Well, this past weekend began the arrival of Americans with Andrew and I traveling to Melbourne to meet up with Jess and her friend Erin for the weekend. Luckily because of this it means I don't have to write about this past weekend because she has done it all for me. Read these three posts from her blog to see what we've been up to:
The only real difference is that while Erin and Jess headed off on their wine tour, Andrew and I headed off to figure out where our rental car went to. We soon discovered that, sadly as it turns out, the car was not stolen but towed but the city. When we parked the night before it was dark and I didn't look closely at whether there was a sign being covered by the tree we parked underneath, all I saw was that the parking cost didn't start again until 10am on Monday, sleep in for us. What we missed was the sign at the top that said there was no parking from 6:30am-10am otherwise cars would be towed.
Once we realized that towing was the fate of our rental we knew we had to get it back and pay whatever fine came with it, this is why it turns out we were unlucky that it was not stolen. To simply get the car out of the impound lot we were charged $322. When we got into the car we saw that the police were nice enough to give us a $119 ticket before having the car towed for parking where we shouldn't. Since there really is nothing we can do in a city that isn't ours we've had to suck it up and agree we will never drive in Melbourne again.
Getting back to work has been a more of a hardship as I was thrown straight into Orientation Tuesday morning followed closely by Enrolment starting on Wednesday and running through to next Friday. This means that about 7 hours of my work days are spent outside of the office and I have to sneak in when I can to try and get some of my normal workload out of the way. Needless to say this weekend could not come soon enough.
Andrew went over to Damon's to play poker on Friday night which means Coops and I got the house to ourselves to relax and watch some trashy movies, although I got hooked into Iron Man on tv so that was pretty good.
Saturday I had to run up to campus as soon as I got up to get security to let me in to my office because we are running an airport meet and greet service for our new international students right now and the person picking up the students this weekend didn't realize he didn't have enough cab vouchers to give to the students. After that adventure I signed up for Medicare, the Australian medical system (in case you haven't heard the very exciting news, I got my official letter from the government the other day and I have been granted the first part of my residency. I am now a temporary permanent resident, which gives me everything a resident can have, it's just temporary for the next 2 years to make sure Andrew and I are actually in a committed relationship. )
After the excitement of the Medicare Office (oh the fun) Andrew and I headed into the city for some actual fun with the Multicultural Festival. We made an attempt at meeting up with a few people but in the end went it alone because everyone kept getting lost. The festival has gotten bigger since last year block off part of a main road and traveling across the street into one of the other main squares in the city. Just as last year we went around splitting dishes for a variety of places:
I'm not sure what everything was but we had spicy banana and polenta from Ghana, some delicious Macedonian meat on a stick, Russian meat dumplings and a bunch of other things we can't remember. And just like last year after two hours we were done with the crowds and high tailed it home where there was a lot more space and less people. It's always good fun though so I doubt we'll ever stop going, too much good food.
Jess and Erin will be with us Wednesday night and I am so excited to show them around. In preparation we did a bit of gardening, by 'we' I, of course, mean Andrew as I can't seem to keep anything alive. He has even managed to get our first peach. Next Monday there should be another good blog from both Jess and I so keep an eye out.
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| Andrew working in the veggie garden |
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| Our first peach |
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