12 January 2014<\/p>\n\n\n\n
It’s almost 9 AM and it’s already hot. \u00a0And I mean, real freaking hot. \u00a0It’s 34 degrees outside, at nine in the morning. \u00a0Crazy. \u00a0Last night I went to bed at around 10, and it was still 36. \u00a0We hit 47 at one point according to my phone (well it isn’t a real thermometer but it reads weather updates via the 4G connection). \u00a0It’s a strange couple of days, everybody tries to lock themselves indoors, or go to the shopping malls, or the cinema. Anything to avoid the heat. \u00a0I guess a lot of people are at the beach, but I find it hard to imagine anyone lying there, getting their tan, so they must be all in the water, therefore the fist few yards of sea must be absolutely packed. \u00a0You couldn’t even swim if you wanted to I bet. \u00a0<\/p>\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n
Anyway, I might go down and check it out myself later this afternoon. \u00a0For now, the crappy aircon unit in the house blows some vaguely coldish air in the living room and it’s bearable. \u00a0But everything is hot. \u00a0The walls, the floor, every object you touch, cold water comes out boiling hot from the tap as it’s been sitting in the pipes for a while. Last night I laughed when I brushed my teeth because my toothbrush was hot when I put it in my mouth.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
When I left home yesterday morning, at about 3 PM, there was a strange, eery silence. With everyone indoors, all you could hear was the quiet humming of the air conditioning units. No cars, no children playing in the backyard, not even a bird. Just silence. I felt like I just woke up in a movie, and I was the sole survivor. Then I turned on the music. My new iPod Classic 160gb is connected to the car stereo, and runs on shuffle, so it varies from Miles Davis, to Slipknot. It’s almost full actually, and I just bought it. There are some crap artists, granted, some I don’t even know who sings, I just like the song, or I did at one point and listening to it reminds me of good memories. The Snowdroppers broke the silence, and I drove off. I went shopping, since the shops are all air conditioned, and I needed a pair of jeans. Because yes, readers, I have put on weight ! Quite a bit actually, my Ganesha tattoo is looking rather plump, and I look like Homer Simpson. Well that’s a tad exaggerated, I’m not quite as yellow as Homer.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
When I landed in Perth, back in December 2012, I was returning from six months in Asia. I absolutely loved it of course, and loved the food. But I was on a tight budget, for starters, and I prefer eating street food than in a restaurant. For two reasons mainly. One, it tastes great in the street stalls, most of the time anyway, sometimes it does taste like arse and you’ll spend the rest of the evening cursing your poor choices. But, let’s be honest, you can’t read the fucking menu so you just pointed at things and said “that looks good, give me three of those please” without knowing what’s in there. Most of the time then, it’s perfect. The rice is cooked to perfection, the vegetables made you love salad again, and the meat, when there is meat, is juicy and tender. Plus, it costs fuck all so, win win.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
The second reason why I don’t eat in “farang” places in Asia is because they have a fridge. It sounds silly, but a fridge means whatever is stored in there is probably not as fresh as you might think. They might have a fridge but nobody told them about the cold chain, the hygiene, the shelf life. Hell they probably never cleaned the fridge since they bought it, ten years ago. I remember when we were in South Laos with my sister Julie, on the island of Don Khong in the Si Phan Don archipelago (called “the four thousands islands” on the Mekong river), we spent three days in a rather comfortable backpackers. We had been on the road and in some shitty ones in the previous few days so we thought we’d relax for a while, plus the view of the Mekong was spectacular and the island had a few sites we could explore. So, the food wasn’t half bad but one day Julie ordered some chicken noodles I think, and she could smell a fishy odour, without thinking much about it I told her “oh it’s probably oyster sauce don’t worry” but after the second bite she stopped and sent the dish back. She had something else brought in and the rest of the evening was fine.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
But then, she spent the next three days hugging the toilet, with a strong fever and a rather upset stomach. I kept her hydrated as much as I could but there was nothing to be done, whatever she ate had to be flushed out of her system. After a rather feisty conversation with the owner and the chef, I got him to admit the chicken Julie had eaten had spent 48h in the sun, on the bank of the river, while the guys repaired the boat engine. Of course when the meat finally arrived on the island, it was bad, but who cares, right, as long as you have a fridge, you can shove bad meat in there, customer won’t know the difference, and most of them are backpackers so they’ll be gone by the next morning.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Truth is, in a street stall, there are no fridge, same goes for a market, or a local kindly inviting you to their humble home. So whatever you eat there, you can be absolutely sure it’s 100% fresh, as they have no choice. And they usually have little, if no, money, so they cannot afford to let any food go bad. Whatever they have they eat, or rather, whatever they need to eat, they will buy that right quantity, no more no less.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
So, as I was saying, I ate street food for six months, which usually means for a dollar or two, you get one bowl of rice, with some meat and vegetables. That’s it. There is no gigantic serving like we have in the “rich countries”, since nobody can afford to waste anything. Which means, after a few weeks only, I’d have lost a few kilos, and by the time Claire met me at Perth Airport in Dec 2012. I looked like I’d came out of jail, and been starved, or I was sick and dying.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
