One Month Anniversary Down Under!

I’ve officially been in Australia for a month now! My one-month anniversary was August 2^nd, which means I have 11 months left to squeeze everything in. The first month went by pretty fast…

I’ve officially completed my first full week of work. I survived the training week. Monday and Tuesday I just listened in on calls, Wednesday I took a few (with someone else listening in on mute of course), and then Thursday and Friday afternoon I did a bunch.  I still had to ask a lot of questions though, as is natural when starting out a new job, so I’m fairly certain that when my first shift actually starts – Thursday –I’ll end up asking questions on almost every single call. It’ll definitely be a very sharp learning curve. I’m hoping to be comfortable with everything by the end of my first “week,” which as I mentioned starts on Thursday and ends on Monday. Some thoughts on the job front:

Coke from the vending machine is $1.40. Not too shabby at all by Australian standards, but it certainly does not hold a candle to the FREE cokes provided at Bernstein. Peter Kraus once wrote a phenomenally thought-provoking piece that was posted on the Loop (this is all Bernstein speak, for those of you who are lost. The Loop is AB’s intranet homepage) about how during the financial crisis, cutting back on the free cokes provided in the pantry was simply NOT an option. The cokes, he said, were crucial for staff morale. It was one of the most brilliant short essays I’d ever read. I should email Peter and ask him to send his thoughts to whoever the CEO of HSBC is. The joint could use more free beverages.

Everyone does seem genuinely friendly and helpful there, which is great. It seems like a nice work environment. One of the girls I trained with said that she started out as a 6-week contractor, and she extended the job to 6 months. I’d like to extend mine a bit as well (if I can stomach the job that is!), so that was good to hear.

They DO have free tea though. I went to the pantry with one of the other new girls to get tea sometime in the middle of the week, Wednesday maybe. It wasn’t as much fun as tea at Bernstein, but it was nice to be able to go. 

Saturdays and Sundays are casual! Not as in business casual – I mean casual casual. Like I can (and will) show up in jeans and sneakers and sit at my desk with my sweatshirt and hood on all day. Because if I hide under my hood then the people calling on the phone can’t find me…

I’m making the world’s most anal resource and training guide for myself. It’s filled with plastic sleeves and is color-coded and the whole works. I even made tabs from an empty granola bar box and some clear packing tape to further organize. I want to get the hang of this stuff as quickly as possible. For a 9-week job, you can’t putz around too much before you have to start being productive!

Friday evening was my first Australian happy hour. It was okay I guess, The drinks weren’t too steep and I did get some good tax advice from a couple of Irish kids that have been here longer than I have.  It was good to have a chance to socialize and whatnot, I certainly could stand to make another friend or two! Happy hour sort of wound down just early enough so that I was able to run over to the gym after and get in some more flipping time.

Speaking of gym, I found another one! I tried one last place and I like this one as well, so now I have two options. One has classes Monday and Thursday, the other Tuesday and Friday. How perfect is that? My work schedule is such that I can’t go a lot, but I should be able to squeeze it in twice a week should I so desire.

Have I bored you yet? Now, for the more interesting stuff:

Training was Monday through Friday, and then my real week starts up again on Thursday, so I left you last entry wondering what I would do with my 5-day weekend. I think I was quite successful at keeping myself occupied.

Saturday – Sydney International Boat Show! I had seen an advertisement for it, and figured for $20 it might be interesting. Plus it was coincidentally being held on my last free Saturday & Sunday for a while. I like boats, and I cannot recall if I’ve ever been to a boat show before. A boat show in one of the world’s great harbor cities seemed like a good idea to me, plus I am always on the lookout for the future potential R.M.S. Dilbert II.  And here he is by the way:

http://www.chaparralboats.com/2011/chaparral/Chaparral-Boat.php?boat_id=13&page=home

He’s slightly pricier than my current R.M.S. Dilbert (who cost me about $125), so I’m not quite in a position to put down a deposit yet. But isn’t he pretty? I think Dilbert the First would love his new big brother very much.

But seriously, the boat show was awesome. SO many boats and boat and water related products, everything you could imagine. I was about 1/3 of the way through the exhibition hall, when I made a beeline for the marina section of the exhibition. It suddenly occurred to me that some of the boats were only in the marina and not in the exhibition hall because some of them are simply too BIG for the hall. And I was right. The marina was filled with big, beautiful, sexy yachts:

There were some giant sailboats and catamarans as well, but mostly a lot of yachts. I like yachts. I think I want one of them too now. Some of them weren’t tour-able, it was “invitation only” boarding, but quite a few of the snazzy ones allowed average joes on, just as long as you took off your shoes, left your bags behind and left your contact information as well, for some of them. So I spent a few hours touring multi-million dollar yachts.

