Inbetween the lines

One of the interesting things about hostels is that you normally have no personal space, your bedroom is shared with people. Your kitchen is always busy and your bathroom is full of naked Asians. Now this normally isn't to much of a problem, I like talking to people but there are certain situations where it can be a real pain in the ass. This was one of them.

Me and Lauren had returned to my room after a good date, luckily the Swedish girls weren't in, but after some fooling around Lauren suddenly froze and said they might come back at any minute. This proved most annoying and pretty soon I found myself down at reception saying.

'OK, I already have a room but could I book another private room please'

'Sure $100 please'

'Sorry, we can't book a room the hostels full' - Now you may notice that something was lost in translation from the Australian hostel desk guy to Lauren but I have only been here a couple of months and wasn't completely fluent in Australian yet. Besides one hundred bloody dollars! For that kind of money I could hire a professional with their own room.

After some more fooling around I attempted to use my powers of persuasion.

'It's OK they are Swedish, think of all the porn they've seen, they would probably just join in' -She didn't budge, my normal tactic of shockingly honest congruently delivered truth didn't work time for plan B.

'There is a picture of a wolf on my sheets and the spirit of the wolf will protect us from being discovered' -If in doubt try and take the conversation to a weird abstract metaphorical place where my mind normally has a distinct advantage. No good.

After some more fooling around I hatched a plan, we could send the Swedish girls a text message explaining the situation.

'Don't come in I'm having sex (unless you want to join in)' - apparently this message was to blatant and had to be redrafted to

'You guys are obviously having fun on a good night out, best not come back till I text you' -I liked the first message more.

Anyway fun was had, I sent the all clear ... seconds later heard a phone bleep outside the door and the Swedish girls entered the room just as if they had been waiting outside the door. Every one was embarrassed apart from me, because ... well if you know you are going to look back and laugh one day ... why wait.

Washing day

An interesting thing happened to me this morning, one of the things you are initially shocked by in an Australian hostel is that in the Men's shower rooms/toilets for some reason a lot of the Asian guys walk around completely butt naked while doing tasks that really don't require nakedness like brushing their teeth or shaving. What shocked me this morning is that I didn't even really notice that I was shaving next to a naked Asian guy! It had just become so normal that my brain barley felt the need to pass the thought into consciousness. I should get my own place soon, I have a feeling I'm becoming hostitutionalized.

Today I had to do my washing again, this is an emotional time for me. By mistake I had brought a lot of my old clothes to Australia with the idea that I could abandon them easily for new clothes when the mood took me. This was a big mistake I was very emotionally attached to my old clothes and I knew that each wash took them one step closer to death.

This was especially true of my lucky boxer shorts, I loved them most of all, but the inevitable disintegration had set in and I knew they only had a short number of washes left before they completely melted away just leaving the lonely white elasticated waist band.

Also when it costs you $6 for a wash any concept of separate colour and white washes fades away. All washing is equal in the eyes of the Laundromat.

Conversations

I have meet some special people over here.

AFL Football guy.

You see him about 25% of the times you go out, he wears a complete Aussie rules football outfit complete with ball and comes into a pub throwing the ball to people. He gets really upset if people don't catch the ball or fail to throw it back intermediately. It puzzles me how well he is accepted by the other pub patrons ... you don't get people with other hobbies going out and doing such displays. For example you don't get joggers run into the pub in full jogging gear then running round in circles. He is yet to throw the ball to me but when he does I'm sure something interesting will happen.

The six million dollar feminist.

She was an absolute joy to talk to, she like a lot of feminists had long given up on the whole equality idea and was gunning for world domination. Talking to her was really hard because of how funny most of her arguments where. She really didn't even want to concede that men had a physiological advantage over women. Claiming unfair training practices and traditions where the real reasons.

On one point I did agree with her, this annoyed her even more. She claimed that men and women should compete equally in sports and not be separated. I agreed, but for the wrong reasons. I'm not a sports guy but I would probably watch mixed men and women competing in sports because ... well ... it would be really funny. We argued for about two hours, but where strangely taking it in turns to buy each other drinks for the whole duration. I would say something really outrageously sexist then see if I could recover using intelligent debate and some minor Jedi mind tricks. I was having a lot of fun but she was starting to get pretty upset, so I started to concede a few points to cheer her up then went on my way to go talk to the girl that looked like Kyle that had just entered the bar.

Khaleel

Khaleel was a strict no drinking, no pork eating, pray five times a day Muslim. He had grown up in Saudi Arabia. I'm not sure how or why but we get on really well, he even calls me brother now, which I like a lot. I don't think we have ever agreed on a single point but we have a lot of fun talking about it. He was having quite a few problems adapting to Australian life. Everyday backpacker things would be happening to him and he really felt like he was living in hell sometimes, I found myself talking him down quite a lot. For instance he saw a girl kissing one guy and then an hour later kissing another guy. For a guy that pretty much believes in no kissing before marriage (yeah that's right not even kissing) this really shocked him.

It was really interesting listening to him as his belief system was just so alien to me that I found it and the reasons behind it absolutely fascinating. I held a great respect for him and his principals and put my points across accordingly. I felt really jealous of this guys perspective hes got so many wonderful experiences and surprises coming his way in his travels around Australia, I was going to do my best to make sure he was in a position to enjoy them.

