Settling in Sydney

  Sydney, New South Wales, Australia
Friday, September 5, 2008

We finally hit Sydney and made it our home for the next few months depending on whether we could find somewhere to live and work. In Alice Springs I was again randomly selected for a swipe of my bag for drugs and explosives. Before they had even got through their speech of way I was chosen I had smiled and handed over my bag. I passed again.
 
Arrived at the airport in good time and got a train to central station which is quite confusing to find the correct exit to get out, the signs here are as bad as back home. Eventually found our way and arrived at hostel just outside the station. We were staying at a YHA and part of the hostel is actually made up of refurbished old style railway carriages and we got to stay in one which was quite cool. Certain annoyances such as chronic snorers and the train announcements we could hear from our room took away from it a little. Left aligned photo tag:

Railway Square Sydney

 
No more adventures of the backpacker for awhile as we set out for somewhere to live. Finding somewhere was a bit tricky as we didn't really know the right areas to live in for a start and secondly we knew it was going to be tricky to get a short term letting as most landlords prefer at least six months. After a few days of fruitless searching either because of this, price, location or in couple of cases the places themselves. We viewed one place which advertised in a few backpacker magazines, what the ad didn't say was that it was opposite a lap dancing bar. Also the room we looked had a hole in the ceiling above the shower which was stuffed with a cushion. We said we'd think about that one.
 
We finally found a little studio through an agency. Met a girl from Ireland in reception of the place, Clare who recommended the area and the place to us as she lived locally. We moved in the next day. Newtown is busy suburb of Sydney filled all sorts of unusual people. Met some characters there and it is a strange place where Goths, the gay community, students and the locals all mix in with each other. Had many a happy night in Kelly's our resident Irish bar for the area.
 
Next stop was to find a job which turned out to be not that easy. As with every city nowadays, the jobs seem to go through recruitment agencies and I registered with quite a few them with mixed results. Unfortunately working in banking, this isn't exactly the best year to get a job, in fact I couldn't have picked a worse one but hey that's life. Took about three weeks before I actually got any work and started getting desperate, I accepted the worst of the worst, a telesales job. I've done it before and hated it but needs must. What the job entailed was that people would ring me to enter a reader's digest competition and I would take their details and then I would try and convince them to buy a book or a subscription to the magazine. Now this is where I sold my soul, people that rang generally fell into the following groups, the old, the unemployed,   foreign people who didn't speak English well and in some cases people who didn't speak English at all and so therefore got their ten year old kid to ring up for them. Imagine trying to sell a Readers Digest subscription to a ten year girl. And what makes matters worse was that I was good at it, I sold something every three calls that were made.. Not my fault, honest.
 
Thankfully after two days I was offered a job with Westpac, a large Australian bank and I jumped at the chance. I was told it was going to be for two months which would give me the stability I was looking for. Unfortunately after a week and a half they let half of us go which was a bit frustrating because not for poor work but the fact that we had done too much work and finished too quickly. The job itself was suitable for a training or untrained monkey as you would bash various numbered sequences into a computer for eight hours a day. I won't bore you any further with the details.
 
Took another few weeks before I found another job for an insurance company again data entry but the good thing was that it would take me all the way until the end of my stay in Sydney.
 
Sydney itself is a bit of a mixed bag, the centre is skyscrapers and clean but just outside that things can be at times rundown and dirty. But with every bad aspect there's a good one and so it's a city of contradictions. One thing that is for sure though is the weather. I go to Alice Springs and its freezing, I come to Sydney and it rains, all the time. It rained solidly for the first week that we were and didn't really let up for awhile.

Sydney Opera House

 
 
One nice aspect of the city is its parks that run it. A little similar to Stephen's Green, Sydney has a small park that runs the length of the CBD called Hyde Park. Luckily for me was that it was right beside where I worked in the insurance firm so I got to  eat my lunch there when it didn't rain. Also the other good thing about parks if you're a backpacker is that they're free. With that in mind we visited the Botanic Gardens which are just north of the CBD near enough to the harbour. Walked through the gardens in the late afternoon which was nice as we got a beautiful view of the sun starting to set on the city skyscraper skyline. Also the bats in the trees were starting to wake up and I got some good photos of them scarily screeching at me as they awoke upside to see someone point a camera at them from below.

