The Swish Files

stupid censorship

2005-10-29T17:37:00.000+10:00

Sorry to all my devoted readers, but I've been in China and Vietnam for the last month or so and blogspot gets blocked from internet cafes. So much for free speech.

As such, if you'd like to hear more of my tales before i get home where i expect i will be able to blog again freely, email me at the address on the side of the page. I'll include you in the mailing list.

England - Swing Jam

2005-09-14T19:29:00.000+10:00

So, after the somewhat rushed tour around Poland I then popped up in England.

Ah, England. Finally a country where they speak my native tongue and drive on the correct side of the road - the left one. After 3 months of traipsing about, I'm not surprised that it felt more like home than all the other places put together.

Have some ramblings I wrote up a few days after I arrived:

It 's the last day of a swing weekend (Swing Jam) here in London. Not quite in central London yet - I came here directly from the airport, but I'm already amused by all the stereotypically British things I've seen and heard, such as red double-decker buses, black cabs and people saying "blimey". I'm staying in one of the dorm rooms at Brunel University, Runnymede.

A few days ago I had a chat with the receptionist of the hostel I stayed at in Prague and she had a good laugh at all the words and euphemisms we have in English for 'toilet', such as loo, washroom, bathroom, restroom - when she heard this one she asked if we go there for a lie-down. Funnily enough, the dorm bathrooms here at Brunel actually have baths in them, as well as showers to choose from for all your bathing needs. That genuinely took me by surprise. To me, that's like actually using a figure-eight egg timer with sand in it to time your eggs as they cook. Sure, you can do it, but that's not what usually happens and it's odd to see it done because it seems so old-fashioned.

Anyway, I'm getting off track.

The campus itself is very pretty, and between the old castle-like looking buildings, the rampant British accent, and the 12 year old British boy in my dance classes I keep thinking I'm living in a Harry Potter novel. But that may have something to do with me polishing off the latest HP book on the train through Poland. Nevertheless, I constantly seem to be half expecting someone to fly past my room on a broom.

But yes, I've come to yet another swing dance camp. You'd have to be crazy to come to these, and at least this camp is being honest about that point. They give out little plastic bracelets, which look suspiciously like the ones issued in mental hospitals. Red for the outpatients, and white for those who are seriously committed. I've got a white one, of course.

My room is up on the 4th level of the building closest to the hall where all the nighttime dancing goes on. Given the 5-6 hours of dancing done during the day, I tend to pass out for a brief nap in the evenings before heading out for more dancing into the night. But being so close to the dance hall means I can hear each word of each song perfectly, even with the windows closed. This brings a bit more of a challenge, but it seems I'm up to it. I see to be now able to sleep in the daylight (as being at Herrang and turning nocturnal has shown), or with music or snoring blaring in the area. I never thought that would really be something I'd be tested at. Oh well, it seems I succeed, and after a shower and a nap I head back out onto the dancefloor.

The crowd here is a bit older on average than at Herrang. And things seem much more formal; the emcee is frequently dresssed in a suit and bow-tie in the evenings. Plus, there's a live band each night of the weekend, which is pretty cool.

In true British fashion, we've been regularly updated (even throughout the evenings of dancing) on the latest cricket scores while the test match has been going on. And as England had been kicking Australia's butt in the Ashes, the Brits were having a lovely time poking fun at the Aussies.

Something had to be done. I was one of two people from Australia there, and we felt compelled to show support for the Aussies. And so a rousing chorus of Aussie! Aussie! Aussie! Oi! Oi! Oi! was performed by the two of us and a sympathetic Canadian. Don't worry Australia, we still love you!

