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Ok ok, wot news from the South. The journal has been a little neglected, I am ashamed to say, mostly because once stuff starts getting a bit the samey, there is less to report! Also owing to the fact that I have really embraced my time in adelaide as a period of 'normal' living. I have not made many trips or done any touristy stuff beyond what I did in my first week or two. In a way that my time in Sydney and Airlie Beach did not, it really just feels like I am living here. I have work and I have my flat and I go to the gym on my days off, I do grocery shopping and make spectacular salads every afternoon, I drink cheap wine in the evenings and spend a lot of time on the internet and that is about it! It has struck me a few times just how quickly my life has become very similar to my life back home, only in Aussieland.
I feel like a resident here. I have my favourite smoothie place, I know what shortcuts to take to get to places fastest and avoid the crowds, I know what day Coles changes their weekly special offers on and I know what buses to get to go to a few different places. I finally know how the pricing system for the Adelaide Metro works, I'm nearly used to not being given plastic bags in shops to put my purchases in; the guy at the Adelaide Nut stand in central markets which I shop at regularly knows what I want before I have to ask for it, the girls at the Taiwan Bubble Tea place recognise me and say hi. I like this, it makes me feel like I belong here.
If I ever were to make the decision to up and emigrate to aussieland, it would undoubtedly be Adelaide where I would put roots. I can see myself living here, if only it wasn't so darn far away from the uke, and if only emigrating itself wasn't such a huge and scary decision. I'm still young (ish) and it is not a decision I would make for a few years at least.
I don't know what to write, there is not much to report, my life really is quite boring here (from anyone else's point of view) but blissful from mine in its being a window of normalcy after 10months of backpacker-living. I'm fully aware that my first few months in nz are likely to be of the backpacker variety once again and revelling in my privacy and routine right now.
Actually, there is one amusing thing I noticed about oz, that I wanted to put down for prosperity, which is that here in australia, they have touch-switch light switches in the bathrooms and toilets, everywhere! This bemuses me for that fact that nowhere in england will you find a lightswitch you can put your finger on in a bathroom, they are all pullcords, or switches outside the room. I learnt when I was younger that this is due to danger of electrocution with wet hands. It got me thinking... do a lot of Aussies therefore get electrocuted switching the light on/off with wet hands? Or is it not really a big risk, and are the English overparanoid? Is the electricity different here and not so much of a danger to a recently hand-washed person? Or did the aussies just not think that water + electricity = bad..?
Both my jobs are great. I've been doing mostly day shifts at the metro, which is great coz it frees me up to do lots of evenings at Hog's, which suits me great coz that is when the majority of the hoggy shifts are, them being dead in the day. Working two jobs I did have a 4week run of no days off (broken yesterday).. it's easy to think that the two jobs are very different, each is a break from the other, and think that I don't need time off, but it's not true! My motivation has slipped recently for saving and not spending and whatnot and I think it's coz I was tired, I forget that I am perhaps not superwoman and that I actually need a day off now and again or my motivation/sanity/mood/sleep suffers! Learn the lesson Imo!
OH Reciprocal Healthcare is the best thing in the world. This is what has allowed me my medicare card and access to certain Aussie healthcare for free. As people that know me will know, back home I am hardly ever ever ill, I am blessed with the constitution of a horse when it comes to immune system stuff, so I rarely have anything physically go wrong with me which might require doctoral attention. For some reason since I have been in Oz, in the last 10months I have visited the doctor no less than TEN times! Granted there were some multiple visits for individual complaints, but between an inflamed tendon sheath in my arm following a canoe safari, ear infection & blockage following diving, acute chest pain that came on whilst in the gym, random electrolyte test and now suspected inflamed Plantar Fascia, I have made damn good use of my Medicare card. To think that when I got it I wasn't sure I would use it at all. I have had THREE parts of my body Xrayed, an ultrasound of my foot, blood tests and two ECGs. I have no idea how much all of that might have cost without Medicare, but I can safely say that it has saved me $1000s. Once again, God Bless Reciprocal Healthcare, and thank you.
It does make me muse a little upon the cause of many recent ailments in a body that has previously given me very few complaints worth taking further than the medicine box at home. Have I become more hypochondriacal? Is old age finally leaving its mark on my disintegrating and degenerating physical self? Am I making a bigger deal out of complaints that I would previously have ignored? Am i perhaps a little more paranoid about something going wrong with my health because a) I am a long way from home if it progresses to being very bad and b) I have a lot of things to do in the coming months that I do not want to be prevented from doing by a painful wrist/infected ear/inflamed foot. I think it's mostly the latter, with the chest pains coming into a) and wrist/ear/foot coming into b). Most of these things were caused by activities I would not normally be doing (canoeing/diving)and I want to get them sorted quick so they don't stop me doing stuff in the future! Back home I didn't do any activities that caused me to exert myself to an extent that caused injury, quite simply. If I had been injured, it woudn't have mattered overly much coz I had little to miss out on. Now I do! I have heaps of cool stuff to do once I get to NZ, I want to take full advantage of the amazing landscapes and spectacular hiking trails there. I want to do LOTS of hiking, so I'm really hoping my ultrasound/xray on my foot tomorrow shows what the problem is definitively so I can sort it aaaat.
I'm sorry this is a pretty boring entry for anyone reading, but my life is really not that interesting right now. Not to anyone else. To me it is exactly what I need for the next month or so until I am on the move again, and don't worry the entries will no doubt be thicker and faster when that time comes, with more to pad them out!
- comments
Deb It must not really be much of a risk when there aren't any wires hanging out or anything. I'm a born-and-bred Melbourne girl where we have just the light switches you describe, and I've never heard of a resulting electrocution.