The end of the year

Well it's new year's eve and so I thought for the sake of completeness I would update this blog with what has been happening over the last 9 months or so since I last posted. This is unlikely to be the definitive post which means I may come back and edit it at some point but for now I just wanted to get something online.
Also I won't be able to go into as much detail as I would like otherwise it would end up looking something like War and Peace. Even though the headline of the period that this post covers is that I was unemployed a lot still managed to happen. So here's a brief summary of some of those things which I may or may not come back and expand on in subsequent posts.

March:
I had spent all of February in India at the RIMYI. I had a separate blog for that here http://evsysindiablog.blogspot.com/ I returned to Australia in early March. I did 6 days at Lonely Planet which finished off my contract there. My last day was Friday 13th.
A couple of days later my Mum came over to visit from the UK. Because of a shortage of holiday she was only here for 8 days but we managed to get quite a bit done in that time visiting Melbourne Zoo, the Great Ocean Road, various restaurants and various family.
2 days after she left Sarah and I went for a holiday in Thailand, which brings us to...

April:
We had just over a week in Thailand. It was my first visit there. The journey to the place we were staying was a bit long winded involving a short night in Bangkok, a flight to Ko Samui (which has a beautiful airport with gorgeous gardens and ponds but on closer inspection the fish in the ponds were all floating) and then a boat ride. It was lovely when we got there and we spent a week trying to relax but with the thought of trying to get a job and Sarah having stress from work on her mind it wasn't as idyllic as it could have been.

Back in Melbourne the next big news was that I got a cat, I called her Joan. Given that I was of indeterminate visa status and had no job this probably wasn't the wisest idea but when I saw her in the window of the vet's I... well I got her anyway. She was orphaned by the bushfires, I don't have much in the way of details but she was found a bit battered and thin which meant that she was at the vet's for a while getting a bit of dental work and some physio (as she had injured her shoulder). She was a bit scraggy when I got her home and she promptly found a whole in the sofa that she got into and wouldn't get out of. It didn't take her long to fatten up and now she's very comfortable looking and has an awesome temperament.

About 3 weeks into April I started sorting my CV out. What I hadn't realised was that I had needed to find work within 28 days of my previous employment ending in order to make visa issues easy to manage, but by this stage that ship had sailed and I believe the express is 'I had it all to do'.

May:
I'm not very good at being unemployed. I get bored easily, I have less energy, I'm less creative etc. Things moved very slowly for me and I was not doing anywhere near enough to improve my situation. I was making occasional improvements to my CV which I was calling iterations just to make it sound a bit like work. I had bits and pieces of interviews with people - mainly recruitment companies but nothing much was happening. This was a time when Australia was not sure how the GFC was going to impact it and so potential employers were being cautious, add to that the added complication of my visa and no one really wanted to touch me.

I did however have an interview with 9MSN I believe that was on 29th May.

June:
By June it was seriously starting to hit home just how unemployed I was. However I did manage to teach a few yoga classes during this month and I enjoyed them very much.
Also bear in mind that this was winter, that doesn't mean snow but it does mean cold and short days.

July:

July is not a good time to look for a job in Australia even if you can work here and there isn't a GFC going on - I was, couldn't and there was. It's the end of the financial year and so people haven't worked out what they are spending just yet, as a result they don't do much hiring.

It may have been in July that I started reading Carl Jung's Memories, Dreams And Reflections, a brilliant book but it was making me a bit too analytical and so I had to stop - I'll go back to it another time when I have a bit less time on my hands.
Other big news was the state of my electricity bill. My flat is great in the summer when it's hot but not so good in the winter and I was pretty inert so I sat with the heating on all day.

It's worth saying that although things were looking pretty hopeless at this time I was managing to get a lot of yoga practice in, that has been the upside of unemployment and the upside of yoga in this time is that it gave me structure, a project, health, focus and all the other things it gives me.

August:
So little happened tha
Although I did transfer to a tourist visa which had an expiry date of 4th Feb 2010. Seems Lonely Planet had forgotten to tell immigration to cancel my visa so I could have transferred it quite easily in theory by the time I knew it was too late.

