Bucks Party Weekend

My taxi driver this morning was a Pakistani gentleman, who I had a good conversation with in regards to being a taxi driver. He was pretty friendly and started off by asking and apologising if he had woken anyone up when calling for me, since the booking system has you put in a telephone number when you book. I didn’t catch his name, nor did I really need it. We talked about the crazy dust storm that we had recently, and then onto being a taxi driver.

What I found out, at least from his perspective, being a taxi driver isn’t a lonely job because you get to talk to and meet a lot of people all the time, and the hours are good because you can choose to work whatever hours and where you like. I knew that most taxi drivers didn’t own their vehicles but other than that I didn’t really have any details. What I did learn today though was that there is generally an “owner” of the vehicle, that the drivers “rent” the car from on a daily basis. The deal for him was $140 a day and the car must be returned at the end of a 12hr period with a full tank of petrol. What he did with it in between was up to him.

What this means though, is that with the government and company set fares, the earning potential is on luck of what fares he picks up, and also how much he wants to work. He said, if he doesn’t feel like working that day, he doesn’t rent the car, simple. If he gets the car, works for an hour, then says, hmm, don’t feel like it, then he just goes home, parks the taxi for a few hours, then takes it back again etc. “It won’t make you a millionaire but it pays the bills” – Pakistani Taxi Driver. He had been doing it for thirteen years.

The conversation ending was pretty funny with him asking me when I was going to be married...

At the airport, I had no luggage to check in, so I went straight through to the security checkpoint, and yes, lo and behold, as usual, I got tagged and tested for narcotics and explosives. This seems to be a regular occurrence, perhaps because I take my boots off or something, but as soon as I took my bag, shoes and laptop off the line and saw the guy, I knew he was going to ask me. He said, blah blah, I said, yes, I’ve done it before and help up and out my palms without him asking me. Then the inside of my bag, and wow! Like you wouldn’t believe it, my stuff, my hands, my boots were clean! /sarcasm.

I went to the food court and got some hash browns to eat because I was going to be hungry being awake at 3:30am and having some cereal wasn’t really going to help me make it until whenever I can get lunch.... And I also got some nestle iced tea from a vending machine at the gate (39 Virgin Blue terminal). The boarding went smoothly, sat next to a quiet couple, and I had a window seat (no, I didn’t select it since I intended to sleep the entire time). My seat was slightly broken in that it wouldn’t stay upright whenever I put weight on the back. The flight attendant thought I was deliberately leaning back but I wasn’t and I had to demonstrate to her that it was broken before she stopped asking me to put it up. For the flight, I slept, fairly okay, no turbulence to speak of, though I may have been sunburned on my lips by the feel of them since I had a window seat... Then, when we were coming in to land, another male attendant told me to put it up but the female attendant told him it was broken. Which, you think that was fine, but he went and made a quip about me being fat! Well, he said, joking, at the end, and it’s obvious I wasn’t that fat, but boy, I hope he wouldn’t have said that to someone who actually was fat in a seat like that.... ~imagines the indignity and complaint to be filed afterwards~.

I disembarked fairly late because the quiet couple next to me were similar to me, in preferring to sit and wait for the mad rush to get out, before smoothly exiting their seats and getting their carry-on luggage. I wasn’t really in any rush either so it didn’t bother me in the slightest. Walking across the tarmac this morning to board and disembark from the plane, I noticed that the line markers that the ground staff uses to keep people away from the engines were attached to wheelie bins. Specially modified wheelie bins with these hook bits on them. They look funny as, as if they are too cheap-ass to use proper markers or something, but thinking about it now, it’s probably a god thing because they can store the actual lines inside the bin and move them. But still, they look funny as.

Popped over to the train link, paid $19.70 for a ticket to Fruitgrove (same price to Altandi or Runcorn...) and boarded the train with 9 minutes. The seats at the station claimed that there was free wireless hotspot, so I tried to connect to it with my netbook, the rather slow boot it has now, I had 5 minutes once everything had loaded (I was running on power saving mode), but while I could connect to the wireless signal, I couldn’t get my browser to connect to sites, so I don’t know if it was a proxy issue or something, which it doesn’t matter I guess, only for four minutes I was just wanting to see if they actually had a half decent connection. Though the connection said 300mbps when I connected O_O Talk about a huge booster, when most places are like a 54mbps connection...

The dude directing people told me that I should stay on the train and change at coopers plains to get to Fruitgrove since the airport train to the Gold Coast ran express to Coopers Plains. So I’ll try that. I traditionally just get off at Central and then switch trains for the usual all stations service down the line. ~shrug~ so thats what I’m doing, writing on the train. I’m now at Central and the time is 8:28am. An hour out from when I landed, not making too bad a time even if I was going to be originally going to paintball. Heck, haha, I could go paintball by myself, and still make the 5pm Lasertag :P

So, now I’ve just made it past Roma St, then it will be South Brisbane, Southbank, Park Rd, Coopers Plains and then I’ll have to change stations, so I’ll save off now.