It's quite interesting, actually. For the entire time I've been in the UK, every time a native finds out I'm from Australia they point out how England beat Australia in the Ashes.
I'd be concerned or irritated or something about how they all rub it in, but, well, I've never been the biggest follower of cricket. So er... I don't really care. :)

In fact, the most striking thing was watching all the people who don't usually give a stuff about cricket suddenly find it enormously interesting. The whole country was struck with cricket-fever now that England didn't suck quite as much as usual. :)

I suppose we have to let them win occasionally so they can keep their hopes up. :P

Krakow and rural Poland

2005-09-13T07:01:00.000+10:00

Krakow is such a beautiful city. Cobblestone roads and a big town square filled with dozens of market stalls. The buildings are colourful and the square seems to always have bands playing and people dressed traditionally doing classic Polish folk dances.
On my first day there, I had to find myself a bed for the night, so I went to an internet cafe, only to have the tunes of a marching band come flooding in through the window as I surfed.

Also in Krakow, I met up with one of my friends from Sydney. Now, meeting up with my Aussie friend who also happens to speak Polish in a Polish city was really quite bizarre. Mainly because it didn't feel weird at all. We felt so comfortable around eachother in a completely different location than usual. There's a different local language, but since we both know it, it was just amusing to chat between ourselves in English, drinking the local booze, and have the locals address us in English, only to then confuse them by answering in Polish. :)

Going off to visit my grandmother an hour or so away from Krakow was a fascinating experience, also. She lives in the countryside, and when I stepped off the train (I think only 2 people got off at that station, and I had to open the door manually - it was that sort of train) the first thing I could smell was coal. I wasn't quite sure of the way to the bus station so I had to ask a few locals along the way. I'm telling you now - I looked entirely out of place with my backpack on, trudging up the hill. But it was only when I got off the bus in the tiny town where my grandmother lives, that i really noticed people looking at me.

My grandmother lives in a town where everyone knows eachother and chats in the street, calling across the river to enquire about the other's health. This is a town where tractors roam the dirt roads, pulling trailors filled with freshly harvested wheat. It is a town where the standard car is a tiny little Trabant, which sounds distinctly like a lawnmower going by. And thus this is a place where people looked at me funny because I wasn't a local.

I was informed by my cousin that a lot of changes had occurred in this town since she was last there several months ago. They now had a local chemist (pharmacy for you non-aussies out there reading this) and mini-buses that go directly to Krakow. Can you imagine a chemist being a big deal? I suppose you could also look at my grandmother's house and say that she's only had running water and plumbing for half a dozen years, too. I'm kind of used to that fact since I've been there a handful of times, but for most of you I'm sure peeing in a bucket would be pretty odd in the late 1990s. Unless there's something you want to tell me about....

My grandmother also has a bunch of chickens. So each morning you are awoken by the fun-filled sound of the rooster crowing and the prospect of more eggs than you can poke a stick at. In a fascinating twist of events, her cat gave birth to a litter of kittens the night before I arrived, too, so I got to see the tiny things ambling about blindly in the chicken coop nest that the cat had selected for her offspring. Never seen a kitten that small in my life, let alone five of them. And here they were, squeaking whenever they were awake and lonely, and the mummy cat running towards them whenever they were distressed. Which happened right after I took a flash shot of them sleeping soundly. Apparently the cat didn't think a flash was a natural occurence in the chicken coop for some reason.

But have a look at the cuteness:

Makes me miss my kitty back home and miss having a tiny kitten to play with too. Not that my big hunk of feline isn't adorable, I mean, who could say no to this face?

New photos!

2005-09-03T04:26:00.000+10:00

I have updated a few posts and added photos for everyone's benefit:

The second Amsterdam post now has reasonably sized photos.

My post about Germany and Austria now has LOTS of pics.

Both the first and second posts about Prague have added photos.

And the Poland post has several new photos.

But you can probably just scroll down to see them all.

Auschwitz

2005-08-30T19:43:00.000+10:00

It was a suitably grey and rainy Tuesday that we set out for Auschwitz (or Oswiecim as it's known in Polish) from Krakow.

I'd been told by other backpackers that Auschwitz is definitely worth going to, for shock value alone. But it's not something you should casually just walk into as though you were going into a chocolate factory. Last time I was in Krakow, my brother and I wanted to go there, but our parents said no. It's too depressing, too intense, they said. They didn't want to see it again.

