Thanksgiving!

Yesterday was Thanksgiving! one of the best holidays of all. Unfortunately, Priscilla and I are in Australia for this day where there are no pilgrims, indians, turkeys, cornucopias, or cut out paper hand turkeys. And its hot and sunny. But thats ok, we had our own Thanksgiving!

This was actually our first turkey day away from our families. This is sad because a) we missed them and b) we don’t know how to cook very well. But we pushed on anyway.

Turkeys are hard to find here (a friend of ours special ordered one for $120!) so we had a chicken instead.

Yummmmm

Priscilla had to work (no Thanksgiving holiday?!?) so i had to do a good bit of the cooking. Luckily she got off early so she saved the day at the end.  We had chicken, stuffing, mashed potatoes, gravy, corn, peas, rolls, and pumpkin pie! Not bad at all. Priscilla also made some hot spiced wine which was pretty much hot sangria. It was pretty good, but it would have been a lot better if it was cold outside. Hot wine on a warm sunny day isn’t so good.

I couldn’t find any canned pumpkin here so i had to get some real pumpkin and cook it and use real pumpkin glop to make the pie. It turned out ok, but not too great. Our oven is a high tech piece of junk and nothing ever cooks right so it was kinda undercooked on the inside and half burned on the outside. Luckily i made a second pie and round 2 came out better.

So it was sad to be away from everyone, but we turned it into our own nice little holiday.

SeaWorld and the Beach

Last weekend P and I decided to rent a car and drive down to the Gold Coast. The Gold Coast is famous for its beaches, but there is also a SeaWorld there. So of course P insisted we go and see the dolphins.

It was nice. We saw the dolphins and other animals sea animals. They had the shark tank aquarium, sea lions, some pelicans, i dunno that sort of stuff. We also rode a couple roller coasters, and watched some shows. There is a gallery uploaded to flickr that you can see to the right. We also go to watch some little kids doing their ’swim with the dolphins’ thing. There were only a few people around so i was cool to watch the trainers, kids, and dolphins interact outside of a big show. The kids had fun and the dolphins seemed to be sort of patient and good with the kids. They reminded us of our dog Madi.   It wasn’t super huge so we were done after five hours or so.

Here’s a link to our flickr SeaWorld gallery.

We still had a few hours of daylight so we went down the coast a bit to Surfer’s Paradise which is a popular beach and city/town. We for whatever reason didn’t bring bathing suits so we ran through the city a bit and found some. Then rushed to the beach. It was a pretty nice beach, but the waves were pretty wild. The lifeguards had only a small area bouy’ed off to swim in so it was pretty packed with people. The water was nice, but waves were quite big. We got sucked under, thrashed around, and spat out near the shore a few times. It was fun though and you could body surf really well. There were so many people though that people were running into each other a lot.  So that wore us out after a short bit and then we laid on the beach for awhile. It was nice.

This has been a crappy post, but i figure a quick something is better than nothing.

Party at Our Place!

This past weekend we had a little party at our apartment with all our new Aussie (and some American and German) friends. A lot of these guys had never played beer pong so we thought we’d bring that out. It was fun, but of course P and I failed by losing to the noobs. In our hayday we won NINE games in a row! Its all over now.

We listened to some music, some people danced, Dan (our friend, not me) dressed up as an impromptu pirate, and Priscilla had a different drink in each hand until she passed out. There were olives in noses, spilt beers, made up mixed drinks, goofy dancing, and the meeting of our neighbors. That sort of led to the management coming and busting our party for being too loud. Wups, not really used to apartment life I guess.

It was a great time and we’ll definitely miss our Brisbane friends if we move to Melbourne. But I’m sure we’ll keep in touch though. I have a lot of pics from the party on Flickr you can access by clicking the feed pics on the right. That’ll take you to the whole gallery. I’m still working on more elegant way of using flickr galleries in here, but that’ll work for now. But really, click em, because some are really funny.

Speaking of Melbourne it seems as though my application at Bosch is moving along. They’ve checked my references and now I have to have a Medical Assessment. This is because I’ll be driving cars in anger and such and need to be healthy. So I hope this means that I’m close. dum dum dum… I’m cautiously optimistic.

I can’t believe its mid November. P and I’s seasonal clocks are seriously screwed up. We moved here as the NC summer was ending just in time for the beginning of a new summer here. It really messes with your head. I almost surprised everytime i step outside that its hot out. It should be cold! At least we’ll have a cold Christmas when we go back home for a bit in December.

Melbourne

Last weekend I was in Melbourne for a job interview and to see my old friends from NC State Josh and Bethany who moved there a few years ago.

The job interview at Bosch went really well I think. In short, the position is for a test driver to evaluate and calibrate ABS, traction control, and stability control systems in cars. I think I nailed the technical stuff and that we all got along great. It seems like an amazing job and a great place to work. Hopefully I’ll hear something next week. This weekend is a holiday (Melbourne Cup) so they’ll be out of the office most of the week.

I also met up with Josh friday night. Melbourne is a really nice city so he showed me around a bit and we found some tasty food in china town. Afterwords we went to a small bar that was about 3-4 stories up a small staircase. It was basically a patio on a rooftop. It was really cool and Josh bought me an absynth. *kissy face*

I slept on their couch and the next morning we got up and had breakfast at a cafe/bistro on the beach right near their apartment. It was a nice way to start the day. Then we went exploring downtown for a bit. We saw the markets (including a pretty wild meat market) and wondered around for a bit. Then i took the train to the airport and I was off.  It was nice to see ol Josh and Bethany again.