Fancy Ramen, Zoo, and My Three Day Girlfriend

I live in Brisbane now. I spent a few days lying in bed and running, a little depressed from leaving all my friends in Melbourne and having to make new ones, and a little depressed from kicking caffeine. In Melbourne the hostel had free tea and coffee so I took advantage of that, but it got a little out of hand with the tea. I had like 5 cups a day.

I got a job real quick here, I applied for a kitchen hand job, which I thought was synonymous with dishwasher and occasional help in the kitchen. But turns out I make peoples food, with heat and ingredients and plates. I’m a real-boy chef!

I wear a chef shirt but no hat, which seems weird, chefs should have hats. Isn’t that a hair law?

The restaurant is pretty hip. It’s like a vaguely Japanese coffee shop/restaurant/bar. It’s all wooden like a pagoda and it’s got two levels. It’s really nice, we have big square plates and we lay the food out like art. They place music that’s like jazzy, like Vince Guraldi’s Charlie Brown Christmas album aesthetic, but then somebody in the band does a line of coke and drum solo sputters out like mustard on chorizo. That’s a dish I make.

There’s a bit of a disconnect between me and my bosses, one’s Italian and the other’s Japanese and neither are fluent in English, so often I’ll ask someone to “show me one” to get an idea of the job they want me to do. This masks my lack experience in the kitchen, so I can just mimic what they do and nobody is the wiser. I cut apples “Al Julian”, bake “pomenaros” (whatever that is), I bundle up spinach and cover it with feta, and I even use a blow torch to caramelize things.

Sometimes things aren’t as resturanty as I’d think. Bins are labeled curiously, the flour was in a bin with the label “yellow” and the sugar was in a bin labeled “Madagascar”. I don’t know.

But I really almost like my job! Everyone is friendly and though I know I’m more of a hindrance than a helper for now (still learning how to cook) I feel like I’m contributing. I even bring the food out to people and some go “Oh wow!” cuz it’s so fancy and I’m like “yea I reheated that”.

So work’s good.

I met another American! This makes 2, countable (more than just a brief convo) Americans. We didn’t exchange names for a while so I just called her Georgia and I really liked that name. But she called me Pittsburgh and that’s a pretty crap name so that had to change. My impression (includes facts and things I assume) is that she’s a smarty from an upper class southern family. She went to a fancy school to be a doctor but failed on that and embarrassingly graduated in applied mathematics, how lame right? We bonded over a love for efficiency and she’s going back to school and I’m trying to convince her not to. She wants to go back to study finance and then do Corporate Social Responsibility and environmentalism and try to save all the nature she sees. She’s a hiker.

I might ask her out.

We joked about the things that make us us and sometimes she takes the double stuff Oreos and twists off the one side and then folds the other side in two to get quadruple stuffed Oreos. I informed her that everyone does that and she’s about as unique as a new U2 album. I mean c’mon, they made the double stuffed ones because they knew people were making them with the single stuffed.

She got the nick name “Spoons” because she always carries around this one spoon and eats peanut butter with it. She takes the spoon wherever she goes and freaks out when she can’t find it. Once it was locked in a hostel kitchen for the night and she stayed up all night by the door waiting to get in. It is a cool a spoon.

Spoons also had a stint as “chopstick girl” because she got chopsticks as a gag gift once, and then she started using them everywhere. She’d go to Chipotle and use them. People noticed and they gave her more and more chopsticks. Her life seems very cutlery centric.

I just did another interview. Since there’s that delay between when you send out job applications and when you hear back. And I’m not married to the kitchen job, so I figured I’d see what the guy had to say.

I applied for a manual labor job, counting mites for a pest control bug breeding company. But when they emailed me back, they said the position was filled but were maybe looking for somebody like me to fill a crop supervisor position. Apparently I showed initiative. Can’t disagree, I waved around my experience in spider lab, and related it to the bug business, and applied for the position by finding it on a site where you can look at the  job postings but  can only apply by paying a subscription service. I bypassed that bullshit and just searched by location and business and used my brain for one fucking second to find the business and email them directly.

The interview went well! He likes me and I like him even if he says “yea” every two seconds interrupting my sentence flow. He’s just enthusiastic. And sometimes when you just talk to somebody on the internet and meet them in real life you go through these mind scenarios where things go all wrong.

