Category Archives: Try Something Different

#116 Give Airbnb a Try

Airbnb has been functioning in Australia for only 12 years, so until recently, I hadn’t jumped on the bandwagon to book a holiday on the site, lest I turn into some sort of reckless adventurer.

But needing a place to stay in Sydney recently and with the usual accommodation at my sister’s in such a state of renovation that Kevin McCloud would confidently predict it was “unlikely to have a completion date this side of 2030”, we decided to splash out and:

#116 Give Airbnb a Try

Why not book an upmarket apartment in the heart of the city with great views and all the mod cons?

Every review for this new apartment was glowing, the ratings universally 5-stars and the praise for our host ‘Anna’* was fulsome. What could go wrong?

Indeed.

We messaged ‘Anna’ from the airport cab as advised, but alas, she wasn’t at the destination to greet us. And the foyer of the 30-storey building where we were staying needed a swipe card to enter, which we didn’t have, so we slipped in behind a Deliveroo chap who obviously knew the secret code. All very James Bond.

When there was no sign of ‘Anna’ inside either, we wandered up to the kindly concierge who we noticed greeting many of the passing visitors by name. We asked if he could let our airbnb host know of our arrival. He seemed puzzled. He didn’t know an ‘Anna’. So we continued to wait for her.

The place was a bustling metropolis reminiscent of a stay in Shanghai or Bangkok. Students and city workers, retired elders carrying bags of groceries, fit young things with dogs on leashes and numerous delivery men criss-crossed the space. Fascinating! It was like entering another world existing in parallel to the one we knew.

Finally someone walked over to us, said he was ‘Anna’s’ partner, bustled us into one of the sleek lifts and sped us up to our apartment 1310. Was I a little disconcerted that there was, unusually, a 13th floor in this building? Perhaps.

But with its neat layout and great views of central Sydney, the apartment was exactly as advertised.

We nipped out to a nearby food court to buy provisions, but it was only on our return that we noticed the sign in the lift.

AIRBNB STRICTLY PROHIBITED?

Surely this sign didn’t pertain to our stay. It must be a new rule, we thought, a rule for others. How lucky were we to be exempt?

So we went out again to explore Sydney and admire the beauty of the QVB.

The evening was drawing in when we returned.

And that’s when things took a darker turn.

The lift refused to accept the electronic code on our key ring. Others sharing the ride up to different floors had no trouble, but for us, persuading the lift to stop at the 13th floor where resided the apartment with all our belongings wasn’t going to happen.

So unless we were happy to ride up and down all night, never being allowed to exit, it looked like we were stymied.

Back to the kindly concierge. Why could we not access our floor, we asked? He told us we’d have to message ‘Anna’ and tell her to ring the National Facilities Management to sort out the issue.

Could we not do that ourselves? No, he said, it had to be ‘Anna’, the owner he now seemed to know.

Hmm. Suspicious. Did he have anything to do with our predicament?

Fortunately ‘Anna’ agreed to message the management for us.

But then asked us to say we were friends of hers.

Sure, ‘Anna’. I’ve no doubt we look just like all your friends.

After a longer wait, by which time I was ready to throw myself on the mercy of the Management Court if I could just be permitted to retrieve my clothes, two very well dressed executive-types walked officiously towards us holding clipboards. They were very stern. We were not entitled to be there. These gorgeous apartments were for owners and tenants only. Airbnb was strictly forbidden. ‘Anna’ knew the rules!

I suspect it was only by virtue of our age, our gender and by now, our bewildered manner that they agreed to unlock the freeze and let us ascend to the 13th floor. We could even stay for the 3 nights we’d paid.

Since our return home, Airbnb keeps asking us to rate our stay. But oddly, when we go looking for the apartment again on their site, all we get is …

And my conclusion from this adventure?

#116 Don’t give Airbnb a Try. Unless you really love stress in your life.

* ‘Anna’ is not her real name. She may – or may not – even exist. We never met her!

# 115 Give Christmas Shopping a Surprise Twist

#114 Communicate in Chinese

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I’m not sure if typing ‘English <=> Chinese’ into Google translate’s website counts as using Artificial Intelligence, but if it does, I’m here for it.