Having been there now I tend to agree. It was one of those haunting experiences, walking the paths the prisoners walked. Going through the hallways of the barracks, their photos and dates of death were hung up on the walls by the hundreds and you feel as though they're all just watching you go by.

There were, as expected, whole rooms filled with suitcases and one with just childrens' shoes stacked up to the ceiling. Then there was the one with adult shoes. And the one which gave me shivers down my spine - the room of human hair, shaved off after extermination to be sold as a material to make cloth. They even showed you a sample of cloth made with hair.

The most disturbing things for me were probably the firing wall, where people were shot in the back of the head with silenced guns right next to one of the womens' barracks, and the crematorium. Here, people were herded into the gas chamber, gassed 700 at a time and slid into the furnace, 3 bodies at a time.
As I stood in the gas chamber, I barely even listened to the tour guide, I just stared at the holes in the ceiling where the poison gas was dropped through. Apparently the crematorium we were in was the small one, only capable of cremating 340 people per day. The "better" ones at the Birkenau camp could go through 2000 bodies a day.

I can't get over the echo in the gas chamber, either, especially when you imagine the sudden realisation of the hundreds of people in there that they are not going to be bathed, they are going to be murdered in a matter of minutes. The screams would have been deafening and only magnified by the echoes.

According to my tour guide, the unlucky sods who had to put the bodies into the furnaces were prisoners, too. I can't even begin to think about the trauma those poor people went through, shovelling the bodies of innocents, friends and family all day long.

------------

The tour guide was really nice and stayed back to describe a few extra things at the end, but this meant that I very nearly got stranded in Auschwitz for the night. To the point that the man at the bus station said that the last bus and minibus to Krakow had already left for the evening, and that my only chance was to catch a train.

The last train was in 15 minutes at the time, and the walk from the station had taken about 30-40 minutes earlier that day. Not surprisingly, I didn't feel like spending the night in this little town, even though it is green and lovely and has just had a horrible history. So I bolted all the way to the train station, getting there a minute before the train.

I much preferred sleeping in my youth hostel than in a town with the world's biggest cemetery with the ashes over a million people left in the soil.

Photos.

2005-08-30T19:28:00.000+10:00

I am going to put some photos up now. But as my facilities are very limited, I appear to be unable to resize them to a moderately sensible size (eg 500 pixels wide). Instead, they are huge and throw my formatting out of whack.

Please take this into consideration.

Does anyone know of a good program I can get online/use online/in internet cafes to resize my photos? Most programs like Paint only let me crop.
Also, if anyone can advise me on how to fix up my blogspot template to accommodate photos larger than 500 pixels wide without it looking stupid as it does now, I'd really appreciate it. Email me if you're willing to help this poor little traveller with icky html.

Come on all you programmers who I know read this blog... there's a scary number of you all...

Trains, trains and more trains. And Poland.

2005-08-26T19:24:00.000+10:00

I love trains. It's just so much more fun as a form of transport than buses or planes. You hop on one and mere hours later, you're in another ciy or country, even. At least it's that way in Europe.
Not only do you change location so quickly, it's so much more comfortable than in a plane or bus. You can get up and walk around. You can gaze as the changing countryside. Also, since the long distance trains in Eastern Europe tend to have 6-8 person compartments, you often get to chat with fellow travellers going your way, and swap stories. It's all good.

Anyway, the last week or so has been crazily busy. I caught a train from Prague to Wroclaw in Poland where I visited my other uncle's family. My train got there at 1:30AM and after a day of sightseeing I was on another train to Gdansk by 11PM of the same day.

Wroclaw:

Gdansk is a beautiful town in the far north of Poland, 20 minutes to the beach. Here, my cousin and I had a quick nap first thing in the morning when we arrived, then spent the afternoon lazing about on the beach with her boyfriend keeping us company. Golden sand, warm sun, gentle water in the Baltic sea, near-naked people to look at - what more could you ask for? We even managed to get sunburnt in the time we where there.

