Settling down...

Before anyone is allowed to work offshore they have to undergo specific training including: first aid, CPR, fire fighting, helicopter crash escape and survival techniques. The training takes three days and is a combination of theory and practical and gives you four years working offshore. On completion you receive a certificate (this one I wont loose like my degree!) and a little card with your picture on. A picture that they take of you looking overly worried about the impending tasks and not wearing a scrap of makeup. It’s not a good look.

Overall, the training was really useful, pretty exciting and some parts could come in handy one day although there are some skills that I would never like to put into practise namely escaping from a capsized, sinking helicopter. In this exercise you are wearing: your bathers (thats Aussie for swimwear), overalls, a survival suit (all in one, airtight, skin tight number), booties (swimming shoes), a life jacket, a rebreather (think baby carrier on your front), gloves and a hard hat. What I’m saying is that you’re three sizes bigger and have lost about 80% mobility...and now you have to swim. 

They execute the training step by step to keep panic to a minimum and you have to do each exercise twice; once holding your breath and once using the re-breather. This is NOT an oxygen tank. This does what it says. Just before submersion you take a deep breath in and exhale into a pipe which part-fills your ‘third lung’. You then re-breathe this ‘air’ (depleting oxygen supply) until you reach the surface. It is not a pleasant experience. You can only re-breathe for about thirty seconds before you become dizzy and disorientated. Once submerged and capsized you have to smash out the window, undo your seatbelt and escape.

It was a busy week and as well as training to be Lara Croft we also had to move house. What a drama (that’s an Aussie fav phase!)!! Amazingly, we managed to bag the first property we viewed in Mandurah; a waterfront apartment with a parking space for a boat! It’s an open plan place with balconies front and back. We are five minutes from the beach, which makes me very happy, close the the Arts Centre, which also makes me very happy, and have lots of restaurants close by. Our closest eatery is a champagne and oyster bar which is located about 25 meters away! We have signed a contract for six months so if I were you guys I’d try and get out here coz it really is nice :-)  

Since securing a job and a long term ‘home’ the focus was now on making friends. This can be quite a daunting task as you have to put yourself out there a bit and push your normal social boundries. Having said that I wasn’t doing too bad. I had found a cultural companion for arty outings and a bashment buddy for hitting up the reggae joints what more could a girl ask for?! Oh wait, neither of these people were Aussie so that was the next task: find Australian friends.