Catching up with old frinends, Art, hashtags and bowling

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I am back in Sydney and have settled into a routine of getting drunk every night and spending my days working on my CV, reading design blogs, starting my own design blog http://dnoise.wordpress.com/ pushing a few pixels around, looking at job sites and generally getting prepared for applying for jobs when we return to the UK. Our travels are nearly over we have a week in Thailand to unwind before flying back to England on the 14th April. It's a little earlier than we planned but we've spent all our money, which will be of no great surprise to anyone who knows Lou or I.

Meet up with Emma, who is Matt's sister, her husband Jason and their dog Kyte. Emma cooked us a lovely meal while Jason kept my wine glass full all night. We had a great evening and it was really good to see them again.

We went to Bondi Beach market and looked at the artists stalls, clothes and jewellery before going for a bit of a swim in a bay just around the corner.

That evening I met up with my old house mate, and one of my best friends from university, Jen. Talking about the old times made me laugh my ass off, remember who I once was and how much of that person I still am. She told me some sad tales from her life and some sad news about a few people we once new which made me want to cry but mostly we just laughed about the crazy stuff we used to do and what great times we had. It was so good to see her again. It bought home to me how important to me friends are and deeply regret the ones that I have lost touch with through distance or travelling different paths though life. It made me very happy that Jen and I could just slot back into our friendship like it was only last week that we were at college together and not fifteen years ago. I love my life now but I would give anything to go back in time, just for a weekend to see all my old friends from back then, share a drink, a laugh and party like crazy freaks again. Bob Dylan said it best in his song 'Bob Dylan's Dream' , but it sounded a little more like this


Jen is a Bikram yoga teacher now and she invited me along to a class. Wow! Bikram Yoga is hard core. There were fifty four of us in the class of varying ability from beginners at the back to yoga teachers at the front. The men just wear shorts and the women wear shorts and tight tops. The room is heated to forty two degrees so I start sweating just lying on my mat. The class is an hour and a half long starting with a warm up and moving on through standing poses then balancing poses then onto floor poses and finishing up with some crazy rapid breathing. The poses are tough and are held for thirty seconds that seem like thirty minutes and I was left desperate for Jen to issue the instruction to 'Change' which puts you back in a neutral position and brings relief from pain. I don't think that I have ever sweated so much in my life and that includes when I play football, basket ball or take part in a heavy gym session. I felt like I was going to pass out on more than one occasion but stuck with it feeling pleased that I completed the class having made a good effort at each of the poses. I felt pretty exhausted after the class but this was replaced by a buzzing high that helped be bounce along the street to a bar with Jen for more catching up and talk of the future. She is coming to London in June and I can't wait to see her again. I was still buzzing when I put her in a taxi at eleven so I decided to walk back to Balmain across the very impressive Anzac Bridge with it's massive cables and dominating towers. It was raining a refreshing shower I had to tunes on my Ipod and I walked home tall, relaxed at ease and happy. It took me about an hour and a half and in an ironic twist I lost the thirty dollars that I had been saving for a taxi during the walk.

I visited a few exhibitions in Sydney my favourite of which was a retrospective of Yayoi Kusama called Mirrored Years. It included several mind blowing installations or immersive environments as they were referred to in the gallery guide. There was living room with furniture from the sixties that was lit with UV lights every surface dotted with coloured spots of many different colours. A room with five full length mirrors along each wall in which I walked in and shut the door and was surrounded by a thousand images of myself from every angle. There were strange little red and white amorphic shapes on the floor and reflections that bent off and up to infinity. A similar mirrored rooms was back with water on the floor and lit only by hanging fairy lights once again the reflections zoomed off to infinity, it felt like standing in the milky way looking out onto an alternative universe. Another huge room contained about eight huge black cloud like soft forms each one the size of a small car. The room was dark and a massive purple dotted abstract painting hung on the back wall. The atmosphere in the room was dark, heavy and meditative. I felt like I was in another world cathedral from a Sci-Fi B-Movie. There was a sculpture made of many mirror balls of many shapes and sizes that as I cast your eyes across from one to the next I almost caught my eyes moving leaving me with a very peculiar feeling. All in all it was a fantastic exhibition and I did about four laps, visiting each room three or four times. If your in Sydney go and see it. It is on until 8th June 2009 at the Museum of Contemporary Art.There is also an exhibition of new Australian Drawing that is worth a look.

I also visited the Archibold Prize Exhibition which had some of the best portrait paintings that I have seen in a long time and in the basement of the Art Gallery of New South Wales where it is being shown is a very creative exhibition of award winning high school students art work.

I met up with Mic who I used to work with in London. He and his mates were talking some strange language that contained a smattering of English but was mainly Auzzie slang heavily peppered with nerdy, tec talk. It was good fun and I was introduced to hashtags on twitter which I'm sure will come in handy one day.

We celebrated our last big night out with our kind hosts Jo and Brett with a visit to Luna park and a go on some of the rides there. Lou narrowly avoided being puked on as someone asked here to swap seats on the ride as they did not want to be at the edge of the cage. They received a generous dose of the contents of a young girls stomach which seemed mainly purple, god knows what she had consumed prior to the ride. In the evening we went ten pin bowling in Darling Harbour at a very stylish bowling alley. It was low lit in with red decor and neon bowling alleys. We payed a couple of games and I was well beaten in both. We moved on to pool and the went down the road to eat tappas. It was midnight when we arrived back at the bowling alley where we booked a kareoke room and proceeded to murder several of our favourite songs until two in the morning, great fun!

Oh and great news from back home, the Harriers beat their closest rivals Stevenage 4-2 taking Kidderminster once massive step closer to the Blue Square Premiere play offs and the possibility of once more playing league football. Common you reds!

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