Just a short post to let you know I arrived safely. It sure was a very long trip, just over 30 hours in total though the last flight got in an hour earlier than estimated. It was totally worth the trip though, It was great meeting Simon at the airport. I'll give you a full report later on. Now it's time to go out and work in the yard. No rest for the wicked :P

I wrote about Carl Williams the other day (if you don't remember have a look HERE) and his name came up today again as I was reading the newspaper. His ex-wife Roberta Williams has granted permission to scientists to get inside the head of the notorious gangster and maybe find an explanation to his violent behaviour.

"I believe it’s to help with research, and might explain why guys like Carl do the violent things they do", Roberta said.

Roberta may also seek legal action, believing the Carl's killing may have been linked to a testimony he was preparing to give regarding a long-running investigation. Carl will be buried (without his brain then I'm guessing) at Keilor Cemetery on Friday and I'm guessing it might turn into a bit of circus he's obviously not a popular man in Melbourne.

The majority of the murders are still unsolved, although police believe that Carl Williams was responsible for ten of them. Carl Williams was arrested and pleaded guilty to three counts of murder on 28 February 2007 and was sentenced to life imprisonment with a non-parole period of 35 years.

Why am I telling you this now? Because Carl Williams was murdered today, bashed to death by his inmates with parts of an exercise bike. Maybe it was just a normal prison fight or maybe it's a bigger conspiracy, either way it's karma; what comes around goes around.

The 2010 Formula 1 Australian Grand Prix started in Melbourne yesterday. The race is part of the annual FIA Formula One World Championship and it's held at the Melbourne Grand Prix Circuit at Albert Park.

Prior to its inclusion in the World Championship it was held annually from 1928 to 1984 at various venues in Australia. It became part of the Formula One World Championship in 1985 and was held at the Adelaide Street Circuit in Adelaide, South Australia from that year to 1995, before moving to Melbourne in 1996.

The Australian Grand Prix is the second round of the Championship, having been the first race of each year, excluding 2006, since the event moved to Melbourne. During its years in Adelaide, the Australian Grand Prix was the final round of the Championship, replacing the Portuguese Grand Prix in that respect.

I managed to miss the race last year since I arrived in Melbourne in May and as I'm in Sweden now it's the same thing all over again. I've been in a car (not a race car though) on the circuit but I don't think that counts since most people that have been to Melbourne has. It would be cool to see the race at one point in the future but I guess I just have to settle for watching it on TV this year. :)

Simon just booked tickets for us to go see Mamma Mia at Her Majesty's Theater when I'm in Melbourne in May! I think I have the best boyfriend in the world. ;) I'm very excited, I've wanted to see the musical for sooo long.

Ironic that I'll go all the way to the other side of the world to finally get to see a musical with ABBA songs (ABBA being about as Swedish as it gets I mean). It's the 10th anniversary tour so the original Australian cast is reprising their critically-acclaimed performances. Not that I know any of them but it should be good.

It's almost here, the day I have planned for so long. Today is the last day of work here in Melbourne before I go away on my holiday. I feel excited but at the same time sad. I will miss working here, miss my wonderful co-workers, the everyday dramas and the laughters. I'm going home to Sweden, to do...yes, I still don't have a clue what I'll be doing...some work of some sort I presume, the future will tell. :P

I don't really care about that now. Right now I'm focused on getting all my stuff together both for my holiday and for the trip home. I think I'll try to send most of the stuff home to Sweden when I get back to Melbourne and maybe travel with an empty backpack to Bangkok (an advice my dear brother gave me...ta!). Otherwise I'll have no room for the shopping I plan on doing :P I have to sort it out once I know how much stuff we're talking about. I think I'll be able to send the whole suitcase home, don't you reckon? And then maybe an extra box of stuff if necessary. I can't really be bothered having both a backpack and a suitcase with me to Bangkok. If you do have tips or recommendations regarding sending stuff from Australia please let me know.

Maria is arriving tonight. I'm very excited! We leave for Cairns tomorrow morning, I think our flight is at 9.30 am. We'll spend the first couple of days up in Cairns just relaxing and planning the trip. My guess is that Maria will be pretty jet lagged the first couple of days but I don't mind spending a couple of days relaxing in the sun. It's around 30 degrees Celsius up there right now, sounds rather pleasant to me :) If you want to look at the weather in Cairns (and get jealous), HERE is a good site.

