off line...

Howdy everyone. I hope that you've been enjoying my rantings here and on the 365. Isla and I are off to melbourne tomorrow for 10 days (with a few days in Perth) and so won't be posting for a while. I promise as soon as we get back I'll be blogging as hard as I'm able to bring you back up to speed. Bare in mind though that most of it will be on the 365 blog so from the 8th Oct onwards have a read on that.

See you soon my cyber friends.

Cafe Sydney

After the Bridge Run we had decided to meet up for a well deserved lunch. Isla's friend Jo had suggested Cafe Sydney which is one of the best (and most expensive) restaurants in Sydney. However, once you get there you realise that the view is worth it alone.

That said, the food was amazing as well. I had a goats cheese salad to start and then the best bit of surloin steak which can only be described as a huge cube of meat on a bed of mash and mushrooms with a game sauce. I wasn't going to have dessert but having a real weak spot for cheese cake meant I had to order a piece.

All in all a great but very pricey place to eat but that was offset by the picturesque location. Also it's another reminder of the al fresco dining possibilities available to Sydney Siders.

Bridge Run

Hey everyone,

Well Isla and I took part in another sporting event here and once again I'm impressed with how the outdoor lifestyle in Australia is facilitated by the reliability of the weather. Isla ran the Sydney Half Marathon and I did the 9km Bridge Run. Considering the trauma of the City to Surf race I'm surprised I actually turned up for the race but I had decided that I was going to do it in under 1 hour to redress the balance of me versus the road. Besided the first part of the race was over the Harbour Bridge which was closed to traffic that morning so crossing it in that fashion is something most people never get to do.

The rest of the run was thankfully uneventful and I crossed the line in 59 mins and 16 seconds with a massive smile on my face. Got the bug properly now and I'm eager to do another race however at the moment I can hardly walk so it may be several days before I get my running shoes on again. Mind you from this photo you can tell that I had a pretty good time doing it so a bit of pain in the thighs won't put me off.

Hair removal.... for nads???

Can you believe that some woman called Sue Ismiel and her three daughters have developed and produced a series of hair removal creams and gels over here with the inspiring name of... Nad's!

What the hell were they thinking? For those of you who perhaps don't understand what I'm on about try this - enter the word "nads" into a google image search and see what pops up! Probably not safe for work. You've been warned.

French - c'est que ce?

If you read the post about the vandals smashing up the train you'll probably wonder why I'm listening to French lessons on my iPod. Well the fact is that I had a sick French person in the Resus room whom I almost withdrew treatment from as he was so sick and spoke no English so I had no idea what was really going on. When I eventually got an interpreter in I realised my mistake and gave him the treatment that saved his life... Let me explain.

The French guy was brough into the A&E resus room with almost no blood pressure probably from an infection. He had had some sort of cancer in 2000 with metastases and was now a paraplegic due to some additional cancer in his back at T6 which had resulted in a spinal cord injury which had left him paralised "from the waist down". I hate to say that almost my first question to the resus staff was "what's his resus status? Is he for active treatment?" Nobody seemed to know so we went through the motions of looking for a source of infection and giving him a bit of IV fluid.

After about 3 hours the interpreter turned up and I was told the following...

He was only 59 but he had lung cancer in 2000 which was operated on and then he had radiotherapy and chemotherapy. In 2005 he was given the all clear and was symptom free. However, in 2006 he had some back pain and a bone scan revealed a spinal tumour. It was removed by French surgeons but during the operation they accidently severed his spinal cord and that's why he was a paraplegic - not because of the cancer. Since then he had been wheel-chair bound and had developed previous urinary sepsis which had resulted in High Dependency Unit Admissions for IV drugs to raise his blood pressure and antibiotics - from which he had made full recoveries!

At this point I started the IV Noradrenalin which brought his pressure up to normal and gave him tons of IV antibiotics (as his urine had some signs of infection) which made him feel better within minutes. Perhaps not the line of treatment you would got with for an end stage cancer patient (which is what I thought he was).

What pissed me off most was that I supposedly used to be able to speak French when I was at school and yet all I could say to the poor man was "can I have 6 slices of ham and some bread please" and "I like basketball" - what use was that. Hence I've started learning it again and listening to it on the mp3 player while I train up and down to work is a simple and easy way to do it.

Incidently... he did fine.

The Journey Home

A few folk have asked what out "return home plans" are and I suppose I can now tell you all as we have pretty much booked up everything.

I stop work on the 23rd December. I'll be spending the festive period up in Brisbane with Isla and her Dad (he's going to be over here at that time so it'll be nice to see a familiar face over Christmas). Then we'll be heading back down to Sydney to see in the New Year Oz-style with BBQs and fireworks.

Over the next week we'll be packing up our stuff, selling our furniture and getting the flat ready to give back to the agency. Then on the 9th Jan we leave for Thailand. From there we'll be doing a 29 day tour of Laos, Thailand, Cambodia and Vietnam. Once we are back in Thailand we are going to chill for a week and soak up the local atmosphere. Isla has some friends there who will hopefully point us in the direction of some local attractions that are off the beaten track.

