Lyfe in not-so-Bris-k-bane – Week 1

Beware,  I am writing a conventional diary entry with things like ‘my first few days in…’ 🙂 I am going to try and mask it with maximum un-conventional stuff 😉

Well, reaching Brisbane became a tough task with first my jug-head travel agent goofing up with my 2 months old blocked ticket with Malaysia Airlines and making my last week in Delhi a big marathon. I had to run to grab a ticket with ‘Cathay Pacific’ , ended up paying 10k more and like it always happens, my plans of spending a relaxed ‘last few days in delhi’ went down the drains. Folks, friends and Times Delhi Festival just made it a little easy. If getting a ticket became a big deal, so did reaching… ‘I DREAM OF MY CAMERA EVERY NIGHT *sob sob*’ (kidding). To spice it up, that camera was not just another gadget like everybody owns.. I was attached to it being my first priced possession with my own money plus a big boost to my time-pass-photography .. and losing it at a time when you could have done the maximum justice to it..is….. *bo hoo hoo*

I’ll cut the melodrama here and come to the point…

I was staying somewhere and shifted today to another place. The backpackers was a fun place with travellers from everywhere ..i specially had some good talks and evenings with a german girl and a guy. The girl is a 20 year old female, who left home at 18 with her best friend to travel with the money she had saved working in a flower shop in her school days. Her friend went back and she continued. She would be traveling to Thailand before returning to her home country. At one of the nights at a pub and over a chat, she told me she wanted to intern in a ‘school for the disabled’ and wants to study and be a speech therapist some day. Now, how many folks had I met with similar approaches towards life. Other than few non-indian folks overseas, I had only met people bogged by thoughts of being in big professions, looking for safety/security in every sense and almost always staying by a tried and tested way of living life. The german guy is another story. He worked in petro stations, got himself skilled in making roofs, built his own house , bought a car etc; now, he is here to complete his studies in architecture after selling off his car J! Everything was damn interesting. I wish I had broken the ice with few more folks around but then my own hunting and run-on-the-mill to find a decent place to stay and getting stuff done at the university along with a unconsciously developed habit of staying away from socializing prevented some more interesting discoveries.

This is weird but I kind of don’t like bumping into Indians here.. mmmm

I have managed a decent room for myself, thanks to a couple who helped me with it. It would not be my permanent place to stay, but it gives me good time and space to take a comfortable decision.

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Brisbane river and the walk across the bridge gives me thrills.
The university is highly automated with the state of art architecture and …
Cycling looks major fun here, I had to leave back my 15-geared monster but once I am set, I should be buying one here.

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 Food is expensive but i like the way everything around has been tagged after a lot of analysis, unlike indian market!
There are ‘n’ Indian eat outs in the areas I have explored.
The city is a bit laid back (the post caption ;))
People are hugely courtesy driven (I hear thank you, sorry and no-worries some billion times every day 😀)
The city-management kinda looks rocking (road rules, signals). Its currently under level-5 water restriction and the way these times are taken care of by the government is commendable(logically very appealing)

Also, i love moving with the map around.. with every street clearly mapped out.. it is kind of fun moving around even though you might be alone.

Update : I weirdly managed work as well here and today happens to be my training day for the same. Hoping things to get smoothened out faster.

I have started this journey putting at stake my parents concerns who never bought my decision and hence, it has been a lot more difficult to come here than it generally would be. Since this was not a long charted out plan, Sayonara-1 was a way of somehow making the move logistically possible. I am technically and socially independent in this place, which imposes an overhead of taking care of every move I make.