In which – Little notes about AUS part 1

There was a massive lightening storm last night at around 2am (4^th Jan today). I managed to sleep through it apart from being woken up once by the thunder and then suddenly I was woken up by someone knocking loudly on our door... but seeing as if you've lost your key you need to go down to reception and identify yourself I left them to themselves and after knocking loudly once more whoever it was left. A lightening strike set off a small fire near the airport here and by noon is was seriously raging. They closed two highways and evacuated homes. Towards the evening now it looks to be under control. We all scoofed in the TV room after this woman who was interviewed at the airport said 'the police were no help, our plane leaves in only ten minutes' and I couldn't help think of the idiots who complained at Stansted when I was heading to visit Lucy who couldn't believe they were held up in the walkway between gates as every one was standing still for two minutes of silence on Nov 11^th.

The traffic lights here are raised on yellow poles and the red light jumps from red to green which is a massive pain because you either have a panic attack when you're at the front of the queue waiting for the sudden green or you miss it and get beeped... therefore a helpful amber light should not be underestimated O_O . The pedestrian crossings here are a nightmare, not only do they take ages but they also last the length of Usain Bolt crossing them from front of the queue and if you miss the green man you get the flashing red man which means you can still crosss... but so can the cars ?_? They have nothing to tell you the button has been pressed and I have been stuck somewhere before where I couldn't cross the road as it hadn't been pressed and you get to thinking you don't need to.

The news networks here are like the US where everything is mid good and bad at the same time and that everything trivial is amazingly interesting and worth dicussion on a bigger scale than back home. They also feature important British stories like today I caught 9 news and discovered about a rolled lorry near Edinburgh brought down by high winds.

The police do random alcohol driving tests and I was pulled over by the police within five minutes for two alcohol tests and a cannabis and marijuana test. There is nothing more freaky than having the red and blues flash behind you when you've done nothing wrong... because all you can think about is why they've pulled you over... and you can't think of a reason!

The Aboriginals named six seasons to the year with December – January being the first summer with plants blooming and February – March being the second summer... where you don't do much... and you just burn... so... something to look forward to :D

They have burger king here but it's called 'Hungry Jacks's' which is funneh. They also have a fast food resturant here that looks like its on the same level as KFC from the outside... but it tastes no different from eating cheap take away chicken you could get in any scary take away shop. But they also have this amazing chicken place called 'Red Roaster' and I really like it. I think its more expensive for fast food but more like on the same level as KFC and the most important thing is that they do different things to KFC and anyway it is nice! Red Roaster's trademark quote at the moment is 'don't think twice' which raises many questions but its obvious they're just saying you don't need to think twice because you know who is the best... still it does sound a little over powering, like as if the offer isn't going to be there a second time.

In the heat here you can get through 1.5 or 3 litres without needing to go to the toilet to get it out of you!

They have ravens here but for some reason the ravens here are obsessed with making a lot of noise and they don't so much 'ka' as they scream (luckily not high pitched). They also have magpies... but they aren't magpies. They are birds with black and white on them and the first people to colony here decided to call them what they looked like back home, oh those colony people ohoho

They have a giant TV screen by the state library here and you never know what's going to be played. There was this depressing song about garbage before Christmas and one day I spied Top Gear being played.

In which Dan realises there could have been no such puddle to get his socks that wet.

So I put a lot of trust in this yellow pages job. It was a job that I had found on gumtree and after searching for days and only finding the tomato one and this one I was very eager to take them. The simple logic of 'a job earns you money' was in my mind and no matter how hard or how short it was still at the end of the day money in my pocket and time well spent.

But after tearing at my flesh in the heat and frustration of the tomato vines in order to gain less than minimum wage both here and probably back home I had thought that nothing could be worse... well when does anything go to plan?

This blog entry will be a blog of numbers now as you try to decide for yourself whether what I decided on was right, too silly or too lenient to the job.

Minimum wage in WA - ~ $15.50

Roughly $182 divided by roughly 5+8+6+6+5 (30) hours = ~ $6.06 per hour Tomato job

One must also consider two things, one is that Alex applied for a carpentary job for which he had quals but was instead put on manual labour and worked for 13 hours a day and getting $25 an hour which levelled him with a cool $325 a day and Matt got a job on gumtree which worked him out at $300 a day for 12 hours work (when you work after midnight here the hourly rate goes up a lot and working silly days like Christmas day can rake you on $50 an hour in some cases). So I wanted a job, that much is clear, and there were good jobs out there, that too is clear, and Matt got a job through gumtree, this is clear. What I'm saying is that initially you feel you're doing the right thing and you follow on with the same course of action because you believe it'll go somewhere good... but you have to have an open mind about these things because they can nip you in the butt.

