Sixth Base

After the catastrophe that was the last place we rented, we wanted something good, with lots of room. We found something through gumtree instead of AirBnB which has advantages and disadvantages. You get less guarantees than in AirBnB, there is a bit of confusion if a room is on offer for short term stays or not and people there are less "prepared" for a lack of a better word. The owner was a young girl who was leaving for a month, so we had the whole apartment for ourselves.

Although I think, this is aesthetically sound, I don't care much about shiny surfaces. Diana hates them.

It was a newly built building with multiple identically furnished apartments. We had a balcony, a small park in front of us where people were doing yoga and boxing-training(?) and a nice stay in the 12 days we stayed there. What surprised me is the low build quality of most of the things there. The TV was not that great. After every visit, there was a small pool of water just outside of the shower that didn't vanish for a day because they haven't put much thought in the inclination of the floor. The dishwasher was leaking water sometimes. The washing machine didn't work. The most outlandish thing for me is that the dishwasher and washing machine had huge stickers on them showcasing the low grades the appliances got for energy and water saving. My impression is that machines that bad are not even on the market in Germany. And if they did save money on pretty much everything, if I was the seller of the apartments I would at least remove the stickers?

We had to walk over 20 mintues to get somewhere where you can have some food. Far from the centre, still lots of cars.

The neighborhood was very nice but the only public transport that was close only came once an hour and all the surrounding neighborhoods were not that great. Also we didn't have internet, so we had to use my phone data which worked out OK.

So it had its disadvantages but still it was pretty relaxing leaving the city centre and living on our own. We even used the kitchen!

Melbourne Centre (not Center)

- I hate it. It's just like Stuttgart with way more people.

Stuttgart doesn't have trams any more but Melbourne does.

I don't hate Melbourne like Diana does but I predictably don't like it as much as people expect someone to do. In order to understand this, you must also know that I don't like metropolitan cities at all. I didn't like Athens, Berlin, Munich, Paris and so on. With some kind of inverse logic, Australians assume that we like Melbourne because it is the city that is most like a European city. The thing is, we left Europe for a reason.

We arrived at the same time as the Chinese New Year. So there were lots of celebrations.

In my mind Perth is something like a big village and Melbourne is the real deal. Culture, art, fashion, people who put in a lot of effort in looking effortlessly cool, more noise, more garbage on the streets, less friendliness. Also cold in the summer just like in good old Germany with 9°C in the night in what is the equivalent of August here.

More celebrations at the South Bank.

There are lots of museums and art galleries here and even when I was impressed by how many types of restaurants Perth has, Melbourne is absolutely overwhelming. If it is important to you to try different things to eat regularily, then this is paradise. Your options are endless and of course there is lots of quality stuff. We ate a lot of burgers and visited the Australien Centre of the Moving Image. Two things happened there. Diana didn't have any connection at all to this stuff and was bored. I already knew most the stuff there and ... was bored as well.

People watching the tennis finale.

Because of the Chinese New Year we saw dancing dragons. There was also the Australien Open tennis tournament which was projected on big screens around the stadium. We visited some parks which was nice. We visited different neighbourhoods. If you want to live in Melbourne there is apparently a wider choice on the kind of home you can live in. You got the typical Australian one-family homes. You got modern apartments in very very tall or smaller buildings. You got Victorian style homes (I think). But at least at the places we have been there is less room compared to what we have seen before.

As opposed to Stuttgart, Melbourne knows how to make a walk next to the river shine.

What else did we do? We visited the Night Market. It had the best gyros I have ever tasted in Australia (it was the only one that tasted good) and the people there spoke the best Greek (they were the only Greeks I have seen that speak Greek). I went to a gyros restaurant a couple of days later and the people selling and serving were exclusively Chinese. The Greeks here are obviously living the dream if they are able to outsource Greek restaurants.

The Night Market opened late but it wasn't quite night yet. The fortune tellers were the best part.

In the next episode we will talk about the beach. Or the next base. Haven't decided yet.

Fifth Base - Flight to Melbourne

On the 26/1 was Australia day. There are probably lots of festivities which we missed because we booked our flight for that day. It was (unsurprisingly) cheaper. But since we have been at New Years Eve in Perth, have seen not one but two firework displays and there was some stuff in Melbourne waiting for us, I didn't mind.