Gdansk:

The evening was spent walking around the town markets, eating the biggest ball of fairy floss I have ever seen, (it was at least half a metre in diametre) and drinking. Polish teenager style. That is, take a bottle of vodka, and pass it around. Everyone takes the biggest swig they can followed by a swig of juice to wash it down. It's thoroughly disgusting. There's also a version where the person who drinks the most gets money from the others.
Suffice it to say, I have never gotten drunk so quickly before in my life, and I still didn't win. It appears I need practice with this style of drinking.

The next day, heads still spinning, we did some more sightseeing before hopping on a 6 hour train to Warsaw to visit more relatives.

Visiting relatives is an odd experience for me. Having grown up so far away from them means I've only visited some of them a few times before, some none at all. The aunt we visited in Warsaw is one of my favourites, though. You can rest assured that once you step into her household you will be stuffed to the gills with excessive amounts of delicious polish foods until you're begging for mercy. This happens at every meal.

Other relatives are a more sobering experience, especially when you can see grandparents slipping away into senility. It's such a waste of precious memories and wisdom. I found it quite confronting that not only did my grandmothers not recognise me, but when told that I am their grandchild, they did not remember that they had grandchildren at all. They would promptly forget my name several seconds later, and my relation to them shortly afterwards. The scariest thing is that this has happened in both grandmothers at once in the last 2 years or so.

Poland is a strange country. The main thing that strikes me about it is that people don't seem to be nearly as friendly and nice as Australians. They don't smile at you as you pass them in your building or on the street, and won't say hello unless you say it first.

In fact, the first morning after I arrived in the country, the first interaction I had with a non-family member was having my arse slapped - hard- by one of a group of guys I had to pass on the footpath. I've been told to take it as a compliment, but dammit, it was annoying. Why can't they me normal and wolf whistle instead or something?
I also know that in Australia, at least, if you see someone trip and fall over you ask if they're ok,
Being the eternal clutz that I am, I tripped and fell on my face while passing a group of teenagers outside a Maccas in Lublin.
Far from asking if I was ok, they laughed audibly and made some comment about walking not being that hard. I don't know if I was just in the wrong place at the wrong time, but I'm not taking the greatest liking to the youth of Poland. I've also been informed that these are standard behaviours in most Eastern European countries.

One last thing about Prague

2005-08-16T19:11:00.000+10:00

The Hostel I was staying at wasn't in the centre of the city, but because it whad a metro station a minute away, it turned out to be really convenient to get to and from. Man, I sound like a travel brochure. It was a basic room and the most striking thing abou it was the view through the window - directly out onto a graveyard. Think spit-and-you'll-hit-it close.

See? This was my room and you can see the gravestones through the window:

Anyway, I found the concept of the graveyard quite hilarious, actually, but I'm sure other people woudn't think of it the same way.

Prague and other stuff

2005-08-15T23:12:00.000+10:00

Catching the train to Prague was fun. I was expecting to have 4 and a half hours to read my new book, but ended up spending 4 and a half hours chatting to two Americans and two Brits.
We swapped travel stories, as you do, and marvelled at the number of freaks in Europe who follow you around.
I found I barely noticed the changing countryside because i was so caught up in the conversation, or busy being amused at the guys with Eurail passes who didn't realise their passes didn't cover the Czech Republic until the ticket pointed at the passes and said so.

Everyone keeps giving me funny looks and tends to go "wow, aren't you sick of travelling yet?" when i tell them i'm two months through a six month trip. But then they all seem to be travelling for several weeks, or two months at most. And to some degree, I am. I'm kind of getting sick of getting to know new people over a few days or weeks, only to then be on my own all over again with just a few email addresses to keep me company. It's that first day of being alone after having company for a while which bugs me. I'm fine after that. On the upside, at least i can say i haven't been bored and all on my own for the whole time. :) And from time to time i get to meet up with friends again, which is great fun.

Speaking of meeting up with friends, I did meet up with some guys from Amsterdam when in Prague. One from the States, one from Canada. And both proceeded to poke fun at my Aussie accent, attempting to teach me "proper" english. Heh. Good thing we didn't go into spellings. Apparently I seriously mispronounce the word "no" and thus I'd hear this echo of 'noooo' from the two of them every time I said it in conversation to them or even to other people.

