Thursday, September 01, 2005

We Gonna Walk Down To... Electric Barbecue

A few nights ago, we sauntered over to the park across the street where there are these coin operated BBQs for the public to use. A novel concept, it provides permanent cooking facilities at a minimal cost, something like 20 cents for 15 minutes of heat. It is more like a 'griddle' than a BBQ, but it does get hot enough to fully cook one's food. There are several of these brick structures scattered in the park, each the size of a car, containing four cooking surfaces. We prepared some sausages and onions with olive oil and garlic in a ziploc and toted it down the street for some easy outdoor cooking as the sun sets.

The grills themselves are sometimes grimy with the previous person's mess, but next time we'll bring aluminum (the accent is placed on the 'min' here, not the 'lum' as in the states) foil and just cover it up. We did see others just throw their mixed fare right on the surface with no worries, but instead we chose to try to clean ours off a bit, with mixed results. When we travel soon, this type of facilities located at campsites should make a pretty good mobile kitchen. Bacon and Eggs for a big brekke, grilled bangers later in the arvo (afternoon)... mmmmm, tasty. We picked up an old esky (ice chest) at the Salvos this weekend to be able to tote our perishable supplies with us in the Holden.

Speaking of meat (and I'm always speaking of meat), we witnessed our first 'meat raffle' this weekend at the local R.S.L. (Arrie, or Rossie) - the Returned Serviceman's League. There was some Snooker tournament that had occurred earlier that day and it was time to dole out the prizes. These meat platters had been sitting out for the greater part of the evening, waiting to be selected by the lucky members. Apparently the 'Brekke Platter' containing ham and eggs is for wussies, because the guy who selected it got a good ribbing from his mates in doing so. The R.S.L. is as authentic as it gets, nowhere else will you find such true Australian character (or characters). Coherence of speech goes completely out the door after about 9pm.

posted by ncawthon at 10:14 AM

Tuesday, August 30, 2005

Patience at the Pace of Progress

One of my packages arrived today, after 10 weeks of sea and freight transport. Saving something like 20% on postage to do the bulk shipping probably wasn't the smartest of decisions. In that box was a fairly heavy laser printer, which in retrospect was a smart thing to send on. The University charges for each page you send to the printer (as well as every megabyte used in a browser which goes over your daily alottment), I've chalked up close to 100 dollars in charges this month alone. So, with neither the Uni nor the home DSL being cheap, I've got to pick one environment to do work in.

Besides the package shipping being numbingly slow, we've found that the visa process is just driving us insane. Their web application causes more headaches than it saves, and this is coming from someone who works on the Internet for a living.

We've been to their downtown office on average of twice a week, each to try and overcome minute hurdles that prevent us from getting our full permission to live and work in Australia. Maiden names versus assumed names, course work versus research classifications, Canadian versus American, you name it and we've dealt with it. Each require a back and forth misunderstanding and clarification process that drolls on forever. The people in person have been helpful, but powerless at times to speed up (or fix) the system.

I am not sure if it is just us, being impatient Americans wanting to get everything done super quickly, but it might be that things just happen slower here. It's a big country, all the way on the other side of the world and there's just not that sense of urgency or drive to push faster, as cited in the previous post about breakfast traditions.

The trademark here, 'No Worries', could easily mean, 'No Hurries'. This will actually be a welcome mentality when we go have a break.

posted by ncawthon at 8:21 PM