What else is new, Kylie got an addition to her family yesterday with Isabelle moving in to the house. My heart melted directly for this little cutie and she reminded me of Trulsan being a kitten (just about 17 years ago...lol). Simon who doesn't like cats that much at all wasn't that impressed and Ajax wasn't that thrilled about the idea of getting a sister either. But how can you not fall in love with a little kitten :P

The updates of the blog will not be as frequent during my holiday as you probably realise but I'll try to give you a couple of updates along the way.

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Positive today:

• The upcoming trip to Queensland.
• Maria arriving tonight. *jumping up and down in excitement*
• The joy experiencing new things, travelling to new places, meeting new friends bring to life. How sad it might feel right now I wouldn't have wanted to be without this experience!!

Negative today:

• That every meeting in life always is followed by a farewell. Leaving Australia will be hard. *holding my thumps that someone will come up with an idea how to move Australia closer to Europe* LOL

 

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Only 1 day until my holiday...

 

Finally, the album is updated with pictures from the previous weekend's sightseeing in Melbourne.

Melbourne

Read the post about the weekend HERE

I have big problems right now regarding my Swedish bank. The bank security device used to give me a code that I need to log in to my internet banking went flat (without any warning). Change the batteries would have been an easy solution but unfortunately that doesn’t work on my device (I tried it with the result being the device being reset.) You have to go into the bank office and change the whole device.

I used to have phone banking as well so I tried calling that and tried to enter what I thought was my pin code just to find out it had expired. Apparently the codes have been changed from 4 digits to 5 digits lately and if you didn’t use the service during a transition period and changed your code the old one was expired (this has probably been taking place while I’ve been here). Give me a break!!

Fine, the realisation had me worried but I didn’t really panic by then but after talking to the bank office I sure did. The information I got was that I do need to go into the office to exchange the device (hard since I’m in Australia), no devices are sent through the mail and without an authorization no one else can get a new device for you.  The authorization cannot be done through fax or e-mail or anything like that you have to personally go to the bank to get this fixed (once again hard when I’m in Australia) and it can’t be done through any other bank offices outside Sweden either.

The bank can’t tell me the amount of money I have in my account either through the phone and they can’t help me transfer money from my e-accounts to the account connected to my VISA-card. They can’t tell me what invoices I have received into the internet bank either but suggested I call the companies I get invoices from electronically and ask them to send me paper invoices instead. Basically they can’t help me at all. Once again, give me a break!! I think I’ll change my bank when I get home, to one with some customer service, which Swedbank obviously lack.

I so regret not following up on the “arrange for my mum to get authorization to my bank accounts in case anything happens” on my to-do list before I left Sweden. I ran out of time and didn’t think it would matter since I can do everything from my internet banking. Was I wrong or what!! So my advice to all your travellers out there is to make sure to give someone else access to your accounts because otherwise in case anything like this happens you’re screwed....like me! :(

So my situation right now is as follows: I can’t access my accounts so at the moment I don’t know how much money there is in my account (can’t get a bank statement through the ATM’s here either), I can’t see the invoices I only receive electronically to my internet bank which makes it hard to pay them, the money I transferred to my accounts only reached through the internet bank can’t be reached either (money I put away every month to use on my holiday in October).

On the positive side, I can still withdraw money with my VISA card (I just don’t know how much there is to withdraw). Yeah, that’s about all the positive sides of the story I can think of...oh yeah, it’s not the end of the month either so there shouldn’t be any unpaid bills...yet.  And it’s not May it’s September, this would have been an even bigger disaster if it would have happened when I just got here, now it’s only two months left before I’m home and can sort it out. Things I try to tell myself in order to cheer myself up....to tell you the truth it’s not really working.

If you have any smart solutions how to solve this dilemma, please let me know, I consider myself being desperate at the moment. But I will try not to let this ruin my weekend in Sydney and I’ll deal with it when I get back next week.

Because of the drama around this yesterday I still haven’t uploaded the photos from last weekend so I’m afraid you have to wait until the end of the weekend since I’m leaving for Sydney straight from work today.

Take care and have a nice weekend!

Spent another nice weekend together with Simon. My second to last weekend in Melbourne before my holiday actually since I’ll be spending the two upcoming weekends in Sydney and Adelaide.

