Book the Fourth: Victor - Victoria!

OK, I admit it - I'm about six months behind on this blog, but at least I haven't given up entirely like Captain Cayman. I'm making a concerted effort to catch up, and might even do a "This Week in the Rugby World Cup" for the next seven weeks - depending on how much I get accomplished this week.

So this update covers my trip to Melbourne for *work* from February 27 until March 4th. Enjoy!

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Most people's impressions of Australia go something like this:



Or this:


The first, and possibly only, photo I've ever put up that's aimed towards straight guys


But what you usually don't think about is this:


Melbourne Skyline



But it's true - Australia has people, many of whom live in cities. Big cities. Actually, it's one of the most urban populations on the planet, because most of the country looks like this:


A drive so boring they tell you when there's a slight turn


The green bits are inhabitable

So getting back to my original tale . . . an opportunity came up to spend a week in Melbourne at a conference centre, training graduate auditors about audit methodology. The grads had between one day and one year of audit experience, and as a facilitator I basically needed to walk through a deck of prepared slides and make it as interesting as possible. It's still audit, so the materials are admittedly dry.

Like all accounting conferences, however, the rather boring days were paired with hilariously booze-filled nights. If haven't sat through eight hours of audit training while trying to recover from a severe hangover, you can't really appreciate how painful it can be.

I was kind of excited, but also terrified since this was my first time doing this as a facilitator. For those of you who are wondering what would happen if you took:

Me


And add wine


Then add 22-year old Australian boys




It turned out exactly how you'd imagine it would. In a nutshell, I was pretty lucky not to have gotten the sexual harassment call when I got back to the office the following Monday. Like those Irish P-Dubs employees last Winter.

I was going to post a picture of the carnage, but I still haven't brought myself to look at the Holiday Party 2009 album on K2B's Facebook. So why don't you pop on over there to look up the ones that made the Interwebz, which were certainly not the most incriminating.


Schedule

The agenda for the Monday was "Introduction to the Group" and "Business Etiquette", so I didn't need to show up until the Tuesday. Since I was only working four days a week at that point, I flew over early Sunday morning, rented a nice hotel room in the city centre, and made my way out to the conference centre (a 27km trip from the City Centre) on Monday night.

So I really like Melbourne for a couple reasons. The downtown is cute and compact. They have good museums, art galleries, sporting events, festivals and a lot of greenspace in the downtown core. Its state Victoria is also home to hundreds of microbreweries, so almost anywhere you go you find find excellent, slightly different beer.

After arriving on Sunday morning, I made my way downtown and stored my junk in a bus station locker for the day. Then I went for a wander.

I just had a look through my files, and apparently I took zero pictures on this trip. I also don't have access to my disk drive with pictures from my 2010 trip to Melbourne, so enjoy these adorable baby animals.






The Westies were dangerous - the puppies were being sold on Tradme (Kiwi Kijiji)


So on my trip around Melbourne's City Centre, I walked to the market and got pizza, walked to the University, and had a coffee at an outdoor cafe. I also paid attention to the hook turns in action. Someone from Melbourne once tried to explain them to me, but it didn't make sense until I saw it happening live. Which I assume is the same as Aussie Rules, since it seems to make absolutely no sense based on watching the highlights and reading the rules on Wikipedia.


The only rule is you must be at least this hot to play


I checked in to my hotel rather early, went to the Woolworth's to pick up some snack foods, and ate a bag of chips while watching Australian news, Bondi Rescue and Border Patrol in the hotel. And Aussie Rules highlights.

The next morning, I slept in until about 10:00am, then wandered down to ACMI, the Australian Centre for the Moving Image. It's a really, really cool (and free) museum in the city centre, and they had a Disney retrospective as their feature exhibit.

I knew I was in heaven when I wandered down the escalator and overheard these two Australian kids planning their trip to America later this year - Harry Potter and Disney World featured prominently in their plans.

So the Disney review started with a sort of "History of Disney" type stuff, like Walt's early animated characters, Steamboat Mickey, all that stuff. I did end up learning a lot, such as:

- Mickey didn't really make an appearance on screen between 1953 and 1983, when they did Mickey's Christmas Carol. And I KNOW that the Ghost of Christmas Future scared the bejeezus out of you too.

