Rainy Day

The above photos show the Regatta Hotel, one of the oldest buildings in Brisbane.  It is on one of the main roads, about 30m from the Brisbane River.  In the top photo there are some small rectangles on the side of building.  These rectangles mark the high water level during the years of the big floods: 1974, 1887, 1983 and 1841, from the bottom to the top.  In other words, they get some crazy high waters here!  (For some prospective, this is a three story building).  Although I am sure there are now some modern protective measures in place to minimize the high waters.

Today we experienced our first heavy rain, and even the locals thought that it was bad.  The weather prediction was for "intermittent showers, up to 3mm".  Instead, we had what we think of as a monsoon!  The day started out cloudy and very hot, then at around 10am the sky turned completely black and the rain started.  This is not like a bad prairie storm, this is an absolute downpour!  It rained sideways and everything on the horizon just disappeared behind the clouds.  We couldn't see across the street from our office.  The clouds moved fast and it rained off and on all afternoon, with a total accumulation of 28mm, almost 10 times what was predicted.  Now we know why it floods!

 (Sorry for the bad photo quality, our temporary internet connection here is really pokey with uploads and we can't yet load everything into Flikr...soon, my pretties).

Historic Weekend

On Saturday afternoon the final match of the Australian Rules Football League took place.  This is a huge event, on par with the Superbowl, including some fantastic commercials.  Everyone at work was saying that we needed to see this match so, on Saturday, we left our house in Milton (see photo above!) and made our way to the Pig and Whistle Pub to watch the game. 

We got ourselves a table and a drink and it really must have been obvious to the table of Aussies next to us that we had no idea what was going on because, only about 20 minutes into the game, three of them sat at our table and answered all of our questions.  By the end of the game we had been adopted by a big group of "Footie Fans" and had a fantastic time.  We even made ourselves look good by singing the team song at the top of our voices ("When the Saints go marching in"...we already knew it!)

What made this match so historic was that it ended in a tie!  Unlike many sports, they don't play overtime or have a shoot out, they will actually play an entire match on Saturday of next week.  This has happened before, but it was at a time when the players were playing part-time and all of them had full-time jobs in other fields.  They couldn't play overtime because they all had to work the next day!  Now the players are big money athletes, fully devoted to playing ARL football.  Before the match, Julia Gillard, the prime minister who herself had just been through a tie-election, made a joke about how they had better make sure that there is a clear winner, as Australians had been through too much tension in the last couple of months.

So now on Saturday, after delaying festivals and moving concerts around to free up the stadium in Melbourne, the St Kilda Saints and the Collingwood Magpies will be back on the field and we will be watching along with the rest of Australia.  Go Saints!



The River

The Brisbane River is big in the news these days.  The photo above (taken with a Blackberry, so a little fuzzy) is from the Eagle St Pier.  This is an area at the edge of the CBD with lots of restaurants and plenty of places to sit outside and enjoy a drink with a view.  A couple of years ago, they spotted a dolphin swimming in this area.  Now, further towards the sea but still within Brisbane, they have had numerous shark sitings.  The one that really made the news was of a man in a kayak enjoying an early morning paddle when a bullshark surfaced beside him!  It was 3m long, easily bigger (and stronger) than his kayak.  Once this story came out the City Cat operators said that they weren't surprised, as they have seen numerous sharks not just surfacing, but LEAPING out of the water, early in the morning.  Apparently, they are feeding on the bats.

This is one crazy place!

http://www.couriermail.com.au/news/queensland/m-shark-seen-in-brisbane-creek/story-e6freoof-1225927247657

Four!

We have now been Australia for four weeks, and today (September 21) is our fourth anniversary!  We were also woken up at four in the morning by a flock of birds that sounded like a pack of wild hyenas.  None of the birds here seem to just chirp or peep.  They shriek, howl, squawk and click, but no peeping.  We guess that they don't need to have a gentle call to attract a mate for a brief mating season.  If they miss one, there will be another mating season next week!

We are getting closer to having a recognized existance.  The city has given us rubbish bins and we are now on the pick-up schedule.  We are going to try, once again, to have phone/internet/cable hooked up on the weekend.  Once we have the internet hooked up properly, expect to be inundated by photos. 

It wouldn't make for much of a photo, but we have now had two days of constant rain.  It is a very light rain, so light that we can't hear it hitting our umbrellas, but it is constant.  Some people (locals, obviously) don't even bother with umbrellas!  We would rather stay dry than look cool.

Do we exist?

We are still adjusting to the differences between renting a house and owning a house.  For instance, there is a room in our house to which we do not have a key.  In the global rental agreement used in Brisbane, it states that tenants should have at least one key to every lock on the premises, unless there is some sort of special reason why they shouldn't.  The reason that we don't have a key to the special room in our house is that "all the electricity is in there".  The owner, who does not live in Australia, beleives that tenants may get up to all kinds of shenanigans if they can access the electricity.

The owner (or builder) also seems to have skipped a few vital steps in finishing the property: we cannot get a phone hook-up, internet or cable because of some illegal wiring, and we can't get garbage pick-up because our address does not exist, according to the City of Brisbane.  This duplex appears to be a slightly shady bit of subdividing that is not recognized by the City.  It is all getting sorted out, but everytime we phone a city service for some kind of information and tell they where we live, they say "That address does not seem to exist.  Are you sure you live there?"  We are very lucky to have a relocation specialist who has made it her personal mission to get everything sorted out within the next three days.  She has 6 kids and is used to getting the impossible done.  We are very confident in her!

On our walk into the CBD in the mornings we sometimes see critters like the one in the photo.  He seems pretty happy and no one questions his existance.  He is one lucky dude.

