Another Weekend Goes By

Its Monday night. Funny how quickly the weekend passes by even when we aren't working. On that note, keeping up with the days has become really challenging now. I am using weekends as a marker for the week. So Fridays and Mondays are relatively easy to keep track of. However, the Tuesdays to Thursday are just so obscure. Fortunately there are smartphones.

I am going to jump right into Sunday as I can't remember what happened on Saturday. Sunday was Valentines' Day and if you remember from an earlier post, it was also the day I was going to attend the soccer trials for the senior Shamrock Rovers team. I got myself ready, received my well-wishes from Sangeetha and headed down to Dinah Oval which is the park opposite my apartment. There, I spoke to the manager and his strong Scottish accent (years of listening to Alex Ferguson speak) immediately made my piece things together. Shamrock Rovers... why of course they had to be Scottish/English. The trial was basically a 2-sided game. We kicked amidst the onset of the mid-day heat at 10.30am. Just as we were going to get the game underway, the manager shouted, "3 touches lads". I knew it was going to be a challenge.

Playing in Singapore under the mid-day sun is madness. Doing the same in Darwin; that's a death-wish. At least for me it was, given my current state of fitness levels. Eventually the trials ended. I had played badly and I kinda knew that I wouldn't make it. I went ahead to the manager and asked him about his decision and I appreciated his direct reply. "We are looking for someone better. Sorry mate."

Yeah no problem. I can deal with that. I was disappointed that I wouldn't be able to play football twice a week but thankfully, my parents have thought me important life lessons in accepting rejection. 

Dinner yesterday. Rice and yogurt absent from image*

As I walked up to the apartment, Sangeetha (who had been sitting at the balcony for almost the entire time) gestured me a thumbs up/down. Thumbs down it was but no worries. I got over it fairly quickly. Once home, we began Valentines' Day preparations. To be honest, Sang and I aren't the biggest Valentines' Day observers. For the past few years, we had practiced spending Valentines' Day by having home-cooked meals. This year was no different as we had mutton, cabbage and yogurt with rice for dinner. It was truly satisfying

Today, went relatively well. We had a simple lunch at a Mexican restaurant near the Darwin Waterfront Centre (which looks uncannily like Sentosa Cove). Following that, we went on a wild goose chase trying to sign up for accredited courses from Charles Darwin University. The campus is spread out all over Darwin and we went to three offices before we were given an email address and a mobile number to contact. So that was a waste of time.

Dinner today

Dinner today was tortilla with chicken ham, pesto sauce, mozzarella cheese, onions and carrots. I must say Sangeetha and I are slowly getting the hang of this cooking thing. It definitely helps to have time to cook, eat and clean up. 

They sell these for 50 cents a piece. 

Just some interesting things that I would like to share with you. When going grocery shoppping, always remember to bring your own bags. You know how in Singapore, we get flooded with plastic bags when going to a supermarket? Yup, its exactly the opposite here. Bags are not given unless requested for and when everyone isn't asking for plastic bags (they bring their own), it feels almost evil to request for plastic bags. I literally imagine plastics burning, deforestation etc. everytime Sangeetha and I feel the need to ask for plastic bags. This has resulted in us doing a few balancing acts whenever we leave a supermarket. Lesson learnt, BYOB (that second B is for Bag not Beer).

See that hollow rectangular plastic tube?

One more thing I found interesting (Manoaj showed it to me) in supermarkets like Coles and Woolies is that they have this tube-like plastic that you can just grab from the checkout electronic belt and place it as a divider between the earlier patrons' goods and your goods. Singapore should have something like that.