But then, February 2013, two months or so after I got back, I started work at CBM and we moved in, started to cook again, started to eat well, and started to put on weight again. Not to mention all that time, Claire was working as a waitress in an Indian restaurant and she brought take aways every day. Indian food is rich, creamy and fatty.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
So that was the start of 2013, the rest was pretty much along the same lines : building the foundations. A job, for both of us. A house, and therefore living together, which even though we’d been together for quite some times, we had never done before, except for that couple of weeks when I moved out of my flat in Noumea. Then a new car, since Claire’s got stolen. New furniture, new everything. 2013 was very much about the foundations for us.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
We got Troopy back, we enhanced it a little with the rooftop tent ; we got the house and enhanced our life too. And we got our couple, and got to learn how this shit works. In twelve months, we went from renting a tiny room in an overpriced house, to a lovely family in the hills in exchange for some handy work , to renting a wicked house in the suburbia. At first the house was a bit shit, to be honest. Everything is crooked, half the house is collapsing into the backyard, the wooden floors and walls are chewed through and through by the termites, we have a possum or a rat living in the roof, and the furniture we have is from the side of the street. Australian people love to change their furniture once or twice a year, and they don’t throw the old ones in the tip, they simply place it on the kerb, and some fortunate couple from overseas with no money to buy stuff will pick it up. So in less than two days, we had the empty house all furnished. Some of it was left from the previous tenants, or the landlord, the landlady rather, Judith. Some we got from the street, some we got from Gumtree, a website for private ads, free or not, for everything ranging from electronics, clothes, furniture even cars. Our couch for instance, was from the VP (I think he was the VP, I couldn’t read his patch properly) of the local chapter of the Gipsy Jokers, we picked it up from his house directly, free. When we bought our own new couch (last month in fact), we gave it away to a couple from South Africa who’d just moved in. Thank you Gumtree.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Also, we made new friends. Claire had already been here for a few months so her circle of friends had already grown, I just basically joined the group really. They’re a bunch of expats in fact, we have South Africa, Columbia, Maurice, France, Italy, Brasil, etc even Poland. Good mates. Camping trips, barbecues, birthday parties, beach impromptus. Even a proposal.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Funny how expats tend to hang out with expats. I noticed the same when I lived in Melbourne, or in Noumea. Maybe it’s because for all of us, our families are far away, so the expat community becomes our family. It’s enlightening anyway, because a discussion with people from the four corners of the globe turns a subject in a three dimensional thing, you really get to see every point of view, from every angle. And we all have different experience, age, religion or even skin colour, which make our debates very complete, very insightful.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Over the past year then, our lives have been improving every day. It’s been a challenging year, for sure. Finding a job, getting a sponsor, getting a roof over our heads, a car, going away as often as we possibly can. But it’s been a great year.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Now, we’re ready to tackle on 2014. Happy new year everybody.<\/p>\n\n\nngg_shortcode_0_placeholder\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
12 January 2014 It’s almost 9 AM and it’s already hot. \u00a0And I mean, real freaking hot. \u00a0It’s 34 degrees outside, at nine in the morning. \u00a0Crazy. \u00a0Last night I went to bed at around 10, and it was still 36. \u00a0We hit 47 at one point according to my phone (well it isn’t, Read More<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":4550,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"ngg_post_thumbnail":0,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_feature_clip_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2},"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[188,4,375],"tags":[63,107,109,47,80],"class_list":["post-968","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-blog","category-news","category-photos","tag-4-x-4","tag-camping","tag-perth","tag-troopy","tag-western-australia"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p27S7o-fC","jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/walkabout.be\/wp-content\/uploads\/ngg_featured\/img_0799.jpg?fit=1024%2C768&ssl=1","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/walkabout.be\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/968","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/walkabout.be\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/walkabout.be\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/walkabout.be\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/walkabout.be\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=968"}],"version-history":[{"count":9,"href":"https:\/\/walkabout.be\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/968\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":47627,"href":"https:\/\/walkabout.be\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/968\/revisions\/47627"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/walkabout.be\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/4550"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/walkabout.be\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=968"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/walkabout.be\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=968"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/walkabout.be\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=968"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}