Tag Archives: turkey

lazy sunday

Today I woke up to the snores of an Irishman. From across the room in the hostel, but still. Very loud. The Americans who woke up to the noise were vocal about their displeasure. I merely lay there waiting and figuring out how to spend my day.

See this is the thing about being in a country that isn’t cheap when you have no real money, you can’t just head off into the void and do whatever, confident in your ability to make it out financially unscathed. Relatively I mean. If you go ahead and crash a scooter even in a country where they’re as cheap as Armenians well yes you do have to pay a bit even then. You need to plan out your day so it’ll work.

Having not a tonne of money in Sydney means I’m spending a lot of time in parks and libraries. It seems a waste to just hang out here at the hostel reading, but too expensive to justify going to have afternoon beers by myself. It’s nice out, 20 degrees during the day, so it’s no great hardship to go sit in the sun. Today I found the local branch of the city public library (as opposed to the state library I was in yesterday) and read some comics.

Also, I got a SIM card and now have a phone number. Not that I use the phone part of my phone very often, especially when I don’t know anyone in this city, but it’s probably good for my future employer (assuming the visa comes through eventually) to have some way of contacting me.

Yesterday I found a really swank comic shop and a decent game store. I’m going to wait until I have an apartment before I start buying books/comics/games, but gamers are the only community I feel any confidence in dropping into. My first forays in Vancouver were to game stores too.

Anyway, I guess the point of this post is that I’m really looking forward to when Holly arrives in a couple of months.

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book review: axiomatic

Another book I grabbed at the CBC Calgary Book Sale last month, Axiomatic is a collection of short stories by Greg Egan. The first time I read this book was when Reyn and I were in Turkey. I’d never heard of Greg Egan and then these stories of jewels in brains and designer viruses and belief attractor zones were so intensely weird. Now, after reading a small pile of Greg Egan novels, I realize these stories are actually the more accessible chunk of his work.

There are two stories that are very similar in the collection. Both are about runners going into a disaster zone. Both involve describing these weird landscapes formed by the anomalous event. This was the only part of the book I wasn’t a big fan of, feeling like I’d already read that. It sort of highlighted the “ideas man” aspect of his writing. Apart from that one near repeat, the book was as good as I remembered it, and I’m super glad I own it now, since it’s long out-of-print.

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