#114 Communicate in Chinese (or 用中文交流 for the aficionados)

During a recent Friends Quest in the on-line language program Duolingo where I’m trying to improve my French, I noticed that the player with whom I was occasionally paired—who from his picture appeared to be of Chinese origin—changed his nickname frequently from one set of incomprehensible Chinese characters to another.

Intriguing. To date, I’d not noticed anyone else changing their name on Duolingo.

Why would he do this? Was he giving himself the name of a Chinese Superhero, perhaps, or was this a secret game he was playing, a game that non-Chinese speakers couldn’t join?

So I took a screen shot of my new friend’s latest name change and copied it into Google translate, only to discover he was indulging in something much deeper than a frivolous nickname upgrade.

He was making an existential comment on his life:

Now my interest was well and truly piqued.

Several weeks later, when we were paired for a Friends Quest again, I noticed he’d given himself a brand new moniker.

I wondered if he were feeling any happier now the worst of winter was over.

Not a bit of it.

Whoa!

was clearly unhappy with the team running Duolingo and wanted them to know it.

A couple of weeks later, his nickname became more pointed:

One of the drawbacks of these Friends Quests is that your success is quite dependent on which partner Duolingo assigns you. It’s like those awful school group projects where if you were the pathetically conscientious one, you ended up doing the brunt of the work.

And so it was becoming with my new friend .

Together we had to complete 20 lessons to be rewarded, but it was looking like bunnykins here was doing most of the heavy lifting:

Hoping to encourage , I changed my own name from the prosaic <Carolyn> to <我们做得到> which translates to <we can do it>.

At least, I hope that’s what is says.

I thought this might be all the encouragement needed to complete a couple more perfect lessons.

Not a chance. Instead, my friend changed his nickname—and his photograph—again, to something I didn’t have to worry about putting into Google translate:

I guess this is an excellent insight for a native Chinese speaker to have, but it didn’t help me.

Our next pairing became even more unbalanced:

GRRR!

So when another friend on Duolingo — one whom I know in real life— sent me this text message …

… I realised it was time to call it quits.

As Duolingo is now letting me choose who my new quest friend will be, I’ve decided to give the flick.

The friendship that had burned so brightly is over now.

As they say, exploit me once, that’s on you, exploit me twice, I’m the idiot.

I’ve moved on to a better friend now. Someone who sticks with their nickname through thick and thin.

And someone who really understands the Yin and Yang of group projects.

#113 Set Yourself a Satisfying Challenge

#112 Attempt a Resuscitation

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It was late on a Sunday evening, after the chickens had been safely locked up and the final load of washing was happily swirling in its soapy juices, that I settled down to watch TV and simultaneously send a few text messages.

Except my iPhone was missing. Nowhere to be found, even after upending all the sofa cushions, checking every room I’d wandered into on the way towards relaxation time and dialling it from my landline.

I knew it couldn’t be lost. I’d had it not forty minutes ago, just before, just before … putting on the washing.

OMG the washing! Had the phone been in the pocket of my jeans?

#112 Attempt a Resuscitation

It’s hard to describe the feeling of watching your iPhone grinning gleefully at you as it sloshes around in sudsy water from inside your washing machine .

Did you know that interrupting front loading washing machines mid-cycle is not at all intuitive?

And it’s terribly stressful trying to locate a 10-year-old washing machine instruction manual in a hurry, find the section on “How to Add or Remove Items From Your Machine”, then discover it’s nigh on impossible if the drum is full of water. The internal screaming at your own stupidity doesn’t help either.

So I resigned the phone to its fate, managed to switch the washer to a shorter cycle and spin, all the while googling “Can a Drowned iPhone be saved?”

It turns out, that’s not as stupid as it sounds. If the immersion has been short-lived, there’s an outside chance of rescue. But there was no mention of “full cycle”, “soap”, “suds” and “high speed spinning”.

Following Google’s advice, I switched the phone off the second I could retrieve it (and it did look very clean) removed the SIM card, rinsed the phone of soapy residue and put it in a jar of rice.

The next morning, after further research told me that rice isn’t a good idea because small grains can get into the mechanism, I moved onto silica beads.

*DO NOT EAT ME … but do save me for a rainy day*

You know the ones. They come in little sachets slipped into various purchases to reduce damp spoilage and they have written exhortations on the packets not to ingest them on pain of death.

