Back Down Under and Getting Organized

Well, I just got back from an excellent trip to the US. I was in the states for about a month while switching visas. It was a nice excuse to come home, but the whole thing still has me a little annoyed. The australian department of immigration told me it would take approximately 2-6 weeks to get my student visa. After calling a number of offices and being told it usually takes about 10 biz days I decided to give my self 4 weeks just to be safe. After all that, spending nearly $2k on plane tickets and taking a years worth of vacation days my visa was processed in less than 72 hours.

While it was a bit of an irritation, it was nice to have the visa out of the way so I could enjoy the rest of my trip. I got to hang with my family, go sailing and see friends. I even squeezed in a trip to NYC and Ithaca. All in all it was a lot of fun and I am very glad I got to go.

Now that I’m back in AU I have been trying to get back into the swing of living a regular grownup life. It is a bit of an adjustment from eating out 5+ days a week and drinking almost every night to doing the exact opposite, but I don’t mind. If you know me at all you know that I like a lazy day at home much more than going out and doing lots of stuff

One of the biggest excitements for me since getting back (don’t hold your breath, I am the only person in the world excited about this) is the fixing of the numerous leaks in my car. Although when I bought it I was assured it was dry as a bone I quickly found 2-3 leaks in the trunk as well as a few inside the passenger cabin. I had been covering it for a month or so before I left and while I was gone, so when I got back it had dried out quite well. I decided to take another crack at it and finally succeeded in fixing the truck leaks as well as the main passenger cabin leak. I just have one more to fix, and I think I can do that today when I get home from work.

Back to marginally more interesting things.

After seeing all the cool things I could do with my iPhone Jess has now gotten one, so I have been spending a lot of time learning lots of cool things that I can do with mine and then (much to her annoyance) insisted on showing her how to do them. I really need to make some more friends with iPhones so I can show them the neet little tricks I have figured out.

Lastly, while wasting time at work today I decided to register 2 domain names. Davidkonigsberg.info and konigsbro.info at the moment they don’t do anything, but I will have them forward to my about.me profile until I think of something better to do with them. $1.34 well spent I think

Turning over a new leaf

Now that my blog has been mentioned on grey radio, I feel like I need to step it up and start updating my blog.

Like I said in my last post I will be starting a phd program at the university of Queensland in the next few weeks and hopefully my life will then take on a bit more structure. For now I’m just going to try to make more constructive use of my free time.

I have been reading and biking a little more and have done some great cooking in the last couple weeks. Home made lasagna (including home made noodles), noodles, pretzels, and vegetarian muscaka. I do need to come up with some other productive stuff to do though.

It may be hard to imaging, but when you are living in a place where you don’t know anyone and can’t afford to travel much it is hard to come up with things to do all day. It’s easy to say go biking, or read a bookmark but there are 16+ usable hours in the day and when u don’t have any real stuff you have to do each day seems very long and a little hard to fill.

News News and More News

Not quite sure where to start, but a lot has happened in the months since I lasted updated this blog (sorry about that by the way). Anyways, here are the main things, X-mass was a lot of fun, there was crazy flooding in Brisbane, I bought a car, and… oh yeah, I got admitted into UQ doing a PhD in Chemical engineering.

Updates and pictures to follow…

Things are going well

A lot has happened since my last post. The day before we left the sunshine coast we got screwed over by the landlord for the apartment we had put a deposit on. Long story short she couldn’t get her old tenants to move out and ended up leaving us without a place to live the next day when we arrived in Brisbane. As a result we spent our first day in Brisbane looking at more apartments. After seeing 4 or 5 we settled on the last one and signed a lease. This place is much smaller than the other one we were going to get, and is only one bedroom instead of two, but at least it is cheaper and still quite close to the city.

We spend a few days living out of our suitcases while our new landlord finished furnishing us with cubbords for our clothes. As of now we are almost completely settled in. We have been cooking almost every night and things are great.

Once we moved into the new place we frantically began looking for work. Because of stupid beurocratic bullshit I have put on hold my search for an engineering job while I go through the rigamarole of getting properly licensed and or certified (if it is even possible). In the meantime I have been trying to get any job available just to have something to do and get paid from. I have dropped off my resume at basically every store within walking distance of my house. Also I put up some adds on line trying to get some handyman work. I only ever got a couple calls about the handyman work, but luckily one of them turned out to be a huge success. I have been working fir them for a little while now and they have referred a couple other customers to me. So far it has kept me busy.

On top of that I took a part time working from home sales job. I haven’t actually started it (I start later today) but i am not sure if it will be worth the trouble. It only pays $5 per hour, but there are commissions that should be easy to get. I can get paid $10 just for scheduling someone for an appointment with the main sales people that actually make the contracts. I will let you guys know how that goes.

The other income potential is at Blockbuster. I am going in Friday for a 3 hour paid training session which will hopefully turn into a job.

[Update] after working that sales job for 30 min I called up my boss and quit. That is more rejection than I can face on a daily basis.

More to come later
-David

P.S. Below is [edit: will be] a picture of the helicopter visible from my kitchen window.

Sunshine coast

Our campsite

Between Rockhampton and Brisbane we decided to spend a couple nights camping on the sunshine coast. Above is a googlemaps picture of our campsite right next to the water, and below is a general picture of the area we are staying. It is really nice. Clean beach nice waves, cool at night. Because our landlord at the new place is a bit of a pushover, and because the current tenants are assholes, our move in date has been pushed back again, so we are moving in tuesday now.

