My First Week in Oz, Who Needs a Suitcase?

November/December 2012

Ok so before when I was in Sri Lanka and I said that I was at the lowest point of my trip, well I was wrong. This is the lowest part of my trip. I’m in Perth, they let me in (it did become a real worry), but the novelty was quickly rubbed off my face when I approached the lost baggage desk and was told they couldn’t help me with my suitcase as they use a different system. Looks like I won’t be getting my case back in the next few days then. What a great way to travel; by train for 3 weeks, with 2 changes of clothing, one of them being a leather coat and fingerless gloves. Anyhow that’s not the worst part. So I’ve missed my bus to the hostel because I was asking silly questions to the baggage assistance. You know silly questions like ‘How do I get my baggage back’ and such like. So I jumped a taxi and decided that the last thing I wanted was a Rochdale taxi driver, you know the type, I’m sure they’re not exclusive to Rochdale, the taxi drivers who insist on making small talk with you despite your obvious high level of not interested at all. Well I found one of those. He told me how he’d lived in Melbourne for x amount of years when he first came to Australia and how he loves Perth (the cynical side of me believes it’s because he can charge twice as much for his fares now). He also told me that storms were forecast for the next day. What a great stroke of luck I thought, I’ve just left torrential rains in Sri Lanka, I’m glad they’ve followed me. Still a bit of rain might help my homesickness.

So I arrive at my hostel check in and take myself to bed, frankly because although its only 2240 I haven’t slept in 2 nights and I want to get me into bed. I was very pleased to find that my room had only 4 beds, but the other 3 beds were taken already by sleeping bodies and there was this strong smell of sweaty men, those of you who have ever worked at hospitals will know exactly what smell I’m referring to, and to reinforce this smell around the room, the room had no windows. I like to think of it as my little prison, that I was charged to stay in. Can you tell that Aussie hostels are nowhere near as nice as some of the ones in Europe and Central Asia?

Anyhow the lack of sleep I had experience for the past 48 hours was too powerful so I made my bed and climbed into it. 40 minutes later I was still awake. I thought I’ll just put a little film on with my ear phones to help me sleep. Disturbing everyone in the room for probably the 3^rd time that night I discovered my worst nightmare. I didn’t have an adapter for Australia, so I had no way of charging my stuff, and no one to ask because everyone was asleep. About an hour later lying in bed and listening to the sounds of a snorer in the opposite bunk I reached the lowest part of my trip.  Having already disturbed the man sleeping below me by dropping my blanket on him as he slept I couldn’t stand lying there anymore and I took myself back downstairs to the common area to watch a film. Someone was already there, watching inglorious Bastards. This isn’t the best film to watch from half way through. Actually let me rephrase that, this film isn’t worth watching but it did hold my attention slightly more than the Mr Sleepy Head’s snores so I watched and tried to work out what was happening. I never worked it out. I was just grateful to get out of that little prison.

So film watched and then I chose another which turned out to be even worse I returned back to my cell and crashed out, probably around 2 or 3. I got woke up the next day at about 7, but of course all devices being dead and not  quite having a grip on how many time zones I had changed in 3 days I had no idea what time it was, but the cells bright lights aren’t conducive to a lie in so as much as I tried to fight it, I found myself toddling off downstairs to get some breakfast, and then back up the stairs to reception to get cutlery and a cup (apparently we can’t be trusted to keep them in the cupboards of the kitchen like normal people do), and then back down stairs again to prepare breakfast.

I did have things to do, I had to go and buy an adapter, then I had to find a place to charge stuff and then I was meeting a friend of a friend for coffee. See one of the benefits of coming to Australia is that everyone at home knows someone who has moved there. So I began speaking with a girl from the same town as me, Terri, who had moved to Perth 6 months earlier. Thanks to the wonder of Facebook we’d chatted and today we were doing lunch. Terri turned out to be my little knight in shining armour, but more of that later.

Before meeting Terri I thought it would be a good idea to check my emails because I had emailed to book my train tickets from Singapore. Luckily I had received a reply and I thought that all my requests would be facilitated. How wrong could I be? The train I wanted to get from Perth to Adelaide was only operating once per week (seriously once per week!) and was fully booked for 3 weeks so unless I wanted to have a constant 6 day trip to Brisbane via train during Christmas week, I was a little stuck. Still I didn’t have time to think of that I had coffee to be getting.

Terri and I had arranged to meet at Perth Central station. So as I stood on the walk over that crossed what I thought was all of the platforms I had this sudden feeling of dread in my stomach. I didn’t know what Terri looked like. I mean I had obviously seen her pictures on Facebook but the image of her had completely gone out of my head. As I stood at the top of the stairs which led people down to the platforms I began to eye up any woman who appeared to be standing on the walkway that little bit too long. It’s not a pastime I’ve done much of before, nor one I intend on taking up on a regular basis. Anyway after about 10 minutes it became apparent that a woman similar age to me was stood at the top of the stairs too. Could this be Terri? She had found herself in a similar position to me. I thought for a while and decided to be brave and go and say hello. After all if I can ask an Armenian man who spoke no English to use his mobile telephone, I’m sure I’ll survive what I presume is a native English speaker.

