It’s official.

So I landed in Brisbane, Australia yesterday, a good 9,800 miles from home.  For anyone who hasn’t heard,  I came here to work (an aspect of the trip I’ll be willfully ignoring in this space until further notice), and I will be here until I come home for Christmas, and I’ll most likely return for a good while longer after that.

A few observations from my first 24 hours upside down:

First things first: the girls are pretty hot, but not shockingly so.   Perhaps if I had come straight from Hartford I might have been more impressed, but coming from New York, especially the New York summer, when the tank tops are out and the booties are on display, I was satisfied but not surprised by the Aussie females I’ve seen in the first 24 hours.  They are mostly thin, though I definitely saw some fatties, but they are not so diverse:  there are asian girls and white girls, but basically nothing else.  Still, I would say that their average attractiveness is a slight notch above everywhere I’ve been besides Amsterdam- maybe it was all the weed, but I distinctly remember seeing beautiful girl after beautiful girl there.  They are not as tan as I expected, although in fairness, it is the “winter” here (more on that in a bit).  Having said all this, actually meeting and conversing with an Australian girl will have to wait for another day.  Or at least until later on today.  

 

Right now I am sitting in a McDonald’s, which I patronized not for the funny bacon or the TINY orange juice..

…but for what I had heard was free internet.  Try again.  Try $5 for 15 minutes of internet.  Well, yea that’s a ripoff, but surely I have internet in my hotel, right?  Well technically, yes.  I can pay $10 for 2 hours of internet.  But if I go over 20 megabytes of data transfer, I have to pay 10 cents per megabyte extra.  To put this in perspective for normal people, I had hoped to complete my download of the fine cinematic work Superbad off of I-tunes, which was about 25% complete when I left the US.  Well, if I want to complete that download, I’ll have to pay no less than ONE HUNDRED AND TWELVE dollars in data transfer fees.  Not to mention I’ll have to pay per megabyte for every espn.com, youtube, and youporn video I watch, and you can see why I’m in a crabby mood.  From this point forward, David Schmerson (my brother suggested I remove my actual name from this post) will never again take prepaid monthly unlimited internet for granted!

(full disclosure:  the exchange rate from the australian dollar to the US dollar is roughly $1AU to $0.95US, so you can shave 5% off of the prices I mentioned for the American amount.  Not much consolation.)

So what about the internet, though, the whole point of this trip was to get away from that shit, right?  To FREE myself from the SHACKLES of technology and FIND myself?  Well, I don’t know if that was exactly the point, but this place does look promising.  First of all, the weather is insane.  Yesterday, June 27th, which would be the equivalent of December 27th in the northern hemisphere, it was dry, breezy, with a high of about 78 degrees.  If the winter is like this, I’m a little scared to think what the summer will be like.   Did I mention that there is a big Casino right by the river?  Did you know that Australians gamble away more money per capita than any other people in the world? (and if you don’t think I’m counting on this factoid to help me out at the poker table, you’re crazy.) Also, did you know that Australians drink more beer than anyone else? This seems like a good place to repeat that the girls are pretty hot.  How could I NOT have fun here?  I know that question was rhetorical, but I sincerely hope not to find out the answer.  With that deep and haunting remark, I’m off to traverse the Brisbane River for the first time.   More to come!