September:
In September I gave up. I really did. There was no sign of a job on the horizon so I though rather than sit around doing nothing all day thinking about how I might get a job that it would make more sense to give up on the whole enterprise and try and enjoy the time I had left in Australia. Throughout August and September I had been doing some yoga teaching and September was particularly busy but on 27th I taught my last class of this period and therefore had nothing in the diary. I decided to take a trip.

October:
I decided with all this time on my hands to go to India. I applied to get on a yoga and Ayurveda course at Yog-ganga. A week before I left I got a call from a recruitment consultant who had seen my details online. He told me that there was a job at Telstra that I could be good for. I told him that I had spoken to Telstra and that they had been clear that they would not sponsor me for a visa, I also said that I was going to be in India in a week's time. Undeterred he put me forward for the job. I had 2 interviews within 24 hours and it looked like I might be offered it.
The trip to India was mindblowing. Far too much happened for me to do justice to here, especially as I have to get this post wrapped up in 10 minutes before I go for dinner. I might add a fuller account to the India blog at a later date, for now though it was 2 days in Delhi, a train ride to Dehradun, 3 weeks in Old Rajpur (minus a day trip) of yoga and fascinating Ayurveda, a train ride and a day in Delhi and then home. I could write a book about it (if I didn't have to go for dinner in 8 minutes time).

November:

After a bit of too-ing and fro-ing while I was away I came back to Australia to a job offer from Telstra. The overwhelming feeling was relief.
Realising that spare time was henceforth going to be at a premium I decided to get another holiday in and spent a few days in Far North Queensland in the Australian rainforest. It was a completely different side of Australia, literally as well as figuratively.

December:
OK I've really got to go soon.

Highlights of December have been taking my first trip to Sydney. I went to visit my friend Claire who is over from Barcelona. She was with one of her sons, Eddie. Sydney Opera house blah blah blah, Sydney Harbour Bridge same - what I can't get over though is the taxi driver we had. He was amazing, it was like being in The Transporter. Lowlight was being so tired by the end of the weekend that I had to have a short sleep in the park in the shade of a tree also being used by a homeless.

Other than that I had my visa approved, I started work and had a lovely, lovely Christmas.

And now I really am going for dinner.

By the way I still haven't heard back from 9msn - fingers crossed though.

Where were we?

It's been a while since my last post. Sorry about that. Plenty has happened. In no particular order here are some of the highlights...

I went to Perth. This was a baby head wetting exercise. The baby was (and still is) Andrew James Shiolou. I stayed with my friends Simon and Martha and their lovely daughter Marcie. I arrived on the Friday and we went to the Indi Bar in Scarborough, we sat on the other side of the pool and saw also the best band in the world. We went to the races at Ascot the following day and then to the casino. By this point I still had 2 days left in Perth but the baby's head was quite damp enough thank you very much so on Sunday we went to King's Park and had a bit of a drive down the coast and on Monday I borrowed Simon's bicycle and went for a ride along the coast road to Hilary's Harbour. This was awesome. The aquarium is there too and I had a look around there and took the worst picture of a shark.


You can click the image to enlarge - it's really worth it.

We had the Lonely Planet Christmas party early in December. I went. I'd really like to post a picture but there's no way. I was wearing a pink wig, eye make up, a white vest with a design on it, blue shorts, knee high socks with pink ribbons, I also had a pink ribbon round my neck, and white shoes (not round my neck). I was also carrying a big lollipop. 5 of us went dressed the same. We were supposed to be the crew of the good ship lollipop. Not sure we pulled it off.

Christmas itself.
Hot Christmas in Melbourne. Very low key this year. I had a nice quiet time. Good food including pumpkin pie which I made. It was nice in its way but I kept hearing about very low temperatures at home and kind of missed a cold Christmas. Seeing the Christmas decorations up in summer was strange, it was like someone had forgotten to take them down.

New year. This was nice too. I cooked a 8/9 course dinner (one of the courses was simply a very expensive chocolate truffle so can't really take credit for it) which included a highly pretentious tomato dish which worked and an attempt to copy someone else's butternut squash dish that didn't. At the turn of the year I burnt a list of things that I'd rather have been different about 2008 which I'd written earlier in the day.
I almost forgot that I met 2 of my cousins that I'd never met before, Shaun and Russell. They are Tony and Linda's sons, Tony being my Dad's brother - there's a post about him somewhere. I went to a hippie market with Shaun and then drank quite a lot of beer before going back to Tony's place for a barbie - this was where I met Russell. They are both nice guys - very different though, from each other.