Botanic Gardens

Just on the outskirts of the gardens is a famous view of the harbour called Mrs Macquarie's Chair. To get there we had to walk past numerous weddings that were taking place in the gardens but unfortunately none of them offered us an invite to their champagne violinist playing receptions on the grass. Back to the famous chair, Mrs Macquarie was the wife of the governor of Sydney a few hundred years ago. She used to look on the stone slab and look out to the headland before the bridge or the opera house was constructed. In the 21st century however it gives a great view of the two landmarks side by side.

Botanic Gardens

Botanic Gardens

 One day in our flat/studio/apartment we finally got the surprise that Australia is famous for, our very first spider. I was sitting on the sofa in our bedroom cum sitting room when I heard a whimper from the bathroom. Marie Therese had just gone into to the toilet and had just opened the door to see a large Huntsman spider on the side of our medicine cabinet. I should say that our place was quiet small. The bathroom had space for a shower, somewhere to stand and a basin in front of you with a medicine cabinet above. Anyway with the whimper I came to investigate as I recognised it wasn't a good sound. From where I stood I couldn't see the spider as it was on the side of the cabinet that faced the door of the toilet. It took a few minutes to cajole Marie Therese out of the toilet as to do that she had to walk within a foot of the spider which was at head height. When she finally did so I went into the toilet to have a look and my God it was big! It was so big I wasn't sure what I could do with it, at home I used to catch spiders in a glass and put them outside but no glass was going to fit round this beast. Tried to use a lunch box but realised that I couldn't slip the lid underneath and didn't fancy getting that close to a spider that can probably jump. I will now say that I wasn't sure at first what spider it was indeed I'm still not a hundred percent sure. It sounds very relaxed but not wanting to tackle it without knowing if it could kill me, I did what everyone does with any question these days I left the bathroom and looked it up on Google. Google has become our quasi 21st century God to which we look with faith for the answers to all of life's answers. And before any religious orientated people mention this to me I'll point out the fault in the matter, Google has webpages written by mere mortals and therefore a whole load of rubbish is thrown in there amongst the good stuff which can be frustratingly hard to find. Anyway I digress, back to the matter in hand. I looked up a few sites of lovely, cutesy photos of spiders and decided it was most probably a Huntsman spider although it didn't look quite the same. I knew this as I had taken a few photos whilst in the toilet and one very shaky video (I have shaky hands okay, wasn't scared in the slightest..). The Huntsman spider is a little misnamed as it doesn't actually hunt men or women for the matter, most Aussies actually like them around the home (crazy people) because they eat and catch flies and all sorts of other creepy crawlies. An Aussie will also say they're completely harmless which isn't strictly true. The Huntsman rarely bite humans and more likely to run away (they are noted for their speed) than to attack. Also importantly their bite doesn't kill which is why the Aussies call them harmless what they don't say however is that their bite can make you vomit or in worse case scenarios send you to hospital. I wouldn't call that harmless would you?
 
Armed with this information I tried to wait the spider out in a tense standoff where I hoped it would simply just runaway and I wouldn't have to harm it as I couldn't think of a way to transport it outside.

The Huntsman

Marie Therese informed me that if it moved towards the bedroom that she would be moving out ASAP. I waited for a couple of hours checking on it intermittingly whilst Marie Therese starting getting dinner and a very strange thing happened. She started cooking mince and I guess that woke the spider up as the next time I checked on it was up on its legs and its pincers were pulsing. This is where I shot the shaky video and you can actually see the pincers moving.

The Huntsman

To be honest I thought if it liked the mince there was only one way out of it as nothing gets between me and me and my food. Tried a few aborted half-hearted attempts with the lunchbox or whacking the side of the medicine cabinet but to no affect. Finally I had to resort to the large can or Raid which is a strong bug spray. I hoped that if I did have to kill that I would make it as quiet and painless as possible. I ruled out whacking it with a thick magazine as to do that I would have to stand in front of it at head height and what if I missed?   Afterwards I came to a conclusion either Raid doesn't really work or this was one hell of a big spider. I emptied three quarters of a can on him and he was still going and fast as well! The battle started off on the side of the cabinet where upon he immediately dropped down onto the basin and quickly onto the floor. I then chased him into the shower cubicle beside us before out again where he made a run for the bedroom thankfully by this stage he was slowing down but still alive. Not wanting to make him suffer anymore I got a big magazine and with one foul heavy swoop, it was over. Felt guilty afterwards but I knew Marie Therese wasn't joking by saying she would move out and I could vaguely hear more whimpers from her and she cowered on the bed as we did battle. I wonder if there's anything that I can find on Google for redemption?