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!

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.