Month: November 2007

You have to draw the line somewhere and I draw it at garlic intolerance

On the weekend that I arrived in London, I started looking up flatshares on the internet and making phone calls. By Sunday, I had two appointments. As you have read from last time, I didn’t have a map so was relying on getting good directions from my potential housemates.

The first one was with Anya. She had a slight accent, which I couldn’t quite identify and gave me a bit of trouble understanding her instructions.

‘Coming out of the station, turn left and follow the road until you get to an intersection. Cross the road, pass a church, keep walking until you see a red banner. We’re the building on the other side.’

It was dark and there was a five-way intersection as soon as I stepped out of the tube station. I knew immediately that it was hopeless. After calling Anya for more directions three times, she agreed to come out of the house and meet me at the McDonald’s outside the tube station.

The flat was neat and colourful. The area was nice. The rent was very cheap. Anya was very pleasant too, although that didn’t help because she was moving out.

Then I met the ‘head housemate’, Angelo. He seemed normal at first. Then he handed to me a piece of paper with a list of house rules. He lectured me about each one. ‘You must always double bolt the front door. Guests can’t stay longer than two nights.’ Okay, so he was a control freak. I could handle that. The rules seemed reasonable.

‘Tell me about yourself,’ he finally asked.

‘Well, I like cooking,’ I said brightly. ‘I’m happy to share a meal every now and then.’

Angelo barked out a laugh. ‘No, we don’t eat together. You know, eating’s not something we ‘do’ really. You just have to eat so we grab anything, eat out mostly. You know how it is.’

‘Okaaaay…’ I thought.

‘What kind of food do you cook?’

‘Chinese food, mainly.’

Angelo made a face. ‘I don’t like Chinese food. I had some once and I asked for no onion. When the food came, there was onion in it!’

I made a sympathetic noise.

‘I hate the smell of onions and garlic!’ he cried passionately.

‘Ah… Well, yes, there’s a lot of garlic and onion in Chinese food,’ I said. Anya was sitting beside me, still and quiet the whole time.

We talked some more about other things, then Angelo came back to the cooking.

‘If you cook, you’ll keep the kitchen clean, right?’

‘Of course,’ I assured him.

‘You have to,’ he said, ‘because this is a communal house and we need to share things.’

‘No problem.’

‘And when we cook, we have to wash up and put everything away before we start to eat.’

Now I was speechless. He already hated my cooking, wouldn’t eat with me and now was telling me to clean up while my food got cold?

At this point, I decided that I could not live here, no matter how cheap the rent was or how nice the room was. Angelo seemed satisfied, though.

‘I like you,’ he declared.

‘Great!’ I nodded.

‘Anya will call you when we decide who gets the room.’

They walked me to the door and I almost bolted out of the flat, already texting my next potential housemate because I was going to be late for my second appointment.

Later that night, I got a message from Anya, saying that another current housemate wanted to meet me. By then, I was able to text back to say that I had found a place to live. You can read about my second and last interview in my next blog post.

Wireless bus

I’ve been living in an apartment in London, which doesn’t have the internet. I am on a coach now, which does have the internet, hence this blog post!

I got to London last Saturday and checked into an apartment that my company rented for me. Damjan and I promptly went off to see Avenue Q, a very funny, rather shocking puppet musical. It’s fantastic. Go see it if you have the chance.

Damjan left on Sunday and I began my permanent-house-hunt. Even though I could live in my rented apartment for two weeks, I wanted to sort out a proper home as soon as I could. Finding a place in London can be tough.

I went to an internet cafe, trawled through websites and downloaded more than 50 house share ads. Then I went back to my internetless apartment and read through the ads properly. Of the 50+ ads, about 10 were in areas I wanted to live and within my price range. Four of them had the right ‘vibe’ so I called them up.

Immediately, two people said that I could visit them this evening. I hesitated.

‘Yes, I’m free tonight. I can come by but you have to give me really clear instructions on how to get there. I don’t have a map or the internet at the moment.’

‘No problem,’ they assured me.

In the next episode of Coconut Joan, you will read about me getting lost, meeting the flatmate from close-to-hell, and getting voted into the house, reality TV style. Stay tuned.

Are you smarter than a high schooler?

This is cool. A link I got from Random Connections led me to The Blog Readability Test.


I usually try to use the simplest words as I can and favour short sentences (damn, I wrote that sentence so self-consciously that I reviewed it three times for simpler words and shortness!). I’m glad that high schoolers can read my blog!

Hmm. It just occurred to me that this application is probably American, so high school is equivalent to Years 9 to 12. I wonder what it would take to make my blog readable by 14 year olds? Maybe I need to put more ‘lol’ and ‘tonite’ in. (Did you see the strategic first sentence in this post?)

For those not in Australia or who don’t watch TV, the title of this post refers to the new TV show on Channel 10, Are You Smarter Than A Fifth Grader? The show is interesting in its concept but duller in execution.

Oh, I’ve just found out that there are versions of this show all over the world.

P.S. Here is a link to a random Opinion article I got from The Age website. I put it into the readability test application and it came out as ‘junior high school’. It’s managed to capture the 14-year-old market that I want! I wonder what the difference is between it and my blog?

