Last day in Australia :(

Just wanted to wish everyone a happy Canada day. Hope the beers are flowin back at home! Tonight is my last night in Australia before I head out to Malaysia, more specifically the island called Pulau Perhentian, located about 10 nautical miles off the coast of Malaysia. The island itself is covered in beautiful white sand beaches, coral, sea turtles, and other marine wildlife. Here I'll hopefully get a chance to get a quick scuba diving lesson so the resorts will let me borrow their gear. I'd love to be able to scuba dive around the coral reefs, or if not at least snorkel in the crystal clear waters. I won't have an internet connection, and probably would never use it anyways so the next time you hear from me will probably be on the 7th or 8th of July when I return to Kuala Lumpur.

...so I left the post last night around 10:00pm local time to go out to the casino with my uncle Seng. I guess a more fitting title would be "Last day in Australia"...so I'm going to change it now. About two months ago, he bought a brand new Alfa Romeo Spider which if you don't know is a pretty sick two door Italian convertable sports car (we don't have Alfa in North America). The casino is located in the Intercontinental Hotel just outside of the Perth City limits. We went and got a beer and I sat down at a $10 buy in black jack table. I don't feel like describing every moment so I'll just tell you the results haha. On $10 in, I finished off with $125 up so I stopped and moved on to this spinning wheel thing with fruits and shit on it (like the Nevada lottery tickets). I ended up losing all but $5 dollars on the stupid wheel so I got pissed and put my last $5 chip on the purple grapes giving me 11-1 odds. Surprisingly the wheel landed on the grapes and I was up $55 again. I was like "hey, my luck's turning around" so I put 20 bucks on oranges (5-1) and won again. At this point I was up to $135 Australian Dollars so I stopped, cashed in and got another beer. I didn't want to lose anymore money cause I'm not a chronic gambler. So moral of the story is always put your money on grapes and oranges :|

So backtracking a bit...on Tuesday, June 30th, my auntie Judy, Monica and uncle Meng and my mom made our way 3 hours north to Nambung National Park to visit the Pinnacles - natural limestone formations in the Northern Australian desert. I thought it was pretty sick since the vast desert were littered with these weird looking rocks, almost resembling stalagmites found in caves (stalagmites are the calcium carbonate formations on the floor of caves, where stalactites are the ones found on the ceiling of caves...food for thought)...hey if you're interested, here's the chemical equilbrium for the reaction:

CaCO₃(s) + H₂O(l) + CO₂(aq) → Ca(HCO₃)₂(aq)

But anyways, a similar reaction occurs in the desert where these Pinnacles are formed. And as I said...quite an amazing site. But I think I was the only one that thought it was cool. My auntie Monica (from London) was complaining that, "we drove all the way to see rocks", and that she can "walk outside to see rocks any day she wants". I guess it's kinda boring, but I still found it pretty interesting to see. Also, my aunts were making jokes about the phallic nature of these shapes since they look like giant dicks in all shapes and sizes. They were having a good time like little school girls taking pictures in poses that I don't want to see my mom or 50 year old ladies do ever again...I'm still having nightmares thinking about it...so lets never talk about this again.

The next day, we went to the Perth City centre to look around, and pick up some last minute souvinirs. I finally bought a didgeridoo which is an aboriginal wind instrument made from the wood of the Eucalyptus tree. The wood, about 4 - 5 feet long and 4 inches in diameter at the largest point is then hollowed out by termites. Most of them however are found hollowed out already which could take hours to find the perfect piece of wood. Here is a link to a pretty sick video of what the didgeridoo sounds like. I can't play as well...but I can get a pretty sick sound out of it and make some cool effects. I'm going to practice up over the rest of the summer and I'll be a pro.

That's about to the extent of everything I've done in the days leading up to now. My aunts are fighting now. All my mom's sisters have the exact same annoying temper as my mom and after this, I know that my mom isn't that bad. The Liew family temper is known by all my uncles and my cousins. It's fucking annoying, and I had to listen to it sitting in the back of a cramped car for 3 hours; my iPod was dead and my noise cancelling headphones couldn't cancel that much noise...even though they are supposed to attenuate sound in a busy city subway... They argue and fight just for the sake of arguing, and they never EVER drop the topic until they are done (which obviously lasts longer than 3 hours). Plus if you don't argue back, they'll keep bringing it up and repeating their point until you want to blow your brains out. I'm glad I don't have that part of the genes.

Anyways, I have to finish packing all my stuff to make sure I don't forget anything. I somehow lost the receipt for my didgeridoo. And by lost, I mean misplaced. And by misplaced, I mean thrown out because I thought the random piece of paper in my pocket was rubbish. Now I can't get the 30 bucks back from the airport as a tax refund (the tax rate in Australia is 10%, so do the math on how much I paid for the didge).

I'll post when I return to civilization if I haven't been eaten by a shark, or paralyzed from the jelly fish and other painful bitey things of the South China Sea.

Bye for now!

p.s. my aunts stopped arguing about 2 minutes ago...there was peace in the world. And it started again...

Simon