Australia: The land where everything costs more

Darwin:  The land where everything costs ALOT more.  It's been well over a year now and I am confident I will never get over how much everything costs here.  Food is obvs ridiculous, I paid almost $4 for a small bunch of radishes the other day.  Fucking radishes! $5 for a loaf of bread.  BREAD!  Then there are the taxes.  Alcohol is taxed to the ridiculous extreme that Australian wines are generally a lot cheaper in the US than here.  Wine is not as bad as beer and liquor though.  Expect to pay $50 for a bottle of Absolut or Jack Daniels (uhh regular size bottle).  Forget something like Grey Goose, totally out of budget.  Beer is INSANE though.  The other day I saw a case of pale ale at the store up the street for $110!!! Others were hovering around $90.  And lucky I dont smoke because cigarettes are around $22 a pack.

Living in Darwin, you get especially screwed over because they up the price of everything because "it's a remote area and they have to truck everything in from down south" yadda yadda.  Basically, I think it's store owers saying, "You dont want to pay this price?  Try and find it somewhere else, bitches! Suck it!"  Another perk of living in Darwin is you get to pay a whole shit load more for electricity too! This is really fucked.  It's hot here, really hot.  So hot the heat makes you sick.  You have to use an air conditioner or it's just too hot to sleep.  Our electricity comes from the Power Water Corporation.  It took me about 6 months of living here to understand that Power Water is a government institution.  I was thinking it was like National Grid, but it's not, it's a department of the Northern Territory government.  Anyway, you've heard me bitch that there was an election here last year and a new party took office.  They allegedly uncovered all this eradict spending the previous govt had been covering up and made all kinds of cuts (like my job!).  Additionally, they decided it was absolutely crucial to raise power bills to help balance the budget.  Now, I couldn't imagine power bills being any higher than they already were.  We are billed quarterly and the bills are normally around $600-900!  Yes, $900 for 3 months of electricity when no one is home all day.  I obvs have been bitching to them  for a year now but their only response is to accuse me of "overusing" my air conditioning. 

The price increase is really out of hand.  We just paid our last bill which covered over the Christmas holiday season.  $650 for a 3 month bill of which no one was home for 7 weeks!  The only thing that was running was the fridge! Obvs we bitch again.  This time we tell them we suspect there is something faulty with our meter causing power to be running even when everything has been turned off.  The customer service agent says, "That may be the case.  If you'd like us to look into it, it will be $120 to send a technician."  !!!!!!!!!!!!  $^$%#$&!!!  You have to be kidding.  Then what?  The technician says it's fine and we just keep paying?!  So today is the day.  We fight the man.  Not taking no for an answer.  Calling Power Water today and getting to the bottom of this, without paying $120!  All fired up!

Party all the time

Ack!  Cant believe I forgot to talk about this because it had me all seized up last weekend.  Remember when I said the Michie Ct had become a little quiter this year?  Well all the military peeps are back (it's not just army living here, there's navy, airforce, etc) and the pool parties have resumed.  FMFL.  Seriously.  Saturday was Australia day and obvs I was predicting it was going to be bad news. Most people have BBQs and since I have no friends I was holding my own 2 person BBQ here, complete with beer pong :)  Before the BBQ, we decided to go to the driving range to practice our swings (oh yeah, Darwin golf is back!).   Come home and there are a million douches in the pool, complete with blow up doll and other things douches like.  They are jumping off ledges (with the blow up doll), smoking in the pool, throwing around glass bottles, etc.  In the meantime, I am hungry and want to start my BBQ, but the ledge they are jumping off is so close to my balcony it's almost attached.  So I said fuck this, calling police.  I call police, tell them what's going on, say I have kids here etc and police say they dont take noise complaints until after MIDNIGHT!  Omg! It was 4pm!  We knew there was a manager (or body corporate, as it's called here), living somewhere in the complex because they leave us notes if we leave our shoes outside (lol).  So Jason decides he will just ring every doorbell until he finds them, which actually works.  Now here is the real kicker!  They are ALLOWED to have parties in there.  She said she would go out there and tell them they couldnt smoke or have glass, but those are the only rules!  That and it had to end by 1030pm.  Wtf?!  How can it be allowed to have huge parties in a shared swimming pool? Grrrrrr.

In golf news, before Christmas we drove 1 hour to get to the only mini golf course we hadnt been to around here.  This one was a real classic.  It was part of a hotel out in the remote area.  We roll and in and immediately start arguing about who is going to go into the hotel and ask about the golf.  Obvs it ends up being me.  Theres no one there so I had to ring a bell - I say, hi I would like to play the mini golf and woman looks at me like "seriously?"  hahaha.  At this point I had no yet seen the course.  So I say yes, 2 please.  She tells me where to go and we are off down this path a little ways past the hotel.  Talk about extreme mini golf!  First off, the course is made from concrete.  There was no turf AT ALL.  Trying to putt on concrete was hilarious as obvs the ball just rolls.  Second, there were 4 holes that were "unplayable" because the entire thing was underwater.  Third, we may have been the first peeps to play on this course in quite some time because there were fallen branches and sticks everywhere, adding extra obstacles to the holes!  Finally, there were green ants (vicious biting ants), mosquitoes, migees, etc EVERYWHERE, so as you were tying to putt, you were getting fucked up by these insects!  At the same time, I was laughing so hard I was crying! Classic Darwin.  Here are some pics:

 

An aerial view of the course

 

An example of the extra obstacles.  Makes it quite challenging.

 

Enjoying all the fun!