Going bush

Continuing on from last time, these pictures are from the main track of a bush conservation area about 1.5 kilometres (a mile) from my house.

This is what it basically looks like. I especially like coming here on a hot day because the path is shady and cool. It smells nice, like gumtree and onions (I think the onion smell comes from some kind of wild onion grass). However, right next to this scrap of nature is a golf course.


The air here is full of bird sounds. I brought my camera, hoping to photograph a flock of cockatoos that I’d seen here a few times. Unfortunately, there were no cockatoos when I went walking that day (there were two when I went out today, though!).

I did photograph this little bird. The following two photos come from the same snap. I don’t know which crop I prefer. I like the branches but compositionally, I’m told it’s often good to leave space in the direction that the subject is looking. I explained this to dad and he suggested using the computer to flip the bird around so that it was looking at the branches! Dilemma solved, eh.


Also, the photo isn’t very sharp. I don’t have steady camera hands. My photos often come out a bit fuzzy 🙁


Here’s a tree that caught my eye. You can’t see how big it is. I’d say it were four storeys high, so maybe 25 metres.

This is my favourite part of the walk. I am standing on a bridge over the creek I wrote about three years ago. It has been very dry for years. It used to be that I didn’t see those rocks on the riverbed at all.

Over the weekend, we’ve had thunderstorms and flooding rains. When I visited the creek this morning, it was serenely full. It was a happy sight.

Being full means that this sign by the creek is finally of use. On other days, the sight of the riverbed rocks themselves should be enough to warn even idiots off.

When I snapped that sign, I heard a voice behind me, which said, ‘Do you want me to smile?’

This couple was happy for me to take their photo. The gentleman told me that he had spent hundreds of dollars on a camera some years ago and now it was worthless. While we were talking about photography, a woman walked by with her dogs and the couple said hello and introduced me. It turns out the couple enjoy meeting new dogs.

The next lot of photos will be from the path going from the bush to the park. There are paddocks along the path so I promise there will be horses.

Pavement pounding

Near my house, there is a big suburban park. Sometimes I walk there in an effort to avoid degenerating into a lazy house slug. If I walk quickly, the return trip takes about 100 minutes. I go from my house, through a bush conservation area, beside some paddocks, then around the park lake.

Last week, I brought my camera on the walk. I thought it would be good to get photos of my favourite part of (tame) Australian bush. I ended up with about 180 photos. I want to share about 40 of them with you but so that you don’t fall asleep with boredom, I will spread my photo posts out over a couple of days.

The first bunch of photos are of the section of the walk that goes from my house to the bush conservation area. It’s about 15 minutes of pavement pounding.

Look! It’s the letterbox from almost two years ago. Strangely, the block is still empty. The grass has grown and the letterbox is a shell of it’s former self. I’m afraid its days of loyal service are over.

Coming back to Australia, I was bemused at how water conscious everyone is, even more than I was when I left. My parents and relatives use buckets to capture cold shower water — you know, when you’re waiting for the water to warm up before you jump in? My parents use the water to flush toilets. I’ve heard other people using it to wash dishes and water plants. It gives me hope that huge cultural change can happen very quickly, given enough government advertising.

You may have heard that a few days ago, a man was killed by a jogger who was upset at him watering his garden. I took photos of these signs in our neighbourhood. These signs are probably a sensible defence against against water rage.

I also spotted four or five of these huge backyard satellite dishes. If my grandma didn’t have one of these, I might have thought my neighbours were spying on each other. My grandma gets satellite TV from China and Taiwan.

These are mulberry ‘multiple fruits‘. There’s nothing special about them except that they always remind me of silkworms (Bombyx mori). Isn’t it amazing that a moth can turn these leaves into something that people will wear? I can’t imagine how anyone would have figured out that the cocoons of larvae could be made into beautiful material.

Do you know what this is? It’s a leaf from a really big cactus I saw in someone’s front yard. It looked like a slide.

You can tell that my writing is rusty. I can’t express myself with any sophistication, which is why I’m using phrases like ‘really big’.

The last photo is of two fire hydrants stacked on top of each other under a tree. I wonder why they’re like that? Was it vandalism or are they waiting to be picked up by a council maintenance worker?

The next lot of photos will be from the bush conservation area, which I mentioned three years ago.

Seven weeks

I am flying back to the UK on Thursday. My visa finally came through.

I’ve had seven weeks at home and I enjoyed every minute of it. It was four more weeks than I planned.

I don’t really know what else to say.

There’s lots I could say. Today, I upgraded the driver for my parents’ laptop’s card reader. It screwed things up so I spent a few hours finding new drivers for other bits and pieces.

I’ve baked a lot in the past seven weeks. Banana and walnut cake was my last effort. I’ve helped mum and dad with their new hobby of dancing. I’m really happy that they’re dancing now. They’ve been talking about it for a while.

Every couple of days, I walk 10 km — to the local park and back. There’s a nice lake there. Once, I walked for longer than I had planned so I bought a roast vegetable sandwich at the park café and had a mini-picnic.

I should have written in my blog more but there aren’t many interesting stories when I’m mostly by myself.

I will need to find a place to live in London. I’m looking forward to meeting new people. I usually quite like first meetings. Sometimes, I don’t have the energy for it but I’ve built up a large reserve in my seven weeks of rest.