Today I wander to Kewdale. I got the train to Oats Street station and looked for the 99 bus, which I didn't get and so instead I walked for 50 mins in the heat to get to the address and then I was only five minutes late but felt foolish especially as I had walked the last two roads without pavement because that's how they do things here. Things started to fall apart straight away as we were instructed by sign to walk across an active warehouse car park with lorries moving about without hi vis and one guy was told off for wearing sandals funnily enough. So we gained the other side and it was a mess as to what we were supposed to do so me and a few other peps just stood there... then we finally moved on to this odd introduction. Now this is also where things were fishy as in an email conversation I asked about raiding private property to place yellow pages and was told to throw it over the fence... at the induction she quite rightly told us not to do this, amongst other things like don't tackle dogs. So after being given hi vis after walking across the terror of the warehouse outside we were suddenly picked by this excited old man from Asia (I don't mean to be racist but he wasn't exactly Irish for example)... (I have nothing against the Irish either).

Something else that makes this whole thing dodgy was how we never saw the name of the company on any signs, buildings or vehicles. Something else that made this dodgy was when asked about pay the woman said she didn't know as it was not up to her. So suddenly we were being told to grab a GPS (for identifying if a house has been delivered to or not) and suddenly I'm being told I'm not allowed to do that. So it was all very messy and I just when along for the ride. Then we were in a car... and I just went along for the ride. Then we were at the first road... finally. There we found some yellow pages that had already been dropped off and after discussing what who should be doing what part of the street we split up. So I did three houses and then bam... there was this massive amount of apartments. So I went back to find out what I was supposed to do at them again and this is where a man who was with us rage quitted and after thrusting the paperwork in my hand drove off with his girlfriend in a hurry. So now there were three. It was me and two Alexs'. Something funny about these two apart from being called Alex, one was from Germany and the other had a Dutch accent as he was from South Africa and he was 15 which just made it hard to understand what to think of him... oh and he was very organised and while he did take charge he also showed his age quite a bit and I don't think he would have done everything without our help (us old guys ;). Then we tackled the apartments by ringing a random number and they let us in. We made the delivery and headed donwn Canning highway to delivery to buisnesses. I went to Hungry Jack's but because they had no number I was like wahhh. What was funny was that we dilvered to houses and buisness around the KFC but not the KFC... like it wasn't really there ~ ohh. We were told to deliver between numbers and people who had said they didn't want to be delivered to so KFC... might really have been a mirage.

Then some houses weren't really there and then we moved on up this street and delivered some more books. I tackled a 28 door apartment/house place and ran out of books so we had to wander for like 300m to get more which I then had to walk back with, we were issued no trolley, and then that's when things started to get fishy. We had been offered a fourth man, from Canada so we really were getting around the world, but we had also been offered some more information. Tina, the girl giving the induction, said that they expected people to do a map every two days and that a map was about 700 books. That works out as $70 in two days which is terrible, especially as we were expecting to receive $100 a day. But the worst part was that we had been told now that the money of $70 would be divided by however many people delivered them which would be $17.50 each for two days work. Now I don't want to sound like we're weak or anything. I don't want it to sound like I'm afraid of hard work or that I'm lazy... but after five hours of lifting and walking in the summer sun here I would like to get a little more than $10. That's is how much we would have earned if we had kept at it until four which we were told to do. Instead of that we sat down together and stared at each other in disbelief that the cokes two of them had bought was basically what they had just worked two and a half hours for.

So then we decided whether it would get better and we realised that at $2 an hour this really was the worst conceivable job ever. One person then went so far as considering that the sweat factories in mid China would pay $0.50 for an hour or $1 per hour and here we were... not even sitting down!We worked out some more things and ultimately I came to the conclusion that no matter what the work was... at $2 an hour I wouldn't even be able to pay the hostel rent for the month and also that seeing as the job would go on all day it would be better pay to sit around doing nothing for the month until the last week then get a job paying half that of Matts and bang out work then.

To put it in perspective, because I know you want it to be, it's like sitting in a petrol station and every hour standing up and serving one customer who buys a coke probably costing the company $1.50 to get there per bottle, you get $2 and the company gets $1 profit for $4.50 and then you go back to sleep or crying or whatever it is young people do these days and then repeat once every hour.... not a nice thought when you come back to the hostel and find your very tired and quite sunburnt.