I meet the guy at the train station and he’s this huge tattooed guy and he’s like “yea ok, so you need to fly a helicopter over the crop fields in the middle of the night to make sure nobody’s stealing the strawberries. You have your pilot’s license right?” and then suddenly I’m the idiot for not knowing how to fly a helicopter. And he’s not an idiot for running some sort of strawberry protection mafia, finding internet randos to do the dirty work.

But nah he was a just normal guy. And I’d probably have to relocate out of the city and he was willing to help me find a place to stay and talked about me using the company car to get to the fields and just made me feel like it was a real job with responsibility and he was a real guy with real brains,

Fell into a bit of routine with work. I get up early. Make some fancy pancakes, make some fancy ramen, run and then lounge around the hostel with friends. Who are overwhelmingly Irish. I can’t understand them most of the time.

Spoons and I wanted to go the Australian Zoo, which is Steve Irwin’s. It’s like an hour away from Brisbane though so we needed a ride. We composed a little ad for Gumtree, which is like better craigslist for Australia. Below is our work

Very effective! Like 4  guys responded and one was just to tell us that we were funny Americans.

We went with Jeff.

There was that pause, where we were like “is this safe?”. Our Irishmen didn’t like us going alone and Rosalind (who’s Scottish but I still can’t understand her) even took a pic of the license plate. But Spoons is a confident hitchhiker, so I followed her lead, and really what could happen?

Jeff was cool! Just a truck driver with a day off. He likes to drive so he tries to pick up people on gum tree and drive them around, but doesn’t usually get many takers. Probs cuz of the whole internet meeting in real life thing.

Jeff talks a lot. So to combat that he tried to focus on us and he asked us really deep questions like “What are your goals? Where are you going in life? What’s your relationship with your parents?”

He’s a father who just got divorced. 2 kids from his ex-wives previous marriage and one from theirs. His kid is 20 and she just bought a house. He was very proud.

Part of the deal for us getting a ride from Jeff was that I would make sandwiches. We gave him two peanut butter banana sandwiches, which apparently is a very American thing. But he loved them.

Spoons and I got to the Aussie zoo and it was kind of like paying tribute to my childhood. Steve Irwin was everywhere, though Bindi more so, she seems to be the poster child for the zoo now. We saw an otter show, tiger show and the famous crocoseum. A bird pooped on Spoons. The croc show was really great, cuz you see crocs on TV and it’s just sort of on screen. You don’t get to here the thwomp of the bite. And they’re sneaky little dudes in the water. You can’t see them at all under the surface, Makes me think I coulda been snapped up back in Darwin. Like that scene in Crocodile Dundee, where the lady is washing her clothes near the water.

Really weirdly they played this auto tuned song of Steve after the croc show. It was really uncomfortable.

Otters are cute. They squee when they get food. And used to build bridges and escape at night, and then return and destroy the bridges so nobody knew they’d been going out partying.

Tigers jump like little cats but they’re big.

But our collective fave would have to be the Koalas. I didn’t think much of them at first, I wasn’t looking forward to them, but there was a bundle that were super active and climbing around and staring at us and we pet them and a keeper tried to move one off it’s tree and when they don’t like something they sneeze. Over and over.

When we were done with the zoo, Jeff was in the parking lot grilling a steak in the trunk of his car.

After the zoo, Spoons and I went on a date. Kinda. More like a hangout rolled into a date. A bottle of wine, some shitty froyo, good convo, a missed boat. I won’t give away the recipe for a good date, but one occurred.

Spoons is cool, a driven person, but not perfect (she got a Chihuahua because of the movie Legally Blonde), funny, open to learning new things, and pretty. More people should be like her.

Spoons is also a symbol of home for me. Yes, American but also like a small sense of comfort when you’ve been living in a hostel for 4 months. It wasn’t the plan. I should’ve had a good job by now and my own apartment and a sense of security and familiarity. It’s exciting doing new things every week, but sometimes you just want to lay on the metaphorical couch and eat metaphorical goldfish. So it’s nice to have someone to talk to about goldfish and be chill with.

Spoons is also leaving tomorrow. So I’ll probs never see her again. I think we’ve both thought about changing our plans, and either I travel with her up to Cairns or she stay here for a while. But if we did that we wouldn’t be the people we are. So the thought left.