Anti-Valentine’s day in a retirement home – Barhopping with couchsurfers.

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Saturday 15^th of February I was invited for lunch to Felipe Kovacic’s house in Chatswood. He’s a retired navy officer who I met briefly in the Chilean Naval School. He’s been living in Sydney for some time now, with his French wife Isa and their 11 month son, Bruno. Turns out, both our fathers were classmates at the Mackay British School in Chile, small world again. Besides me, they invited an Armenian – Iranian couple and a French couple. It was a very pleasant afternoon and after the other guests left, I stayed several more ours chatting with Isa and Felipe; “lunch” ended up at about 8 pm. After that I went back to the house I was staying in Marrickville (the retirement house now turned into a flat) and when I got there, the Valentine’s party for singles was well underway. It was really crowded; it must’ve been about 50 or 60 people that showed up. There was a twister section, plenty of food and drink, etc. The party died at about 5 am and several people crashed in the house until next morning, including myself. After waking up and help clean the mess that was left in the house, I went to the city center, walked around for a bit and had lunch at an Italian restaurant near Circular Quay. Later, I grabbed my things again and went to Felipe Kovacic’s house to stay for a few days, while I look for something to stay permanently for a while (I’m still looking, but a few options have opened up and hopefully will get something by the end of the week). I’m looking to rent a room for my own (there’s a lot of options to rent shared-rooms for lower prices, but not really interested in that). I have an “interview” this evening, so, I’ll see how that goes. Plans for the time being are to do the scuba diving instructor course and take the sailing lessons during the weekends. That will take me about 3 months if I get a job in between. If I don’t, the whole process should take me about a month and a half. Then, I’m heading north to Queensland to find a job in scuba diving and/or on a yacht.

On Monday, I was looking at the CS website (http://www.couchsurfing.org) and in the “Sydney Group”, some people posted that they were bored and that they needed other people to meet for drinks or sightseeing in the city. About 5 of us got together in a place called “Scubar”, a backpacker’s bar with very low prices and loud music, which was pretty good. The people that got there were a girl from Australia (Martina) and one from Holland (Rune), a guy from Chile (Tomás), one from the U.S. (Eric), one from Egypt (Abram) and myself. We ended up having a really good time and after Scubar, we went to another pub until about 11 and then everyone went back home, but we decided to get together for lunch again the next day. On Tuesday 3 of us met in Circular Quay (Rune, Eric and I) and we met a German girl, Christiane (friend of Rune) near Hyde Park. Rune said she remembered a good Thai food place from the last time she was in Sydney, so we followed her through the city for about 20 minutes. We finally got the place (Snakebean was its name), but it was shut down, so we went to a place across the street which had a variety of Asian food (Wok On Inn). It ended up being pretty good and we had a good lunch there. After lunch we went walking to Central Station and there we met Tomás (the other Chilean guy). We headed back to Hyde Park and just layed there for an hour while waiting for the Australian Museum to open at 17:30. While we waited we had origami bird making lessons with Rune.

Turns out, they’re opening the museum every Tuesday for 10 weeks, from 17:30 until 21:30 – 22:00 to literally party at the museum (http://www.jurassiclounge.com/). They have live music, different activities like karaoke, silent disco, DJ’s, etc. and you wonder about the museum with a drink in your hand. This Tuesday was Valentine’s, so they had a variety of anti-Valentine related activities, such as “Screw love Valentine’s cards", speed “hate” dating, among other things. Most of us actually participated in this speed “hate” dating, which was sort of a parody of speed dating (more on this here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Speed_dating). I must say I had a good time. From the 15 or so girls I spoke with, there were at least 3 I would’ve considered calling, so it wasn’t that bad. We all had a good laugh anyway.

After this was over, we had a bite to eat and then went to a pub (can’t remember the name), but it was across the street from the pub called “3 Wise Monkeys”, located on 555 George St. (I had in this pub almost 10 years ago!). We had a few drinks there and then we went to the 3 Wise Monkeys for a few more drinks. We ended up listening to a pretty good band and dancing next to the stage. We left at about 2am and then it was too late to go back to Chatswood (no more trains or buses at that time), so I ended up sleeping in a hostel room with 27 beds for a few hours and took an early train back home. These three following days I really have to get back to finding a place to stay if I want to settle down for a while. There’s a few more activities going on this week, especially during the weekend (surfing competition, film festival, more CS meetings) which are distracting me from taking the time to search for places to stay and finding a part time job, but I can’t say I’m not enjoying myself…

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Photos

Retirement house
Austin Powers' toilet

Couchsurfers
Reunion of the french orphanage kids