Driving

For getting around the city, its been all trains, buses, ferries, and taxi's for us, but for the first time since we arrived, we drove!   We are getting our furniture from Calgary delivered on Thursday and so we needed to buy lamps and a few other things to replace the rental products that will be picked up before our furniture arrives.  And when you need lamps, a garbage can, a shelving unit and a bunch little things for the house, nothing beats IKEA.  Like all IKEAs, the one here is far away from the city centre.  The suburb it is in is about 25 minutes drive from where we live and we actually drove on the freeway!  In fact things went so well that we drove to another mall to buy a vacuum cleaner and we didn't get lost or cause any accidents.  What more can you ask for?
Jim did all of the driving and we aren't sure whether it is less stressful to drive on the opposite side of the road, or be the passenger.  Nothing looks right and there is no possibity of allowing your mind to wander for even a second.  You have to watch where you are in the lane, where the other drivers are and make sure that you don't get all "North American" and start driving on the right hand side of the road. 
Jim adapted really fast.  Going to IKEA was a little tricky, but it soon became second nature.  He turned when he should, how he should and remembered to shoulder check the right way.  Traffic roundabouts were initially odd to say the least, but they work so good...why hasn't North America embraced the roundabout?  Probably the hardest part is getting past the "muscle memory".  The signal is on the right hand side of the steering wheel and the windshield wipers are on the left.  When Joanne drove she washed the windows everytime she turned a corner.  The rental car was an automatic...you need a special license to rent a manual transmission.
This was a BIG step for us.  We won't be leasing a car (why pay to let a vehicle sit in the garage 25 days a month?) but we will definitely be renting a bit and have a vacation to the Sunshine Coast coming up.

Spider-blog!

Like everyone else in Australia, we dry most of our clothes on a clothesline.  We do have a dryer (negotiated it on our rental agreement) but it is very small and we really only use it for towels or things that will take a long time to dry.  We may, however, start using it just a little bit more. 
Our clothesline is in our backyard.  It is one of these collapsible dealies that folds down flat against the fence.  On Saturday morning we hung up some laundry and when we pulled out the frame of the clothesline, discovered an entire web-world created by one very industrious spider.  The spider seemed content to stay in it's own corner so, after great deal of toe and bum-clenching, we got the clothes hung up on the other end of the line and Jim called on his vast store of his spider-killing abilities.  These abilities worked very well in Canada.  The Aussie spider had a few moves that Jim had not seen before.  With Jim, heavily armed with a handful of paper towels, trying to lunge and grab spidey, Joanne stood on a chair in the house, with the glass doors closed, making squealing noises.  After about 5 minutes of war, a truce was declared and the spider abandoned his web, going off to live in a nearby tree.
After we got our heart rates back down near normal we went back out to hang up the rest of the laundry.  Some kind of movement caught our attention.  On a web above the backdoor of our neighbours' house was a spider with a body the size of an average adult's thumb...plus his legs!  He can easily be seen from 5 metres away, which was how far away the above photo was taken (with maximum zoom).
If we find one of these spiders on our clothesline, we'll just buy new clothes every week.  Neither of us is going near one of those things!

Cents

We have now been here for 8 weeks and are really feeling at home.  We walk on the left hand side of the street, we order drinks at the bar and carry them back to our table and we no longer wait to get a penny in our change.
Money in Australia is similar to Canada.  The bills are different colours (purple, blue, pink and yellow) and they have $1 and $2 coins (which we call loonies and toonies, because those names are awesome).  They have 5 cent, 10 cent, 20 cent and 50 cent coins, but no pennies!  There are lots of prices that end in 99 cents, but it is just for show.  The final amount is rounded up or down, usually in favour of the customer.  It is really nice not to have a change purse full of pennies.  There is no standing in line behind someone at the till in the grocery store, counting out 120 pennies to buy a pack of gum!
The Canadian Mint proposed a similiar measure a few years ago, but it didn't go anywhere.  If it ever comes up and goes to a vote, we can recommend dropping the penny.  It might mean finding a use for all of those mason jars full of pennies that are cluttering up the house, but just think of the freedom in a penny-free world!

Dining Out

The restaurants in Brisbane are really amazing.  There is every kind of cuisine imaginable and the restaurants are usually clustered together so that if you don't fancy the first restaurant you get to, there is another just a few metres away.  The photo above is from Park Road, the restaurant "village" that is about 3 minutes from where we live.  Oddly enough, the French restaurant is beneath a palm tree further along the street and there is an Italian restaurant beneath the Eiffel Tower.
There are lots of seafood restaurants here, but the biggest and best surprise for us have been the steak houses.  And not just a steak house, but a steak house that specializes in char-grilled steaks.  There is at least one in every cluster of restaurants and they always have a name that leaves nothing to the imagination: Cha-Cha-Char, Embers and, our favourite so far, Moo Moo.  And, like all good steak houses, they only sell meat dishes, no vegetarian dishes and especially no vegan dishes. 
We're sure they're out there, but we have yet to see a Mr Carrot Eatery or Veggies Galore Cafe.  Although even if we did see them, it's unlikely we'd go in.  Who wants a big juicy radish to close out the work week?

Gobble! Gobble!