I approached her slowly, giving myself the opportunity to change my mind in case Terri began to appear on the stairs. I interrupted the lady who was clearly very busy reading Facebook on her mobile with the very original line:

 ‘Are you Terri?’

Her response (which if your wondering was ‘eeerrrgggh what?)’ I knew it wasn’t Terri. Mainly because she spoke with an ‘Australian’ accent (the first I’d heard since the airport yesterday). Deciding that I couldn’t possible make more of a fool of myself than I already had done, I asked the mystery lady if this was the only entrance to the train station in Perth. Looking at me a little confused she informed me that this wasn’t the only entrance. I think she also made some comment about it being a big station, it had 5 platforms next to each other it was hardly London Euston but who am I to judge I come from Rochdale. She went on to tell me there was another entrance to the underground around the corner onto some street. Great I thought, Perth has an underground system, how come I’ve not seen it, and this is the thinking which led onto my next question:

 ‘So this underground entrance ........ It leads to the trains ............. and these trains go ............. like ............ under the ground?’

Where's Terri?

I can’t describe the look I received back with this response but I got the impression my mystery lady wished she had arrange to meet her friend at a different location. So becoming overly concerned that I would never meet Terri and not seeing any payphones around to use I made a huge mistake. I used some of the new fond principles I had picked up from Armenia and Sri Lanka and I asked the mystery lady would it be possible for her to text my friend who I was meeting to let her know where I was. Clearly over stepping the limits of Australian social acceptability my mystery lady was in shock and, presumably, just wanted rid of me so she text Terri for me, explaining where I was and told her I’d be waiting. I thanked her and tried to explain that I wasn’t a freak and that I was meeting a friend of a friend and that I had only just arrived in Australia etc etc etc.

Yeah she wasn’t interested and for some reason I couldn’t find a way to shut my mouth. I think that after so long of being with people whose first language wasn’t English I kind of went a little mad when I was speaking to a native English speaker. She didn’t say much, she just tried to pretend I wasn’t there.  I needn’t have worried about recognising Terri because as soon as I saw her I knew it was her, climbing up those stairs. We said our hellos, and I felt the need to introduce her to my mystery lady to prove that I wasn’t just standing in train stations as an excuse to talk to women. So I thanked her for sending Terri a message to which Terri questioned:

 ‘Oh was that your number?’

The mystery lady, clearly irritated by our interactions replied shortly:

 ‘Yes, don’t text me!’

And walked off. I wonder should I have told her I was gay, but in hindsight I think I should have just said a little less.  She wasn’t even interested when I told her my suitcase had been lost. So yeah story over, I think it’s safe to say Australia, for all of its positives, isn’t Armenia, and here it’s not appropriate to ask for help on the streets, a good lesson for me to learn.

So Terri and I did lunch and coffee and chatted, and then decided it was time to have a real drink, which is  when I began to tell her the story of my night in the hostel, Including the falling blanket, the snorer and the lovely smell. Somewhere in the middle of this conversation Terri invited me to stay at her place, as she had a second bedroom and so long as I didn’t mind having to sleep on an airbed. I jumped at the chance and so my times in hostels were over, at least for the next few days. A few beers later we jumped on the free bus back to my hostel to collect me few remaining possessions. We chose to use the bus not because it was a far walk, but because it had started to rain, and was windy and these two things combined did make us both feel a little cold. The conversation was flowing and then I suddenly realised I had no idea where Terri lived, so I asked her. You can imagine the look on my face when she said ‘Cockburn,’ what a horrible name for a suburb.

Still it was 15 minutes outside of the city by train and there really was nothing there. It was so strange. Whilst on the train Terri tried to prepare me for the ‘city’ (It’s definitely a city, it has a sign describing it as one) and not to expect very much. The conversation was broken slightly by the waves which were crashing over the usual sea defences and up onto the highway which travelled parallel to the railway. I later found out these waves caused a closure of some of the lanes on the highway. I thought Australia had good weather?

Anyhow Cockburn city centre was great, it had a little shopping centre and a train station and a few apartment complexes. It’s definitely a place that’s still being developed. I met Terri’s other half and enjoyed pizza and beers, much more civilised than hostel life.