On the 22nd Feb I fly back to Scotland arriving around midday on the 23rd in Glasgow. Isla however, is going on to India to meet her Mum and the two of them are planning to spend a few weeks touring the East and South-East coasts.

So anyone that's around at the end of Feb that wants to go for a few beers.... Not hinting!

The Journey Home

Shattered and... shattered!

You might be wondering the meaning of the title of this post but I'll explain. First I'm shattered as I've been on nights for ages. There seems to have been some mistake in the roster which has resulted in me doing 2 sets of back to back nights instead of the usual one so I've been so nocturnal recently that I'm begining to hallucinate. Luckily only one more night to go.

One thing I didn't hallucinate about was the thousands of shards of glass (hence the second "shattered") that were sprayed over me and two other train passengers as 2 gang members (calling themselves "the White South Boys") trashed the train carriage I was sitting in last night on the way to work.

I have to say that the whole experience was a bit surreal - not really frightening as I always have that thought in my mind that 1 ned with a Stanley Knife could chib the crap out of any Aussie thug, but none the less a bit disturbing.

Earlier in the day I'd toyed with the idea of cycling to work but it was getting cold and the road was still damp after the recent rain so I opted for the train. As the 20:48 to Hornsby came to a stop in front of me I saw 2 guys lying asleep near the doors. The trains here are quite a good design for carrying lots of people. As you walk in to a carriage there are seats on one side for disabled people, elderly folk and the like that run parallel with the train like those on the Glasgow ungerground (which is where these guys were sleeping). On the other side of those you have the option of going up or down a few steps to a double decker section that houses about 12 rows of seats perpendicular to the train.

I walked passed the sleeping 20 year olds who had their hoodies pulled over their faces to shade themselves from the over head lights and went down to the lower section of seats. About 20 minutes into the journey there was suddenly loads of banging from the disabled seats and I looked up to see one of the blokes hanging upside down from the hand rails kicking his feet into the overhead lights until the smashed and went out. Bare in mind that there was about eight lights in total so this went on for several minutes.

He was about to settle back down to sleep when his phone went and he answered with the phrase "White South Boys, White South Boys" and started going onto to his mate that is was "like totally lights out here man. Totally lights out!".

Now so far none of this had really bothered me apart from that fact that I'm paying taxes in a foreign country which were now going towards repairing a train carriage that some dick head had smashed up for no real reason except that he'd forgotten an eye mask, and that I was trying to listen to "Learn French in your car" on my iPod and the banging completely screwed up my grammer for "there is a goldfish in this bowl that is floating upside down". However, the 2 other blokes that were sitting a few seats behind me had gone totally silent.

After the short conversation with the mate on the phone the light-smasher and his now-awake buddy seemed to move into the next cabin. Suddenly I saw my ashen-faced carriage compadres out of the corner of my eye grab their stuff and move to the very back row of seats. There was a few new bangs and I looked up to the landing to see the thugs on the far side of the doors ajoining to the next carriage kick the door window in which sent a ton of glass shards flying into out carriage. They then proceeded to do the same to the remaining 3 windows.

Luckily it was my stop next (the one before Hornsby) and as I walked past the two guys who were white as Pete Docherty after snorting some bad coke while at a Halloween party dressed as a ghost having just had a bag of flour thrown in his face, one of them said, "Er, if you see anyone at the station can you tell them what's going on?"

"Sure," I said and as I got off the train the two "gang" members were proceding to smash in the outer windows of the train so I simply called the Cops. I don't know if they ever caught the guys but after a few minutes of calling I could hear several sirens in the direction of Hornsby station.

I hope they did get a Rodney King-style doing, but really the main point of this story was more to illustrate that even though there was the threat of imminent violence Sydney still seems incredibly safe compared to Glasgow. If it had been 2 Neds on the train then they would have also been looking to cut up someones face whereas these guys never interacted with any of us and just seemed intent on vandalism. Not that I was about to try it out but I wonder what would have happened if someone had actually approached them in a confrontational manner? If anything I think a fist-fight would have been the only result without any real blood shed or serious injury to the losing party.

Weird that Glasgow makes you complacent to violence eh?

Team America/Australia?

People often refer to Australia and New Zealand as the southern hemisphere version of America and Canada respectively. I have to say that Australia really doesn't have that much that reminds me of the USA but every now and then I find a corker that does. Take this little gem...

The APEC conference is on next week and there is a team of nurses and doctors who are on call incase of an "incident" like an explosion or something similar. In the UK I'm sure that this group of people would have a name which in non-contrived and self explanatory like the "Mobile Medical Disaster Unit" or the "Rapid Response Emergency Medical Team". Wouldn't you?

Well one of the girls at work is part of this group that consists of 4 nurses and 2 doctors who are required to attend an emergency should something occur during the conference. And what are they called.... "The Strike Team". How rediculously SWAT-like is that? It doesn't even make sense. Are they suppose to turn up and get people picketing and demanding higher wages or is their remit to slap-head would-be protesters? Strike Team certainly doesn't conjour up images of highly trained medical specialists reviving the dead and patching up the wounded does it?

U S A! U S A!