So it's about that time again at work where I don't have anything to do. Oh wait, that's all the time…
Well it's about time I updated my blog with what I've been doing. I know there are some fans of my blog out there dying to read about what I've been up to.
So the work week was the work week: me mindlessly trying to get through the day without looking too relaxed. It's quite hard to switch screens with the machine they've given me. There isn't enough processing power so sometimes the window of facebook lingers on the screen a little longer than I'd have preferred when someone is walking by. It's also funny to see that almost everyone else takes the time at work to upload their pictures.
But moving off the subject which I feel I've beaten to death and onto my weekend! So the Australian Open is in Town. There are banners and advertisements scattered across the city. And since I' m already across the world, why not go? So I bought a ticket that I had a classmate print out at his office. It was around $33 total which I guess isn't too bad because it is a grand slam event and you can pretty much stay there for the whole day. I woke up pretty late on Saturday due to the previous evening's festivities which I will go into detail later. I quickly ate some of my leftovers for breakfast and headed out to the open. I arrived there and got lost in the crowds trying to find where everyone else already was. Then I waited in line for about 30 minutes before I got into the courts and watched the 2nd half of Cirstea vs Errani. Of course while at the Open I took some pictures to prove that I was actually there because that's what this super expensive IQP is all about, right? Fly across the world just to take some pictures and say you were there and have done things! Who knows, something in the next few weeks might make me fall in love with Australia and move here. Apparently there are at least three WPI alumni who have moved here after their IQPs.
But moving right along. After the women's singles game there was Ferrer vs Chela. I don't know any of the names I'm typing and frankly, I'm surprised I even remember them at this point. But Ferrer is ranked 5 and Chela is ranked 27 so Ferrer pretty much dominated the match. It took him a while to get into the groove and he doubled faulted the entire first game, but after a few games he started owning the court. Oh and Errani won the previous game. So after Ferrer beat Chela I'd had about 4-5 hours of tennis, which is a large quantity for someone who doesn't really follow tennis and really just went to say he'd been there. So I left and just chilled the evening away, which is what happens a lot. Watch some TV, watch some anime, play some games, the usual.
Now Sunday I actually made it to church. Relatively large church with a cool name, Cross Culture. Think about that for a bit. There's the whole diversity part of it as the church is pretty diverse, lots of Asians, got some Caucasians too, and Indians, and it's in general pretty diverse, but mostly Asian. But then the name has another connotation, the culture of the Cross, what it means to be a Christian, to carry your cross daily. And there are way too many commas in that sentence because I like to use commas instead of periods because Word puts that ugly green underline in if you use periods instead of commas. Enough about the name of the church. So the service was pretty generic, albeit long. And I slightly disagree with the order of their actual service, but that's a completely unrelated topic and perhaps it's not my place to even be criticizing that aspect. I met some people there and pretty much spent my entire afternoon with them. It was quite interesting.
I didn't exactly feel the most welcome at the church except for this one oldish guy who pretty much showed me his little cultural snippet of Melbourne. His name is Nigel and he immigrated to Australia 25 years ago, but still has an extremely heavy Lebanese accent. Along with us were Jim and Neal, two young men of Asian descent. I don't remember which name goes with which person… but I can just arbitrarily assign them and it'll be okay. So Jim moved here 13 years ago from China and now works in a small law firm. His English is good, but he also still has a pretty heavy Asian accent. Neal finished his contract for work in Taiwan and decided to take a year off and work somewhere that wasn't Taiwan so he made his way to Australia and he's now on his 5th month here. Neal barely understands English and because of that keeps quiet most of the time. I'm sure the three of us could have easily carried on a conversation in Mandarin, but that would've been quite rude in the presence of Nigel who was pretty much the guy who brought us all together.
So I met Nigel because he happened to sit next to me during the service. Whether or not he chose to sit next to me because he noticed that I was new I have no idea, but I have the suspicion that he didn't know I was knew because when he asked for my name he said, "What was your name again?" implying that he thought we had met at a previous engagement and he had forgotten my name. It must be because all Asians look the same so he was confused. After he found out I was new, he half-followed me around after the service and invited me out to lunch at a Lebanese bakery. So we ate falafel and Lebanese pizza. It was really good and tasted and felt really authentic, and it must have been because this man has been living in Melbourne for half his life, he damn well must've found the best Lebanese bakery in town. That and it was pretty popular. Then after dinner he brought us to get some sweets: baklava. And oh my goodness was that baklava amazing cuz I mean, half his life. The four of us ended eating half a kilo of Baklava and the layers of pastry were so thin and crispy and the filling was sweet and the overall feel was just freaking delicious. I wish I had brought my camera with me to take pictures of the falafel and the baklava, but alas, I'm a camera noob so I didn't even think to bring my camera with me when I left the apartment.
