Bain Partner/Spouse Outing

Yesterday, we had a picnic in the park with other Bain partners/spouses, but the weird part about it was that the Bain halves of our couples were not invited. I met up with Nicole before we went and headed over together. It was kind of strange since I had never met of the other halves of the people that we were meeting and they had never met Dave.

There was an array of food for all, but I didn't take any photos because it would have been a bit strange. The worst part of eating in the park was that the flies would not only bother you, but they would continuously try to get into all the food that we had. It was quite annoying.

I felt really bad for one of the wives, who's husband was from the Munich office. She's been in Sydney for about 4-5 months, is 4 months pregnant and barely speak English. She mostly speaks Spanish and German. So, while the rest of us were talking, she barely spoke a word probably because she could barely follow the conversation.

After the park, we helped bring the food back to the Sydney office and they have this awesome array of fruit just sitting in a bowl. It's much better than the fruit offered in the Boston office. This one has asian pears, regular pears, bananas, nectarine, peaches and sometimes kiwi. Obviously, I took some of the fruit to bring home since fruit is outrageously priced around here.

Australia's strange fact of the day: everything is expensive, nothing is considered a deal compared to the US. A bottle of soda is minimum $2.75. A mango can go for $4-6 per mango. The other day I had seen the price for cherries were $49.99 per kilo. A bag of chips is usually $4, but can be found on sale for $3. Sometimes it's hard to tell how much more expensive it is compared to the US since it uses per kilo versus per pound, but I haven't found anything that seems like it's cheaper here. Clinique is about 4 times the price that it is in the US. Since the Aussie dollar is stronger than it's ever been, the exchange rate is killing me and everything is definitely more expensive. I'm waiting to find that "cheaper" item and buying lots of it. I'll let you know if I ever do...