Right, firstly you have to pronounce it correctly - it's not the same as the one in the UK; this place is proud of every syllable so get it right!
Lawnsesston is a gorgeous little town. There's something very European about it in that it's lots of little houses dotted around hillsides with a river running through the middle. It also has mainly two-storey dwellings which makes it different to the other towns in Australia that I've stayed in. usually the only two-storey building is the hotel or pub. In fact, maybe the whole town lives in pubs - hadn't thought of that one!
It's very green at the moment as they've had a very wet winter.
Talking of weather - did you get any coverage of hurricane Yasi over there? Unfortunately the news channels had dedicated their night's broadcasts to it and found that, after showing a couple of webcam images of horizontal palm trees and signs being blown across roads, there really wasn't much more to report as the whole population was in hiding and all the telephone lines were down. They ended up chatting to one reporter by torchlight in a local shopping mall which was one of the shelters asking how many people were asleep. They might as well have asked if there were any good offers on crab sticks. Really, it had come to that; meanwhile they were murdering each other in Cairo. It's a crazy world. Anyway, the destruction has been pretty thorough and the usual apres disaster images are being shown daily. There's only been one death thank goodness - some poor soul was asphyxiated by using his portable generator in a confined space.
On the subject of supermarkets, I'm officially on my conservation holiday at the moment. I know! I didn't think it would involve being sat in a hostel for two days either. I had my induction on Friday and was then deposited in this hostel to wait to be picked up on the Monday to go to the site. The induction had included the slightly scary advice to "let Jamie know if you have even the smallest scratch whether it's bleeding or not as it might be a spider bite and the venom is delayed action". Ok, that makes me feel just heaps better. To return to supermarkets and Koreans - did I mention the Koreans? I'm awaiting the arrival of the rest of my work team at the hostel, three meat-loving Korean guys are turning up on Sunday and I have to explain to them where our food is in the kitchen, that they need to be packed and ready to go by 8am Monday morning and that they should bring their swimmers. In addition to these babysitting duties I was also to cook and eat with them. No chance - that's as far into meat-loving territory as this girl's willing to go, I'll lead the Koreans to meat but after that they're on their own. I suppose I should probably find out what the Korean for swimsuit is...
The supermarket shop was an experience. Jamie the leader, in the true tradition of tree-hugging conservationists, is a bit ditsy and we couldn't make a decision between us. He couldn't get over the idea that an English woman didn't want to blow her budget on biccies to go with my tea. We had a mini war over pak choi and feta cheese but managed to find a Switzerland on the decision over whether to go with the onion or not. Did I mention that Jamie is a vegetarian - he eats meat but he's a veggie. Fish is meat everybody! What didn't help was that Jamie was a serial trolley abandonner; I'd go and find something and then I'd have to search for the trolley which was floating around somewhere near the deli counter with a trolley jam behind it stretching for three aisles. At one point jamie actually loaded the spring onions into someone else's trolley. I felt like I was trying to shop with a toddler. He also disappeared at the checkout to pick something else up leaving me with $80 worth of food in the basket and 20 in my purse. Do you know what? Just for once it would be nice not to have to be the grown-up. I'm already going to be leading Team Korea into the fray on Monday.
Have you ever tried to sleep in a room with seven other women? I know some blokes who say they have hahaha but they got kicked out. Anyway, the fun thing about being in a big dorm is that you get the opportunity for tiered leaving in the morning. Do you know what the loudest sound in the world is? No, not the atom bomb, no, not Ian Paisley or Hilty's candy-striped deckchair shirt, it is, in fact, a plastic bag in a sleepy dorm room. I have no idea how they make them so noisy but it's impossible to sleep through the rustling. It's kind of like being trapped in a small car with about ten children all munching their way through packets of crisps like a lot of hungry goats at a washing line.
Because of this, I have only one plastic bag and everything else is zips. Unfortunately, not everyone else in the traveling community has cottoned on to this one and still go for the rustling option. Seven women; two of whom were on the 6am flight and had to get the bus at 4am, three of whom were due to be picked up at 7am and needed to commence plastic bag rustling at 5am and one of whom had decided to come in at 1am and do her rustling in advance of the morning rush. So how much sleep do you reckon we got?
This isn't just ordinary rustling either; this is women - do you know how many bags and packets and tubes and pots and bottles we use to get out in the morning? You've seen the evidence in most couple's bathrooms where you see a shelf looking like an aisle of Boots with a can of 'Lynx' squeezed in just about teetering on the brink at one end as the male addition to the party. Each backpacker took on average 15 minutes to rustle their way out to the showers and then a further 20 minutes to rustle their way through packing the things away on their return. I know this because I was AWAKE FOR EACH AND EVERY MINUTE.
Never mind, I didn't need to catch up on my sleep after jetlag or anything, or get a good night's sleep before going off into the wilderness to do some work on the Conservation equivalent of the chain gang did I? Grr.
Anyway, mustn't grumble, still got another two weeks left..
Elsie x