Then we phoned the guy back up because no matter how angry we were we still had their GPSs and we didn't want to steal them. He arrived and we managed to miss the whole point of why we had stopped working and done little and he got angry, I said nothing because all I wanted to do was return the GPS and get out of there. He can keep his $5 for like three hours sizzling and melting, I gave him only a name and an email address and there is no way he can remember who I am so essentially all I did today was try a job and decide that it wasn't for me... for anyone in the whole world because you can't live off $2 an hour.

So there are some things to cover like how you'd make more money with a trolley and if there were only two of you but then other problems would get in the way. In order to bring a yellow pages to a house with a locked gate you have to put it in a bag and that takes time. Unless you get a book appear in your hand every time you need one you are tripling the distance and time it takes to deliver one; if you move one metre to deliver a book then move back, pick up another and then move on that same metre you will have covered three metres.

So quite simply it doesn't work out as a job and I earnt more doing a paper round, although that was only on Sunday mornings, so there is no way I could do that job and instead I must keep looking for another one but as it is I might as well start looking for geology ones now even though it is not mid Jan. It just pains me to think that once again I have no income!

In which Dan goes spider hunting

 It's too dangerous to wander out into the bush, especially alone. It's also too dangerous to go poking spiders with a stick... so what did I actually get up to? Well I decided to waste some time so I took the free bus up to King's Park. It was very hot this day and I later found out that it had been the second hottest day of the year... in December. Anyway, fighting the heat and downing half the water fountain I thought it would be a good lol to wander off into the city bush which is that area of the park which hasn't been built on, its just been left as it was before the city was there; bushland. It's not insane bush land with all manner of dangers, as one man once said only bad things hide under rocks and that is why AUS is full of bad things because it is under the world. I also took along a sketch book but its times like these where I remember that I'm not actually that good at drawing. Then I saw this bug:

and then I decided to go spider hunting as there were so many cobwebs. I wondered how many different types of spiders I could see in this bush land, although I did only stick to the path, which was a good idea I think. I got to see Canning Bridge from far up and away in the park. This is a bridge you'll remember from the lovely leaflet drop job that just didn't work out... you know... that giant walk I had to go on for no reason seeing as the place was right next to the bus stop.

You can see a lot of jet skis on the Swan River from up in the park

Below is a picture of a 'black boy' which has a crazily dark bark trunk and a funny head dress looking leaves top. Apparently this scared the colony people as when walking amongst them in the dark or evening would raise a certain fear.

So the first of the three spiders I counted and saw is this crazy little one. It is only a centimetre or so big but it looks quite intimidating. It's red and orange with black spikes. The cobwebs are the same as spiders back home in that the web is a hexagon and gets smaller inwards until the middle where the spider sits.

The second spider is a kind of freaky one. Opposite to the previous spider it has long legs and a small body. The head is like half a centimetre big and the legs go on for an inch at least. It was quite freaky finding these spiders because they literally just hang off the cobweb, and the cobweb has no structure. It's just like a giant net. The long legs and the fact that it dangles down on the web make this a very dangerous looking thing. Luckily it isn't very big.

This third spider is the scary one. I wanted to get a closer shot to show you how big it is but it hides out far from the path. It manages to make a giant bridge across the path at like three or four metres in the air. This cobweb really is like a giant net and there really is no structure to it. I don't know how it gets from one tree to the other because the gap is like about four or five metres. Maybe the spider attachs the web to one tree and then drops down on a line and then swings until it reaches something else to attach to and then climbs up. So this spider it about two centimetres body size but the legs make it up to palm sized or beyond. The head it black and small but the behind is white and much larger. The two giant pincers on the front make it scary to approach too so maybe its good it was far away. Plus you can never tell how fast anything here moves until it does it and you also don't know what kind of damage anything could do, except those hammer sharks, they could give you a certain whack for sure :/

Below is one of the magpies that they have here, as you can see they are nothing like the magpies back home other than the colour, they like zebras to horses. I chased this particular magpie around a tree.

Then I found the DNA tower at last. The last time I was in King's Park I was running about the park going from one side of the 2km bushland to the other along sand paths without a bottle of water (I did have water) and although I did find many things I didn't find this tower. On this trip though I did find it and I hope you like the look of it for it was a mirage to me in the heat. Nawww I'm joking but the weird thing was that because of the heat there was no one around. There was no one in either direction in sight, no one climbing the tower and no one in eye shot even after climbing the tower. This I thought was an attractive place for people to come to yet here I was without people, go figure. So a picture of the tower and a pictures from atop the tower.

and then I thought I'd show you this massive meal we ate of which I paid nothing because they bought too much, they bought a whole bag of potatoes and didn't consider keeping any so we turned them all into mass; nom.