Sunshine Coast

Rockvegas

Ok, so I have been in Rockhampton for nearly a week now and it seems I have done almost all there is to do. Don’t get the wrong idea here, I haven’t actually been doing much While it is true there is virtually nothing to do here I have been having a good time. The people are very friendly, and there is plenty of shopping that I need to do to provision my apartment.

I have done a few rather more exciting things though. The second night I was here we went out to dinner in a beach town called Yeppon about an hour away. After dinner we drove over to emu park beach and had a bonfire which was awesome. I still haven’t had a day at the beach yet, but yesterday Jess and I drove to a park called Stoney creek. After driving along maybe 10-15k of dirt track we go to the park where we cooked lunch and went for a swim in the creek. The water was a little cool, but it was very beautiful, I took a couple pictures and will try to post them here when I get down to brisbane.

On a completely unrelated note, I bought a pasta maker the other day. I had been wanting to buy one for a while now but they are usually kinda expensive. Surprisingly I was able to find one here for under $25 which worked quite well. My thought is that once I get a food processor or find an Indian grocery store (both somewhat unlikely events while I am in Rockhampton) I can use lentil flour to make less unhealthy pasta.

Well that’s about it for now, I am driving down to Brisbane on Saturday with two nights camping on the way down. It should be fun, I will try to take pics and keep you updated.

-D

[Editor's note: Edit of the Day - 'Don't get the wrong idea here thigh, ...'. I have no idea why the word 'thigh' is in there, making it all the more humorous.]

Australia…things are finally coming together

You may think that since I haven’t posted anything in a while, that nothing has been going on. For the few weeks of my blogging blackout that was correct, but there was also a ton of excitement that I was just too lazy to write about. I went to Indonesia with Jess, Korea to visit my cousin, and now I am in Australia with Jess. Because I am still lazy and I don’t have access to my laptop write now I am just gonna fill you guys in on recent events and leave the Korea/Indonesia stuff for another post.

So, Jess and I left Singapore around 10pm bound for Brisbane via Darwin. The flight was uneventfully and we arrived at Darwin to go through immigration around 4a.m. The only issue I had was didn’t involve any of the important issues like visas or customs, but the stupid security screening to get to the gates. Because my backpack had only computer stuff in it I asked if I had to pull it all out or if just my laptop would do. He said just laptop was fine, but once it had gone through he then told me I had to pull out my net book and iPad which I did. Still threatened by my technological superiority they made me remove… My iPod touch, hard drive, digital camera, iPod video, and all my chargers…oh and my Bluetooth keyboard. Other than that the flight to brisbane was uneventful.

Once arrived in Brisbane we took the train (metro kind of train) into the city. The ride was fast and easy, but $15 each! It was painful. Then we hopped on another train and went further south where we met jess’s grandparents. They were extremely friendly and fed us lunch and caught up with Jess while we got our possession squared away (we are leaving our checked bags there while we take a week long trip up to Rockhampton.) After a few hrs of catching up we had to get going to make an appointment to look at an apartment.

The place we looked at was relatively nice for what we were looking to spend and we were getting close to ready to decide to take it and be done with looking, but we thought that for good measure we would still attend the appointment we had set for the next day to look at another.

I am getting tired of writing in such detail, and I am sure you are tired of reading it, so I am going to pick up the pace.

We went and checked into the hostel which was relatively nice. We had dinner in down town Brisbane and then walked back to the hostel and passed out. The next day we took a bus out to greenslopes to look at the other place. It was a little less nice, but it was better equipped (we were looking only at furnished apartments) and the landlord was able to give us a discount on the rent and a latter start date. All in all this place would work out costing us about $500 less over the three months that we are signed on for. On top of that the nearby restaurants were about 15 min away instead of 15 seconds, so hopefully that will help us resist temptation. Also, the new place is a lot more residential so it seemed like it would be nice and quiet and safe for biking and running and stuff.

Anyways we put a deposit on the second place after lunch and then went back to the hostel. We had to get up at 4a.m. The next morning for our flight to Rockhampton so our evening was low key and short. After 4 hours sleep we caught to the airport. Just so you know, cabs in Australia are not cheap. In fact they are quite expensive. The 20-25 min ride cost us about $50.

Security to fly to Rocky was a joke. We had printed out our tickets online and not once in the process of getting to the gate and onto the plane did anyone bother to check our ID. The flight was just under an hour and jess’s dad picked us up and brought us to his townhouse/duplex place. It is really nice, in fact it is one of the few things I have actually taken pictures of.

The first day in Rocky was spent mostly on logistical stuff. I got 3G set up on my iPad, which continues to be one of the most useful things I have ever owned, especially when traveling. I also opened an Australian bank account.

I also drove on the left side of the road for the first time. It was a huge success.

Oh, I just remembered. Right after we got here we also got a big gift from Jess’s dad. He had bought us a ton of provisions for our new place. Towels, sheets, pans, toaster, almost everything else. It was very generous of him, especially considering he is already lending us a virtually brand new Honda jazz/fit for as long as we need it.

Will post more about my second day in Rockhampton soon.

[Editor's note: Favourite moment in this post - tie between 'threatened by my technological superiority' and 'It was a huge success'. If pressed, I'd pick the first; however, both are excellent. I'm too tired to correct his lack of capitalizations so I left them as is.]