It’s now 4:41pm, and I’m here at the laserzone place waiting for the friends to turn up to have some low tech fun. Interestingly, paintball technologies these days make it more high tech than lasertag is..

What did I do today? I ate a lot, and I also napped. Arriving at my cousins place, I had a lot of food pushed upon me, which I ate some of it, not all of it, then the rest of my uncles and aunts and cousins came around, which then they had lunch while watching a drama on satellite tv, kind of a weekly occurrence. What made it funny though was my cousins daughter, so I guess still my cousin, who is four years old.

She speaks Chinese and English and is very energetic. Besides the fact that she was a little afraid of me because she had never seen me before in her life, she was fairly outgoing. She had her own rules to play Connect 4, which, if you followed, would have allowed her to win every time LOL. My cousin Daniel, who is a bit of a ‘tard and likes to mess with her, was helping her colour in a poster of Dora the Explorer, but he was messing it up deliberately, to which she then called him a terrible terrible man, in perfect English ROFLOL. She was also very courteous and methodical when it came to dispensing the Bio-Feel (ripoff of Yakult drinks) to everyone after lunch, looking around to see who had one, who hadn’t had one, and even replying “you’re welcome” when thanked for the little bottle she gave to people. Very cute. She has some kind of skin blemish condition which is on her face and on her back, a pigmentation issue, which isn’t bad or harmful, but the skin on her left cheek is darker, and the skin on her back between the lower edge of the scapulae is lighter. But, because of how people would be like “aww” and touch her face, she’s been taught to “show them the hand” (i.e. put her palm up to them in a stop sign) and say “No!) because she doesn’t want their pity.

I think she exhibits behaviour of a intelligent kid, so we’ll see how she turns out when she gets a little older. The rest of my cousins seem to have ended up in the accessories market, with my aunt shipping over from Taiwan a bunch of accessories for them to sell at market and online. They needed a table to use at the markets that they are going to (their first venture) so we went to the Logan City Recycling Market, and browsed through a lot of stuff to find something suitable. In the end, we got some folding stands and some boards to form a table which they will throw a table cloth over the top to make it look nice. The whole lot came to $22, which my uncle thought was expensive, but I thought it was quite reasonable considering the folding stands probably would cost that much each if bought new, say from K-Mart or something.

After that, I went back to the other cousins house, where I helped her look through a cover letter for a sponsorship proposal. The university society she was in is holding a fundraising event to raise money for the Taiwan Earthquake victims, similar to what the Taiwanese Students Association did at my own uni, but they are having a major event with music, performances and a fashion show, which she is co-ordinating the fashion show. Then I got driven over here by my uncle to the lasertag place.

It’s been a long long time since I’ve been here, but I know I’ve been here before for a marathon 12midnight to 6am session in my school years. Long long time ago. It’s good to see that it’s still looking to be a popular place with lots of kids and adults still playing and roaming it’s halls. I don’t actually know how many people are going to be here tonight though..... hmm. In any case, I’ll wrap up for now. 4:53pm.

It’s now Sunday and I’m at domestic airport in Brisbane waiting for my flight home. Unfortunately for me the flight has been delayed for 45min, quite possibly due to roll on effects of the dust storms or something hmm. Now, how do I recap the events of last night hmm.

If I was to make sound effects to cover the events, it would perhaps go something like this.
“Suit Activated”. Pew pew pew “Game Overrrrrr Maaaaan”. Zvroom. Clink clink, glug clink glug, trudge trudge. Pow, kabam, hahahaha. Zroom, blah blah, Zzzzz.

Now to expand it in my customary long winded epic descriptions. The guys turned up a little late to the lasertag venue, but I was used to that, it’s a Gauvin thing LOL. We hung around outside for a little chatting while waiting for the others to arrive. It didn’t take too long, but all in all, there were seven of us. We then trooped inside and put in for the games. We had to sit through an ultra ultra lame briefing thing video that told us how the game worked etc, which, I would have hoped they would have skipped since most of us had played before, and those who hadn’t were old enough to probably figure it out with simple spoken terms and not the 10 min wasted watching this terrible video.

We strapped on our packs and each pack had a name that would be on the ranking lists at the end of each round. I got mine and it had the name Zim. Simple enough. First round was Free For All individual, second round was a Team Deathmatch, and then in the last round, once again it was Free For All that we played. The course inside apparently has changed a little since I was there last, but it didn’t feel that different. There was upstairs and downstairs sections and three zones to accommodate up to three teams (red, blue and green) at a time.

Running around in the semi-dark was fun, even though you’re not meant to run. It’s not like we were sprinting, but a light jog in some areas to cover ground to get into cover as soon as possible. It works the thighs also to duck and crouch around to find cover and so forth. At the end of each of the rounds, we popped out to check the scores, with each round running 10 minutes. For my results, I came in third, then first on my team (still third overall for the round) and then in the third round, I came in third yet again. Consistency lol. We got pretty sweaty from it because there was no moving air inside the actual play zone, and only a single air-conditioning unit in the main lobby area.