Wednesday Market

One thing that we are really spoiled with here is the amount of fresh food that is constantly available.  Every Wednesday, from 10am - 6pm, there is a MASSIVE farmer's market on the Queen Street Mall.  They have people selling meat, fish, veg, fruit, chocolates, crafts, pastas...the list goes on.  And the most amazing thing about it is that everything is completely fresh...and this is the end of winter!  It gets really crowded on a lunch hour, but it is well worth a walk through just to hear the selling pitches, "$6 for strawberries...not for one pack, but for two!  That's right, $6 for half a kilo of starwberries!  How am I in business!  I must be crazy!  Take advantage of me now before I go broke!" or "These avacodos will ripen over the next two weeks, in case you aren't smart enough to put them in the fridge right away!"
In other news, we have now both received our first pay cheques in months.  It's good to be working!

New Digs

We have moved into our new duplex in the Milton suburb of Brisbane. We have everything in the area that we need, especially since we don't have a car. We are less than a three minute walk from a mini-maill with an IGA, a bakery, a fruit and veg stand, a pharmacy, a dry-cleaner, a pizza place, a Mexican restaurant, a news stand, a fish monger and a liquor store! We are also about a 10 minute walk from a restaurant with the best lunch-time slow cooked pork sandwich that either of us have ever had. It was pretty high on the list of deciding factors in our neighbourhood search.

This place is brand new. The other half of the duplex is currently unoccupied, so we have the run of the joint, but are having to deal with initial services being put in, like the phone line to be hooked up and garbage cans to be delivered. We are also waiting for a modem, so no internet at home now. Once we are all wired in, we can upload some photos and show off our jazzy new place. We should have our furniture in by the end of November (or earlier, we hope!), and then it will really feel like home.

So far, after one week of work, we are both liking it but still adjusting to getting up in the morning and going to the office. At least it's a nice walk in!

Cruise Ship Terminal

We were very surprised on Sunday when we took the City Cat in the East direction and, after 20 minutes, arrived at the cruise ship terminal.  As you can see from the size of the ship in the photo above (taken on Blackberry, so not the clearest), this is really deep water.  No wonder there are sharks in the river!
We have now had three full days of work and are starting to get settled in.  There is nothing exotic about Canadians in the Santos Brisbane office.  Each of us have been sitting in meetings where sometimes 20% of the people in the room are from Canada.  As far as we know there is another group of 10 Canadians who were hired in Calgary at the June Oil and Gas convention.  They should be here by the end of 2010.  We can't get away from these people!

Back to reality!

Today was our first day at our new jobs at Santos.  It was also the most time that we have spent apart in the last 7 months!  The new jobs seem good and we are just the first in a small wave of Canadians that Santos has hired in the last couple of months.  Most will be arriving in October and November. 
We also had some good news about a rental place that we applied for at the end of last week.  The third time was the charm for us and we take possession of our new townhouse on Friday.  The rental process here can be a little sticky.  It isn't always clear what is going on or how it will proceed.  The first place we applied for (an apartment) already had an application in and approval was pending.  We didn't know this until after the fact, and we would not have applied for the apartment if we had known (although it was a beautiful ground-floor place with river views and a pool).  The second place we applied for was a fanastic house that had been converted from industrial use (a cheese factory).  It was a really interesting place, but it was actually for sale and the owners were just feeling out the rental market.  They decided to sell rather than rent, so the application was also denied (why the secrecy? just take the bloody place off the rental market!)  We applied for this townhouse on Friday and right away we were sure that we would get it.  The rental company communicated with us right away and we were told we would hear from them on Monday, and we did.  This place was our strong first choice until we saw the other places.  It fell to third, but we think that we will be happier here than we would have been at the other, jazzier places.  This one is in a neighbourhood that is more our style and the rent is half the price of the other places.  Sometimes things just work out right!

River Fire!

There is an arts and music festival in Brisbane at the beginning of September, "The Brisbane Festival".  The first night there is a MASSIVE fireworks show called "River Fire".  We have seen plenty of fireworks shows at the Stampede and around the world, but this one, maybe because it was completely new, was incredibly impressive.

The fireworks initiate from different points all along the Brisbane river.  People start getting seats, or standing spots, starting around 3 in the afternoon.  The fireworks start around 7pm.  First there is a flyover by an Australian F111, which does a "dump and burn", or an ignition of it's fuel/vapour cloud, which is wickedly impressive and you can almost feel the heat.  The fireworks are not fom one central point, but from the tops of buildings along the river, from the bridges and from special temporary pontoons that are anchored on the river.

The show took almost 30 minutes and we were both so impressed...absolutely stunning, we have never seen anything like it!  Over the last couple of days, when ever a local heard our Canadian (foreign) accents, he/she would tell us to make sure that we saw River Fire.  Now we know why!  As much as we don't like our temporary accomodation, we will miss this view next year.

The first day of Spring

Our realtor told us that September 1 is considered the first day of spring in Australia (rather than the 21st, the first day of autumn in the northern hemisphere).  It was a balmy 26C and we took a ride on the "Brisbane Wheel", which is like the "London Eye", but half the size and, obviously, it is in Brisbane rather than London.
Even though there are sharks in the river, people still want to be able to go for a swim.  In the photo above, taken during our ride on the Wheel, there is a turquoise pool surrounded by palm trees in the lower third of the picture.  All along the river side in this area of Brisbane (South Bank) there are man-made beaches with beautiful white sand and lots of pools, some of them up to 2m deep.  They are mostly for kids, but the water is nice and warm and there were lots of people around and in the water.  Just offsetting the water there are tons of shops and restaurants, so South Bank is almost like a little resort town, right in the city.  This is also at the edge of the campus for Gritffith University, probably a much nicer setting than the middle of Calgary or Regina or just about anywhere that any of us went to school!