But the few packs I could scavenge didn’t seem enough, so I bought more from my friendly hardware monolith, slipped the phone into an old sock and buried it in a heap of the beads for 5 days.

*… and that’s the SIM card at the top, wrapped in a piece of tissue in an attempt to salvage it as well.*

The amount of water extracted after the first 5 days was surprising

so I repeated the process with fresh beads for another 5 days with similar results. (Being without your phone for ten days is a whole other story … )

Being loath to risk electrocution by turning it on or recharging it after such a soaking, I took it into a very brave iPhone repairer who did the deed for me. He, too, was mightily impressed with the silica beads’ water extraction capabilities and offered to nurse the phone on his bespoke temperature controlled warming-bed for another 24 hours.

I find this hard to believe, but my phone has been working since I picked it up from him.

Yes, really!

I’ll be honest, a machine can’t go through that much trauma and come out totally unscathed.

It can no longer manage facial recognition, take a screen shot or allow me to pay using the Visa card in my apple wallet, but these are minor issues and so far, everything else works pretty well.

HALLELUJAH!

And the major lesson I’ve learned from this adventure? (Well, apart from the obvious.)

Save up all the little sachets of DO NOT EAT silica beads you ever get, because who knows, one day the phone they save may be yours.

#110 Relearn a Language

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We’re constantly being exhorted to exercise our minds as well as our bodies, so when a friend told me a few months ago about Duolingo, “The World’s Best Way to Learn a Language” (according to Duolingo’s website), it sounded like an idea that was perfect for the times. Certainly a much better idea than exercising my body which wasn’t ready for anything as dangerous as say, walking.

So I promptly enrolled in their French course, a language I had once haltingly stammered over 50 years ago, and found myself ensnared in a juggernaut of relentless encouragement.

#110 Relearn a Language

The Duo part of Duolingo, as well as meaning two, is also the website’s green owl, a mascot who keeps urging you on in that intermittent re-inforcement fashion that psychologists have shown to be most effective at keeping people trapped in their addictions.

When you least expect it, he pops up to your right

*… to give you that little frisson of satisfaction and convince you to keep going*

or to your left,

It’s much more interactive and engaging than the classes I remember at school in the ’60s taught by the rather quiet nun who’d never been within cooee of France, and the rewards (points to amass, promotion to a higher grade, or just flattering encouragement) are frequent enough to satisfy, but inconsistent enough to keep you returning.

Peer pressure works well, too. Other students will often follow you in the hope of being followed back, so you can send and receive congratulations when you both achieve your goals.

But after six months, and having successfully graduated from beginner’s to intermediate classes, it suddenly dawned on me that I wasn’t enjoying it so much any more.

Each day became filled with too many messages urging me to do even better, work even harder, amass more points, and maintain my position. And if I slipped behind, or was about to be overtaken, the messages arrived as relentlessly as those in the opening scenes of Harry Potter, impossible to ignore.

But still they kept coming, reminding me what I’d achieved that week and what I could do the next:

Finally the shaming began. I was going backwards:

*Oh no! 93 minutes less than last week. A pathway to disgrace*

Things had to change.

I realised that something I was doing for pleasure, purely to keep my mind active—and to prove that I could almost recognise every fifth word spoken during an SBS French film—was turning into a nightmare. I had no time to sleep, no time to eat, no other enjoyments in life. And as I was never going to stroll along the Seine again on a warm Parisian afternoon, would I ever need to ask directions or enquire as to the cost of croissants?

Enough, I decided!

So I’m back to an enjoyable ten to fifteen minutes revision every day.

*Yes, every day. I’m on a roll, you see, and what would Duo think if I suddenly stopped?.*

Who cares about points and promotions?

Anyway, I have a new love now. A friend introduced me to Quordle, and I think I’m hooked.

#109 Play Around with Works of Art

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If you’re ever watched the UK programme Fake or Fortune, you’ll know it involves experts investigating the provenance of little known works of art submitted by the owners in the hope that their find is a long lost piece by a Great Master.

Am I the only one who, by the episode’s end, is thinking ‘if it’s so hard to tell the difference between the real thing and this newly discovered offering, does it really matter?’ Although this admission might suggest I know nothing about art.

