Voices from home and Fulham Prison Blues

Voices from home and Fulham Prison Blues
(Names are omitted to protect the innocent)

Last week was going by slowly, as they always due when you have Monday off for a public holiday. I had finally moved to the beach and was getting the hang of walking to the bus, the grocery store and the beach. It actually has been a lot like moving to University walking and taking the bus, except the beach part. Even my apartment is kind of like college housing, in décor, design and appointments.

Work has been fairly normal, if you can really ever call the pseudo accounting/consulting world ever normal or for that matter exciting. We have had a few staff changes and other events. Sorry, I promised I wouldn’t bore everyone to death with the inner workings and bureaucracy of work. Also I am not 100% sure what I should say. However you lucky GTUS BAS people can look forward to an update at some point.

Anyway, Thursday my cell phone rang and displayed a number I had never seen. After one or two attempts to answer and the resulting disconnection, I hear “I bet you don’t know who this is”. Well I was a little taken aback but it was the voice of my best friend’s father who was in town with his wife, visiting their daughter; who was a few hours away at university studying abroad from the US. You get that? I know run on sentence, so sue me. We talked for a second and agreed to meet for dinner. So later that night, we caught up for dinner and chatted. I did have to try the grilled kangaroo, a little earthy but good, similar to venison. It’s nice.

It was good, yet surreal, to see familiar faces in Sydney. Whereas they didn’t come expressly to visit me, they were the first visitors to Sydney who I knew. It also made me realize that I have been derelict in my duty to stay connected to the US, in that I hadn’t actually spoken with anyone back home. (That and I was chastised by my friend’s mom) I have meant to call people, namely my mom and brothers, but had kept putting it off until I figured out the best way to call. I realized I can call to the States from my cell without a calling card for a minimal fee, as long as I keep it fairly short. I have tried a few calls but the only one that actually went through was to my mom. Unfortunately I don’t have very many phone numbers written down and cannot remember many at all. It seems that my cell phone had become my repository and my mind draws a blank on most phone numbers these days. But I can tell you how many buttons I have to press to reach their number in my phone’s directory. So if you want a call or txt, ya’ll (yes I still say ya’ll, I haven’t pulled a Madonna and adopted a fake accent) are going to have to send me your numbers.

When I did manage to speak to my mom, I was in the airport headed to Melbourne for my first travel in OZ for work. We were going to a small town (Fulham) 3 hours drive east of Melbourne for an assignment. To avoid the boring details of work, I won’t go into what we were doing (SOX). But it did involve several days inside the Fulham Correctional Centre. Fulham is an open campus too, which mean you occupy a lot of the same spaces as the prisoners. But it is a minimum security facility so it was no big deal. So yes, now I have gone to a country founded as a penal colony and spent time in a prison. Exciting huh? We were able to drive down to the 90 mile beach after work one day and look around. The beach there reminded me a lot of NC beaches with sand dunes, weathered scrub trees and not a whole lot around.

I am also in the midst of planning my holiday vacation; we have a mandatory 2 week shut down over Christmas and New Year’s. I think I have decided on a trip up and down the east coast (Cairns to Sydney) visiting various beaches and other attractions Australia has to offer. Maybe a little sailing, a little snorkeling, little surfing and who knows.