Cricket, Door to door and Penguins!

As Em mentioned previously we will be doing separate blogs for the next few months so this blog covers what I've been doing for the past two months since New Years.

For those of you don't know I'm currently playing cricket at a club called Bentleigh which is just south of central Melbourne. After the luxury of Amanda's house, which Em has already mentioned, I moved into the apartment which would be my home for the next 3 months. This is a 3 bedroom flat with 6 people so as you can imagine it gets quite busy at times!

My first training session at Bentleigh was a couple of days after the new year when temperatures reached 37oC; needless to say I suffered a fair amount that day! The first game was the following weekend and I started in the thirds playing a one day game. As no other teams where playing this weekend it was a great chance to get some practice in and push for a position in a higher team. We played at Fawkner Park against the team that is two places below us in the league and we managed to bowl them out for 90 and knocked them off in pretty quick time. A return of 2 for and 22* was a good start to the season for me. The next weekend saw me move up into the 2's where we played a 40 over game against Keilor. Batting first we managed 140ish in 40 overs and then bowled the opposition out for 90 odd. Another win, although only 10 runs and two wickets didn't represent a great game for me. The next week saw us play local rivals McKinnon. Bowling first we restricted them to 150 from 40 overs but fell agonizingly short by 4 runs! 

Whilst all the cricket training had been going on I, like Em had been looking for a job. Somehow I managed to land myself an interview with a marketing company, or that's how it was described on the advert. So I turned up to this interview, which turned out to be a group interview and was for a door to door sales company! I got through the interview; the only skills you needed were English and to be able to answer the question 'why should I hire you?' It turns out the answer 'I'm desperate' was good enough. There was also some fairly dubious racial profiling going on during the interview! After a couple of days of 'training' it was time for the real thing. I arrived to the office at 9am to the sound of club music being pounded out at ridiculous levels and people jumping all over the place. To those of you that don't know me that well, I am not a morning person so this was a big shock to the system!! That day I was sent out with an experienced salesman to learn the ropes, which was an experience I'm not going to forget in a while. The following day my experienced salesman had to leave early meaning I was on my own for most of the day. After knocking on around about 150 doors I finally made a sale to a lovely old couple from Wales!!Over the next week and a half I had made 2 more sales despite knocking on hundreds of doors, making it pretty obvious I shouldn't try and get a door to door job in the UK! Things got worse when I asked for 2 days off, which was apparently unacceptable, so I got fired, rounding off a pretty bad week for me!!

Following that interesting 2 weeks it was good to get back to the cricket with the first two day game of the new year against Beaumauris, played over consecutive Saturdays. We managed to bowl them out for 156 within 63 overs and were 28-1 by the end of the first day. We then passed that on the second weekend 8 down, finally ending up on 200ish all out with myself making 38. Beaumauris then went in to bat again and we had them 3 down at the end of the game signalling another impressive win.

In between games Em and I decided to do some touristy things. First up was a trip up the Eureka Skydeck, which has the highest observation deck in the southern hemisphere!  This provided myself with some difficulties given my fear of heights! None the less we decided (after some persuasion by em) to do the edge experience. This involves going out in a elevator sideways out of the building, initially frosted up, this then clears to be an all glass elevator over the streets of Melbourne!  

Next up we did a tour to Philip Island. This started with a trip to the Moonlit Wildlife sanctuary, where we got to see even more koalas and feed some more wallabies much to Ems excitement!

 From here we moved onto Churchill Island, an old working farm. Along with the very impressive views of the the surrounding islands we also got to see a demonstration of how a working dog does its job and how the handler controls it, something I definitely need to get my dog to do! We also saw how a sheep gets sheared as well as going inside the old house to see how the wealthy melbournites lived back in colonial times.

Cape Woolamai surf beach was our next stop, although it wasn't included on the tour, our tour guide was adamant that we go to see it and it didn't disappoint! After another short journey via the chocolate factory we arrived at a Koala sanctuary, which was amazing!! There were several large open areas where there are boardwalks leading right up to where the koalas are. This was an unbelievable chance to get up close with some of the cutest baby koalas ever!!

After a quick stop at Nobbies where we grabbed some dinner and saw a few penguins hiding under the boardwalk, we finally we arrived at the Penguin Sanctuary. Herr we took our seats and waited for the arrival of the adult Little Penguins bringing food back for their young. At about 9pm they began to arrive on the beach, first in small groups of 5, but then in much bigger groups of about 15. Watching the adults waddle up the beach and into their nests was an amazing experience, especially as we managed to get front row seats so this was happening less than 5m away! Unfortunately photos were not allowed so you'll just have to use your imagination to visualise how good it was but its an experience we will never forget!

That about covers it for now, Em will post another blog in a week or so about our time on the Great Ocean Road, the Grampians and her time in Adelaide.

Hope alls well wherever you are!

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