Tag Archives: landlord

surrounded by boxes

My first week back at school is done. I still have to have my first Management class on Monday night, and a bunch of meetings that’ll determine how my term’ll go, but it’s been pretty okay.

I got my rental bond refund from the Sydney apartment today so that was nice. There’d been a lot of back and forth with our landlord’s rental agent that had been giving me worries. I know that his parasitic trying to worm an extra hundred dollars out of me while telling me he’d my friend is just his job, but man, does that kind of stuff get me angry. I needed him to sign a form so I could get the bond money back, but he said he couldn’t do it so he’d get the landlord to do it that afternoon and fax it in. A week later I had to call him again to find out why it hadn’t been done and then there were stories of papers getting lost and blah blah blah. I really didn’t want to get mad about the money, but it’s a big enough sum to cover two months of my Vancouver rent.

I hate getting mad about things like that. I mean, I knew I was in the right, and the agent wasn’t doing his job well (or was trying to pull something). But just being right doesn’t mean much at all. I used to be better at dealing with that kind of thing. I think. The condo broke me, made me so unhappy and paranoid when it comes to those kinds of matters. I can still feel it here, like something’s going to happen and I’m going to have to move all my stuff out of this apartment (which I quite like).

All of that to explain why my room still looks like I’m living out of a suitcase. It’s hard to know how much unpacking and settling to do here. I might be staying a long time, but maybe I won’t. In Sydney I lived out of two carryon bags for eight months (the amount of time I have left in this degree), so all the crap strewn about already seems wasteful, and that’s with only one bookcase taken out of storage. But the more you settle in the crappier the moving on later is.

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nigh, the way only ends can be

I’ve realized that our time in Oz is coming to an end. It was the placard-toting vigilantes that finally clued me in.

Right now the plan is that Holly goes travelling in Australia by herself for a while when she quits her job, and then heads over to New Zealand to visit Catherine, a friend we know from China. Because of my incessant and pitiful whining on the subject she’s shifted things around so I can come to NZ the day I finish work and go hiking with them on the Milford Track. I’ll only get a week in Middle Earth (and on the South Island so no trips to Hobbiton) but that’s way better than being down here and not going to visit the Canada of the south Pacific (a phrase which garners curiously few Google hits, and one of them referred to Australia).

One of the great pities of living here has been the lack of oven in our apartment. If you live with a baker, be very sure your dwelling has one. But last week, in order to make us not want to leave (or complain about the extra rooms and people being added to the place), our landlord finally gave us a small convection oven. This is what life with a baker should be. Last night we made pizza, real pizza without having to use the “covered frying pan” technique. Holly’s made biscuits and muffins and buns. She’s possibly baking cookies right now.

It’s good and inspiring, this whole “eating delicious food” thing (our whole time living together, really). It’d be difficult to go back to Vancouver and not cook better for myself, even without the prod of cooking for someone else. I’ve been thinking about that a bit because yeah, with less than a month left before I’m unemployed, my orientation is shifting back towards Vancouver. That’s how I roll, with great inertia. Things to prepare for even if you don’t know what they’ll look like. Amat Victoria Curam. I don’t know who that’d be a victory over.

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coming to terms with the lack of internet

Saturday morning I went out to have a cultural day. A free cultural day. Up at the Sydney Opera House (perhaps you’ve heard of it?) there was an indigenous film festival going on with free screenings. The movie I saw was called Here I Am, and’ll be touring Oz over the next while.

The movie was shown in the Playhouse part of the theatre, so not the gigantic part. Actually, I don’t know if there is a gigantic part. All the different shells are separated for than I’d always assumed. It’s not just one big shell that’d have you looking up at the concave version of the icon from the inside.

After the movie I went for a walk through the botanical gardens to find the Art Gallery of NSW. I knew it was in that vicinity but it’s much deeper behind the park than I’d assumed the last time I went looking for it. On Saturday I found it and wandered around. It’s a free gallery which is appreciated (so I could go now without worrying about wasting it before Holly arrives).

The collection was kind of awesome. They’ve got European masters (I looked at one Monet and recognized very few other artist names in that area since I don’t really know that much about Art) and aboriginal stuff and 20th century Australian art. One painting, “The Telephone Box” by John Brack, was from 1954 but could have been 21st century street art; I checked the date a couple of times.

There was also an exhibit by this Japanese photographer who takes pictures of pictures projected onto posing nigh-naked people painted white. It was pretty neat.

But the coolest exhibit was Unguided Tours, which was a bunch of cool video things. Part of one piece used Google Maps to mark out the discarded condoms in a neighbourhood. Another artist created these awesome video pieces out of these gigantic mounds of junk. One basically made a video of outside a jet window flying above a cloudless ocean. But what made it cool is how the video is constructed out of broken chairs and hairbrushes and a vacuum cleaner hose and an unshaded desk-lamp. Very very neat.

It almost made up for still having no internet at the apartment. Our landlord is apologizing and says there was a mixup last Thursday about the address so they can’t get here till this week.

So far the living with a shared kitchen isn’t going too badly. There’s not an Australian in the building though. We’ve got three Chileans, a Colombian, a New Zealander, and Holly and I will represent North America. When I type it out like that it seems like a lot of people. But it doesn’t feel that full.

I got a library card the other day. And went to the little Chinese grocery store where they carry almost all my favourite Chinese brands of juice and snacks (no Shaolin cookies though). And I’m working on a story to submit for the second Machine of Death anthology. And writing letters. Things aren’t too bad.

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