Once the rounds were over, it was time for dinner and drinks somewhere. The location was apparently the Lychee Lounge on Boundary Rd in West End. We went back to the house in Indooroopilly where we got changed for dinner. The drive back into West End was dusty, real dusty. The dust storms were still floating around and right now at the airport at 10:30am, there is still a visible dust haze here, and it was apparently tasted in the air this morning also. We found parking on a side street and walked to the lounge. I had gone with the bride’s father and brother, and waited for the groom’s boys to come. Eventually, after an extended wait, we were all finally there and headed inside.

The place is very cosy, very small but packed full of tables and block benches, stools and high tables, with no bar to sit at, the entire bar was for placing the made drinks so they could be served. There was a kitchen off to one side, and that was pretty much it. We ordered some food and drinks to begin off the evening. For me, I had a mojito, a cocktail based on soda with mint and lime. It wasn’t too bad, alright but probably not really something I’d drink on a regular basis as such. For the meal aspect, I went with the tapas option and got three dishes. A sourdough bread with pesto and sliced onion, a dish of sesame tempura prawn with cucumber tartare sauce, and one of the specials of the day, pork belly with a raspberry confit/jus. The others got a variety of others such as eye fillet steak with mash and shitake mushrooms, pad thai, and also another dish that I didn’t pick the name of. So we ate and chatted and had our drinks, reliving the days of yesteryear when the groom to be was up to crazy things, drinking stories and what not.

Post food wise, I had another cocktail, which someone picked for me, called a Bloodthirsty Blizzard. It was a citrus based cocktail with blood orange, cuirass alcohol, orange zest and some other stuff. It was slightly bitter, but alright. Very citrus. A few hours later, we decided to wrap it up and got the bill. The whole lot came to $543 for the whole table. It wasn’t actually as high as we thought it might have been. My share for it was $58 + the special (the pork belly, which was labelled as Misc, but it had 4x, where as it was only two of us on the table that had it, but the price was lower, so I think it was 2x price of the lower price, and thus 2x2 was the 4x). Reasonable because the quality was very nice. Murray, who was a chef was very impressed with it, it exceeded his expectations of what it would be, so that tells you something.

We ended up walking over to Murrays house in South Brisbane because they were going to get a few more drinks from a bottle shop down the hill from his house. By the time we got there, and someone went for a jog to buy it, they had actually already shut shop. We then just ended up playing Murray’s Xbox360 console on his very nice big flatscreen Samsung LCD. We played Street Fighter IV, then played Bully, Left4Dead, Puzzle Fighter and then Castle Crashers. It was pretty fun. But then it was getting pretty late, so we went home.

Once we got back to the house, the groom crashed out, and I stayed up for another hour or so talking to one of the guys because I didn’t manage to catch up during the evening, before he went to bed, and I too bunked down, but not before I made a booking for the taxi.

In the morning, after three hours of sleep, I was awake because the bride to be was up in the kitchen before her morning exercise swim. I stayed up to do my emails etc, before saying goodbye to people when they had got up, and caught the taxi. The taxi ride was pretty uneventful and my driver was non-talkative, so it was very quiet and I was nodding off to sleep, having only six hours in the last 48 hours. The taxi fare came to $59.70, $3.30 cheaper than how much it cost me to get to the airport in Sydney. The taxi driver was also a little strange in that he kept changing lanes at times, which resulted in no change, because he just changed back without doing anything (like overtaking etc). Still, I got there in one piece so, nothing to complain about.

Once I passed through the airport security, I discovered that my flight had been delayed by forty-five minutes, ~sigh~ and then thus I started my writing in the food court. Well, it didn’t turn out to be as epic as I thought it was. I could make it more epic I guess, but I don’t really feel like writing that much. Hmm, so I’m pretty much done for the moment. ~waits for the flight~.

Post flight, I must say, it was the scariest landing I have ever had, even counting the strange European flight where people clapped and cheered once the plane had landed. The winds today in Sydney are really strong and gusty, and we experienced significant turbulence on the approach, but what made it scary was not the turbulence, but the speed that we came flying down on the runway at. It was the fastest I have ever experienced, watching the buildings coming by, as we made the south-north runway approach. The actual touchdown was very smooth, but we hovered above the tarmac about 1-2m for quite a distance at very high speeds before the wheels touched (with some wing rocking motions) and then the loud roar as the engine speed was cranked back. I knew we were going much faster than usual because when the engines kicked in, I was physically pushed forwards into my seatbelt more than normal and the engine roar lasted longer...

Other than that, it was a rather uneventful trip home. Besides the crazy strong winds making the wind-chill factor high, dropping today’s temperature to only 17°C even though it’s nice and sunny.... Had a shower and am feeling much more refreshed. A good weekend.