But the show gave me the idea for a topic to interest my Discovery friends at one of our recent afternoon get-togethers. Why not—

#109 Play around with Works of Art

—to see if we can reproduce them, for better or worse?

The brief was broad. Take any work of art you like and using materials of your choice, recreate it. Then show us a photograph of the original art work and your copy.

To allay any anxiety about the need to create something wondrous, I provided a couple of examples of what could be achieved with simple tools:

On the left is **Untitled** by R Ryman. It sold for $3.9 Million USD. On the right is my copy—*Wall—* worth $0

And another:

On the left: **Still Life with Fruit** by artist Belinda Nott. On the right: **Lemons from the Garden**.

Everyone was given a couple of weeks to prepare their masterpiece, and they rose to the occasion with fabulous offerings. I challenge you to pick the original!

One of these is Margaret Olley’s **Pomegranates 1** and the other isn’t

Can you tell the real Kandinsky **Colour Study** from the fake?

The mood of Clarice Beckett’s **End of the Garden** has been cleverly reproduced.

Can you tell which is Whistler’s **Arrangement in Grey and Black** and which is the imposter?

An excellent reproduction of Picasso’s **Woman with Dove**

McCubbin’s **Lost (Child)** set among gum trees has morphed into **Lost (Wallaby)** in the scrub

A masterful recreation of part of Bosch’s **The Last Judgement** (top half)

Portion of **Blue Moon** by Mirka Mora—copied using Aldi crayons

Vermeer’s **Girl with a Pearl Earring**—and a few years later?

Art in nature. The rainbow lorikeet, but which one is the fake?

A lovingly recreated **Tea Set** by Charles Sluga

Impossible to pick the real Botticelli’s **Birth of Venus**

A little-known Chagall: **Composition with Goat** cleverly reproduced.

And another Clarice Beckett: **Moonlight and Calm Sea** beside smokey **Sunlight on Lagoon**

Despite the less than perfect results, our intentions were pure, so surely our imitations can be seen as flattery?

It’s not like a certain famous Swedish furniture company that recreated Renoir’s Luncheon of the Boating Party and van Gogh’s The Potato Eaters so they could build the sets to advertise flat pack furniture no less!

The featured image is from a still life by painter Abraham Mignon (1640-1679). The bouquet to its right was gifted to one of our participants.

#108 Make Soap (yes, really!)

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It wasn’t supposed to be like this.

With the Omicron peak waning, most of us happily vaccinated and lockdowns and restrictions a thing of the past, adventures far from home beckoned. So this month’s blog should have been about fresh fields, exotic travel, excitement, restaurants and glamour.

And yet here I am, explaining how to

#108 Make Soap (yes, really!)

Constructing new cakes of soap out of neglected, leftover shards of old soaps is reminiscent of the sad, lonely, lockdown-type activities of 2020 or 2021, but due to a recent spontaneous fracture in my leg (insultingly called an ‘insufficiency fracture’ as though I neglected to care for my bones sufficiently) I’m on ‘minimal-weight-bearing-until-it-heals’ orders from the orthopaedic surgeon.

And so it’s back to finding new activities that can be done without venturing from home. Or walking really.

So I scoured the internet to find instructions on how to convert all the bits and pieces of old soaps I’d found in the bathroom cabinet into brand new hearty bars of soap.

*Gather together about a cup of old leftovers. It speeds up the process to shave or grate them into smallish pieces, as I discovered too late.*

Place them in a saucepan, cover with cold water and leave overnight till the mixture becomes a slushy mess.

Add a tablespoon of olive or vegetable oil and a few drops of a fragrant essence or lemon zest and stir over medium heat until all the soap has melted. It can take a while —up to 30 minutes.

*It helps to have a jazzy stirrer like this, but a wooden spoon works too*

It ends up looking like the smooth custard you’d prepare for a Portuguese tart, but sadly cannot taste.

Add a few drops of food colouring and pour into silicon moulds to set:

Leave for 24 hours, then remove from the moulds and dry on a wire rack for a few more days before using.

The websites I found speak of packaging these small soaps in pretty shapes adorned with ribbons and giving them away as gifts,

but although they’ve been sterilised by boiling for ages, I’m a bit uncomfortable about forcing them onto unsuspecting friends. And they’d not win any beauty contests.

However, to my surprise, the fully dried cakes of soap work extremely well and I’m excited to see if I can collect all the shards from this lot to create even more batches in the future.

