fluxon.net

Did I wish you Merry Xmas? Well, a Happy New Year then, just for the record. A lot of things happened since that last time I blogged during the night while waiting for my wallet to come back! Let me give you a short insight of what happened.
On the morning of December 26th Marc and I flew to Melbourne to hang out some days and see the city before starting our adventure trip on Tassie. I gotta say that I liked the city immediately and I also understood what people had in mind telling me that it has a European style. We got ourselves a backpacker hostel right next to the Federation Square, a good point to start our exploration. Since we did not really study the Lonely Planet before the trip we managed to make heavy use of the tourists office which (and here I am serious) is the best one I have ever been to. We got heaps of tips, maps, walking guides, car rental companies and a truck load of ideas how to see the Great Ocean Road - a lot of filtering had to be done. We decided to give the walking tours a go for shopping definately wasn't our main interest and chilling here and there while seeing the great sport locations, the parcs, some historical sights sounded just good. What I enjoyed most was the river running through the city's heart, with lots of cool things to see, especially at night, sculptures, fancy fountains, the exhibitions center, artists, funny people, ... and whatnot.
Strolling through the city we found ourselves in the Melbourne Central shopping mall, hey, this complex is soo huge, going over four blocks (including several bridges over streets), somehow hidden, really well equipped and architecturally absolutely astonishing from the inside! As we discovered it held a cinema (of course) we decided to watch King Kong that night. However, no time for a movie review.

So viele Sachen müßte, nein wollte ich bloggen. Es ist hier schon nicht mehr der 25., ich sitze in meiner Newtown'schen Behausung im wahrsten Sinne des Wortes auf gepackten Sachen. Eigentlich hatte ich um diese Zeit schon in Melbourne sein wollen, doch (mehr zufällig) mußte ich feststellen, daß unser Flug gestrichen wurde. Nach etwas Telefoniererei geht es nun Morgen früh los, gleich, darum will ich mich an dieser Stelle kurz fassen: Ich habe sehr andere Weihnachten gefeiert dieses Jahr, nicht zu vergleichen mit den heimischen Freunden und natürlich der Familie, aber doch recht erlebnisreich. Mit großem BBQ am 23. , schnorcheln, nettem Thairestaurant mit Freunden, einem original Christmas lunch, doch noch ein bißchen Strand, natürlich viel Hitze und echt nette Leute. Ein paar echt coole Geschenke waren auch dabei.
Was jetzt kommt? Nun, allen denen ich es nicht schon fünfmal erzählt habe, sei gesagt, daß ich nun bald nach Melbourne fliege, mir die Stadt ansehe und ein wenig entspanne, dann hoffentlich die Great Ocean Road zu Gesicht bekomme und anschließend geht es nach Tassie, dem highlight der Tour. Mit einer kleinen Maschine in den Dschungel und dann siebe Tage South Coast Track zu Fuß zurück in die Zivilisation. Kann kaum sagen, wie ich mich freue.
Nun bleibt mir also nur noch, Euch allen noch einmal frohe Weihnachten zu wünschen, und darüber hinaus auch einen guten Rutsch. Mein vernetzes Jahr endet hier ...



... ach, eh, daß ich es vergesse: Guten Tag, guten Abend und - gute Nacht.

The interested reader may already know that I didn't get up early. But - and that was really the best thing that day for me - I had no hangover, in fact I would claim that I was very close to being sober when I came home, after a walk from Redfern station. I didn't do a lot of things last Sunday, I sat in front of the computer listening to random music for more than two hours. Luckily Sander decided to have a BBQ at his place and as I was very hungry and had not left the house before I rode my bike up to Glebe (53 Darghan street, you stalkers). This place is very funny. It's like a small IKEA store, for real. The story to this is, that one of his flatmates works at IKEA Sydney and as the company wanted to get rid of some stuff, they got the whole furniture ... for free. Very convenient, huh?
The BBQ itself was also very nice. Although you could insult someone here by saying "you couldn't even organize a BBQ" I feel free to mention that we're really getting better with that wich (to some extend) is part of becoming an Aussie in my opinion. A lot of people canceled and so we had heaps of food (yeah, one big mistake... you don't have to bring stuff for everybody). Actually Marc and Sander were the only guys eating meat at first cause Greg is (at least sometimes) vegeterian. Please, guys, now that it's official don't bother him with that anymore, okay?
Finally, after being awake for the amazing amount of seven hours, I decided to leave, wanted to be fit for running on Monday morning. And hey, why pushing yourself on a Sunday?

