Tag Archives: victoria

11.09.10 [Saturday]
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australia, books, food, school, travel

heading to victoria again

Tonight I get on the train to small-town Victoria again to do some training at a regional health library. Woo! Actually that’s not even a sarcastic woo, because Holly’s going to come too. She has to take an earlier train back than me so she can get to work on time (stupid-early-o-clock) but I’m going to be working anyway.

Maybe we won’t exhaust all the excitement Shepparton has to offer right away, but if we do, Holly’ll get to at least spice it up by driving. We’re renting a car and while she can legally drive here, I don’t have a license for Australia (apparently you can use your North American one for three months, which I have been here longer than).

This is sort of a warmup for December when we’re planning a bit more extensive roadtripping up to my friend Mel’s place and maybe inland a ways. I like deserts.

Other than this excitement, things are just ticking along. Holly made Chinese noodles last night that tasted very approximately like the noodles you get everywhere in Nanchong. She’s in charge of that kind of cooking – specific cooking. My technique is more “Let’s combine a bunch of stuff and see what happens” which isn’t untasty, but it’s hard to know how to make something happen.

I’m reading a bunch of SF&F books for the class I’m taking, which is a fun way to spend my time. Not that I didn’t enjoy my recent social media class, but reading about Vikings and faery and space travel and thinly veiled Christian allegories is a much nicer way to spend a Saturday.

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11.06.28 [Tuesday]
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australia, travel, vancouver, winnipeg

gippsland droogs

Bairnsdale is a small town. I didn’t mind it much, though it has its oddities. I suppose places without droogs on the prowl have Milk Bars, but I really liked how one of Bairnsdale’s (I saw two) had a sign twice as big as the name of the place saying “We Sell Milk.” Just so you didn’t think there was anything tricksy about the name.

After our first session one of the librarians took me out for a little drive down to Paynesville. That is not a cacophemism, but a retirement village for yachters.

I didn’t realize how close we are to the ocean here, but Gippsland has a bunch of lakes that are just barely separated from the ocean (I suppose it’s technically a strait of some kind between Victoria and Tasmania maybe – I don’t have a map accessible while I’m offline typing this) by a forested sandbar. The librarian said they used to be freshwater but when an opening was created to the sea it turned everything a bit more brackish throughout the floodplain.

In Paynesville they’ve dug out canals through the poshest residential areas so that everyone can have backyard access to their boats. It was nicer than I expected, thinking of Dexter episodes (that takes place in some grubby part of Florida with those kinds of things right?).

We drove back into Bairnsdale as the sun was setting and the sky was just huge. I do kind of feel a bit of prairie nostalgia when I see a big sunset like that. Though the gum trees made different enough silhouettes to keep it foreign.

One of the librarians has a thirty-year-old nephew who’s going to Estonia on his first trip out of Australia next month. I think Estonia is an awesome first foreign country to visit. Way better than for him to just go to Canada or something boring and safe. She says her nephew’s bringing too much luggage. This came about because today I brought my bag to the library with me so I could go straight to the train station after we finished up our session.

I realized the other day that by the time we leave Australia I’ll have lived in Sydney longer than in Vancouver (and Holly’s going to live in three foreign-to-her countries between this June and next). I’d thought before coming here that I’d identify Vancouver as home when asked, but I tend to tell people I live in Vancouver and am from a place they haven’t heard of. I don’t have a depth of knowledge about Vancouver to pass on to curious people. And while my Winnipeg knowledge isn’t particularly deep it’s still an easier place to tell stories of and make it sound exotic.

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11.06.26 [Sunday]
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australia, travel

bairnsdale the first

I maintain my love of sleeper trains, but even the Melbourne-Bairnsdale bus today was pretty good. What the busride had over the trainride was its daylight hours, so I could actually expect the Australia rolling past me.

I keep having to remind myself that it’s winter here, since everything is so green. Rural Victoria (at least in the Gippsland direction) looks like a lot of dairy and sheep farms. It’s kind of hilly (in a way more bulbous than rolling) and off in the distance are mountainish looking things.

There was a weird stretch where there were these erratic dead, branchless tress studding the fields like bones in compound fractures. It was kind of ominous, but fairly localized.

I like how the trees are different from North American trees. You see a clump of trees in a field and that’s fine and then when you pass close by it’s like no northern tree you’d care to think of, all made of ropes entwined on itself. When I was out walking I thought about how knowing more about plants would probably get me amazed at the differences in the ground cover and grasses and all that too. But trees are big enough to be noticeable.

Bairnsdale is a small town and my motel is about a mile from the train station and town square. This is because of a mixup in the recommendation process wherein someone thought a restaurant was a hotel (well, it is called a hotel but that doesn’t seem to mean anything about lodging here) and quoted us the price of the motel with the one-letter-off name. When we couldn’t book a room at the restaurant we assumed the recommender had mistyped the name, rather than that she was recommending I sleep in a restaurant.

It’s not a bad little town. I had all of Sunday afternoon to wander around. There’s a village and a really tall-spired church and not much is open past 2pm on a Sunday afternoon.

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11.06.24 [Friday]
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australia, games, library, travel, 中国

travel days ahead

I’m heading off to scenic Gippsland, Victoria tomorrow for some Koha training. I was talking to Sean the other day about how weird small businesses are. I mean, these librarians are paying for me to go out and teach them about this software I’ve only been using since April. I feel like at a lot of places I’d have needed more training than I have had (which is actually pretty extensive since I’m helping people with their Koha problems all day). Whatever works, I guess. And it means I get to see more of Oz while I’m here.

I’ve been pretty bad about going out to see stuff recently. A lot of hunkering down here in front of the internet. My friend Jamie is off to do his practicum in London (the real one) and got scolded by another of our classmates for solving internet puzzles while he’s supposed to be on vacation. But dude, I completely get that. I’ve been spending far too much time planning out Blood Bowl teams (speaking of which, I found an unofficial Blood Bowl client for playing online which almost works completely well apart from me not being able to simply stand up prone players – let me know if you’re interested in playing).

Of course, a week from today all of that will change since that’s when Holly arrives from China. I’ll engage in a tiny bit of understatement to say I’m looking forward to being in the same city as her, especially without an end-date.

Finally, if you miss my voice, you can now listen to me read Firing Squad, my Machine of Death story whenever you want. Though the magic of reading (and recording) it’s my voice without my innumerable hesitations, filler words and false starts that litter my real speech pattern, so it’s probably more pleasurable in every possible way. You can pump that story through your speakers and pity the poor shmucks who have to deal with me speaking without a script at them.

Like the librarians in Gippsdale next week.

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