The three of us went out on a day trip to the town of Kutna Hora (about an hour away from Prague by train) where there is a church with the bones of 40 000 skeletons, used as decorations. This, let me tell you, is both weird and creepy to see. They have strings of bones hanging like streamers and even a coat of arms fashioned out of them. The central massive chandelier is made using every type of bone from the human body.

Look for yourself:

So yeah, twas a fun excursion to a little town where food was blissfully cheap (i think i paid the equivalent of AU$7 for a very filling meal, including an additional side dish, tea and a coke).

Last night we went on the Worst Guided Tour Ever (TM). It was so bad it was hilarious. Imagine, if you will, that you have just paid decent money for a tour and when you get on it, the tour ends up being primarily in Czech, with the occasional translation into English by the guide. But what she says consists of "on your right is the national theatre", "on your left is the Jewish Quarter" said in the most monotone of voices. Not a funny anecdote in sight, and you get the impression that she'd rather be pulling her nose hairs out with a spoon than be working there. Then, midway through the tour (which was 420 Crown - roughly $20AU), she suddenly says that the next part of the tour costs 50 additional Crown. Surely they should have included this in the price, or at least warned us that there may be additional costs. Grr. I didn't have any cash left for this and had to rely on the goodness of one of my companions to get me into that section of the tour.

Needless to say, don't go on the Prague -" Getting Acquainted" tour if you're ever in this city. In fact avoid the tours put on by the company that runs that in general. Unless you enjoy wasting your money, that is. Not that I'm bitter or anything.

And now I'm just hanging out in Prague for another day on my own due to a brief (I hope) case of extreme idiocy on my part.

This way I get to see more of the seedy underbelly of Prague all on my own. Today's fun adventures involved going down to an internet cafe underneath the main train station, but turning back halfway down the stairs because a bunch of people were sitting across the entire width of the stairs snorting something which didn't look legal. They didn't move across to let me pass, and even yelled at me when i turned back and went back up the stairs. I was later bugged for money and cigarettes by passing bums and had to step over someone sleeping outside the station.

Good fun, huh?

Interestingly, many of the beggars seem to have given up on traditional methods of begging by asking people for money, and kneel on the ground, even putting their heads on the ground, just leaving their hands cupped and outstretched. They just look really tired and frustrated, i guess. But at least they're less intrusive than the ones in Vienna.

I suppose wandering around recently at night has shown me some of the more beautiful aspects of Prague. The buildings are all lit up and make stunning reflections in the water. In the time I've been travelling, Prague is the city where I've most cursed not having a tripod for my camera because the evening shots would just be incredible. I've taken a few and damn, I needed a tripod:

Torture chamber:

Germans and Austrians

2005-08-09T05:46:00.000+10:00

Anyway, back to tales of cultural oddities.

I spent a few days wandering around Munich with my cousin. She was my tour guide and showed me the town halls, and the main town squares, which were covered in school children enjoying their holidays which had only just begun a few days earlier. Too many children running about, I say. I prefer cities filled with backpackers, waiting to be met and asked many random questions.

Munich isn't the most beautiful city. But it is quaint and European in terms of all the buildings everywhere with their palace-esque styles. Compared with Australia and the states, it looks old and dignified.

As far as I can tell, it's quite typically German in terms of being run to the second in terms of promptness and exactness. The metro system has trains coming pretty much every 20 minutes on the dot on our line, not like Sydney at all, where trains being 20 minutes late is not uncommon. I also love the buy-one-ticket-get-travel-on-all-forms-of-transport-all-day-long philosophy. It's great for tourists such as myself.
Even my cousin is so cute and German. She tells me about her usual day right down to the exact minute. She's meant to leave the house at 7:20am, she says, but she's often running late and instead of having 5 minutes to walk to the bus which comes at 7:25, she runs the distance in 2 minutes. Don't these people have traffic jams? How can it all be so predictable? When I leave the house aiming for a 7:25 bus, i leave at 7:15, in case it comes early, and don't leave in disgust until 7:50 because some buses are genuinely 15 or 20 minutes late in Sydney. In my area, at least.

