Chuck Another Brim on the Barbie

Fast forward

If you have been keeping up with this blog and you know me then you will know that I am actually a week behind with my posts. That was mainly due to China being mental and me being slightly exhausted. What I’m going to do is actually condense the week that I am late by into this single post. My reasoning for this is that I want to make the blog more current and that in the last week, not a great deal has happened but things are starting to get fun now and I want to be able to write about them in a current way. Without further ado…

First days in work are always a bit of a nightmare. This one was made easier by the fact that I wasn’t starting a new job but made harder by the fact that I am in a different continent where I don’t know anyone.

Davide (my boss/co-worker) met me in the lobby of the building and took me up to the 30th floor. The first thing I noticed as I walked in was the view. It was amazing! Our office has a great, almost unobstructed view of the coast, harbour and sea.

The rest of the day was a pretty standard first day; meeting people, filling in forms and working much slower than normal. The highlight of the day was setting up my bank account. I know that sounds boring but when you have dealt with banks and their process as much as I have (I worked for one for about 3 years), you dread having to go there. The branch was actually in our building and everything was so easy! UK banks take note!

I’m going to skip Friday entirely as nothing of note happened. Nothing at all.

Saturday was iPhone day. I really wanted to get my hands on the iPhone 4S so I got up at 6am, ready to travel to the Apple Store and queue up. I actually missed my bus and ended up getting a train, McDonalds breakfast and a bus to get to Westfields Doncaster (a lot of places seemed to be named after places in The Grim North of the UK).

I eventually get outside the Apple store at 8:45am and there is already a queue. I used their free wifi on my iPad to pass the time before 2 guys who worked in the store came out to tell us that they didn’t have an 4Ss in stock. Balls. I grabbed the bus back into the CBD for a wander around.

I had a good wander, I visited the following places:

• Federation Square - A sort of general meeting and gathering place. The local art museum is there and there is usually going on outside for people to watch.
• Federation Wharf - Just the other side of the river from me, it’s a nice grassy area to just chill
• The place that the people following the ‘Occupy Wall St’ campaign have decided to set up camp, right outside Starbucks.
• Queen Victoria Market - A really cool market that sells a bit of everything. I bought some bread and cheese. Very tasty.

Sunday involved more wandering and I managed to find a cheap shop that I could buy another visitor travel plug (I only had 1), some chopsticks (I’m getting into it now) and some cheap drinks (Pepsi Max for only $1.75!).

Monday and Tuesday were pretty much uneventful. My work rate was finally back up to a decent level on Monday. It seems jet lag had hit me, just when I thought I had avoided it! I was also back in the gym both Monday and Tuesday. Taking it a bit slow as I try to ease myself back into it.

The photos I took on Saturday while I was wandering can be found here. Note: at the time of writing they are still uploading. Be patient :)