The whole festive period was lovely, apart from the times when I went into work.

I went to the Mornington Peninsular for a weekend, it beautiful wine-making country. There are many wineries around there to visit and get tastings at and some really good wines. I also went to a cheese making place and had a variety of Australian cheeses.

This weekend that has just gone I had my friend Dimitri over to visit me in Melbourne. We did a load of touristy stuff which I really enjoyed. We went to see Melbourne Victory beat Wellington 2-0 at the Telstra Dome, we went to the Melbourne Museum for the Melbourne Story exhibition, we went to St Kilda and had a great lunch of lots of shellfish at Claypots plus a pot at the Esplanade. Also we went up the Eureka tower, had a tour of the MCG and a couple of nice dinners and some interesting cocktails. It was Australia day yesterday which is a day off. I asked some Australians what you're supposed to do on Australia day and they said 'as little as possible'. I went over to see Tony and Linda and we had a barbie and a swim.

So we're all up to date now I think. This is a good point to leave it again for a few weeks as I go off to India to do some yoga. I suppose it'd be good if I did a blog? Fear not for Evsy's India Blog is born!

I love the smell of a yoga mat in the morning

They do like their morning yoga classes here. Most (if not all) schools offer classes at 6am which in my experience is quite rare in the UK. Mind you it would have been very unlikely for me to have got to a yoga class at 6am in the UK, it was hard enough for me to get to one at 7.30am and I taught that one. Here though I have seen up to 13 people in a class at 6.

There aren't that many level 3 classes though. Level 3 is the most advanced class that you get here, it's like an intermediate 2 in the UK. The school over the road from where I live does a level 3 at 6am on Tuesdays. It's too good an opportunity to miss so I have made the effort to start going. I have been to 3 in 3 weeks. I consider myself to be quite the hero for managing to do this.

Peter Scott teaches at his school fairly close to where I live and I went to one of his level 2 classes after which he mentioned to me that on Mon, Weds and Fri there is a teacher's practice there at 6am which he attends and that I'd be welcome at. This is a brilliant opportunity as he is an excellent teacher. BUT it is at 6am and it's a bike ride away. I don't even have that much of a problem with the hour - even though I have to be up at 5.20 which is tough for someone who isn't a morning person. What was really bothering me was the cycle ride which, although not far, is mainly about getting up a big massive hill. However this morning I gave it a go.

It was awesome. It was such a beautiful morning. The sky was clear and light blue. The sun hadn't come up yet but was near enough to the horizon to light up the vapour trails from aeroplanes in red and there was hardly a soul around. Whenever I have to be up for dawn I think it's the most beautiful time of day and that I should get up for it everyday but when the next day comes along I'd rather have the sleep. As I got onto the main road I saw 4 hot air balloons hanging in the sky which must have been over the Yarra Valley National Park. As I was going up the big massive hill I looked back at the city which was all lit up red with the sun coming up. It looked really still.
I was in a good mood before I arrived at the school.

I had already worked out a practice sequence for myself. There were quite a few people there and they seemed mainly to be teachers in training or recently qualified. I seem to be quite a highly qualified teacher here but I'm not looking to get back into teaching until I'm a bit more settled. At about 6.30 Peter turned up. The practice is not led and he got on with his own practice ocassionally giving the regulars some guidance. There was a bit of discussion going on. I didn't manage to complete my whole sequence but that's OK as there are plenty of other opportunities. I did enough and felt good for it. I very much liked that as a teacher and a very experienced practitioner Peter was doing his practice with his students.

I left at about 8.10. The session cost me 5 dollars (a bit over 2 quid) then I cycled 45mins to work and got to my desk at about 9.20. This is not what I was used to in the UK.

I'm going to add a photo of the beautiful morning, as long as it comes out OK, but my camera has run out of battery so in the meantime here's where I went to yoga this morning.