Saturday night I found out from Tom (the one who lives here with his girlfriend) that I have unknowingly already dodged not one, but TWO roommate bullets. Apparently a girl had a deposit put down on the room as part of some sort of internship with paid accommodation, but then pulled out of the internship. And then apparently this happened again, with a different girl. Now I don’t know how accurate that story is, but Lady Luck must be smiling down upon me. But will I dodge a third roommate bullet? I don’t know man, that doesn’t seem likely.

Sunday – I went to the Sydney Aquarium! It was okay, kind of smaller than I expected. I met Cheryl at 10 and we were done by 12:30.  Saw some dugongs and reef sharks though, which were cool.

Monday – time to get OUT of Sydney! I figured that I should take advantage of my time off, since I won’t have more that 2 days off until after the HSBC gig is over. So I did what everyone in Sydney (or “Sydneysiders” as they are called) does when they are looking for a quick “weekend” getaway – I went to the Blue Mountains.

The Blue Mountains are blue from the gases that the trillions of eucalyptus trees give off. It produces a blue haze over the hills and valleys. The stuff is actually super flammable though, and a small brush fire can turn into a giant fire ball quite easily. I bought myself a day tour package, and then extended my stay by reserving 2 nights at the Blue Mountains YHA (hostel) in Katoomba, which is one of the small towns in the region. It’s quite pretty, it sits right on top of a cliff.

Our guide showed up at 7:30, which was about 10 minutes late. His name was Smokey. I don’t know if that is his real name, but that’s what was stitched onto his shirt as well, and I honestly wouldn’t be surprised if his birth certificate actually did say Smokey on it. The guy looked like he has just stepped out of the outback. Super “Australian” looking, but not in that I’m-a-tour-guide-so-I-dress-up-like-Crocodile-Dundee way. He genuinely looked like he might wrestle saltwater crocodiles on the weekends. He had that leather cowboy hat and a walking stick and a fossilized shark tooth necklace and was super friendly and said hi to everyone everywhere. He was quite a lot of fun. Definitely the first real “Aussie” person I’ve seen. Everyone in Sydney is either a backpacker, an immigrant freshly from elsewhere or the corporate office type. But the iconic looking Crocodile Dundee type IS out there!

The tour group was fairly small, which was great. Mostly young travelers, and one older couple from Rhode Island. Our first stop was at the tip of the Blue Mountains, to try and spot some wild kangaroos. They weren’t too tough to find, we quickly spotted a mommy and fairly giant joey. They were quite cute, and we were able to get fairly close too. Smokey also found a giant funky looking spider to show us. He said this particular one wasn’t poisonous, since one bit him in the past and, well, he’s still alive.

Pit stop in a small town was next. The brochure referred to the 30 minute stop in Glenbrook as an opportunity for “morning tea,” but really, it was just a bathroom break.

We then headed off to our first bushwalk! Doesn’t that sound a whole lot sexier than saying “hiking”? I like that word, bushwalk. It sounds so much more adventurous. Anyway, we walked for a couple of hours I’d say, and the walk was really quite amazing. AND, may I NOW present you with Dara’s first encounter with one of Australia’s top 10 deadliest animals:

See that hole? In that hole, lives a fellow by the name of Mr. Funnel Web Spider. He sleeps during the day, and that’s his house. However, if you piss him off (or walk in the woods at night when he’s awake…) and he bites you, without seeking immediate medical attention, you are dead in 45 minutes. Yup, that little fellow is right up there with the giant saltwater crocs and the my beloved great white shark in terms of danger level. It’s best to me nice to Mr. Funnel Web, and not to poke his house with sticks. There are also poisonous snakes in the Mountains, but since it’s winter they weren’t too much of a concern.

Smokey was a great guide, he gave us lots of interesting information on the plant and animal life in the area, and we also learned a great deal about Aboriginal culture. We hiked down to the bottom of a waterfall too. Here’s the cliff that we descended to get there:

I thought Smokey was joking when he said we had to walk back UP as well, but up we went. We stopped about halfway up, and he actually took everyone’s pulse to make sure no one was on the brink of dying. It was a hell of a climb.

We had a nice picnic lunch, where I was quite the little piggy. One giant ham and cheese sandwich, 2 granola bars and 3 servings of pasta salad. Like I said, that was one hell of a climb.

