The Zoo

Two blog posts in a week! Say whaaaaaaaaaaaat!

The other day work sent me home early because we were quiet (probably because the temperature was around 35C and it felt like we were melting) so I called Mathias and he came down to the zoo. Here are a few pictures of my colleagues:

There's a new lemur enclosure that you walk through so the lemurs are just hanging around next to you! Cool!

Scratch and sniff, "do I need to shower yet?"

Dad?

Pygmy hippo! He was dancing under the water. So cute!

Poor monkey was being banged at on the window BY AN ADULT! I wanted to slap him.

Enchilada!

Monkey in a basket

Sometimes I serve canapés by this enclosure, which is pretty cool

The butterfly house is cool. If you stand still long enough they'll land on you (I don't have that much patience)

New baby elephant!!! He's just a couple of weeks old. It was the end of the day so he was exhausted and sound asleep.

Orangutan thugs

Smacking his brother in the head

Mathias has a profound love for platypuses (wikipedia tells me there is no agreed upon plural form for platypus... platypi? Platypussy?)

There is an ice lolly over here called Golden Gaytime - a source of much humour for us, and Mathias finally got to try one.

No.

Sleepy wombat!

Kangaroo slumber party

Meow

There's a place just south of Melbourne where you can see these penguins in the wild! We are going to go sooooon!

Giant tortoise! I need one.

Melting in my work trousers

All in all, I work at a pretty cool place!

In other news, I still have a cold and I still want more sympathy. Thanks!

Merry (late) Christmas!

I'm ill so I can't really be bothered making a post :( Father Christmas brought me a cold this year. I would have preferred reindeer poo.

Christmas was fun! But also a bit weird. So many people were out on the streets, the trams were packed, and the beach was absolutely heaving! A lot of people were wearing santa hats at the beach, and one group had even brought a Christmas tree with them. Everyone had beer with them.

I worked until 4pm so we just went to the beach for half an hour to take some pictures and experience an Australian Christmas, then came home and made a traditional British Christmas dinner (but with kangaroo instead of turkey :/)

Mathias got me a knife for Christmas! How sweet...

He seemed quite pleased with his book

and cinema tickets to see The Hobbit on opening night. Unfortunately that meant I had to go and see it with him. It wasn't quite as shit as the other Lord of the Rings film that I've seen (and no, there is no difference).

I'm working a lot at the moment and looking forward to having money for once. It was quiet today so I finished early and called Mathias to come down to the zoo, so we spent a couple of hours looking around, which was nice as I don't usually get time to see the animals.

Ok I'm rambling now. Time for paracetamol and sleep.

Labyrinth

It's really difficult to explain our house to people - actually it's pretty hard to understand the layout for us! So I created this excellent diagram to help. I'm sure Mathias will be proud of my 2D computer drawing skills.

As you can see, there are 4 houses that are all connected by covered walk ways. The front doors are never used so we enter by the side street at gate 1 - there is a code on the gate for security.

Immediately to the right are 2 washers and a dryer than we can use free of charge (woop!) and to the left are the bins and washing lines. To enter the houses you need to go through another coded gate (number 2).

To get to our room we walk through the big kitchen, down the 2nd walk way and then through the door on the left and up the stairs. We use the big kitchen, which is house number 2 and 3's kitchens knocked into one, but if it is busy we can use the small kitchen too.

Gate 3 leads to the kitchen that was originally the kitchen of our house but it is not possible to access it anymore. Some of the students that live here get their meals included and I think that is where the woman does the cooking for those meals.

We have a bathroom just down the hall from us but if that is busy then we can use the ones in the kitchen or sometimes Mathias goes to one in another house.

On our floor there are 3 other bedrooms and downstairs there are another 2. The other houses are similar but house 1 has a living room where we an go and socialise (we don't :P) and there is a piano there that some of the students practise on.

So, as you can see it is a bit of a warren! But it works pretty well and we like it.

We can pay rent!

Just a week ago we weren't sure if we were going to have to head back to the UK because the work situation wasn't working out very well, but since then I've been hired at the zoo to do catering and Mathias got hired at a cafe!

Today is rent day and we can actually pay it! Woooop!!

Tomorrow it will be 3 months since we arrived in Australia. It has been really fun a lot of the time and really stressful a lot of the time but I guess that's all part of the adventure.

Here's hoping things go a little smoother from here...

Driving Down Under

It took us about 2 weeks to drive from Northern Queensland to Melbourne so I thought I'd talk about driving in Australia, seeing as it's nothing like any driving I've had to do before.

I've driven in the ass crack of nowhere in the US, where there are lots of boringly long, straight roads, but it's different here. First of all, you can't relax. Ever. There is always the potential for animals darting out in front of you here, so you have to be very alert the whole time. Just looking at the road ahead isn't good enough - you have to be scanning the sides of the road the whole time to look for kangaroos and emus that might be resting there.

And that's the thing about these bloody kangaroos - they stand at the side of the road until you're just within hitting distance and then they hop out in front of you! They are so dumb! They are their own worst enemy - they blend in to the colour of the grass around them, they like to hang out at the side of the road, and they panic when you get close, which is why they suddenly hop out. It would upset me if I hit a kangaroo but that isn't the only problem - kangaroos are HUGE. If you hit one of them you're going to cause some serious damage to your car. A lot of the people that live in the outback have special bars on their cars just in case.

This isn't a rare occurence. There are dead kangaroos all over the roads and I had to slow down for ones by the side of the road during every single trip. They are most active when the sun is coming up/going down because it's cooler, and it means that driving at night is particularly dangerous. Once the sun goes down at around 8pm the roads get very quiet because of this (we ended up driving in the dark once by accident. Never again!)

And the dead kangaroos are a hazard too! They are so big, if you hit some roadkill you're going to damage your car then too!

Other than kangaroos, we have seen all of the following in the middle of the road:
snake, goanna, sheep, cows, emus, various other birds, possum... possibly others that I've forgotten.

Luckily it was only the possum that didn't survive these meetings! :/

No chance of a wrong turn around here

Still never managed to get a picture of an actual kangaroo in the road because we're always concentrating too much on not hitting it!

There are a lot of unfenced cattle areas. Cows have the right of way around here!

Emus!

Emus and kangaroos often have friends around, so if you see one you have to watch out for others running out

Of course the biggest problem with driving out here is when your car has a tantrum!

Spotting kangaroos is a lot easier when your co-pilot helps out...

Fossicking

Whilst we were in Emerald we stopped by the local gem fields in Sapphire and Rubyvale (can you guess what kind of gems you can find there?) to try our hand at fossicking! Fossicking basically just means searching through dirt until you find something pretty. Here's how you do it:

First, you get a big bucket of dirt and empty some of it into a sieve

Then you shake it to get rid of the small pieces

You have to shake it a lot

Next, you have to wash it whilst shaking it

You have to wash it a lot. You do an up and down motion so that the "centrifugal force" (or some such nonsense) pushes the heavy pieces (the sapphires) into the centre and should make them easier to find

Then you carefully tip it out onto a table and search through all of it to find your gems

It's a lot of searching. You have to face the sun so that you can see if anything is shiny

Once you've repeated the process until you've been through the whole bucket you should come out with a bag full of lovely sapphires!

Then you get Alan from Stranraer to go through them with his sexy specs to verify which ones are genuine sapphires and which ones are lowly quartz

And then you do your "I OWN A BAG OF SAPPHIRES" dance