PISTOL SHRIMP

I had a pretty tame Australia Day, which was just what I was after. Some friends and I did a cultural pub walk around Chelsea, but being broke and unemployed I was very restrained and sensible. Someone sent me this YouTube clip of a Pistol Shrimp, which I think is kinda cool, so I'll share that with you and delay writing anything interesting until one day when I'm feeling more inspired.

ABU DHABI

I liked Abu Dhabi. It's a strange place, a bit bland to look at and it seems to lack a strong cultural identity. I guess this is not surprising given that the city as we know it sprang into existence only recently when the progress-loving Sheikh Zayed gained power in 1966. Prior to that, the emirate consisted of a few camel herders living in mud huts in a vast expanse of desert. When oil was discovered in 1958 there were only 15,000 people living in Abu Dhabi, and now barely fifty years later it's the capital of the United Arab Emirates with a population of around 1.5 million. It doesn't have the buzz or eccentricities of its neighbour Dubai, and if truth be told doesn't seem to have much personality at all. I was only there three and a half days yet managed to see all the major sites except for one massive mosque.

So why did I like it? Basically because I was there with good friends who had an insider's view of which sites are worth visiting and also a car to get us there in comfort. Travelling by taxi is a bit of a nightmare because of the bizarre system of street addresses. Basically there isn't one. Despite the fact that the streets are all signposted using a grid system, nobody follows or understands it so you have to describe your destination by using landmarks. Obviously a bit of a challenge for a clueless tourist such as myself. This is where my fabulous friends' local knowledge and car ownership came in handy. I was visiting a mate who I haven't seen since he left Vietnam for the UK five years ago. We kept in contact once he moved to Cambridge but despite the best intentions to catch up we could never manage to be in the same country at the same time. He was one of only three people who I knew were living in Britain when I decided to move over here (the others being in York and London) but in a display of spectacularly bad timing, he moved to Abu Dhabi just one week before I landed at Heathrow. So it was great to finally catch up and spend some time hanging out with him and his wife.

I arrived at the start of the weekend (Friday-Saturday) and on the first day we checked out the Abu Dhabi Heritage Village and were treated to a strange performance. It consisted of two rows of Arabian chaps clad in the traditional long white robes (called dishdashes) and headscarves singing across at each other while swinging canes in unison. The tune was quite catchy, but unfortunately distorted through crap speakers. It was a world apart from our destination the next day, which was the gold-encrusted Emirates Palace Hotel. It can be described by only one word: opulence. It's a massive complex with its own private beach and the day we were there they were setting up a stage for the upcoming Elton John concert. Riiiight.

All in all it was a fantastic trip and my mid-journey recovery from jetlag made me even more excited about heading back to London and getting stuck back into life. I've been on holiday for the last six months and as fabulous as that has been, I'm really a bit over it and looking forward to working again. Well, more looking forward to earning money than the actual working part. I haven't gone completely mad.

SNAPPLE, GET IT?

I'm back in London now, but I'm still a bit tired and don't feel like writing about my Abu Dhabi stopover yet. Here's a link to a comic to entertain you until I get motivated to write more. I think it's funny. Did I mention I'm tired?

THINK ABOUT IT

I'm about to fly back north into the winter. Here's a little something to think about while I'm squished inside a smelly plane hurtling through the sky for hours and hours on end:

MY PERFECT HOLIDAY?

Study study study study study…I’ve spent the last seven days studying solidly. I really know how to holiday, huh? The background is that I started a Professional Certificate in Editing and Proofreading back in 2006, with the intention being to get some freelance work to supplement the meagre income I was earning from my job with an arts charity in Sydney. The course was designed to be completed “at your own pace”, so predictably I only completed a few units of study before it got lost amongst more exciting pursuits like preparing for my relocation to the UK.

It wasn't completely forgotten, though. I even called the distance education provider before leaving Aus to ask whether I was able to defer the study for a year or so (to save myself the added hassle and weight of transporting my study materials over with me in the initial load) and was assured that this was possible. However, when I was sorting through the pile of my mail at mum’s house over Christmas I came across a letter saying that if I did not complete all remaining assessments by 5 February 2008 I would not be eligible to be awarded the certificate. Confusion! Panic! I had paid something like $800 for this course so I wanted the piece of bloody paper to go with it! I was determined to complete all remaining units and post them off before flying back to London in mid-January.

