Hanging out near the car-park-with-a-view while waiting for Gam on Wednesday. We couldn't check in until 2pm so Gam went to training and I hung around and read a book.
Gam and I are currently staying in Coolangatta, where he is attending a training programme for work. His work has put him up at 'Calypso Plaza', a centrally-located motel/resort thingummy close to the beach. In one of the cheapo rooms, mind. It's nice and clean, but there's a few little thing that niggle... like the fact that the bed is made up of two singles pushed together and has a hard ridge down the middle (all very well for couples who don't like to cuddle up when they sleep, I suppose, but very uncomfortable otherwise). Also, when I opened the door to the cabinet housing the small refrigerator, not only was one of the hinges broken, a blast of hot air escaped through the door because the fridge was giving off so much heat!
If the place burns down, this'll probably be the culprit.
Has pay TV... which is just as crap as free-to-air TV.Why does anyone watch TV?
Neat and clean, but no tissues!
Plus there's no tissues, and with my chronic hayfever being much worse than usual this morning (probably because of all the cleaning chemicals and air-fresheners they use around the place, I'm guessing), that means I'm pretty quickly working my way through a roll of toilet paper.
Looks can be deceptive: great pillows, dreadful mattresses.Also, while a jug for tea and coffee making is provided, the only accessible power-point to plug it into is in the bathroom (unless I wanted to make tea on the floor). The cups provided smelled funny, so I had to make a cup of tea with the cheap teabags provided and throw it out as a way of cleaning the cup and removing the stale smell. I brought Barambah Organics milk with us because I figured it might be difficult to get it here. I love that milk.
That said, even our cheap room has ocean views (unfortunately we're not close enough to hear the sea) and there is a really good little turkish take-away place across the road that does a crazily good Turkish pizza... Gam reckons it would be better with cheese, but I strongly disagree. We went there for lunch yesterday, and if Gam hadn't resisted I would have gone there for dinner too! Unfortunately we got Indian take-away last night (also from across the road) and it was just awful. Expensive compared with Brisbane, and the quality was really poor. The lamb roganjosh we ordered was pale yellow and in a cream sauce! The garlic naan was miniscule, and the vegetable samosas were filled with what tasted like salt paste. The only good thing I can say about it was that the samosas were perfectly fried. I think the place was called 'Mujani' or something like that. Give it a miss- it was awful.
I do remember the name of the Turkish place- it's called Adana's Palace. It just looks like your average grotty little take-away place, but their pizza was sensational. While we were waiting for our food, two young mums were having lunch with their babies- one of the mums was a blonde girl, certainly no older than me, with a beautiful chubby, brown baby boy. At one point he started staring at us and babbling away. On their way out we waved goodbye to him and his mother said “He's saying that if you two ever have a baby it'll look like him!”, noting that the baby's father was Ghanaian- and learning with some surprise that Gam is too (there aren't so many Ghanaians even in Brisbane, let alone in Coolangatta). Baby Tobias, aka Kwame ('born on a Saturday') was pretty damn adorable- Gam likes to look for excuses to be anti-baby (anti-us-having-a-baby!), but baby Tobias was so cute and well behaved that all he could come up with was “he was too fat!”. Not true, of course. Awwww.
Depressing weather...There's a nice pool at Calypso Plaza- although it looks designed with kids in mind, being less than a metre deep- but after a horrid storm with rain, thunder and strong winds yesterday, we're having a freezing day today. I'm in winter clothes :( I had at least looked up the weather forecast on the bureau of meteorology website before we left, which was just as well, or I might have been freezing for the entire 3 days.
This morning we popped downstairs to the bakery/cafe next door to buy coffee. The bakery is called 'The Ginger Jar'- when I saw the name of it I was quite excited, figuring it must have all sorts of tasty baked goods containing ginger. Nope! From what I could see it sold only standard bakery fare, not a single ginger biscuit or cake or tart or pudding... Disappointing! So was the quality of the coffee... upon finding out that they couldn't do an iced latte we asked for two double espresso shots so we could take them back to our room and at least use Barambah Organics milk... It tasted like mud. Even the good milk couldn't rescue the bad coffee. At least the lady running the place was nice and friendly. We also bought a croissant and two cinnamon donuts. The croissant was good quality, but I prefer a sweet croissant, so Gam ate that. Donuts are never as good as when they're piping hot and fresh, and the Ginger Jar donuts were not hot but they were of decent quality, considering... whatever fat they were fried in kind of left my mouth with a tacky feel, however.
Expensive internet access...Gam has gone off to work now, and I am working on my thesis. Gam managed to resurrect our dead laptop so I could work here instead of staying at home... I have to use it plugged in; he had to take the battery out because it kept getting so hot we were worried it might explode. We paid $20 for 24 hours' internet access at Calypso Plaza, which is pretty steep, but at least they weren't lying when they said they had a wireless connection. That said, when I ran the connection test for 'MyPort' (the provider Calypso Plaza uses) I am pretty sure it lied to me about the download speeds I'd be getting -they said 1690 kbps, but in reality it's almost as slow as dial-up on iinet. Expensive and crappy, but better than nothing. I didn't see a single internet cafe in this area.
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