Tour, Trip, & Trade

My funny story this post comes from a trip I went on yesterday. We were winding through some curvy roads in a long van holding 21 people, and the more I looked out the window, the more I started to feel sweaty and clammy and just all-around ill. So I closed my eyes and rested for a while, and at the next stop decided to order a coffee, just to have something liquid in me. I ordered a coffee with cream and sugar, pretty basic. Well, I give the lady my name for the order, then wait for a few minutes as she prepares my coffee - I'm the only one in the little shop at the moment. She finishes up a few minutes later and announces, "Flat white." I'm thinking, why'd she make that when there's no one else here? Surely she could just make my coffee now? So I wait a bit, and she comes over to the counter again and says, "Chris, flat white?". Then I'm thinking, what'd you call me?! But I shook my head - nope, not me, I got a coffee with milk and sugar. Finally, she repeats it again and looks right at me: "Chris - didn't you order a flat white?" So I had no choice - I had to be straight up. "No," I said, "I order a coffee with cream and sugar." They're the same thing. She hadn't put the sugar in yet, so a coffee with cream is colloquially known as a "flat white." Then she asks how many sugars I want, so I said four. "One?" she asks. Seriously? "No, could I have four please?" She wouldn't do it - three was her "personal" maximum for a coffee that size, so she would only put three in. Phew, the coffee vernacular down here, hey!

This week included some exciting opportunities! First on the list was the Sydney Opera House tour. It was really great. Our tour guide took plenty of time to go through everything in detail, disregarding how long that might take. In fact, our one-hour tour was ten minutes shy of two hours. We got to see several of the performance halls, including the most modular hall where Coldplay has done some recording on (I believe) their most recent album. I'll be back later this season to see Rigolletto. I learned during the tour that they used real horses during the opera Carmen - how cool would that have been, hey?

Then it was night photography at Circular Quay, the harbor where you can the Harbour Bridge and the Opera House. Nick, a buddy here from the University of Texas at Austin, is a great airline photographer, but can shoot anything. He wanted to get some night shots of the famous Sydney architecture before Vivid Sydney started (the festival of lights that began just two days ago, May 23rd, and goes for about two weeks). The fun part about that night was the style of photography. Since there's much less light at night, you have to take pictures using long exposure. So each shot takes somewhere between 2.5 seconds and 30 seconds, which means you have to stay still for that long if you're in the shot. So we had some shots where we had four mouths, or our hands looked like we had insane jitters - some great bloopers.

Next, it was off to the Royal National Park & South Coast day trip. My friend Joseph, from Georgia State University, booked this trip for $125 and suddenly couldn't make it. So he offered it to me! How awesome is that? It was supposed to include learning to throw a boomerang, playing a didgeridoo, painting yourself with ochre, and hearing creation stories from an aboriginal, but he didn't show up... So instead, we went on a morning hike. And believe it or not, two whales were close enough to the coast that we could see them playing! Over the course of a half hour or so, we saw them jump out of the water three times, which is pretty amazing in the wild. Later in the day, we canoed through a pristine river that cut through some uninhabited land. So you were completely surrounded by nature on all sides, which was wonderful.

Finally, I was offered a job to work at Plymouth Rock for the summer! Which is pretty incredible, given how limited time I have to be home, and that my background isn't exactly perfectly matched to the business world. I can't wait to start - I think it'll be an awesome experience, no matter what I end up working on. I'll bring a strong work ethic, determination, and open mind to the job, and hope to leave with a better appreciation for business (particularly surrounding the insurance online interface), a deeper knowledge of business as an industry, and an perhaps an inuition concerning my post-graduation plans (engineering v. business).

Now it's just preparing for Josh's visit!

#operahouse #night