Happy Canadian Thanksgiving!  As far as we can tell, there is no equivalent holiday here.  No-one butchers up a bush turkey and serves it for dinner...it's probably just as well, these look none too tasty!

What no-one here is thankful for is the rain!  It has rained almost 180mm in the last 24 hours...a tropical monsoon, and the wettest October on record.  In a country/region that is normally fighting annual droughts, the entire place is inundated right now.  There is enough water in the Brisbane reservoir right now to last for 5 years, even if they don't get another drop of rain!  The rains here come in from the ocean so, unlike in Calgary where it can rain in and around the city and just flow along the Bow out of town (excpet 2005!), the rain stays here and does the damage here.  There is some flooding, but it doesn't seem to devastating.  What is causing more damage is the erosion of the shoreline.  It seems bad now, but the surfers will be out in force as soon as the beaches reopen.  At least they have something to be thankful for.



The Rogaine Competition

There are always team-building competitions going on at work.  Jim's team recently went to a park and one of the employees from South America cooked arapas for everyone.  On Friday, Joanne's group had a Rogaine competition.  A Rogaine competition has nothing to do with growing hair (although she would be a clear winner on that front), it is a combination of orienteering and a scavenger hunt (the name comes from probably three drunk friends trying to have some fun, coming up with a game and naming it after themselves...Robert, Gairy (?) and Neil, maybe).

The department was divided up into teams of three.  They had 10 minutes to mark on a map the location of the items in 10 photos (some were easy, but it was hard to place the close-ups of sidewalks or a certain tile on a building), then they headed out and had one hour to complete a series of tasks.  Some of the tasks involved going to specific places (the library to note the exact title of a certain search number) and some of the tasks involved wandering the CBD and looking for opportunities.  The tasks had different points, from 5 to 15.  5 points were easy to get, 15 points involved more work.  One task was to buy a copy of "The Big Issue", which is a magazine sold by people who are on the fringes of the economy.  Another task was to ask someone to try on his/her vest.  In the above photo, Joanne has talked The Big Issue agent into letting her put on his vest for a photo.  There was discussion by the judges about awarding bonus points for efficiency in getting two tasks at once, but no luck.  Since Joanne had no idea where to go to get things done, she was stuck with the embarrassing tasks, like doing the moonwalk in the 7/11 store (a video exists of this) and singing on the Queen St Mall (see the photo below). 

The final results: out of four teams, Joanne's was tied for second.  Next time they will argue for the bonus points!

Daylight Savings Time

In case you are wondering why we have so many night-time photos, it is because a) Brisbane is not as far south as Calgary is north and so we do not have the big swing between light and dark that one gets as one nears the poles, so the nights are longer here and b) Queensland does not have Daylight Savings Time.  It gets light here at about 5 am...and not twilight, but LIGHT!  The birds start their screeching about 30 minutes before the sun comes up (the little buggers) and it is HOT when we walk in to work.  Joanne has had a 7:45 am sunburn and Jim now wears shorts to walk in.  It is hot and sunny.  The early daylight at this latitude also means that we get early nightfall.  When we first moved here it was totally dark by 6:15, but now it gets dark at around 6:30pm, and it is always twilight when we are walking home.  The nights here are warm, so it is quite nice to be out in the 23ºC weather, with 80% humidity.  We have yet to wear jackets on the way home, or anytime since we landed.

Daylight Savings Time is a hot-button topic here.  Queensland, the Northern Territories and Western Australia do not have Daylight Savings Time, but the ACT (Canberra), New South Wales, Southern Australia, Tasmania and New South Wales do.  This means that if one travels south (towards Sydney) along the Gold Coast, one goes from a Queensland resort town to a NSW resort town, sometimes only 100's of metres apart, and loses an hour.  There is now talk of creating a SE Queensland district that will have DST.  Whenever we are asked if all of Canada is on DST, we answer "Everywhere except Saskatchewan, and there they don't have it because of the farmers not wanting to upset the cow's schedule".  This is the same answer that they have here!  Since when have cows been running the world?  They don't even pay taxes!  We have been told that the DST issue goes to a referendum every year or so, and if it does, you know where our vote is going....vote Yes to DST!

Finals Weekend!

We have just been through the ultimate in sport weekends...if you actually understand all of the sports that are available here to watch.  First we had the Grand Final for the AFL, which was the second "Grand Final" after last weekend's tie between the Collingwood Magpies and the St Kilda Saints (the Magpies were the winners).  Then it was the Rugby League Grand Final...except that when we stopped in to watch it in a pub we actually ended up watching a different Grand Final in rugby, this time for gigantic under-20s (seriously, these players are massive, they have thighs the size of a panda's butt!)  The real "Grand Final" was played a few hours later.  Luckily our accents and clear lack of understanding lead a kindly bartender to explain the whole set-up to us.  In addition to all of this, they report heavily on the Ryder Cup and the Commonwealth Games.
So why did we spend a weekend watching sports?  It rained here all weekend, not a heavy tropical downpour, but a constant swirling mist causing the humidity to rise to infinity.  We both are getting big, curly heads of hair and are always looking quite refreshed.  Coming from the dry climate of Calgary, we really find this refreshing.  Some Australians hate it and that is too bad: they are predicting that we are going in to one of the wettest summers on record!