- Bambi was the first animated film to create 3D visual effects. This did this by using four layered images and filming through the top three. By moving the tiers left and right at different speeds, you could "see" around trees and such. cool stuff

- Under the Sea is still the greatest song of all time

Did you click the link? I put it in so you'd click it, and watch the video, then have calypso music running through your head for the next three weeks. You're welcome.

After that, I treated myself to an outdoor lunch of Fish & Chips in the centre of town, then walked down through the banks of the Yarra. Then I sat on a bench and went through the audit slides I was supposed to know back to front as a bunch of yuppies went out for the lunch hour runs. There wasn't really anything good to look at though, so I must have been in the wrong park. Like maybe the hotties are all at Batman Park.

Then I had lunch at Mrs. Parma's, where they serve a chicken parmigiana that's roughly the size of your face and have a rotating selection of beers. Their beer of the week was called an Arctic Breeze or something, which tasted a bit like Kilkenny with a minty aftertaste. It was incredible, so I had two.


Mmmnnn Mrs. Parma's. I've spent a grand total of six days in Melbourne, and I've been here three times. Sacrilicious

Then I took the train up to the conference, which took an hour and fifteen minutes to get to the last station. Then, since it was just after rush hour, the cab took about twenty minutes to come get me. Overall, a pretty big fail.

I checked in to the conference centre, and was greeted with a lovely little sign on the desk:

"Due to the warm season and our rural location, we have had reports of snakes being observed on the grounds and footpaths. If you see a snake, please do not approach it. Please notify our staff of its approximate location as soon as possible."

Because it's Australia, where you can't even hug a Platypus because it has poisonous spurs on its feet, the snakes were of course venomous and a bite could kill you three times over. Yay for evolutionary arms races!

The audit facilitators had arranged to meet in the hotel lounge while the grads were out drinking their faces off at the casino, so I got to experience the following conversation for the first of about twenty times that week:

Person: "So, how'd you end up in New Zealand?"
Dustin: "My partner has been living there since 2008, so I made the move when I got my CA."
Person: "Oh, what does she do?"
Dustin: "He, actually, and studies a PHD in ancient Latin. Like, the language."
Person: "Oh, that's . . . unusual. Is he coming over this week?"
Dustin: "No, he can't, he's in the hospital for a spinal cord injury."
Person: "Oh my god what happened?"

There's nothing quite like spending an entire week having people being really interested, then get sort of horrified, and ultimately just feeling a little bit bad for you.

OK, so I Googled "Supportive Mouse" in the hopes of getting some sort of adorable clip art where a mouse is frowning and looking sympathetic, but this came up instead:


GLBTTI activism may have officially jumped the shark


So where was I . . . yes, so the facilitators met and went through things on Monday night, and overall the training went off quite well. It was a lot more practical than the graduate training I had originally gone through in 2007, and seemed to parallel the revised training that was introduced at the other place a few years later. We also had a really excellent group of graduates, who managed to stay focused (or at least quiet) for the entire week.

For the nights I was there, Tuesday night was a Welcome Dinner hosted by the Melbourne office, Wednesday night was a free night and Thursday was a Casino-Royale themed deal at a rather fancy nightclub at the Docklands, but occurred early enough in the evening that we could clear out at 10:00pm and not disrupt the rest of their business. It all went off quite well, but the days were full-on and the distance from the city centre meant that you either had to:

a) Go back to the hotel a little bit early (to catch the 10:00pm bus)
b) Commit to having a really fantastic night out, which you'll definitely regret when you cab back to the hotel at 4:00am


Snooki was having a fantastic night out until she ran into the cops

So . . . yeah. Friday night I hitched a flight straight back to Christchurch, spent my FINAL weekend at Hotel Burwood, and the rest is history.


Oh, Burwood . . . how I do NOT miss you

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This ends the fourth and final chapter in my travel blog for Q1 2011. The rest of the quarter was mostly looking forward to, or trying to recover from, these vacations. There was also the small matter of finding a wheelchair accessible house, which I eventually managed to do. We moved in on 27 March 2011