Well, in general I've been up to a whole lot of nothing again. I bought a blazer for being interviewed for jobs in for when I want to get interviewed for jobs, and we went for dim sum last Saturday (it's called yum cha here) and myself and Dizzy spent a while digging through the sale stock in a gaming shop (he came away with some cheap Cyberpunk 2020 modules and a Star Wars RPG sourcebook for Yavin and Bespin, and I got some adventures for the long-dead Indiana Jones RPG, a book and GM screen for the game of piratey swashbuckling 7th Sea, which I'll have to get the rulebooks for now, and best find ever, a copy of the excellent Hong Kong Action Theatre! game) but for the most part I've been sitting around reading or whatever.
And so it came to pass that I booked into a Bar Skills course run by the people who ran the RSA and RCG things, because those were good - I'd like to know how to pull a pint and serve a shot correctly before going and asking for jobs. The course was on yesterday in town, so I got up early having been to bed late again (that was the case for the Responsibility courses and my scuba course, and they went fine so I figured it couldn't hurt) and went along to the same building as before. Once the eleven participants had turned up we were ushered along to their training bar and seated around a table.
The guy giving the course said he'd been working in and running pubs and cafes for fourteen years and had only gone into the training end of things about a year ago. It started off with a bit of theory, which was all really basic stuff but contained lots of useful little things to remember - which is pretty much how the whole course was actually. We ran over stuff like uniform, grooming, customer service, complaints, equipment, glass sizes and uses and how to open up a bar at the start of your shift, and then got into pint-pulling. Straightforward stuff, of course, once you know how it's done, but again with little things to remember like stop about two-thirds of the way through to see if the head is too big or too small, and take appropriate countermeasures, and hold the glass low down for hygiene reasons and so on. We all got a few tries at that until we had the knack, and the half that weren't doing that at any given time practised free-pouring spirits from bottles (cleverly simulated using water), that is to say, trying to pour 30ml into a tumbler without measuring it except in your brain (a quick one-two-three count from when it starts coming out the spouty thing is about right) which is useful for working in a cocktail bar. Then he showed us how to serve spirits and soft drinks, and we had to practise that too (again, little things to bear in mind, like ice goes in first, then spirit, then mixer).
There was some more theory, like learning names of some standard, premium and deluxe (not sure if they're official categories or just convenient ones for the purposes of the course) spirits, which was useful for me because I'm not familiar with many of the brands for sale over here, and what various liqueurs are about. Then we learned about cocktails, and how to make them in the five different ways - shaking, stirring, blending, building and muddling. And then each of us was handed a card and instructed to make the cocktail it had a recipe for on it. Mine was called an Irish Banana, unfortunately since I hate bananas with a passion alien to most people who have never spent any time in throes of religious fanaticism. Nevertheless, I managed to successfully shake ice, banana liqueur, Bailey's and cream together and strain the resulting off-grey spoo into a martini glass and then avoid trying it. After that we learned the basics of closing down a bar at the end of the day and then cleaned the place up until it was just the way we'd found it. Groovy.
Britta's been having some trouble with her cancer cells at work, they all died or something (that's bad, contrary to common beliefs) so while new ones are growing or thawing out or whatever until she can poke them and make note of the results on a fancy graph on her computer, she's at a bit of a loose end and has taken to not spending as much time at work as she's technically supposed to because there's nothing for her to do there for now. So when I got home she was here and had spent the day making cookies and playing a computer game involving designing roller coasters for theme parks. When Dizzy arrived, making the traditional voyage from the front door (entryway) to the fridge (beer storage) and they'd eaten dinner, we found ourselves short of anything to do for the evening, as usual. Myself and Dizzy were chatting a bit about a spin-off roleplaying game idea he'd been thinking about, involving crossing over the Cyberpunk setting with 1920s Chicago, so he suggested seeing what gangster movies the local video shop has, so off we set. After the usual amount of glaring incompetence as we tried to actually find the video shop, he set about joining up in order to get the two-for-the-price-of-one deal they offer for your first month and I started going through the Classics section because there wasn't anything more likely-looking. Odd place - I also had a look through the Hong Kong and "Japanimation" sections which were both conspicuous by their absences - the Hong Kong section had all three soft-porno unofficial spin-offs of the very highly regarded A Chinese Ghost Story series, but none of the originals, for example, and had John Woo's less-well-known Bullet in the Head but neither of his most famous pieces, Hardboiled and The Killer. Curious. Oh well, we eventually emerged much later than planned with The Godfather, which I'd never actually seen before, and Angels With Dirty Faces. Not sure if they're the right era (The Godfather certainly isn't) but it's a start. We watched The Godfather and it was good but long and I was exhausted by the end of it.
Today I went down to the dive shop to enquire about a dive they'd suggested might be happening on Monday, which is a bank holiday here. Alas there was no sign of such a thing happening, and I'll be out of town for the rest of the weekend so the other dives weren't doable, but the guy there (it's mildly disturbing to be greeted with "Hi Shane" when I walk into a shop, but at least the shop in question is a lot cooler than Games Workshop or whatever type of place I'd otherwise be most likely to get such treatment) mentioned a boat dive taking place on Saturday week where they'd be looking at sharks. Now this being my first real proper dive I'd been hoping I could start out with something a bit more beginnery, like one of the free shore dives I get with my club membership (a shore dive involves wading into the sea until you're up to your chest or thereabouts, then putting your fins on and getting going, whereas a boat dive involves getting geared up on a boat, holding your mask and regulator in place with one hand and stepping off the side into water too deep to see the bottom of), but I wasn't about to pass up the opportunity to swim with sharks, and hey, in at the deep end and all that, so I signed up for it. I'm not sure how they allocate buddies and I feel sorry for whoever gets lumped with babysitting the newbie, because if nothing else I'm gonna guzzle my air like it's going out of fashion and therefore have to limit how long we can spend down there, but it's gonna be great regardless, for me at least. And I'll finally get to get my new gear wet. The dive is in 16m of water and I'm certified down to 18, so I won't have to spend the whole time checking my altimiter or whatever scuba divers call them to ensure I haven't gone too deep, although it's much deeper than I've been before which means I'll have to put into practise those techniques for ensuring giant nitrogen bubbles don't start rampaging about under your skin, and your lungs don't explode and all that. Exciting!
Dizzy got Friday off from work, and Britta isn't gonna bother going in, so tonight we're off to Britta's hometown up in the Blue Mountains to stay with her folks and do some hiking and cave exploring for the weekend. That's gonna be fun too, if the weather's okay. There was a lot of lightning from that direction last night (we could see it from here) and it's really windy here today, and I don't know what the significance of that is.