A life made of summer, surf and barbecues

Yes, that’s what’s life is made of in this part of the world. I’ve been told it’s been too long since I wrote something for the blog. True. I was supposed to post this in 2012, but with Christmas and the usual change freeze we all know, we’ve been really, really busy. Working late and working week-ends when needed, to finish everything before the end of year holiday break.

So what happened since last time? Well, something called “Summer” arrived here. For those of you who aren’t familiar with it, it’s usually a common phenomenon (actually it depends in which part of the world you live) where temperatures rise quite a lot: +26°C on average these days; and up to 45°C - and something called “Sun” is visible most of the time. Which means I am now going for a swim around 06.am every day before work and! I spend all my free week-ends on the beach – when you guys try to remember what a warm mulled wine tastes like. Hahahaha (evil laugh) Yes that first photo is the pool located at err… 45 seconds of my house and this early in the morning, the swimming pool is mine.

What else? We had the Excelian Christmas dinner. It was a good opportunity to meet with most of the Excelian staff in Australia. It’s great to see so many of us here and numbers are growing. Shirin (who else?) organized the diner at the Wildfire restaurant. Great location, great food. A Brazilian barbecue in front of the Opera house cannot go wrong! Oh! And on a side note, I won the Christmas joke contest. I know, I know…

Speaking of grilling meat, it’s barbecue season here. So far we’ve had one pretty much every week-end. It’s easy: every respectable house has a “barbie” (so house party = barbecue), pretty much every beach in Australia has public BBQs and the quality of the meat in this country is incredible! GFB FTW! (Translation: Grass-Fed-Beef-For-The-Win). You can see me at work and also Cihan here being a good Australian, “slipping a shrimp on the barbie”.

What else? Surfing and the likes. We finished our lessons. Cihan and Shirin bought all their gears and are catching the waves every week-end and/or sometimes in the early Am before work.

Cihan, Me and Gael. This is one of the only few times I managed to stand on the board.

Shirin – Jesus style.

What about me?! Have I bought a board? No. Why? Well, picture a clumsy penguin on a bicycle. See it? Ok: that’s me on a surfboard. So errr yeah. It’s very very frustrating… so I’m trying other things, like paddle boarding, kite surfing, etc. Piece of advice for anything like this: kinda useless in London, here Groupon is your best friend.

What about the others? Who are the others? What am I talking about? Let’s recap because this post doesn’t make any sense. I started writing it almost 2 months ago and in the meantime few more people arrived in Sydney: Laurent, Ronald, Ingrid, Stella, Sipho and Pablo. You can see a bunch of us relaxing around a Friday drink.

A’right, anyone else wants to come to Australia?

Credits:
Text (or what seems like one): Damo.
Photo editing (or what seems like one): Ciho.