Ok so here's my job situation.

There is a list of countries that have mutual working agreements with Australia that allow the citizens of each to get working holiday visas at the other, but the US isn't on it. A working holiday visa is like a visitor's visa, but it allows you to get work while you are visiting. The fact that I can't get one of those means that I can't get temporary work to support me until I get a longterm job nor can I start at a longterm job (once I get one) until my longstay work visa application clears. The office of immigration in Australia originaly told me that the application would take 14 days to clear after it was submitted. However, several calls to the office of immigration later I have found out that the time to clear is more like 6-8 weeks than 14 days. And they seemed to think that it was my fault for believing the first person I spoke to at the office.

Where does that leave me? Sitting in Australia, no income and can't get a temp job, running out of money with 6 weeks left on my visitor's visa. So I'm fucked. Oh well. I gave it a shot. I'm heading back to the US and will hopefully be able to get a job there quickly. Not going back to Iowa, tho. Since I'm set to live in a new place anyway I'm going to give Seattle a shot. Any advice anyone? Know any easy places I can get a job or someone who could help me get one out there? I was pissed about my situation yesterday, but now I'm just anxious to get moving again. I'm going to go and do some scuba diving on the Great Barrier Reef before I go, tho. I wouldn't be able to forgive myself if I didn't...

Ok so I'm posting another exciting installment of my adventures in Oz. First of all I am really getting sick of living with my aunt and uncle. The house has no doors or finished walls except exterior doors and walls. There are only bed sheets hanging in the doorways. And the walls only go up 8 feet or so. The celing is like between 10 and 12 feet from the ground so there is no such thing as privacy here. You can hear what everyone in the house is doing and saying all of the time. It sux because they are daytime people and I'm a night owl. I have to be quiet as a mouce all night or I'll wake them up. So that pretty much sux and that's just the house.

I'm also having trouble just getting along with my aunt and uncle. They are really uphappy about how introverted I am and about who I am in general. They can't stand what I like to eat, what I like to do, that I'm not to interested in gardening or cattle or that I don't enjoy listening/watching the news every waking moment. They can't stand that I really don't care if people like me or not. They detest that I like to read a lot and that I don't like going for long solitary walks in the sunlight.

I'm not sure what I can do about this. I've tried to stay out of their way, be as unobtrusive as possible, but that just seems to piss them off even more. I get the feeling that what they wanted was a clone of my uncle and that I'm just not good enough. Got into an argument with them several days ago because they were trying to order me around and I told them that I was an an adult and that I could think and decide for myself. It wasn't like they were telling me to help them with anything (I've offered tons of times, but they always refuse), they were trying to order me to like certain things and activities. Things and activities that had nothing to do with them! They were just blatantly ordering me to be someone else! They were telling me that if I changed then people would like me better and that I'd like myself. I told them that I liked myself just fine and that I didn't care who else liked me. Then they got angry and started telling me it was selfish to not plan my life around making others like me!! I'm really not sure what they want from me, but I know who I am (generaly), I like who I am (generaly) and anyone who doesn't like me can just fuck off.

Anyway, I took this opportunity to take the train to Sydney for the weekend. I had a great time :) I went out to a club (for some reason all of their clubs are called "hotels" here) and had a few drinks. It was a good time :) I met a bunch of Sydney natives and a couple of Canadians, named Stu and Phil, who decided that I was an honorary Canadian. Then they started drunkenly singing "Blame Canada!" at the tops of their lungs :) During the course of the night I apparently set Phil up with a rather unattractive Australian woman and he didn't realize how unattractive she was until the next day :/ He laughed about it the next evening, tho, so it must not have been that bad ;)

The next evening I went to the same club for a DnB show that was advertised there. OMFG was it packed!! Sydney loves it's DnB!! I had a hard time meeting anyone there that night because it was so packed and loud!! I did, however, meet up with Gotham who is a DnB producer/DJ from Arizona who lives in Sydney. I'd met him the first time I was in Sydney, but we didn't get to hang out much then. We got pretty trashed and then left the place to go and meet up with a dude named Merlin. Apparently he was on some TV show called "Big Brother" and was apparently very famous (and rich) because of it. I don't watch TV so I didn't recognise him, but he was definately an interesting guy. We went all over Sydney with Merlin, he bought tons of drinks and paid for cab rides everywhere. We ended up at Gotham's place and listened to the tracks he'd written and the tracks he was working on while getting more messed up. Then Merlin had to go home and go to bed. Gotham and I then went to another bar (this was around 4:30am) and continued to get drunk while we waited for a couple of Gotham's other friends to show up. I watched Gotham loose $35 to those electronic gambling machines while we waited for an hour.