View Larger Map

Aussie Fashion

I thought I wanted to write something about fashion crimes in Australia. I thought I might be able to find enough to say. The reason I wanted to write it was so that I could put up the photo I had taken. I never got to the point where I had enough content. All I got was

Fascinators - already mentioned in the A Day at the Races article. Fact is that there are many many fashion crimes at the races but I've covered that.
Jeans tucked into high heels. I saw someone on the train like this. Very weird.
That's it.

So I suppose the Australians are sartorially OK really which is a bit disappointing.

I still have a photo.

This is it.

It's a hooded shirt.

It's in a shop selling formalwear.

A proudly Australian shop.

End of month drinks

At the end of every month Lonely Planet puts on free food and drink for the employees. The end of month drinks for October were inexplicably in the first week of November. That was Friday 6th. It's great do and the Lonely Planet band played. There was some talent there, some.

I realised that I have not put up any pictures of myself on this blog yet and thought that you might be worried by this. I'm fine though so don't concern yourself.

My mission to myself was to get a photo of me looking comfortable with my work colleagues to show that I was settling in OK.

This is the best I could do.



God bless Australia.

Another day at the races

Saturday 7th November 2008, Family day at Flemington race course. The last day of the Spring Carnival.

I have at least 2 concerns about this
a) That there would be a family day at the races in the first place.
b) Without betting then horse racing doesn't really make any sense. Given this then family day is about getting the kids into gambling early.
2) It was a day devoted to drinking
4) There was a fashion show of children
5) Fashion is not a word that has any place in a sentence with the word 'children' or anywhere near the concept of the races in Australia
6) What does it say about Australian family life?

This was a totally different experience to Melbourne Cup day.

On Melbourne Cup day I was with these people

You can click the photos for bigger versions (and they are massive)

For Family Day I was with this guy


His name is Shippo.

I had a great day on Saturday. There were 3 of us. Shippo, me and a chap called Luke. I had not met Luke before. He was very keen on speculating about the horses. Partly informed by the form guide and partly by the presence or absence of a 'full set of cruets' on the male horses. He had no winners all day. I believe this may have a bearing on the quality of his son's education and the size of house that the bookies will be living in.

Shippo and I arrived just before the fourth race was run. Shippo has a friend who is a bookie at the track, Calvin. He gave us a tip for the race, a horse called Vigor. I put 10 dollars on it and got 75 back when it romped home. From this point Calvin's word was gospel. Vigor was the only horse that paid out for me that day, other than the remorse horse that had a good outing all over my head.

Least said soonest mended.

One last thing. My favourite quote of the day came from Shippo 'I think we all know that the real winner here today was fake tan'.

A day at the races

Yesterday, 4th November, was the Melbourne cup. It's a horse race in importance that is on a par with the Grand National or the Kentucky Derby. The whole city stops for it. I mean it. The place literally grinds to a halt. Well not literally but you get the picture. It's a day off in Victoria (which is the state where Melbourne is) and everyone is interested in it and talks about it. About 150,000 people go to the track and they all get really dressed up and then really drunk.

Some of the things that people say
It is amazing to see how much effort people make and then how much of a mess they get themselves into
I was wearing a light blue shirt and it wasn't light blue by the end of the day
I've been once, I will never go again
You have to go once
You will see Australian culture in all its glory
Plus there are some more graphic and specific stories that I can't put here but if you request them by email I will provide them (there are 2 but maybe there'll be more on their way).

The Cup is the jewel in the Spring Carnival crown. Spring Carnival goes for a few days in early November and there are specific days like the Oaks, Emirates Day, Ladies Day (actually that might be the Oaks, I don't know - do your own research). I had been invited to go with one of the lads from work to the last day of the Carnival which is Saturday 8th. This is billed as Family Day, around 50,000 people go and it's apparently tamer than the other days but a good introduction. I thought it would be a good insight into Aussie culture so I accepted. I was looking forward to it and discovered that there were a few people from work going but then on Monday when I was in work (pretty much alone as everyone else had taken the day off to make a 4 day weekend) and I got a call from a colleague saying he had a spare ticket to the Cup and did I want to come along. Well what else was I going to do that day? So I accepted.