Christmas is not a good time to study, so I grabbed the course materials from my mum’s house but didn’t look at them straight away. New Years is also not the best for studying, so they stayed unopened and stowed away amongst my luggage during this time too. I was staying with my little sister on the Sunshine Coast by now, and her birthday is on 3 January. It would be just plain rude to study on my little sister’s birthday! I made her a nice breakfast and lunch, we hung out for the day and she partied well into the night, which left Friday a little delicate. The 3rd was a Thursday, so her actual birthday party was that Saturday night. We went out to Maroochydore with a bunch of her friends and danced the night away. It was a really great night. So great, in fact, that Sunday was a complete write-off.

So finally, on Monday 7 January, I opened my study materials determined to complete the five or so assessments I thought I had left by 16 January which is the day before I’m scheduled to fly back overseas. At this point, I discovered I actually had ten units and assignments to complete.
Ten.
Not five.
Ten assignments in ten days.
That didn’t sound very fun at all. And indeed it hasn’t been overly fun. I’ve been studying like a big fat nerdy-pants, trying to get one assignment per day into the post box. I’ve since revised my travel plans and am going to spend the night in Brisbane tomorrow which means I really need to finish and post them all today. It’s 8:30 in the morning, and I still have two assessments to finalise and send off by the end of the day.

So what am I doing wasting time writing this entry I hear you think? Good question! I don't know! Gotta go study!

SUMMER SUNSHINE (AT LAST)

The past two weeks have been wet and windy. I spent Christmas at Bargara, which is a beachside town near Bundaberg, and there was so much wind that the surf lifesavers were warning people not to swim at the beach. Luckily there's a lagoon thing just beside the beach so we could swim in there without fear of being caught in a rip and dragged out to our death. It was a huge family Christmas, the first we'd had since 1999 according to my uncle, which is why I trekked all the way back from the UK to be here. I'm glad I did, it was really nice. We were all staying at holiday units by the beach, and it was very bizarre to be sleeping on a bunk bed in a small cottage with both parents, both sisters, my brother and my future brother-in-law. Staying in adjacent cottages were my uncles, aunts, cousins and second cousins. I must be getting old and nostalgic, because I actually enjoyed the family-ness of the whole thing. Plus I got to feed grapes to a friendly possum I named Flopsy. You can't fault a holiday that involves playing with a possum.

The wild weather continued when I arrived back in the Sunshine Coast. The rain was unrelenting, the wind reaching speeds of up to 100km/hr at one point. Beaches were closed and the New Year's Eve fireworks cancelled due to the danger of debris being blown into buildings (or people) and starting spot fires. This is a photo of the view from my sister's house on New Year's Day. As if everyone wasn't feeling yucky enough. And for the benefit of my UK readers, the sky is not supposed to be grey and palm trees are not supposed to lean over like that. The cause of all this chaos was a low pressure system meandering down the coast. While the hard-core surfers were overjoyed with the wicked waves, the surf lifesavers and police were going nuts. Twenty-five beaches were closed, lifesavers were being flipped out of their rescue boats and having to be rescued themselves, and police were called to beaches to stop people entering the treacherous waves. There were stories on the news of young, reckless, inexperienced body boarders and surfers getting rescued and then running back in the surf laughing. Idiots.

It wasn't until Saturday that the weather cleared up. This was just in time to annoy my sister, who returned to work on Monday after spending all but the last weekend of her holidays hiding from the abysmal weather indoors. Whereas I, the pale elder sibling, would be relatively content with grey skies protecting me from the evil sun, I'm now the one free to frolic on the beach all day long. Of course I'm not actually doing that, I'm just sitting indoors sweating. It is hot, hot, hot.

I did take the opportunity of seeing blue skies for the first time in three weeks to go wandering along the 'sunshine strip' between Mooloolaba and Maroochydore. I walked up to Alexandra Headland, plonked myself under a shady tree and watched some pelicans fighting over fish scraps. In a brief burst of youthful energy I decided to climb up the tree as well. I used to love climbing trees as a child. I loved climbing this tree as well, but noticed it was a litttttle bit harder to stretch my legs up to the next branch than it was when I was ten. I think I need to do yoga or something. Maybe I could add that to my ever-expanding list of new year resolutions.