Unbelivably boring.

Then Bal and Johnny showed up. Bal was from India and was filthy rich. His family was friends with some shiek or another and as a result that shiek bought Bal a $10million dollar appartment overlooking Sydney Harbor and the opera house as well as 10 Feraris and 10 porshes for him to get around Sydney in. Damn was this dude loaded. We chilled for a while then around 7 am he and Johnny decided that they were going to go to another friend of their's place in the "Lebanise part of Sydney" and they didn't think that it'd be wise for a caucasian American like myself to join them. I was kind of tired anyway so I went back to the hostel I was staying at and crashed. Definately a long weird night... That's about it so far.

Hope this is amusing to you all :)

Bah... Being this far removed from civilization is really getting to me :/ 25km from the nearest town of 400 people, an hour beyond that is the nearest town with a train station and Sydney is a two hour ride from that :( Very beautiful out here, but with all the power comming from wind and solar it must be conserved, so when it gets dark... it really gets dark. Lights taking a lot of power and all. You quickly get used to going to bed shortly after dark and getting up with the sun. Not really as hard as I thought it would be to get up that early everyday. There are other problems with getting all of your power from wind and sun. Like there is running water, but the pump is usualy turned off to conserve power. No drinks of water at night. No toilet usage.

Same with computers. I can use my uncle's laptop because they don't use much power, but not a regular computer or a regular monitor. I could not live this way permanently... I'm also used to cooking my own food. I so much prefer that to having my aunt cook a new meal for me three times a day. She said that it'd be ok for me to cook for myself, but was obviously just being polite. That and she took all of the food I'd bought for me to use cooking and used it all in group meals as quickly as she could. And she really doesn't like me not eating grains or potatos (that being the reason I bought a bunch of food for myself). When I first got here it was like a 2 hour conversation with her asking if I eat various breads and pastas or rice or potatos and me saying "no" over and over again. She still proclaims (contrary I've already told her) that not eating carbs will make me gain weight. sigh I need to find a job... soon...

Hey kidz :) I have am now in the wonderful land of Oz. It's very interesting here. Sydney is beautiful. The people are nice. In the two nights I was in Sydney I found two DnB parties to go to and met some kewl people :) I'm at my uncle's right now. He lives in a middle of a national park in the mountains south of Sydney. We are 25km from the nearest town (which has a population of 400) and another hour drive from the next closest town that is kind of a vacationing spot on the ocean (good surfing) and from there a 2 hour train ride to Sydney. It is much colder here than I thought it would be. The area around here is a temperate rainforest. That means it's a lot like the Pacific Northwest. Cold, fogy, rainy, but beautiful :)

So far I've seen several parrots, two wallabys, an echidna, and a dead wombat. The wombat had been shot by my aunt the day before we arrived. My aunt and uncle get all of their power from solar and wind, their water from a spring, and live in the house that my uncle built himself. It's not as rugged as you'd think tho. It's pretty comfortable (if you remember to pack warm clothing, which I didn't) Not everything is great. I know I'm going to get an ulcer if I don't get a job soon and I don't much like living with family (excepting my brother) I would really like to get out and get a place of my own. I prefer more privacy and solitude than I am allowed living with my aunt and uncle.

Don't get me wrong. They are great people and I'm very greatfull to them for letting me stay here, but the same could be said of my parents who I couldn't live with for very long either... It seems that if I want to get out of here I must quickly become profecient in Java and J2EE because they are very popular here in Oz. If anyone knows anything about those please tell me so I can ask you questions. I'm reading the books I bought and they are making sense but it's not going as fast as I'd like it to. Anyway, I'm going to try and post some pictures tomorrow when I go to the computer center near where my aunt works. They only have dialup at their house (ick!).