I ended the work week with a night out in the city on Friday. We went for a couple of drinks at a place called the Cabana Club. A pretty cool place, tucked away in a basement in an ally just of Exhibition Street.  Finished off the night spending a couple of hours at CQ before I called it the night.

Saturday started with a couple of episodes of Sex and the City on the couch before I did anything productive. Went to the camera store and bought a new camera bag that fits both my camera and the extra lens. A mission for the day was to find lights for Simon’s house too so we ended up taking a trip to IKEA. Didn’t find any lights that we liked but I stocked up on some lollies and chocolate (mmm Ahlgrens bilar and Marabou Daim chocolate).  Dinner at the Waterfront Seafood Restaurant in the Crown Entertainment Complex together with Simon’s mum ended a nice Saturday. I had a beautiful barramundi dish (a fish from Northern Australia).

Since my mission every weekend is to try to experience something new and do something touristy, Sunday was scheduled to be the day. Started off by heading to the city and Mitchells Adventure to try on the backpack I’ve found there one more time. It still felt like a perfect fit and I ended up buying it so now I’m one step closer to being ready for my holiday.

A quick trip to another lighting store and pick up some light we found there the other day for Simon before our lunch date with Julie and Terry. We tried a new place (new to us that is) on Brunswick Street in Fitzroy called the Cherry lounge which was really nice.

Simon and I then headed to Eureka Skydeck. The weather wasn’t too bad (read at least it wasn’t raining) so we got a nice 360 degree view of the city. It looks so different from above! Eureka Skydeck has a unique offer called The Edge – a glass cube which projects 3 meters out from the building with you in it (suspended almost 300 metres above the ground). Something we ended up NOT doing even if it would have been cool since the Skydeck is the only observation deck in the world that offers anything like this but the wait for this was 1 hour and 30 minutes which seemed a little too long. We just had to settle with walking out on the windy balcony instead, not as cool but cool enough :P

Our next stop once we felt that we had seen enough of the view was the Shrine of Remembrance. The Shrine of Remembrance is Victoria’s largest and most visited war memorial located on St Kilda Road just south of the CBD. The Shrine was built between July 1928 and November 1934 in remembrance of the men and women of Victoria who served and those who died in the Great War of 1914-1918. It now serves as a memorial for all Australians who served in war and it is the site of annual observances of ANZAC Day (25 April) and Remembrance Day (11 November).

The Shrine of Remembrance

View of the City from the balcony of the Shrine

To top off the day we took a walk through the Royal Botanical Gardens (RBG).  RBG Melbourne was  founded in 1846 and is recognised as one of the world’s finest botanic gardens. And I must admit it was really nice even though a lot of the flowers aren’t really flowering at the moment. There are over 10,000 species and 50,000 individual plants in the 38 hectare gardens, including trees and plants of great cultural value. Many of these plants are irreplaceable, endangered or even extinct in the wild.

View of the RBG with the Eureka Tower in the background


Bush Lily

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More photos from the day can be found in the updated Picasa album Melbourne. (*NOW UPDATED*)

Melbourne

Learned something new today when I got pinched and punched this morning by my co-worker accompanied by the phrase “A pinch and a punch for the first day of the month”. For those who know me, you already know I immediately had to google it and see what that was all about and this is what I found out:

The phrase is said the first day of a new month, accompanied by a pinch and (a gentle) punch to the victim. This dates from old England when people thought that witches still existed. It was believed that salt would make a witch weak so the pinch part is for a pinch of salt. She would be so weak from the salt that she could be easily banished by the punch.

A common extension of this phrase is to add "and no returns" or “slip slap you can’t do it back” to the end of the phrase, to prevent the person from doing it back. You can still respond with "a kick and a flick for being so quick" gently kicking and flicking the person. They sure are funny people, the Aussies :P  

First day of Spring today and the sun is actually out. You got to love that!

Have a good one!

Went for the Nikkor AF-S DX VR 55-200 mm f/4.5-5.6G IF-ED in the end since the price was reasonable, "only" 470 AUD (~3000 SEK). (Nikon's homepage: English: HERE or Swedish: HERE) You might ask yourself why I didn't choose the 18-200 mm one instead because it's considered to be slightly better. The answer to that is that I'm still a amateur so I'll definitely think this one will cover my needs for now and the price for the 18-200 mm one is about 4 times the 55-200 mm one.