Actually it was more Damian and Kathryn's Cocktail Night, but hey ... that's the rules. They invited us over to their house in Parramatta, which is a 20min train ride from the city. Marc wanted to take the ferry up the river, but the rest of the bunch was just too lazy. On the other hand we put quite some effort into getting good cocktails for that night, what involved taking up contact with my cocktail bar owning family members. And they again did a good job writing up a list with ingredients and quite a few cocktail recipes we could do with that. Well, we had real problems finding all that, the juices were harder to get than the spirits, but after cutting back some of our expectations and wished we finally made it (with the help of Kathryn and her rediscovered car) to reach the (btw. huge) appartement of our hosts.
There was quite a bunch of people there, Lanbo and her spouse David, Joachim and Mani, Marc, Sander, Nathan, a friend from uni, and of course Damian and Kathryn.
And so we did our best to get everybody satisfied with drinks in their hands all the time. I got hard on the blender, for the shaker turned out to be leaking and we needed bigger amounts anyway. It was very relaxed, we started playing card and boardgames and the time appeared to just rush by. Suddenly we had to decide on staying or leaving for the last train - guess what happened.



We talked and played on ... yeah, right, also had some more drinks and started to play a card game that has some strange side effects. We avoided the hardest parts, but still ended up serving Damian a beef drink. Beef drink? Ah, gonna introduce that, when I am back. And I have some more ideas for weired punishments thanks to Nathan. If winning the party means staying (awake) longer than everybody else I guess it was me who did it. Not that I was competitive. But in the end the European team left for the (I reckon) fifth train and it was past seven when I finally reached Newtown. Didn't manage to get up before 1600 that Sunday after calling some people before going to bed.

Bondi, Boogie Board, Batman Begins. Yesterday we went to Bondi again. It was really hot and Sander (who had slept at our couch), Marc and I simply needed the refreshing sea. I called Greg, who joined in and about an hour later we were on our way to Bondi Junction where we wanted to catch a bus to the promenade. We had no luck with the connections and waited a long time at different places. That sucks, I don't get why a city like Sydney has such stupid timetables.
And then, at Bondi, we did not even have a lot of time to hang out. Why? A strong storm came up wich literally blew the crowd off the beach, I guess this is what sandstorms in the Sahara could be like. One time my frisbee went out of control, taken by the wind, and made it further than I could have thrown it, crashing two meters next to some people into a stone wall. Wogga! Of course all this started while we were having our burgers for delayed lunch. If the weather had gotten better again we would have had the beach for the four of us, but we didn't wait that long and went back sooner than planned.
We agreed on having a dvd session at my place, we picked up some pizzas at dominos, got ourselves some wine and beer and watched Batman Begins. An entertaining movie, though people may claim that it's not close enough to the comics. It was a real quiet night and we all were pretty tired. But as the movie wasn't finished before the last trains left Newtown sation, we decided to wait for the first ones. We had some random movie sessions, hacked on Greg's Sodoku generator and it's objective c frontend (how geeky) and watched funny pictures. I also took the opportunity to call my mom at 19.00 German time - rather unusual. In the end Sander crushed another night and I went to sleep around 5:30. Yawn!

This is Peter, my boss. Isn't that a great picture (and a great hat)? He seems so relaxed though having a lot of things to care about ... and is just great fun to be with. More bosses should be like him, I reckon. His comment to me taking this picture: "Yeah, right, this is what all Australians look like sitting in their office." Don't think he was serious.