This is the background to the invitation. Colleague is a guy called Michael, he has a girlfriend, her name is Sarah, she has an ex-boyfriend (she pointed out that Michael's totally fine with this) and her ex-boyfriend introduced her to his friend Phil. Phil has become very rich from mining (big big business in Australia), Phil is in his 60s and is often happy for Sarah to benefit from his wealth (Michael is completely fine with this, although he dropped the term Sugar Daddy once or twice in a kind of 'I'm not very happy with this' kind of a way). Phil is based in Sydney but fancied a trip to the races so he organised a tent at the Melbourne Cup and invited his usual suspects - it seems he has a pretty regular crew of people that attend the same party at different venues all the time to celebrate a range of events… New year, birthdays etc. Phil has a boat and whilst recently embarking one of his guests slipped and broke her leg (quite badly by all accounts) but because she generally likes to make a fuss she was pretty much ignored, including by her husband. The upshot was that she was unable to make it to the Melbourne Cup thus freeing up a ticket - her husband still went. In total there were 16 people on Phil's tab. Michael and Sarah were invited and so was Sarah's (and now Michael's) friend Cara. Sarah had the idea of inviting me along in some sort of capacity to accompany Cara but it's not clear to me at the time of writing exactly what that capacity was. It may never become clear. In summary I was at the highlight of the Melburnian cultural calendar the place of an infirm woman to escort someone I had never met, free lunch and drink.

Blimey that was a lot of copy just to say that I got a freebie to the races.

We had a corporate tent with lunch and a bar. No one seemed to be too interested in taking full advantage of the free bar which surprised me, it almost seemed unAustralian. The tent was in the middle of the track, which is to say that we had to cross the track in between races to get to the central area where the tents were. We were insulated by a racecourse from all of the fun and alcoholic carnage that was happening in the outer area (bit of a shame this). We had to go through it to get to the crossing place. This was an excellent opportunity to see everyone in their finery.

A note on finery.
The typical female Australia attire for the Melbourne Cup seems to consist of 3-4 main parts. Firstly there is the dress. Gawdy is the watchword here. Oh and being too small seems to be a big part of it too. Actually now I think of it there might be 5 main parts to the outfit. But certainly start with a cheap looking dress which is a couple of sizes too small. Taste should not be a factor in choice of dress. Secondly there are the shoes. From what I can gather the shoes also need to be too small or at least very painful. Thousands of dollars worth of ladies shoes must be left behind as most of the ladies leave barefoot. Thirdly there is the hat or the fascinator. In my life I have had more or less seven sisters if you count steps so I've been exposed to quite a lot of female attire and consider myself to be well versed in girly paraphenalia that goes on with hair and make up and such but until last Saturday I had never heard of the fascinator which surprised me. I tried to rename the fascinator a cat botherer. They are essentially some feather based contrivance nailed to the side of your head. They come in all shapes and sizes and it's quite possible that primary school teachers substitute their income by getting their pupils to make these things. They are amazing. And generally quite horrible. But very popular. Where are we up to? Fourthly! So fourthly the handbag features. These fall into two groups - the very practical and the totally impractical. The practical contain booze, fags and a pair of thongs (flip flops) where as the impractical are just for show and contain lipstick. The fifth part of the outfit only emerges at the end of the day and is big, red, nasty, horrible, sore SUNBURN (please note the practical handbag does not contain sunblock).
Oh yeah, male finery. Anything goes really as long as it's a suit. Tasteless is pretty much the go. 'Humourous' is fine. I felt no pressure to be elegant for the event so went to the direct factory outlet and bought the second suit I tried on. It was silver, and thankfully still is.

There were horse races too. I put a few bets on but didn't win anything. I got 2 out of 3 on a trifector in the last race but that was the closest I got.

When we left I asked if we could go back through the hoi polloi to check out the carnage. Carnage it was indeed. Much drunkeness. Plenty of random pashing and drifts of rubbish mainly consisting of plastic champagne bottles.

I took some photos. I bought a digital camera at the weekend. I'll put some up on a site somewhere and link them to this site probably on a separate post to make life easy.

I am still going again this Saturday but will be in the thick of it this time.
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I've just read this through. I thought I should say something about Michael's girlfriends' friend Cara. She was very friendly and absolutely stunning, I fully expect never to see her again.