After a couple days of such general wandering around Munich (such as seeing their Olympic Games village from the 70s - which reminds me, they wanted the 2012 games, but would have built an all new village, wouldn't they? Why don't they just reuse the facilities they have, dammit! It seems like such wasted investments. Sorry, mini-rant.), my cousin and I have headed over to Austria.

We spent a day and a half in Salzburg, going around the fortress and basking in the beauty that is the town in which the Sound of Music was filmed. It's old and makes a big fuss about Mozart coming from there. All of Austria seems to, actually. Vienna included, even though it's several hours away from his birthplace and he may have only lived here for a few months.

We also managed to go to a free presentation of one of Mozart's operas. It was probably free because it was presented in the strangest way ever. We missed the first 10 minutes, but I don't think that would have made it any less odd. It was in Italian, and all the performers were dressed in very contemporary clothes, but that wasn't the odd bit. As far as we could tell, two girls and two guys were singing about who-knows-what and obsessing about this tall guy in an orange shirt. They ended up wrapped up in a 5 way hug, where Orange-Shirt-Guy had someone clinging to each leg.

Does this not look odd to everyone else, too? Remember that there's another person attached to his right leg, too, but it's behind the head in the audience.

Another thing that struck me as odd is the sheer number of Australians I've encountered in my travels. We were getting into the Festungbahn (Fortress train that takes you up the hill)

to go into the Fortress, and within our carriage (which takes no more than 10 people) there were 4 Australian guys. At our current youth hostel in Vienna, every evening I've encountered someone else with a familiar accent.
Of course, at the same time I keep hearing such a mix of different languages here that it's been quite impressive. Everything from French to Korean has been audible, and even a few languages I haven't been able to quite place. Extremely common are Italians, not surprisingly. A few I met the other night biked their way up from Italy, which I thought was a decent effort.

At the same time, when you go out into the city, it's hard to find someone who doesn't speak English. I got asked for directions in English several times. This is just another one of those cities filled with tourists.

And again, where there are hoardes of tourists, there are people who try to take advantage of them. Along one of the main streets in Vienna, Mariahilfer Strasse, we have been repeatedly approached by beggars. They try to come up with interesting reasons to give them money, too. Yesterday, one wanted money to buy food for his dog. Another woman asked my cousin gently for money for her child, and when my cousin said she didn't have any money, the woman got furious, called her a liar, and said she shouldn't be a liar at such a young age. When, I wonder, is an appropriate age to become a liar?

Some of the buskers have been interesting, also. There was a violin player who would only play when someone put money into his hat. Like a wind-up toy, he'd play a few bars then slow down and rock back and forth on the last note, freezing until the next coin was placed in his hat. He would play for various amounts of time, depending on how good the coin was. I suspect the only reason it worked for him was because he seemed to be a pretty decent violinist.

One odd thing I've noticed about the Austrians is that sometimes when you ask them for something, they won't respond. They'll just continue whatever it is that they were doing and if you repeat yourself, then they'll get annoyed because they heard you the first time. This is an unusual thing to work with, but I guess I've learnt to speak loudly and clearly the first time and assume I've been heard unless they don't do what I want for ages afterwards.

Other random photos of Salzburg:

And now some of Vienna:

The town hall:

The royal apartments' decorations:

The art gallery which is a stunning building itself:

And an Egyptian display within:

Finally, some pretty bridge photos over the Danube:

i had my birthday the other day

2005-08-06T05:14:00.000+10:00

Woo. I'm 24.

My birthday was very different to usual. Firstly, I had it while I was in Munich, which is definitely different to usual. Secondly, it was at my uncle's place with my parents there. I haven't spent my birthday with my parents since '99. And none of my friends were around. But that's ok, because I still received emails and SMSes from them.
The main thing that I found that was strange was that in such a situation where there were a number of really sick individuals, there was a reason for me to focus on myself, and yet it felt so excessive and frivolous for me to think of myself.
It's hard to explain.
Usually, I'm perfectly happy to take the limelight, but I just wasn't there. I think it has to do with the desperate situation that they're in. Each night, they pray for a miracle. Literally - they do a round of the rosary. I've joined in. It's kind of mind-blowing to think of having exhausted all the options and being left with only religion to keep your hopes up. You hear about these situations, but it's odd to be in the midst of one, yourself.