And that was pretty much my Sunday. I had planned to go to the beach with some of my classmate as it was pretty hot, but I'm glad I spent some time with the local people here. I want to spend more time with locals and meet more of them. I mean, we're on the other side of the planet. I go to school with my classmates. Sure I don't really talk to them much at school, but I'm sure it'll happen more often now that we have time together here, well at least for some of them. We're in Melbourne, I want to meet new people, have them share Melbourne's secrets with me. There's some bars and places I found via r/Melbourne that I'm gonna try and bring some classmates with me to. I wouldn't mind going alone, but there's still that barrier of being a foreigner. Go to a reddit meet up on Australia Day and perhaps go to the bars they frequent. Speaking of which, I found this awesome bar here that I'm definitely going to visit and take pictures of before I leave. It's called the Mana Bar and it's as nerdy as it sounds. It's a gaming bar and they have TVs and consoles scattered around the bar and have the nerdiest cocktails you can imagine. There's the Princess Peach, Health Potion, and the Mana Potion to name a few. Biggest nerdgasm ever.
And I guess since we're on the topic of alcohol, I can go into the details of Friday night. What a smooth transition that was just ruined by this sentence. Well Friday night we pre-game because alcohol is SUPER expensive here. The cheapest thing you can buy here is a $2.50 bottle of wine. And that's pretty decent. I mean it's probably really crappy wine, but I don't know wine too well and it doesn't taste too bad. I know the red variant is pretty gross, but the white version isn't too bad. I even bought a $12 bottle of Pinot Grigio just to taste and to my untrained taste buds the $2.50 white tastes better initially. The $12 tastes like vinegar when you first drink it, and it does for the entire first cup which is absolutely horrid, but the next day I decided to try it again it tasted a hell of a lot better and was actually quite enjoyable. But then I took a couple days off from the "expensive" stuff and had another glass with dinner yesterday and the same vinegar flavor of the wine came back and it's just so unpleasant. I don't think I'll understand wine while I'm here, maybe later in life, unless someone can explain it to me, or I might actually just try and look it up later because there's still a good deal of time left in the workday.
Now where was I? So we were pre-gaming and we played a little bit of slap cup, then we started to get too loud and we were on the same floor as our advisor, so we decided to move the party upstairs away from the professor. When we got upstairs we started playing with a deck of cards. Various drinking games that I had never played before because I don't drink or party at school. Well after the pre-gaming was over I had consumed almost a full bottle of cheap wine and I don't know how wise it is of me to be posting this information on the internet for the world to see. It'll be the dark side of the Sun I guess. But yes, almost a full bottle of wine + 120 lbs of small Asian don't mix the greatest. But I'm very glad that I don't have Asian-flush nor do I ever plan on vomiting due to drinking stupidly. Even when drunk I'm surprised at how much control you have over yourself. Makes you wonder about all those people who use drunkenness as an excuse. Then again I've never been ridiculously drunk because I don't ever want to reach that point.
Pre-gaming done, we went to Eurotrash. It was a really small club and the music was not bad. The crowd wasn't the greatest though; a lot of dudes and the chicks there weren't too attractive. Man I sound like a douche when I'm writing about partying and clubbing. But after awhile we decided to leave and go back to the Lion, the second club we went to last weekend. It's a pretty decent club/bar and it's got no entry fee and is a block away from our apartments. At the Lion is where things went down. I got threatened by a small Vietnamese dude. He threatened "to smack [me], and [I didn't] want that to happen bro. I'll do it." So what had happened was that in a club it gets pretty crowded and you get pushed around a little bit and of course the natural reaction is to push back. And apparently this guy didn't like it. I didn't turn around or even acknowledge his existence but I could tell that the voice was coming from the down direction so I could only assume that he was even shorter than me. It's kind of funny thinking back on it and I'm sure if anything did end up happening, my WPI crew ( haha that's funny because there's someone who rows here…) would've had my back, but fortunately, or perhaps unfortunately, it didn't end up that way.
Speaking of the rower here, he got a free drink from a gay guy. He beat me to my own game. There are details there of course, but you can ask me because I'm at 2100+ words already.
Tl;dr: Work->clubbing->Australian Open->church
P-P-PEACE
1 comment:
zzz.
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