The view from the balcony where we spend zero time because it had no room and we didn't have good access..

The flight to Melbourne was annoying and meditative at the same time for me. Here is how it goes: Behind my seat was an approximately four year old who was constatly kicking my seat. He was part of a family with three boys and the parents. The mother was sitting with two boys. In the middle seat behind me was the wild one. He started kicking my seat from behind. The mother was scolding him now and then. When it got even wilder, I turned around ready to say something, she noticed and scolded him even more. It didn't help. I thought about any possible solutions for a while but my will to find a solution faded and I noticed my anger towards him and her for not having control over him giving way to sympathy. I had to endure the little shit for 3 hours. She has to endure him for years and she is helpless. Literally. Her husband was sitting one row behind her and didn't lift a finger. I promised myself to never be like him. I could ignore the kicking so well that I even read a book. It was the end of Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep and although I like the book, I didn't "get" the ending. I am not even sure if there is something to get.

Looking down a bit.

We landed at 1 in the morning, took a double decker bus to the city and arrived at our new appartment on the 13th floor of a skyscraper. It looked bad. There were two bedrooms in the apartment and one of the two couples moved to the living room behind a curtain in order to be able to sub-lease the bedroom. The bedroom was extremely small - more of a box, and the bottom of the window was at my eye level. In the morning light it left an even worse impression than by night because there was no morning light to see. The next skyscraper was 8 meters next to ours, so there was so little light coming into the room that it was impossible to know, if it was sunny or rainy. If capitalism is meant to have triumphed over communism, this apartment is a testament that this is not necessarily right for everyone.

This photo captures the feeling you get living in that apartment pretty well.

But no worries! There are things to like in Melbourne. We'll get to them in the next post.

Dolphins

Rockingham was the base of a company that takes you with a boat to swim with dolphins. "Swimming" is not accurate here because you are not allowed to move but we are getting ahead of ourselves. We looked into it while leaving in Perth but in order to take part in it we had to meet with them at 7 in the morning or something so we had to be awake at 6 or earlier which was not going to happen. So we went there while we were living in Rockingham. By that time we also had come coupons which let us save some good money, so everything worked out well ... except Diana freezing to death, so now I have to find a new woman. Applications are accepted via e-mail.

You will know what you see in a minute. Read on!

We picked the warmest day of the week actually and we were outfitted with diving suits but that didn't help much. The way it worked is that we visited wild dolphins and when we saw them, the boat would stop, we would drop in the water and the dolphins might come and stay with us for a bit or not. They were not fed or anything. We also couldn't swim because the movements we normally do while swimming and producing bubbles and such are interpreted by the dolphins as aggressive behaviour. So we made lines like on the photo with one person hanging on the belt of the previous one and the guy or the gal at the top being one of the guiding team pulling us with a machine thingy that I don't have word for. Depending on the place in the row and the clarity of the water, we sometimes saw the dolphins very clearly and sometimes not at all. It's good fun. The "problem" is, I wanted more of it.

This one can probably jump higher than me on land.

The boat also made some waves which the dolphins used to surf and jump out of which sounds still insane as I am writing it. This amount of playfulness you normally link to cats and dogs which are at least domesticated. After doing our rounds, they gave us a meal and some additionaly explanations of what we saw. Turns out that the playfulness of dolphins extends to them trolling other fish. We saw a stingray next to a dolphin and what dolphins do with stingrays is that they can anticipate when they are going to find food with their sonar, so when the stingray is doing its rounds and forces its prey to come out of the sand, the dolphin will come in, flip the stingray and steal the food. One dolphin also sucked the poison out of a blowfish because the poison is like drugs to them and they like getting high. They seem to get away with it.

Am I too nice to people?

Fourth Base - Rockingham

After living close to the centre of the city for so long and liking Penguin Island, the Diana argued that we could also live near the beach for a while. So we went to Rockingham for a bit. That's a kind of peninsula to the south of Perth that lets you access Penguin Island. The island we haven't visited again. I am sure, the penguins miss us.

I like it colourful.