And here I was, in the middle of my 6 month round-the-world trip celebrating a birthday during what will probably be one of the best times of my life. Bit of a contrast, don't you think?

Strange birthday.

Munich

2005-08-04T06:37:00.000+10:00

After such a wicked time in Amsterdam, I arrived in Munich to visit some relatives. These particular relatives have an absolutely awful run of luck healthwise which I won't go into, but the upshot is that it's been a rather sobering experience. And again I can't help but feel just how lucky I am to be well and gallivanting around the world as I have been.

There must be something in the water.

2005-08-03T20:11:00.000+10:00

My two days in Amsterdam were a fascinating experience. It was a pleasant contrast to Herrang in a lot of ways.

For example, after two weeks of listening to pretty much exclusively swing music all day every day, hearing regular mainstream music was brilliant. Well, I was transfixed for about 20 minutes even by the most mundane of MTV music when I first turned it on. It was a random U2 song I don't even like, and Coldplay, amongst other things. But that didn't matter. It wasn't swing, and that was good.

Also, unlike Herrang, where a good proportion of the people there were swedish, and relatively local, I've come to the conclusion that there are hardly any Dutch people in Amsterdam. Every time I looked around, somebody was speaking English, or Polish or French or German - the Dutch were in hiding! Either that, or they must have shipped out for the holidays. Can't blame them, really, what with all the silly tourists wandering around the maze of alleyways and canals.

The only thing that suggests that there might still be some Dutch people around is the presence of bicycles everywhere. Crossing the road, you look left for cars, and you look left for bikes before moving. There's also the fact that every bridge over a canal has a million bikes parked on it. I was quite amused at how inventive people were being at finding new bike parking spots for themselves - I saw one attached to some scaffolding which was over a footpath.

The other visible dutch people must be the ladies in the Red Light District windows, many of whom are apparently men, but, to be honest, I can't usually tell which ones are the men.

But the strangest thing for me was that I got hit on quite so many times while in Amsterdam. Twice in pubs (not surprising, I know), once at the youth hostel, once even in an internet cafe? And I had someone offer me dinner while I walked along the street! I didn't even slow down to talk to this person, he just walked along at my pace and offered to buy me dinner. When I declined, he veered off into a side lane. Absolutely bizarre.
I can't help but wonder if the presence of the Red Light District influences things like that.

I had a fun experience chatting with a Moroccan guy, actually. Funnily enough, he spoke 4 languages, none of which are English. It ended up being a rather broken conversation in French, since mine isn't very good. To tell you the truth, I hadn't realised just how much French I'd forgotten till I tried and failed miserably at putting together a sentence longer than 'I like cats'. Nevertheless, we comminicated using a little French, a lot of gestures and a few animal sounds when necessary. We wandered over to one of those lovely "coffee shops" which doesn't sell coffee and although I didn't have a joint, there was probably enough smoke in the air to stone a small elephant. Consequently, his mooing was pretty damn hilarious at the time.

Sidenote: the coffee shop itself was very intriguing - dim lighting, people splayed out on cushions on the floor, obviously stoned. It was an indian-themed coffee shop, with elephants on the walls and carpets and cushions on the floors, so from a stoned perspective it may have been quite surreal.

Anyway. My French isn't that good, but it's good enough to recognise the phrases mon amour "my love", je t'aime "I love you" and ce material ferait une belle robe de mariage which basically translates to "get the hell out of there because the loony who's spent 2 hours with you is smitten and talking about marriage".
As such, my French was enough to tell me to get out of the situation. Unfortunately, I'd given him my number before he seemed quite so crazy and then had to endure two 10 minute phone calls the next day of him literally begging me to meet up with him one last time. Yeah, right, freak. I don't think I've said 'non' that many times in such a short space of time before.

