Crocked and Roll

Roll on the holidays. Just two weeks now and then I am off for two weeks. I can't wait, especially as I am getting progressively more and more crippled by work at the moment.

It's pretty much a given that in my job you end up with a bad back but at the moment I am not getting better. I really need to take a couple of weeks off work to recuperate but it's just too busy. Every time I move now my spine cracks and my neck burns. Hey ho, hopefully I'll get better over my holiday. Actually if I do and then get worse again when I get back to work I'm thinking of trying for workers compo. Not a road I really want to go down, but it's costing me a fortune in physio and drugs. Actually it could probably be all resolved if I just got a more acceptable chair to put the patients on.

Still I am looking forward to the holiday. I went and got the foreign currency the other day. Well I tried to. Obviously getting Taiwan Dollars in Perth is a considerable challenge. If you want US dollars or British Pounds or New Zealand Dollars then no problem. Obviously only English speaking currencies available in this town.

I understand that the little exchange booths don't have Taiwanese dollars on hand, but the fact that the ANZ bank doesn't have it, and can't even order it, it ridiculous. I mean they are a bank for god sake. Aren't they meant to handle money? Eventually I got it from a little Travelex booth in Karrinyup shopping centre. They were both helpful and polite, which was a pleasant change. Mind you I have no Idea if I actually have Taiwanese money as it's all written in Chinese. They could have given me anything. Luckily the numbers are in arabic script so I know how much each note is worth.

I've also had a few Mandarin lessons from Selene at work. I now know how to say "hello", "thank you", "excuse me", "no thank you" and "I am allergic to prawns". Well I say I know how. I might need to practice as it's a tonal language and that makes it really tricky for an English speaker, especially one like me who is hopeless at foreign languages. Thank goodness the iPhone now has a voice recorder on it. I shall be sitting on the plane practising my Chinese for 8 hours.

I am expecting some very funny looks.