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Ahhh Perth, the city that sleeps....at 5pm. I'm not kidding. Late night shopping / extended shopping hours means shops close at 9pm, and that only happens on thursdays. We're entering the summer months right now and the sun rises at 6am and sets at 830pm. You can be walking around in broad daylight but its a ghost town everywhere. A damn hot one might I add. The weather was perfect when I arrived 6 weeks ago: sunny with clear skies and cool winds. The weather today? A 20-year record high of 44 degrees celsius. Add that with a low relative humidity and you've got a sauna for a city. Forget about cooking an egg on the ground. You can grill a chicken on a drain cover.
And I thought this can only be found in a Star Wars movie: Seeing the moon on a sunny afternoon.
Training here has its ups and downs. The instructor you're assigned to will play a part on how you perform. You can prepare for a flight for many hours, but if he has really high standards and shouts/screams at every small mistake, you'll come down from the flight feeling mentally drained and totally demoralised. I'm fortunate to not have been assigned to any 'screamer' as yet, but I just completed a few hours with one who has really high standards. So right now I feel like I can't fly for nuts. Luckily I heard my next instructor is a nice guy who teaches well because my first hurdle in training is to fly solo for just one round around the runway, including the take off and landing. And solo meaning the instructor won't be in the plane with me, so if anything goes awry during the flight, I'm supposed to take corrective actions. Sounds easy? It's not. I'll give you a comparison. Let's say I ask you to make a left turn in a car along the road. No sweat right? Now what if I tell you to ensure your left wheel stays on the dotted road marker at all times during the turn, maintain the same speed and engine rev, look out for any other cars around you, listen to the deejay whom you've just called and reply to his question, and all this while a strong wind is blowing your car to the right and the road is riddled with potholes. That's quite a challenge trust me. And I haven't even gone into what goes on in landing the plane. So before you tell me 'But flying is so easy what! Why do you have t train so much?', think again. That statement might be half-true in a technologically advanced commercial jet, but in a plane with a manual transmission and without power steering, to speak metaphorically, it sure is not.
This lovely single-storey red brick building is our office, and where we stay is directly opposite this, across the road, in a lovely double-storey red brick building. Somehow I didn't see the need to take a photo of our accommodation. But its really convenient to have your office just a stone's throw away from where you live no?
And this is where our aircraft are parked, just behind the offices. Its called the apron, and there are more aircraft. I'll try to post up a better photo to show the extent of it, because this isn't my photo.
I have been living in different rooms for the past 4 years, and have been quite used to shifting stuff in and out of them. Here's my latest room, which is the best I must say, apart from the one in my house of course. It's huge (even if you were to convert it to a single room) and it has air-con. TV reception ain't that great though and the internet usage has its limits. Once we bust that limit, we're running on speeds slower than a 56kbps modem. Simpsons and Friends take up primetime television, with David Letterman later at night. Oh and explicit language and sexually suggestive scenes are tolerated in TV with just a content warning before the show. No surprises, given that you can find topless photos in magazines in any bookshop. Sweet.
And this is where our cars are parked, just a 5 min walk from our accommodation. Its called the scrapyard, and there are more cars. I won't try to post up a better photo, because the cars are really old. Most of them at least...
...like this one. It's a 1990 Toyota Camry, 1.6L 5-speed manual, power-steering (thank God), radio and CD player, no air-con, no central locking, comes at a cheap price of A$1600, and...it's mine, shared between 4 of us. Everyone here has a car, you can't leave home without one, not in the suburbs at least. I now understand why some people prefer manual cars. It's just more fun to drive and makes you feel more in control of the car. Driving in perth is quite relaxing, because traffic isn't really a problem and there are hardly any pesky motorcycles zipping in and out of lanes. I've only come across a total of 5 so far.
So that's just a short intro of life here. More trivia and facts about perth as I post more. Unfortunately I haven't been very trigger-happy with my camera so bear with the diarrhoea of words. It's to make up for my lack of blogging anything interesting the past few months anyway haha.
