How to make friends and find a place to live

I arrived in Australia on a Friday in the early morning. Having no where else to go, I went straight into work. This is a disadvantage to being homeless. Then I worked. Surprise! Towards the end of the afternoon I met up with Nick at the Landsdown hotel for drinking, board games, and eventually a ride to my home for the week. A good way to start my life in Australia. It's a while ago, but I seem to remember a impromptu party back at Nick's place and not getting to bed until after midnight. Having been up since 6am or so, and still on San Francisco time that was a little rough, but I will say, I got over jet lag a lot faster this second trip because of it.

Let us call Nick's house Annandale House, cause that's what everyone else seems to call it and it is in Annandale. Everyone in Annandale House was involved in the Sydney University Science Review, Jurassic Quark. (It's worth noting that if you speak with an Australian accent, Park rhymes with Quark). Our house was basically the epicenter of set and prop design and construction. Loving theater as I do I was happy to jump in. Nick had warned me this was going on and it didn't deter me from staying with him. I helped on a number of different projects, but I the most time designing and making a set of shields and a matching standard.

I even have this nifty picture of the shields, while they were under construction in our kitchen. By day two (Sunday) I'd met all four of Nick's flat mates, and was very involved in construction. The down side of all this is that what I was supposed to be doing is looking for a place to stay. Nick was leaving the country for three months and our arrangement was that I could only stay until he had to leave, since his roommates didn't know me and all. I can respect them not wanting to have a stranger staying with them after the host leaves.

Lucky for me, jumping in and helping everyone build stuff is a good way to make friends. So by the time Sunday rolled around, pretty much everyone had said they'd be comfortable with me sticking around for a while. Room searching has now been postponed as I have a place to stay for a bit.

This living situation has turned out to be amazing, and I'm a very lucky guy. I get along really well with all of my flat mates. We cook together (we've made things like roast chicken wrapped in bacon), we play video games together (I think I've played about 13 hours of Halo 3 in the last day, most of it as part of a surprise birthday party for Brendan, another flat mate), we watch TV (finished season 4 of Battlestar Galactica), and generally hang out and have a good time. I've also started taking a Kaizen Ryu karate class in Pyrmont with Christie and Brendan. That involves lots of push ups and me getting sweaty and exhausted very quickly. Seems good for me. I really wanted to have a social life outside of Google, and I've managed to land smack dab in the middle of an awesome one right away. My house mates: Christie & Brendan, Alistair, and Yasmin and their friends that I've gotten to know have all been very friendly, welcoming, and fun to hang out with. I look forward to a lot more of it.

Back to the beginning

I felt that my adventures as food, being the inspiration for the name of this blog, should get the first post. But perhaps it would be good to go back and explain things a bit. I've just moved to Sydney from San Francisco, and this blog is for my friends and family, so that they can follow along if they feel so inclined. I suppose it's also a nice record for myself, and a chance to just write, and be amused writing up my stories in ways that I enjoy. I have no desire to chronicle every day, or even write about things chronologically. But, if you follow along, you'll hear about what happens here as I write about it, and hopefully it will be both amusing and informative (at least if you care about me).

A brief recap of the pre-move story. One day at work a long time ago I received a mass email to the company encouraging everyone to look at the opportunities to work abroad, and take advantage of them. Sounded pretty nifty to me, so it stuck in the back of my mind and I decided it'd be something I'd like to do in 2009. I only speak English, and I thought the Australian office was open for a particular nice 1-year transfer program so that became my target. (I didn't actually get the super nice 1 year transfer, so now I'm on a permanent transfer with a plan to permanently transfer back in a year or so). I was thinking sometime in the q2-q3 time frame (March-August) would be a good time to go over. I dragged my heels applying (finding an amazing girlfriend will do that to you), but once I talked to my now manager he really got the ball rolling and the next thing I knew I was filling out applications, finding records for my work visa, getting my chest x-rayed, and then suddenly at the beginning of August everything was in order and I had a brief 2 week trip to check out Sydney before the final move at the beginning of September. I think I'll mostly chronicle things from September on, but if I think of something good to write about August I will.

The most important thing about August is that I met my new team, including Nick, who was willing to let me crash on his couch temporarily while I look for a longer term apartment. Several other co-workers were willing to let me stay with them, but I liked the idea of staying with Nick, it sounded like it be an adventure. That it certainly was, and those stories deserve a post of their own.

Tasty, Tasty American

I itched everywhere. I didn't have a rash, or any sort of skin condition, just bug bites. Not even that many bug bites all told. One on the back of each hand, four on my right wrist, another four in the area around my right shoulder and neck, oh and the big bite on my left leg that I think was from a spider. The others were from mossie's (mosquitoes) or bed bugs, all from while I slept. There was some debate as to which type of bug or bugs bit me and I may never know for sure. But once you've decided you're being eating alive by bugs, well, psychosomatic itching kicks in and you itch everywhere. And it might just be bites that haven't gotten big yet so you're scared to scratch anywhere. And to make matters worse maybe you've just shown up in Australia and you have no idea what type of store to go into to get hydrocortizone cream (either a pharmacy or a chemist, I never did get around to getting any).

So I walked around for a few days with an ace bandage from the work first aid kit wrapped around my wrist so that neither my jacket, nor I, itched the bug bites on my wrist. I got quite a few questions about it. And I think I convinced a lot of Australian's that I'm a wuss. Apparently bug bites are something to be expected and just silently dealt with here. I'm slowly getting the hang of that. But at fist I was a little surprised. I mean, winter's just ending. Bugs aren't supposed to be alive in winter! What's going on?!? Well, as long as little spiders don't crawl out of the bite on my leg (which supposedly can happen), I think I'll be doing okay.

It's been about a week since the last of the bites, and they're all pretty much faded away. Now I go out at night and do my laundry barefoot. Maybe this means I'm stupid, or maybe it just means I'm getting used to life in Australia. Either way, my first few weeks here have convinced me that the fauna of Australia thinks I'm one tasty, tasty American.