latin twist. After dinner's served there's a latin dance performance and then they teach some people to do the lambada and then everyone does the limbo. It was pretty cool. However, I assumed that it was going to be full of tourists, not 3 different groups of women celebrating their Hen's Night. As you can imagine the boat was lacking single men, or any men for that matter. Combine that with a bunch of alcohol and loud dancing music and you got single women wanting to have some fun. Well! I never! So J, J and I were standing around and just dancing in our own little corner, next thing you know I'm doing the lambada with about 1 or 2 drunk women. Then 3, then 4 or 5. Okay, okay, its fun to dance with other people, you know, its the 'women's' night party. But the next thing I know there's a tug at my collar, then my camera strap, then the bottom of my shirt. Then there's about 4 women surrounding me all trying to take my shirt off!! Do I look like a male stripper?? That's when I had to say no thanks. If only I were straight...

Setting Off

So I was kinda sad to leave Sydney, for a few different reasons. But I think its time to leave a place when you've gotten into a huge routine of grocery shopping on Sundays, knowing what's on the television each night of the week, giving directions to tourists you see lost on the street, know a good chunk of the different suburbs/communities around the area, etc, etc. I was sad to say goodbye to the family I have there. We all tried to get together one last time before I left. That was nice. We all kinda took the fact that I was in Sydney for 5 months for granted and thought it was much longer than shorter. So towards the end we tried to squish as much meetings as possible.

We had to transport all the items that my cousin Rowena lent us and return it via train to her house. That wasn't fun. We used shopping carts to take these chairs and large blankets and stuff to her house. We weren't allowed to bring the cart unto the train though, Jeremy tried to get it on though and acted naively when he was told he couldn't. We then took out the chairs on the platform and waited for the train on them and took pictures while people staired at us. Hehehe.

We then had to rush to the Post Office to send out a 20kg package to Canada. The office closed at 5pm and we left the house at 4:40pm. We again used a cart and literally ran through our community with this 20kg box. We made it just on time to find out that the box was 2.5kg overweight! Shit! We then had to open the box that we'd already taped up about 5 times around and take out some shoes that we'd all bought in Sydney. In the end it was all good, just had to donate the shoes to Salvation Army.

Our Filippino neighbor Annie who befriended us about a week before she knew we were leaving, it was nice because she made us a nice dinner and we played with her Mestiso son and chatted with her husband. Jenny and her hung for a few days and bonded... kinda. Anyway, the last day we were leaving she came to the flat and was all like "Oh, what are you doing with this, can I have it? oh and this too? this too? Oh, you're not going to take this with you, can I have it?" No wonder she wanted to be friends with us! In all fairness though, she gave me $50 for all the stuff she took. We were actually just going to give it to Salvation Army, but were too rushed. We were able to make it to our bus on time. And here we are...

Paddle, Paddle!!

So our first destination was a little hippy town called Byron Bay. And this is where our games began. Byron Bay is really well known for its surfing and chilling out. That's what we did.

Jenny and I took a beginner surfing course for 3.5hrs. It was really fun, we had this instructor from Israel and whose surfed all around the world. There was only one other guy in our class, Marcus from Switzerland. So we all got lots of attention. I wore a wetsuit for the first time in my life. Man, are those things tight! I felt kinda silly in it at first because my belly was hanging out. (I've gained a little wait since being in Sydney... oh well). They really keep you warm in the water though. It was actually raining, but you don't even feel or notice it, I think it was more exciting to surf in the rain.

Anyway, all we learned were the simple basics of how to stand up on the board when a wave comes. I was able to do it a few times. At first the Raz, the instructor, pushes you off and tells you when to try and stand. Then he lets you go yourself and you gotta paddle. First off, let me tell you that surfboards are freakin' heavy and after a while you get quite tired, (especially if you were up at 5am to watch the sunrise on the most eastern point of inland Australia that morning, trying to see whales and dolphins... I didn't see any) so by the time that it was time for me to paddle I had no energy at all. Raz kept yelling at me to "paddle, paddle!". That and among a few other things I have to work on, but I can totally understand how people get addicted to it, its all about waiting for the wave and executing it. I was so thrilled when I was able to just stand up when the waves came, I wanted to do it again and again, just keep trying. Hopefully... one day.

After all that working and living in Sydney we needed to just chill. We ended up buying some funky herbal tea at this all natural store. It was supposed to be like a eurphoric/aphrodisiac type thing. All it did was give me a headache and make me wanna sleep. However, we did get to do some partying with our hostel mates and have a grand old time Byron Bay. I can't let you know (again), how nice it is be travelling again and meeting new people from around the world.

Fraser Island

I gotta go... this is probably too much to read anyway, I'll tell you all about this in my next blog. Later.