G'day!
C.I. is back from the mine for a week so we've been out and about exploring, which is why I've been a bit quiet for the last couple of days.
Today has been by far the hottest day so far. The sky was black this afternoon with a huge cloud hanging ominously over us, but it refused to rain, just got hotter and more humid. Our skin was literally soaking with sweat that couldn't evaporate as the air was so charged with water! And C.I. has an annoying habit of patting me on the back when I'm most sweaty, leaving big sweat hand prints where my shirt sticks to my skin!
We had an extremely rude awakening at 4am this morning. At first I thought that Rusty had surpassed himself in a frenzy of squeaking. Then I thought I was dreaming that we were in a WWII air raid. Finally it sank in that it was the fire alarm going off in the corridor outside.
Pants, I thought. What do we do now?
I made C.I. poke his head out of the door, but he reported there was not a soul to be seen, just this horrendous siren squealing louder and louder. He was all for going back to sleep but I decided we should get dressed and evacuate.
Locking the flat behind us, the squealing now at a deafening pitch, we opened the fire exit and made our way down 4 flights of stairs in a dimly lit furnace of a concrete stairway. I felt like I was in Derren Brown's holocaust. At the bottom of the stairs we turned a corner into a dark passageway flooded with rusty coloured water (I just hoped it wasn't sewage). The exit door was at the other end of the passage.
Stepping gingerly through the rusty (omg, that word crops up everywhere!) lake, we opened the fire exit door and looked out at a group of people sitting across the road staring at us.
For some reason they all burst out laughing as we stepped out, which only added to the bizarre surrealism of the whole experience. At least we weren't the only two standing outside in the middle of the night! However there were only 10 of us in total, the rest having turned over and gone back to sleep. Someone told me that this was the 9th time this had happened since Christmas, so we have this to look forward to! Eventually the alarm stopped and we all trooped back in again and back to bed.
This afternoon we decided to go and watch the sunset in Fannie Bay (that's such a quaint name!).
On the way to the bus stop we stopped to have a look in a souvenir shop and I found the best contenders so far in my quest to find the tackiest Northern Territory souvenir:
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| Genuine stuffed toads - who on earth would want to buy one of these? And who on earth came up with the idea? |
Is there some kind of relevance to Darwin and stuffed toads that yet escapes me?
I decided I have a lot to learn about this place.
