Month: April 2013

No pain, rogaine

We did something new on the weekend — rogaining. An hour north of Melbourne, our team of five friends competed with a hundred other teams to find as many checkpoints in the forest as we could within six hours. No smartphones or GPS allowed, just a compass and map.

It’s a good thing I’m on Week 6 of 9 the Couch to 5k running program. It means I can comfortably run for 20 minutes. My heart didn’t let me down as we tramped through prickly bush, climbed Steep Track and power walked towards our targets.

On the way to our third checkpoint, I tripped and crashed.

‘Are you okay?’ my team mates asked.

Surprised, I couldn’t answer.

It was exactly like the two seconds immediately after a toddler falls over, when you can see him working out if he is going to cry.

‘Joan, are you okay?’ they asked again

Mm. Still no pain.

‘Uh yes,’ I finally said. ‘Okay.’

As they helped me up, I said, ‘I haven’t fallen since I was a kid. It doesn’t hurt like I remember.’

My friends patched me up with antiseptic and giant bandages, then we were on our way.

The second checkpoint we found.
We found it! This was our second checkpoint. Another team found it the same time.
Registering at the second checkpoint
Damjan and Michael wore our team’s nav lights on their wrists. These had to be registered at each checkpoint we found. Sometimes when we spotted a checkpoint down in a gully or across a creek, we sent them onwards and waited for them to return. Ha ha ha.

 

Free English lessons

Aaron and I were in Shanghai for a work project. One evening, we went in search of cheap electronic goods at a shopping centre that one of our colleagues recommended.

Sadly, pirated software and unbranded hardware seems to be a thing of the Shanghai past. Everything we saw was the real deal, as genuine as anything on Bourke Street Mall.

‘No discount.’ they said as we clumsily tried to haggle. ‘Real Apple. Same price everywhere.’

We quickly gave up our search for an Apple-compatible VGA cable. Instead, we found ourselves in a China-scale bookstore. It was as big as a small department store in Melbourne, and at 9pm was full of people reading.

‘Hello!’ someone said as I walked past a display of translated Barack Obama biographies.

‘Hello,’ I replied, keen to practice my Chinese.

‘Do you want to learn English?’

‘Um…’

‘Here! You can have English lessons,’ he said, trying to hand me a brochure. ‘Free lessons.’

‘Ah! I marshalled my thoughts to explain. ‘I grew up in Australia. My English is… much better than Chinese!’

The fellow looked confused and then left us alone. I think he got the message.

Later, I got two more chances to practice the same conversation with bookstore staff positioned deeper into the store.

Piano parking

We have a parking space in our apartment building, which we don’t use. So we put up an ad online for someone to rent it.

Peter emailed us. ‘Hello, I live in Adelaide. I’m coming to Melbourne to busk with a piano. Can I keep the piano in the carpark? The piano is an Kawai upright piano on a small trolley and I push it into the CBD/Southbank each day. Would having a piano on a small trolley instead of a car in the carpark be okay?”

So here it is — the piano parked in our car spot.

Piano parked at our home
Piano parked, safe and sound

More dead things

This is getting to be a bit of a theme, after my line up of dead things in September last year.

Why am I doing this? They look like they’re sleeping. It’s a Sleeping Beauty kind of surrealism. The duck is particularly striking. It’s still plump.

Duck on a footpath on Spring Street, Melbourne
Duck on a footpath on Spring Street, Melbourne
Mouse on the road in Southbank, Melbourne
Mouse on the road in Southbank, Melbourne

Good form in Auckland

I love forms. There’s just something about boxes. Seven years ago, I was crushed by missing out on Australia’s 2006 census. My disappointment was finally wiped by my participation as Person 1 in the 2011 census.

So you’ll understand my joy when on a work trip in New Zealand, I found these forms tucked under the door of my hotel room.

NZ 2013 census forms
A present left in my hotel room: the NZ 2013 census form.

You may be thinking, ‘That’s ridiculous. How many people in the hotel are actually going to fill in the form?’

I’ll have you know that the next morning, I walked into the lift and there were two other people. All three of us had the white census envelope, ready to give to the reception staff.

Quiet town

They’re almost finished — two tall apartment buildings across the road from us, which have been under construction since we moved to our home almost two years ago.

I had the vague notion that once people start moving in, our whole street would be lit up with activity and cars. Thinking a bit more, though, I realise that this probably won’t happen.

My brother moved into his new apartment building just a few weeks ago. When we visit him, we hardly run into anyone. At street level, it’s as quiet as ever.

Even our own apartment complex, which is more than 20 years old and well and truly populated –  four out of five times that I leave my front door, I don’t meet anyone.

Strange, isn’t it?

I guess it means that even at high home densities (say, 60+ dwellings per hectare), the actual people density is still low. It’s not like Hong Kong or the Melbourne CBD at lunch time. You need to pack people into a restaurant or office before you start to feel the urban buzz. Two people every 70 square metres for an apartment is just not busy.

I’m not an idiot but…

I’m not an idiot but I’ve ‘failed’ the Australian passport interview twice now.

The first time, I didn’t bring my birth certificate. There’s small print on the form saying that if my Citizenship papers don’t have my place of birth and sex on it, then I need a birth certificate (and if the birth certificate isn’t in English, then it needs to be officially translated).

Today, I was knocked back straight away for having my form printed double-sided. Now this really annoyed me. Why didn’t the first interviewer tell me this? Why doesn’t it say on the form to print single sided?

Two other missteps averted: again in small print on the form, you have to bring photocopies of some (but not all) your original certificates. Also, your passport photo can’t have shadows. So I went to Officeworks to get photocopies and redid my passport photos on the weekend.

So. Why is the process for getting a new passport so hard? Unnecessarily hard, is my view.