big city life/coffeecrazy/queenscliffe

G'day mates!

So once again, it has been about a week since my last update... I'll likely continue at this pace until I have some more exciting stuff on my agenda, I'll probably be hitting up Brisbane & the Great Barrier Reef sometime in May and hopefully seeing Tasmania sometime in June. After that, I'll likely stop work, hit up Sydney, New Zealand, Malaysia, Singapore, Hong Kong, then back home... Hopefully I can fit one of the Philippines, Thailand or Indonesia in there as well! So yeah, this blog will be lighting up around July/August, because that's when I think I'll be doing most of my sightseeing.

Anyways, I have been somewhat active in the city over the past week, I've signed up to volunteer at the Amnesty International office here, and I plan on spending a bunch of my free time there while I'm in Melbourne. I've also been hanging out lots at the State Library of Victoria, a beautiful building with lots of study space and free WiFi... I tend to do the bulk of my reading/writing there when I have free time :) There's also a chess room where people can go play chess, which I know sounds super nerdy, but I think I'm gonna go check that out over the next couple weeks...

One very important thing to mention about Melbourne is the coffee culture. I know I've spoken to a few people back home about how Melburnians go nuts over their coffee... but it's seriously tripping me out. There's no such thing as filtered coffee here- just espresso drinks... and its highly frowned upon to have any sort of flavouring in your coffee... so if you're drinking a vanilla latte right now, you would be shunned in Melbourne. The coffee here is actually pretty good, and even though I'm a tea drinker, I can say that I've enjoyed some of the best coffee in the world at these cafes.

As I've mentioned before, I'm staying on the Mornington Peninsula, which is an area just southeast of Melbourne, along the Port Philip Bay. The Peninsula has some pretty sweet beaches, but also some of the most beautiful and prestigious wineries in Australia. At the end of the Peninsula is a small town called Sorrento, which is linked to a small town called Queenscliffe on the other side of the bay via ferry. The bay is the main link from Melbourne to the Ocean, so I see a lot of cargo ships and stuff outside my window everyday. Anyways, I hopped on the ferry to Queenscliffe a couple days ago, and it was a really quaint old town right on the water.. lots of pretty old buildings and a great lookout point over the bay.

With work and the 1.25 hour commute each way into the city, not a lot of my time spent over the past couple of weeks has been blog-worthy, but I promise I'm earning money to bring you some incredible stories over the next few weeks/months!

I'll close off with a few pics I've taken over the past little while..

Aussie Rules Football!

 Birds of Queenscliffe

Queenscliffe Sunset

Melbourne Museum & Queenscliffe Post Office

Hopefully all these pics don't take too long to load! I'm still going to put up a lot more on a flickr site when I get time... look for another update next weekend! :)

workworkwork

Hullo!

So first off, I must apologize for slacking in updating this blog... However, I do have an excuse... I mentioned that I started work at that CD place, and thankfully I've been getting shifts everyday (besides weekends) since I started... so while that leaves me little time to travel around Melbourne and see more of the city, it also gives me the money I'm going to need to see places like Kuala Lumpur (ooh) and Singapore (ahh)

The past few days at work I've been shifted from working in the warehouse to working in the office... basically they needed help mailing out catalogues, so I had to pack envelopes with catelogues and order forms and stick mailing stickers on them... Went through about 2500 envelopes in two and a half days of work!











All in a day's work!

Anyways, besides work I do have a few stories to share! I want to apologize to all the vegans/vegetarians that are reading this in advance because what I am about to post next you may not enjoy... In my last update I posted that I tried shark! I subsequently posted that I was going to eat kangaroo next... semi-jokingly... well anyways, I was at a pub last week and they had "Peppered Kangaroo Fillets" on the menu... obviously I had to try it... and oh my goodness it was delicious! Roomeat as Aussies call it has to be the best kind of meat I've ever had... *maybe* ostrich comes close...

Kangaroo!

I find it kind of funny that I've eaten kangaroo in Australia before I've seen a live one... I'm still waiting for a wild kangaroo to jump out of the bushes and try to box my face in... now THAT would be a story to tell! (apparently it happened to some dude a couple weeks ago... it was on the news!)

Oh and yesterday I went to this spoken word show put on by this dude named Henry Rollins... the guy pretty much said EVERYTHING I believe... like seriously... this guy stole my personal philosophy and espoused it to everyone else in the room! I must admit, it was pretty cool to hear everyone cheering and clapping for things that I've believed in for awhile... his basic message was to travel, see the world, eliminate ignorance, educate yourself, and change the world for the better in the process... sound familiar?? I THINK IT DOES!

Anyhow, he said this one bit that I thought was very well put so I'm gonna paraphrase it here... people say changing the world is a fool's idea... that we're so set in our ways in so many things like war, violence, racism other oppression etc... but really so much has changed in every century in our memory... and so much can still change in our century... it's only 10 years old! and as we all know, ten year olds are very impressionable... so go do something to change the world! raise this century like its your own 10 year old kid... shape it to become one where we do actually make some kind of incredible progress, like eliminating racism, or slowing down climate change.... it's only impossible if we say it is and do nothing about it!

WWHAT IS UP WITH THIS COUNTRY?!?!?!

sooo instead of saying "how's it going" here, people say "how ya goin"

WTF?

oh and check this out...




NUTS I TELL YA!

beaches/footy/work

G'DAY!!!

ummm so it's been awhile since I last updated me blog... that is due to a combination of factors including laziness, lack of internet access and TOO MUCH TIME SPENT BEING AWESOME... okay so the latter isn't entirely true... but I'd like to think so...

Anywho! Easter weekend here was amazing, as I was treated to some of the most beautiful scenery known to mankind.

Yes... I do include the view of my nostrils to be amongst the most magnificent scenery in the universe. Those are just a couple of the photos I took over the weekend, I have like 200 more so I'm probably gonna set up a flickr site at some point to put up the rest of the pics. OH and on my wonderful weekend on the beach I got a chance to eat SHARK... that was pretty cool... though I'm pretty sure a lot of other people who are reading this have also eaten shark.... next up KANGAROO!

On Easter Monday I went to an INSANE footy match between the Geelong Cats and the Hawthorn Hawks... now footy in Melbourne doesn't refer to the lame game where pansies like Christiano Ronaldo run around and flop on the field when they get nudged by an opposing player... (okay I take that back... I love soccer... WORLD CUP IN TWO MONTHS!!) no... the footy I am speaking of is Australian Rules Football, a combination of Basketball (Dribbling), American Football (tackling, punting), Rugby and Quidditch (ball through posts for different point values)... it's pretty much the best game ever... and Geelong, the side I was cheering for came back from being down 24 points at the half to winning the match 100-91 with 2 goals (12 pts) in the last 3 minutes!! It was crazyyy! (lsm) I don't have any pics of it right now because my camera is at my cousin's place, but I will post em as soon as I get those pics on my hard drive.

Anddd today was also my first day of work! wooo! basically all I do is pick CDs and DVDsoff shelves and get them ready to be shipped off to record stores (the Aussie equivalent of HMV would order from us)... it's pretty cool working in the warehouse and all the people I work with seem pretty rad. I will give more updates on that soon...

Other than that I've just been eating a TON... lots of delicious pie here which keeps me happy... GOOO PIE! and enjoying the city... I would have written an even longer post, but my eeepc is dwindling down to about 2% in battery life.... hopefully it accepts this post before dying out!

Love & Peace to all my loyal readers!