The last stop of the day was to view the famous three sisters rock formation, and to climb down the “Giant Staircase,” which is 900+ steps down to the valley floor.

Thankfully, this time we didn’t have to climb back up. We instead took a ride back up to the top on the world’s steepest railway, which goes back up the cliff at a whopping 52 degree angle.

It was a GREAT ride!

A couple of other girls from the tour were staying overnight in Katoomba as well, so we went out to dinner in town after the tour bus dropped us off. The Blue Mountains YHA is actually a really cute hostel. It’s probably been my favorite hostel I’ve ever stayed at. Very home-y feeling.

The next day I went to the Jenolan Caves, which are about a hour and a half drive from Katoomba. The ride to the caves was interesting. Lots of cliffside twists and turns, where if you go off the edge you plummet to your death.

Now I‘ve been on cave tours in the past, once in Budapest and once out in Arizona. They were both really fun and interesting, but neither held a candle to THIS cave tour:

Yes, that is me in the middle of a rock. I went on an introduction to adventure caving tour, where they stick you in overalls and give you a hard hat with a light on it. To get to the cave entrance, we had to abseil down to the bottom:

Some of the holes we had to get through were REALLY tight. Sometimes we had to go feet first. Sometimes head first. Some maneuvers involved sliding, and one involved crawling through an s-bend tunnel on our sides. It was a LOT of fun. The Jenolan caves have plenty of the boring-er tours where you stay on paved cement behind guard rails, but who wants to do that when you can crawl through holes instead? AND, I even found $4 in the cave!

My last day up in the mountains I went on a solo bushwalk. The reception lady at the hostel gave me a map and a recommendation, and off I went. They also have a sign up sheet where you’re supposed to write your name and destination, so that if you never come back to cross yourself off the list then they know to go out looking for you. She told me that the walk was about 3 hours round trip, but I took my time and enjoyed the scenery, plus I did meander a bit to hike down to the bottom of a waterfall. The walk was really awesome, to describe it somewhat crudely. It was like being in the rainforest. And it was the perfect amount of woods-iness  for my first solo bushwalk. Rural enough that you feel like you’re in the middle of nowhere, but I generally passed another hiker every 10-20 minutes. Once I even passed a group of old Japanese tourists wandering about. So it wasn’t too scary.

So that’s been the past 10 days or so! I’ve been VERY busy, and now it’s back to work, so more business to come. I barely even found the time to squeeze in the blog update!

Some random thoughts:

Australians AND British people call French fries “chips.” However, potato chips are also, “chips.” Really guys, just call them fries. It’s so much easier.

I came home to ol’ Sydney and I’m still ALONE in my room! Phenomenal!

For my first night in the Blue Mountains hostel, I was lucky enough to be in a stuffy room with a girl who hacked and wheezed and snored and snorted all night long. Shockingly, about 36 hours later I started to feel the symptoms of an oncoming cold. When I got home, I knocked back some Vitamin C pills, and did the same the next morning. Cold=Vanished. This “vitamin C” stuff is like MAGIC. For the second time in a month I’ve gotten the start of a cold, only to have the vitamin C just completely annihilate it. Did everyone else out there know about these magical pills??? Am I the only one who didn’t know???

I’ve finally figures out how to do a quick conversion in my head from kilometers to miles, so that’s exciting for me. Celsius I’m still a bit lost on. I should be better at it, they used it in France too. In fact, everyone uses it. Why are we the only country who still uses the damn English system? Even the ENGLISH use the metric system. Don’t get me wrong, I love my miles and feet and pounds. I understand them. They make me happy. But the rest of the world doesn’t use them, and I never know when I should wear a jacket. I can’t wrap my little American brain around 40 degrees being broiling hot. It just seems odd.

I’ve already had my desk temporarily moved at work. It’s just for the weekend, but I’m not liking the precedent. At Bernstein they at least waited 3 weeks before they made me move. I’ve only been at HSBC for 7 days. I went on to move desks 6 times at Bernstein. HSBC better not start shuffling me around too, I don’t enjoy the life of a corporate nomad.

Apparently when you work past 8 pm, HSBC pays for your cab fare home. Three cheers for THAT!

Wish me luck for my first week at work flying solo! I might not have all the answers, but I KNOW that I MUST be more prepared than the other 4 new kids. I mean, I have a binder. With plastic sleeves. And tabs. Homemade tabs. Beat that.