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Published: August 13th 2009
Ants
There are a lot of ants in Australia. A lot.By the week of June 1st, we’d been living in Karama for two weeks already. We’d gotten used to the bus schedule, our new jobs, and our new home. Although, one thing hadn’t been quite resolved yet… laundry. We didn’t have a washing machine in the house, and well, Hillary and I weren’t quite that adept at washing by hand. We gave it the ol’ college try, but for a full week’s worth of clothes, it wasn’t quite going to work out. So we had to find the closest laundromat. Turns out, there aren’t too many around. Every hostel we had previously stayed at had their own, so laundry never weighed too heavily on our minds. Eventually, we found one in Nightcliff (one of the bigger neighbourhoods around Darwin). In fact, it was right around the corner from one of the first apartments we looked at renting. Lol We did this Tuesday night, which meant no movie this week. Considering we had seen Angels & Demons the week before and Star Trek (a second time) that Saturday past, we could survive.
Wednesday June 3rd was a big day for Hillary and I in terms of getting to know Australian culture.
Ants - 2
And these guys are really big too! There's even one who's making sure the rest stay in line. lol Now, if Canadians like hockey, what would you say the equivalent for Australians would be? Rugby! Well, Wednesday was the first game in the State of Origin series. First, you should know that Australia houses three different types of rugby. One is Australian Rules Football, another is Rugby Union, and the last is Rugby League. The difference? Well, Aussie Rules is a lot different from the other two, but personally I’m not completely sure what the difference is between League and Union. Anyways, State of Origin is three games made up of players from different teams in League, separated into a New South Wales team and a Queensland team. Supposedly it’s supposed to represent the origin of Australia, and how Queensland and New South Wales were the first two states created, so they developed a little rivalry. It’s a big thing here. People were even bringing flags into the office. We watched the game from one of the local pubs with John and Gill. The game was exciting, and in the end Queensland won! The next game though wouldn’t be for another few weeks though.
Saturday morning I dropped by Gill’s to help him out with his pool. He
Glenti
Hillary at the Greek Festival. had drained it as far as he could, but the last foot couldn’t be sucked up by his pump. He has a bad back when it comes to lifting, so he asked me to pop over and help scoop it out. It didn’t take too long, but was I sore after that! It was like trying to bail water out of a sinking ship! Afterwards, Hillary and I went downtown to use some free internet at the Reference Library. We may have spent the afternoon on the computer, but that evening we checked out the local Greek Festival, called Glenti! It was a nice night out. We watched Greek dancing, and ate some great Greek dessert, much to Hillary’s excitement. lol
The other nice thing about that weekend was that it was a long weekend, the Queen’s Birthday! Hillary and I checked out the Darwin Sky City casino, since we heard it had a good buffet. Well, it was pretty good. We stuffed ourselves, and then played some roulette. But the real story is what happened on the way home! I mentioned this on my Facebook page, where it garnered a bit of attention, so now I’ll explain the
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This was the sheltered stage. whole thing. So Hillary and I get on the bus to head home, and it’s pretty packed. She sits down in the middle of the bus, and there doesn’t really seem to be anymore seats, so I stand next to her. Well, a guy starts yelling from the back of the bus.
“Hey! There’s a seat here! Hey! Somebody smack that guy in the back of the head!”
Eventually I turn around and see this guy pointing at a seat right in front of his (he was sitting in the back row of the bus). He looked sketchy, but I figured it would get him to be quiet. So I sat down. Well, doesn’t he start (pardon my language) bitching and complaining about how I was standing in the aisle, getting in front of everyone’s way and that I was showing off about how tough I was, being able to stand during the bus ride. I turned to him and said that I didn’t mean to do that, and apologized. I turned away only to hear him nudging the complete strangers beside him, saying how the young show no respect to their elders these days. I did my best to
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Mmmm... Greek food. ignore him, but it kept going. I couldn’t tell if he was intoxicated, mentally unstable, or quite frankly just an angry person, but it was starting to look like he wasn’t going to let this go.
It continued to escalate for the next five to ten minutes. He started threatening me, and demanding I get off the bus with him to apologize properly. Yeah right, like I was going to get off the bus with this idiot. Even the guy beside him at this point was getting tired of this, and started nudging him to quiet down. Eventually once he started into the whole “your parents should be ashamed of you” and pretending to punch me like he’d do it off the bus, there wasn’t much of a choice left. All I could do was sigh, stand up and make my way through the waves of people to the front of the bus. I told the bus driver that I was getting harassed, and he said that it was already being handled. To my surprise, transit security was already escorting him off the bus. Personally, I didn’t know anyone had really noticed anything. I walked by Hillary, telling her
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Some godo dancing between male and female partners. that she wouldn’t believe what just happened, and her reply was that she and the rest of the bus heard the whole thing! As we drove away, security was wrestling him to the ground on the sidewalk. It was nice to finally have that over with. I’m very glad that security patrols the bus routes regularly, but then I have to admit that it’s sad that it’s needed. Anyways, never a dull moment!
By the way, this will be our first entry where we may actually be able to upload videos! If it does work (and depending on it's success), we might go back and upload all the videos we wanted to put on the Blog but never had the means to do it. They'll be attached to the appropriate blog entries, but we'll post a new entry detailing which entries now have videos and what the videos are about! Here's keeping our fingers crossed!
Kevin
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