This post was written over a week or so, saved as a draft in my email because i didn't get too much time on the internet to write all i wanted to write.

So i'm now in davenport. much has happened and i've not got much time to write.

The reason i left Launceston was because i couldn't find a job, despite much searching and applying. Many places said they'd call me back, including various jobs as a pruner of grape vines, a job picking gum tree nuts off the old growth forest floor, a takeaway shop (greasy food and sammiches), Taxi driver, Cafe staff, and delivery driver of dominoes pizza. Many of these places said they would call me back and then didn't. Finally I found a job planting onions, which i wrote about in my last post a bit, and then that ended and i moved to davenport to do collyflower picking. I'll write about that a bit later...

But i'll write a bit about my last days in launceston. I moved back into the Launceston backpackers, a nice place that has a piano and some nice people staying there. I stayed there before during the summer and it was crazy full of people, and it was nice to be there during the quiet season. I met alot of canadians too, including a group of students doing volunteer work (although i do'nt think they were required to work all that hard, because they told me they did tree planting, and said they planted about the same number of trees in a week that i did in one day). A couple of things really do annoy me about backpackers: one thing is getting my stuff stolen- i've had my sweet little tape player with the speaker on the side stolen, and one day i had most of my laundry stolen off the line which was a terrible loss- i lost all my sweaters, or, as the australians call them, 'Jumpers'. Also, it was all too easy to lose food. This one time during the summer months i put my bag of groceries that i bought into a box in the fridge, because it was the only free space there, and later, after all the groceries disappeared, i found out that this was the FREE box, only it didn't have a sign on it telling me that it was the FREE box. i might have written about that in here before, but it still annoys me because there should be some warning to someone who might mistakenly put his groceries in the free box by accident, perhaps a sign that says FREE would have worked... and there's always the possiblity of getting your food stolen, because i can't watch my stuff all the time... and another annoying thing is how i always get my food covered in crap from other peoples food on the higher shelves in the fridge- like my bag will be full of some sticky mystery liquid, milk, or blood from some nasty meat. GROSS. There are some nice people though, and the thing about traveling is you'll always meet new people.

So now im in Davenport, working the collies. I'm staying in this backpackers that used to be a hospital or something, and because it's the off season, there aren't many people staying there, and i have my own room, which is great. There aren't alot of people here which is nice, and there is a comfortable common room with a fire place and sweet tv satellite. One annoying thing, i've noticed it alot but especially here, is pee on the toilet seat! i guess some people never learn.
Last night was friday and i went out after a friend gave me some vodka here. There was a girl i wasn't all that attracted to who was kindof being friendly with me; i think she's a really cool girl and everything but we're much too different for it to work i think, and she swears so much! The tasmanians swear alot generally, and she's not as bad as some that i've met. One word that i find harsh is the word CUNT, but locals here don't seem to mind it, and they tend to use it in speech often. Perhaps i'll write a bit more about speech differences at the bottom, as i have been doing in earlier posts. I've been doing alot of reading as well, and have read just under 20 books since i got here, and i have a pile waiting to be read as well - the libraries here are great, and i've been taking advantage of their books as well as their internets.

One time i was in this takeaway shop and i saw what i thought was Cosmopolitan magazine, or Cosmo, the womans magazine. I thought i'd take a look at it, because sometimes i like to read those types of magazines; even though i don't like to be seen reading them, i feel like i'm spying on women by reading their trashy mags. anyways,, it wasn't cosmo, it was Cosmetic surgury magazine, a thick glossy magazine devoted to plastic surgury with really nasty before and after pictures. It's something i've never seen before, i wonder if they have it in canada.

I'm sure most people know of the Tasmanian devil, but maybe not everyone knows it's giong extinct. It's kindof gross how it happens, but i guess the tassie devil is a kindof gross animal in the way it lives. See, the tasmanian devils eat other dead animals, and when they're eating a corpse of a wallaby or kangaroo or whatever it is, they fight and bit over the corpse biting each other. But the thing is, this biting and fighting over food causes the spread of an infectious disease, or, it's like a mouth cancer.

Here are a few more speech differences i've noticed. When someone on TV is announcing the weather, it is either cold/rainy/cloudy/whatever OR, FINE. And another thing i've noticed on the news is they say, 'and now we move on to sport', like in canada we have the SPORTS part of the news, but in australia, it's just SPORT, and australians love their SPORT, especially FOOTY (haha).
I've also noticed some differences in names- i can't remember where this came from, but there was a man/ woman couple named MIF (the woman) and HAMISH (the man); apparently Hamish is a common name for a guy. weird eh? I also might have written about these two guys i met, named ASHLEY and COOKIE; in canada, ashley is a girls name, but i guess it's more of a guys name here, and cookie i thought was a weird name but apparently it's only a nickname- at the the time i thought, 'it's weird how australians name their kids 'COOKIE'.
There's something about australian speech; it's not that they're lazy when they're talking... or maybe they are talking in kindof a lazy way, but it's not like there's anything wrong with it i guess, it's just different. Like, when a word ends in A, like the word area, or australia, an australian would say the word as if it ended in an ER, like AIRYER, or AUSTRALIER,,, and to oppose this, if a word ends with ER, like the words worker, eater, killer, filler, ,, those words would be said, WORKA,EATA, KILLA, FILLA, or whatever. i think that's a strange difference. Also, if someone says the word NO, they actually say NOY, like as if they were saying soy, like the soybean kind of soy. I had a bunch more examples but my hands are cold and my time on the internet is up....