It will, of course, follow the laws of diminishing returns, but I’m hopeful it may be some time before I ever have to buy soap again.

#106 Try Calligraphy

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It was during one of our lockdowns, while looking for an entertaining gift to send to a friend in Sydney, that I came across a couple of Calligraphy practice kits on the shelves of the local post office.

They looked intriguing. Why not purchase one for my artistic friend who seemed at risk of going stir-crazy during her enforced imprisonment?

The chap behind the counter gave a suppressed snort as he scanned the box.

‘They still selling these?’ he said. (Bearing in mind he was literally selling the item to me at that moment, it was an interesting use of the word ‘they’, but no matter). ‘Twenty-odd years ago my dad ran the Post Office in [Tinyville] and I’d help him out sometimes. They stocked them back in those days.’

This suggested that the kits are either wildly popular and timeless, or the type of horribly out-dated stock a post office would hold. But it was his next words that clinched the deal.

‘You’re in luck.’ He sounded surprised. ‘They’re on sale. Half price.’

‘Wait a sec.’ I held up my hand. ‘Let me go and get the other one as well!’

And that’s how I came to:

#106 Try Calligraphy

After a friend mentioned that she and her sons had experimented with calligraphy many years earlier and the ink stains still hadn’t come out of their fingers, it took me a few weeks to even open the kit, and I wisely began to practice with pencil.

As the word calligraphy means ‘beautiful writing’ I went looking for a non finger-staining writing tool that might achieve this, reasoning that if I jumped into using the pen and ink provided in the kit, beautiful writing might never happen.

Enter pens created especially for the occasion. Brilliant!

The salesman in the small, old-fashioned stationery store seemed as surprised as I was that they stocked something called a “Calligraphy pen”, let alone with a choice of colours.

Time to test its ability to write in calligraphy style.

After practising for a while,

the ink in my brand new calligraphy pen began to fade, which I put down to its age, imagining it had probably been sitting in the stationer’s fusty store for years.

But on re-reading the instructions in the kit booklet, I came across this admonition:

So it was time to give the real pen and ink a whirl:

Then it hit me. While doing calligraphy is a relaxing, meditative hobby, I wasn’t going to live long enough to become adept at it, and anyway, wasn’t that what fonts were for?

Medieval monks had to spend their lives writing laborious decorative epistles because they didn’t have access to Word programmes on their computers, but we do.

So I went looking for fonts that matched the concept of ‘Beautiful Writing’ and came up with a fabulous assortment.

*So…oo much better than anything I’ll ever do*

I can see where this is heading. I might just become a contestant on Mastermind whose special subject is—Calligraphy Fonts.

#101 Finish a Blog

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Whoever claimed ‘It’s not about the destination, it’s all about the journey’ clearly never suffered from motion sickness. I have vivid memories of every childhood holiday (and fortunately they weren’t too frequent) spent in the back seat of a hot car with my head over a bucket wondering if I’d die before we made it to our destination.

And don’t remind me of the horrendous boat trip out to the Great Barrier Reef in the ’80s where I became that pariah below deck, throwing up her insides; nor that New Year’s Eve yachting party on Sydney Harbour in the ’90s where a water-taxi had to be called to ferry such an embarrassing guest away. Oh no, journeys have rarely held much pleasure for me.

So imagine my surprise to discover, on finally reaching my destination of completing 101 Fun and Frivolous Activities in Retirement—after almost 9 years—that I’ve actually loved this particular journey. Not a hint of travel sickness.

But where to from here?

#101 Finish a Blog

So for something a little different to celebrate this 101st and final blog post, I’ve created an interactive one for a change.

If you like quizzes, this one’s for you; if you love crosswords, it will fill in a few minutes of your day; and if you’re of a literary bent, you’ll enjoy recalling past reads because this one’s a literary-themed crossword.

And in a final twist, there’s a mystery message to be deciphered at the end.

*My apologies that it’s not a crossword where you can type in the answers, but that skill’s way above my pay grade.*

Clues:

Once you’ve found the answers, you can go on to solve the mystery message:

And if you think I have too much time on my hands, you may be right, but it sure beats travel sickness!

outsidethesquare101

101 fun and frivolous things to try in retirement: a single's guide