The Time I Hung Out in a Tattoo Shop

It’s my first time in a tattoo shop and I'm nervous. I walk into the open-concept room with its black and white checker board floors and blood red brick walls with a bit of a shake in my step. There are three tattoo artists with their clients spread out across the room. After a series of hurried and slightly …

Confusion and Boredom at the Cricket

It was the last remaining link to my Australian sporting experience. Cricket, or in the grammatically awkward Australian expression, “the cricket”. It’s always been a curious sport for me: famously drawn out and slow-paced, full of quirky rules and traditions, noticeably denied from the North American mainstream yet loved by billions of people across the …

The Goal of Ex-Pat Life: Finding Full Cultural Immersion

It first came as a slip of the tongue, just a simple phrase. I was at the front of the classroom talking about a simple case study, when I had a brief slip of the mind. What was the name of the athlete again? I panicked a little bit, coming to that grounding halt that …

The Advantages of Taking a Year’s Sabbatical

The last 3 months have offered up another mixed-bag of surprises in my attempt to penetrate the Australian workforce. One gleaming opportunity that emerged was my current position at the University of the Sunshine Coast. Since July, I have been working as a Tutor in the undergrad Sport Psychology class on campus, assisting with the …

A Journey Into the Outback

Page by page, I flipped through, enthralled by tales of pure bravery and determination of will. These tales were brazen stories of heroism, adventure, and tragedy from an earlier era. The book was “The Explorers”, a gripping series of primary accounts of early expeditions into the uncharted dusty, red centre of newly-discovered Australia. Explorer by …