The room we lived in, was actually a small cottage with its own kitchen. It was cute. Our hosts were Germans and I used up all the internets. European readers may not understand what I just wrote but in Third World countries like the U.S. and Australia, there might be a volume cap on the internet at home. So in addition to being slow, the amount of internets you can use per month is limited. In my defence, I didn't know Australia had that option, I thought the whole thing was an exclusively American invention to torture people in Guantanamo and noone dared copy them because of Human Rights issues.

The town centre. If you see past all the people filling the streets, it's quite lovely.

So the cottage was cute and the beach was also one of the nicest that I have seen here. I was clean and mostly empty and because the waters are "protected" by an island, there are almost no waves. The wind is still there to make you cold half the time but I enjoyed it there and could reach the beach on foot. Everything else (including food) was far away.

Well, it WAS full of people on Australia day but that was the day we took the flight to Melbourne because it was the cheapest.

Our hosts took out a couple of unused bikes for us which were very useful but also had saddles so hard that I now might have been rendered impotent. But that is not so bad as we will learn in a post sometime in the future.

I used the handles of the playground to do some pull-ups.

We didn't do much while being there apart from some yoga and visiting some fucking dolphins. I will write about the dolphins the next time.

Penguin Island

After spending most of the time in the city, we wanted to see a bit of nature, including the fauna of Australia. There is an island close to Perth which is called - hold it - Penguin Island. All penguins are wild and free except from some sick ones who couldn't survive on their own. Australians often advertise with the fact that they don't keep animals in cages in order for people to see them. They have many more wild parks than zoos. Access to the island is with a ferry boat or by walking through the water.

Enlarge to see people crossing the waters.

Yes. The water between the main land and the island is shallow enough that you could walk to the other side. Of course some smart people who couldn't swim did just that a couple of years ago and Australia hit them back with some currents that pulled them away and they drowned. So they advise against of anyone doing it. We had bags with stuff that shouldn't get wet (like the camera I use to do all these wonderful photos), so we took the boat anyway.

Nice.

We arrived and waited for a bit for the feeding of the penguins to start. They make a bit of a show out of it and a nice woman told us a bit about the kind of penguins they have there which is the smallest in existence.

So small!

We got out, slept for an hour on the grass and then we did a round of the island that Diana found so pretty, that she wanted to do another round as soon as we finished the first one.

The island was also small. It took an hour to see everything.

Since the last boat was leaving at 4 and we didn't have much time but then again there was a queue with people waiting to get on the boats, we went back to the feeding pool. The woman there was talking to some other people and when she was done she asked:

- Did you see any of the wild penguins? Do you want to see them?

- No.

She was confused.

- I mean, no, we didn't see any, but yes, we would like to see them.

Then she explained where to find some who like to hide under the stairs.

King's Park

We do everything wrong.

Do we?

That's an overstatement but this is how it feels sometimes. We visited King's Park twice. The first time was before we were living on the edge of King's Park and the second time was after we were living on the edge of King's Park. When we were living exactly next to it for two weeks, we didn't go. One reason is probably that, to ascend to King's Park we had to go up the fiercest slope Perth offers, right outside our apartment which was kind of demotivating.

First visit. There were many more people than visible here.

King's Park is bigger than New York's Central Park but I don't know if they are compareable because only one fifth of the park looks like a park. The rest of it looks more like a forest. The first time we went there, we only visited the parky looking place and it was very pretty. We also saw a gallery with aboriginal art - from the outside. It was closed and we told ourselves that we will visit it another day when it is open. We didn't. They was also an exhibit of plants which they transported from the outback. We almost missed it because there were there. Plants. And small signs. No fence or anything. They trusted people not to step on them.

Second visit. We saw almost no people at all.

The second time we went there, we walked through the more like a forest looking part from the north to the south. We arrived at the sea which could also still be a river at that place, I never figured that out. I wanted to walk back on a different route but Diana was having none of it. We took some photos of a house on the water which as far as I gathered has no significance other than it looks kind of nice but still constantly attracts people who want a picture in front of it.

Normally we would take a photo of us in front of it but there was a line and we didn't want to wait.

Then we took the bus back to the centre. I still walked almost 13 km that day. I don't know how much that is in fake / imperial units.