Oct 30 - Rain and Laundry

Today accounted for a whole lot of nothing. Just one of those throw-away days (Not a great sales pitch for reading today's blog, I know). Woke up to rain after it had poured through the night and headed down to the TV room to watch (surprisingly) NBA basketball. I don't even remotely enjoy basketball, but it was so nice to see a real sport for once. Then the intensive coverage on the first day of the Melbourne Cup began and I watched the first of 8 races. Glad I didn't fork over $70 to watch that in the rain. It's horses. They run. Couple minutes and it's over and some old fat white guys are happy that their animal won them some more money. The races happening today are spaced out something like every 45 minutes. Each race has its own name and more importantly, its own sponsor. The 6th race is the Victoria Derby, AKA the most important race of day one and apparently considered by some to be the best race of the 4 days of racing. I say a horse race is a horse race, but maybe that's just me. At this point, B was still sleeping and there wasn't much happening around the hostel, so I decided to venture out to browse the shops on Smith Street. Smith Street would be the Collingwood equivalent to Broadway Avenue in Saskatoon; trendy, artsy, etc. It wasn't raining, but was a bit chilly. But being a true Canadian I threw on my Riders t-shirt, a pair of shorts and some shoes and headed out into the damp streets.

I brought along my disposable camera that had photos from snorkeling in the Whitsundays and the Great Barrier Reef trip out of Port Douglas, and I shortly located a one-hour photo place and dropped my disposable off with some very nice Asian folks to process the film. Then I headed in the opposite direction on Smith and checked out some of the surf shops and outlet stores that are oddly enough in this area of town. Since it was cold out and we are heading to New Zealand on Tuesday, I bought a Nike zip-up hoodie. With my new purchase keeping me warm, I headed back towards the photo shop, but the hour wasn't up yet, so I picked up a pizza bun type thing from a bakery and as I enjoyed it with some juice, it started to rain. Waited it out awhile, but it didn't let up, so I hustled over to the photo place, got my pictures, then jogged back to the hostel (which was several blocks away). By the time I returned, it was pouring rain, and from this point on, it rained all day and well into the night. I checked out my photos and I'd say about half turned out decently, though most looked similar. I did get a couple clear ones of clownfish though, so all in all the camera was a success. Now the issue is finding a scanner to scan the images so I can upload them onto Facebook.

B was up now and apparently I had just missed a free BBQ at the hostel, but I was full from my pizza bun, so everyone wins in the end. Decided to take a nap (I was up at like 10 AM today, thank you very much!) and afterwards headed to the laundromat under the train tracks (it looked like a cliche big city laundry place) to do some much needed laundry. After washing and drying and catching up on all the Hollywood gossip via the magazines in the laundromat, we booked it back to the hostel through the rain, shielding our dry laundry under rain jackets. Dropped off the clothes and walked to Woolworth's for much needed groceries. Shopped like grown-ups for 3 days worth of meals and walked back to the hostel for a meal of steak and potatoes, fried in a fresh garlic puree/butter mix. Yeah, serious chef skills. Then just relaxed after dinner. Had a good convo with two German girls, then with a Taiwanese guy (who showed me a bunch of Powerpoint slides on Taiwan that he was so proud of). Then I enjoyed the treat of watching an American movie - Mr. and Mrs. Smith (shown on Aussie TV, imagine!), while B caught up on South Park on the netbook. Tomorrow morning I might try and check out mass in a huge Catholic Church in West Melbourne. See how they do things over here. If I can wake up that early. If Jesus wants me attending mass, He'll make sure I'm awake in time. Ball's in His court now, as they say. (That was a pretty long blog post for a nothing day...and you read the whole thing. Shouldn't you be working or something?)