The weather has unfortunatly not been great so I haven't tried out the lens that much yet. I did go out and test it for a little bit though and here is the result:

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Test report on Photozone can be found HERE if you're interested in reading more about the lens (and other lenses as well if you're looking to buy one)

Time flies. In 5 weeks I'll be in Cairns on my holiday. 5 weeks! My stay here in Melbourne has passed really quickly (I've been here 17 weeks on Saturday) and it is with mixed feelings I think about my return to Sweden. Of course, I do miss friends, family and all that back home and I'm really looking forward to seeing you all again. I'm especially excited about finally meeting Ella for the first time. Last week Maria and Håkan asked me if I would like to become her godmother and of course I accepted. I will spoil her rotten! Haha!

But on the other hand I will miss all the friends I've made down here. I will miss living in Melbourne. There are so many things in the lifestyle here that I will miss and as much as I miss Sweden I will miss Oz when I go home. I will miss my work colleagues as well. Not knowing what my future bear in mind at my company in Sweden when I do return doesn't make things any easier. Especially this week as my company started negotiations with the trading unions with the intention of closing two of our smaller production units in Sweden. It doesn't affect me and my job but it sure makes me think what the future has in store.

I try not to think too much about all this stuff but it is hard. I won't let it ruin the months I have left. So moving on to talk about more pleasant stuff, I have two more weekend trips booked in for September that I'm really looking forward to, one to Sydney and one to Adelaide. The rest of the weekends will be spent in Melbourne and I'm looking forward to that as well.

I'll buy a new lens for my camera this weekend and if the weather treats us well I'll try it out on Saturday from the skydeck at the Eureka tower (the highest viewing platform in the Southern Hemisphere). The last week has treated us with some really windy and rainy weather. Apparently that's normal for this season but it's not very pleasant and I hope the weekend will be better. I also have a footy game booked in on Saturday and Simon's birthday on Sunday. I can't wait for it to be Friday afternoon!

Now you know what's going on down here so now it's your turn to update me on the goss in Sweden?

Wednesday and half of the week has past. Don't feel as tired this week as the last one so the trip last weekend must have helped :)

I went to the movies last night and saw The Hangover, very funny! It's nice to have a good laugh or two from time to time :). Most of the cinemas have cheaper tickets on Tuesdays, commonly known as Tight Arse Tuesdays. The movie tickets are normally around $17-18 (about the same as in Sweden) and on Tuesdays around $10.
The weekend is planned as it usually is nowadays: I have a pole dancing class Friday evening (lol) and a winery tour on Saturday. Hopefully the weather will be nice. Though I'll be missing my camera lenses...or mine or mine, the ones I've borrowed the whole time I've been here and that I now have returned. I think I have to go out and buy myself a new lens. It's been nice to try out a couple of different ones and see which one I want. I'll probably end up buying the 18-105 mm or 18-200 mm, I haven't really decided yet. I also would love to have a macro lens but that has to wait, maybe for my birthday in October: P

Work hasn't been crazy busy lately and I've actually done reasonable hours the last couple of weeks. Feels like I've lost my motivation though and I really don't know why. I have to try to get it back somehow. It's hard though when you have to get help from other people that are very busy. They are even busier now since the Factory Manager got a ‘mini stroke' yesterday and was rushed to the hospital, which means we are one man short and he's one of the key persons in the production. He's doing alright and recovering but he'll probably be home for a couple of weeks at least.

I haven't mentioned this yet but I'll be moving next week, leaving my serviced apartment and moving in with Kylie in her house instead, looking forward to that. It won't be so lonely which is nice. Kylie also has a cat, Ajax, which is nice (even if he's a little crazy). I really miss my animals! So I'll have a new address as of Wednesday next week so stop sending things to the Quest apartment...not that I really received anything...two postcards since I arrived here...haha!

Next week will be a short work week for me; I'm leaving for New Zealand on Thursday afternoon. Hopefully I'll have a good time over there and no issues with customs getting back into the country again.

I'm almost half way now, only 70 days left until I have my holiday and I've been here for 81 days. I've really started to feel more at home here in Melbourne now and I like being here. I've started to get some friends and it's going to be hard to leave in October...

But I'm going to try not to think about that now. I have no plans for the evening. I think I just going to relax and do nothing. Yes, do nothing!