Spider Pig

Sleeping in the same room as three Swedish girls can be a lot harder than it sounds, especially due to my new identity as an English gentleman. To start with I was having to go outside to fart which was becoming most inconvenient especially after a curry. Last night was especially difficult to sleep, it was about two or three in the morning. They returned shortly after myself obviously been to the cinema and then out for a lot of drinks.

I was awoken by them coming in then almost intermediately falling out the door again. I love how loud drunk people are when they are trying to be quiet. I took the opportunity to quickly stand up and hide behind the door to jump out on them when they returned. Judging by the screams and other people coming to the room to check what had just transpired this scared them a little to well. Things settled down and we went to bed.

There would be a few minutes of silence, then just as you would start to drift off to sleep one of them would start singing.

'Spider pig, Spider pig'

This would be followed for a few minutes of school girl giggles then a few minutes more silence ... just long enough for you to almost be asleep again before another would take her turn to sing. It was hard to be angry because well, to be honest it was really funny. After about an hour of this they had obviously had there fun and where drifting off to sleep.

'Look out here comes the spider pig' -It was my turn and the whole cycle began again.

For those unfamiliar with the Simpson's trailer here is the reference:

Welcome to the Zoo

The Australian winter had taken a savage turn for the worse, the temperature last night dropped to a biting 11 degrees and some days it was only just reaching 23 degrees. Here's me enduring another inhospitable winters day over here. Hows the rain guys?



By the way that wasn't the ice cream I ordered but I didn't really mind. I was looking at that one when I ordered thinking what the hell kind of flavour is that.

Today I was going to Australia Zoo, it was set up and run by Steve Irwin's family. In death Steve had transformed from national embarrassment to the Australian answer to John Lennon. For those of you unfamiliar with his work here is him doing a very tame show (for him) at the zoo.



It was by far the best Zoo I had ever been to, but the tour left us there for 6 hours which is a very long time to stay at the zoo, here are my photos. I'm all proud of myself now, having actually done a tourist thing.

Australia Zoo

I have been offered the job, but have decided not to take it, I really preferred Melbourne so as the worst traveller in the world ever I am going to return next week to the only other place in Australia that I have been to. I've given myself a week here to tie up a few lose ends and maximise my return on dating time invested.

A New Hope

Things have been looking up the past few days, having survived the plague and finally found a good hostel in Brisbane. If your ever backpacking around these parts I recommend Brisbane Palace Backpackers its a really nice place. For the first time since I arrived I unpacked and it felt good, my mind breathed a sigh of relief that if had found somewhere that it felt comfortable to call home for the next few weeks.

Yesterday I talked to Claire on the phone for a while. Shes been lucky enough to find her dream guy complete with cottage, white picket fence and his own horse. She seemed very happy and almost ready to settle down. I'm happy for her and wish her all the best. I'm starting to wonder just how many amazing women I was going to let slip through my fingers - I'm estimating at least another couple ;o) . As much as I have enjoyed my perpetual search I was starting to feel starting to feel the loss as another of my X's settles down/gets married with someone else.

I had a job interview today with a young and very big profit making company wotif.com they seemed like a really good bunch of guys. The had a sense of humour and where very smart. I loved that their stock symbol was WTF! I had a phone interview yesterday with them and they where bringing me in today for the real one. It looked like it would be a really good job, the recruitment consultant was going crazy that I had managed to get an interview with them, saying things like they are very picky about who they employ so be careful what you say. The interview went very smoothly here's my favourite extract:

'So we noticed on your CV that the last time you worked was over a year ago, what have you been doing?'

'Nothing'

'So what have you been doing to keep your IT Skills up to scratch?'

'Nothing'

There we go, with two perfectly congruent and amazingly honest answers I had just explained the year gap in my job history to the panels satisfaction.

Later that day they asked me back for a second and final interview tomorrow, I explained that I couldn't make it as I was going to the Zoo tomorrow so we scheduled it for Thursday afternoon instead.

After the interview I had a shopping trip come date with Lauren, not wanting to be late I turned up in my suit and jokingly scorned her for turning up somewhat under dressed. One of the best things about my hostel is that It's only one block from the center of town so I could quickly pop back after we meet and slip into something more comfortable.

The shopping, then drinks, then lunch, then drinks, then dinner then more drinks with Lauren was very enjoyable. We found two great pubs that actually sold nice tasting beer! One was a micro brewery place and the other specialized in Belgian beer It was so nice not to be drinking XXXX or Victoria Bitter for a change. Near the end of the evening talk turned to whose place we should head to. Since I had my room all to myself it was the natural choice. Things where starting to get interesting when ...well ... here's a sentence that I never thought I would say:

'Unfortunately that's the moment when three Swedish girls decided to move into my room'



Sadly that's where all similarities with porn films ended rather abruptly. Shame :o(

It's been pointed out to me by Gabe that as this trip is a social experiment that I shouldn't be showing the people I interacted with in Australia this blog as I would corrupting the experiment. I work on the idea that you should just tell everyone possible the truth, but showing people a blog containing entries about them and some of my recent explots was proving increasingly unpopular with the ladies.

So in a debate between scientific method and ethics I have picked this compromise, I will reveal the blog to them in it entirety but only after my interaction with them has come to an end. This seems a good balance.

Just think of the blogortunities!

Outbreak

A couple of days ago an Asian guy stayed in our room coughing all night. By the morning the plague bearer had left but everyone else in the room was coughing and feeling like death. I'm not sure if it's bird flu or sars or some horrible new mutation of the two.

I'm spending all my time in bed, normal blogging service will resume shortly.