Aren't we Pretty in the Rain

So as the weather was freakishly bad whilst I was in Perth, there wasn’t a great deal we could do. On the Friday the forecast was better and we decided that a trip to Freemantle would be good. We took the train so that we could both have a drink and before you knew it, we were walking around Freemantle.  Freemantle is so different to Perth. Perth is all new and high rises with huge glass fronted panels. It springs up from the middle of nowhere and its impressive how much the city has grown in such a short space of time. Freemantle is old, well by Australian standards. Every structure is a low rise building built a hundred and odd years ago at most and it looks pretty. The town is also quite alternative and funky. We went to the markets and I suddenly had a craving for chippy. I knew I wouldn’t get proper English chippy chips but surely a fish a chips shop here cant struggle to get chips right. So we went in and looked at the menu and they had about 10 different types of fish to choose from, I’m not even a fish eating type of person, but I gave up and order teriyaki chicken and rice instead. I loved it.

A quick look around the markets and it reminded me of ‘Affleck’s Palace’ in Manchester. We didn’t buy anything but it was nice to have a wander around and view the different things the stalls had for sale. One of my favourites being this palm sized ball of rubber or plastic or some other manmade type material. It could be moulded into a variety of shapes and ‘moods’ I wish I could remember the name, although I guess it doesn’t really matter because it’s not like you’re actually going to go online and try and find one to buy.

Enough shopping done, we went for a drink and opted to try a few different ones by buying this platter of beers. It was great, I’d had something similar in Tel Aviv but here each beer came in a glass a little less than half a pint. You had six beers in total, and each beer came with a little piece of paper giving you all the important information on the beers, its ingredients, its name and most importantly its alcoholic strength. The Australians are very aware of how much alcohol they consume. The night consisted of another platter of these and a bottle of wine in a bar called ‘Little Creatures’. I didn’t realise at the time that ‘Little Creatures’ is actually a brewery and that we should have been drinking their home brews and not a (not so) cheap bottle of red. Still it was nice to sit outside and watch the sun go down over the ocean. Australia seemed like a nice place from this point on. Not wanting to miss out on any of the live entertainment we had seen advertised earlier, we decided to jump into a tuk tuk and get there as fast as we could. Except it wasn’t quite a tuk tuk. It was some bloke (English I think) who pedalled us there whilst we sat in the back. It turned out this was his first night doing the job, and the only way he made money was through his fares, and even then he had to still pay rental on the bicycle tuk tuk, I don’t think it’s a career option I want to pursue.

Just to keep you up to date with my new plans but thanks to the missing bag situation and the fully booked train situation I decided my best option would be to fly straight to Brisbane and stay with my aunty and uncle until my case arrives and get a few weeks work in before Christmas, ready for my big NYE celebrations in Sydney.

The morning after the night before thus became my last day as I had booked a flight for Sunday at around 11 o’clock in the evening.  I had arranged to meet my cousin who lived about 60 km south of Perth and meet his wife and son. Sat on the train going down to meet him, I started to have a little panic, what happens if I don’t recognise him, I mean people’s appearance changes in 13 years. I myself was only 12 the last time we met. Deciding that it was too late to worry about that now I pushed that thought out of my mind and enjoyed the ride on the train.  Once I left the train station Ben was waiting for me, thankfully I didn’t have to ask anyone for help this time so a repeat performance of my time, curb crawling, in Perth’s Central station didn’t occur. Surprised at my lack of luggage I began to explain about my suitcase taking a little holiday of its own and how it might join me at some point in the future. I met his wife Bec and their son Cohan, who was surprisingly quick to take to me. We chatted and played with Thomas the Tank Engine and learned about each others life’s whilst swapping stories and updates of family back in the UK. It was really nice to be around family after so long without it.

So Ben, Bec and Cohan live in Secret Harbour which except for sounding like a really cool name is right on the sea so their home is about 15 minutes walk to the beach. And the beach was powder white sand and busy, but not too busy. Apparently there are plans to build an apartment complex complete with additional dining facilities etc right on the beach but apparently, they’ve run out of money. The suburb is 60 km south of Perth and its main ‘attraction’ I guess is the gold course which the houses are built around.  Everything here is walking distance, although sometimes there is no pavement to walk on so you question if they really want you to walk anywhere. The place seems to have been designed really well and the street look really pretty with their manicured flower beds and tree lined pavements.  We went out for a meal on the Saturday night and as we walked I got to see my first ‘drive-through’ bottle shop (off licence/liquor store), I definitely need to get me a car so I can try one of those.

The next day was a special day; it was the first fake Christmas. Because Ben, Bec and Cohan will be in Queensland for Christmas they had arranged to have Christmas celebrations with Bec's family before they left, today was Christmas with Cohan’s Uncle Adam (no not me, Bec’s brother is also called Adam). After an early morning game of ‘Thomas the Tank Engine’ which involved a huge pop up Thomas and carriages it was time for the celebrations to commence; and what food should you have on Fake Christmas Day number 1? Curry of course : ) I really enjoyed the day but soon came the time to leave and set off for the airport for the longest flight of my trip so far, and funnily enough the only flight that was not going to take me to another country!