So yes, it was a fun weekend, and there's nothing quite like feeling that you've mangled someone's impression of what girls from Australia are like.

The land of tulips, clogs, and little red lights.

2005-07-30T20:29:00.000+10:00

That's right, I've torn myself away from the evil seductive place known as Herrang. I should probably upload photos. But, oh well. Not today.
Instead, the tales of my first day in Amsterdam come your way.

Oddly enough, although I couldn't sleep very well at all on the long flights between Australia and the States and then between the States and Copenhagen, I seem to be unable to keep my eyes open on the short flights between Copenhagen and Stockholm and Stockholm and Amsterdam. Bizarre. Maybe I'm getting used to flying. Who knows. Maybe it's the fact that I'd been getting 4-5 hrs sleep the nights before those flights... could be anything, really...

Anyway, basically, I arrived in Amsterdam last night, drowsy and completely out of it, having just snoozed for a good hour and a half on the plane. Although I'd briefly done a search for accommodation the day before, and called a few places, I couldn't make a booking for a dorm bed, and had to wing it when I arrived. This was a Bad Idea (TM). Arriving in Amsterdam on a Friday evening at the end of July with beautiful balmy weather without accommodation booked isn't wise, it seems. The place is absolutely crawling with backpackers. In fact the first thought i had as I stepped out of the Centraal Station was Wow, there's a lot of backpackers. And, to follow on from that thought, most youth hostels were completely full and had No Vacancy signs outside. At 7 pm. This, as you might imagine, is not what I wanted to see. Single hotel rooms were just as scarce.
After an hour or so of searching and poking my head into hotel reservation offices to be told they had nothing, I started wondering if I'd be sleeping in the street that night. But eventually I came across one that said yes, they did have a vacancy in a 3 night minimum place. Suited me fine, and it was the last available bed. It seems persistence pays off eventually.

It's funny how perceived room facility quality is all entirely relative. A few months ago, sharing a room with 5 other girls and not having a private bathroom would have been quite a shock to the system. Last night, after having spent the previous fortnight at Herrang, having only 6 people in my room seemed like a luxury. Sheets on the bed, even. Bliss. And the best thing? A hot shower with a door with a lock. Priceless. Herrang does not have hot showers. The closest you can get is warm, and even that is only around 4 or 5 am. Most of the time they're cold, or possibly lukewarm. So, as you might imagine, it was a damn nice experience having a truly hot shower. :)

After this, I was ready to hit the town, to see what Amsterdam has to offer.

My youth hostel isn't quite in the official Red Light district, but that doesn't mean much, it seems. Walking outside means you see sex shops all over the place, peep shows within a few minutes of the hostel and cafes with curious odours wafting out on most street corners. And there's not much choice in the matter. Ladies dressed in only their underwear sit enticingly in windows, hoping to snag a catch. It's just everywhere. Like bikes, so too are the sex shops. Almost one per person, it seems.

Or at least that's my first impression.

Anyway, excuse me for the moment while I go off to see the world-famous sex museum. :)

I'm being eaten alive!

2005-07-25T00:09:00.000+10:00

It's raining outside as I write this, and that just encourages the mosquitoes and froggies to come out of hiding. I like the cute little froggies as they hop across the road, but I could really do without the millions of blood-sucking mini-vultures zooming around constantly.

Another couple of dance-filled days have passed and I've officially crossed over into swing-dance-obsessed freak territory. The other night I stayed up social dancing till 9 am, and only got off the dance floor to have a shower, breakfast and go to my class which started at 10 am.

By the end of 4 hours of classes that day, though, I was walking around like a swing-dazed vegetable. I caught a few hours of sleep and then headed out to the social dance floor once more.

That's just what it's like here, though. You alternate between swing dancing, sleeping and eating with the occasional shower thrown in as well.

Walking into Herrang is one of the weirdest experiences ever. Time stands still as you enter this swing-dance bubble of existence where music is playing constantly from one building or another and people are frequently seen dancing in the streets. I've done it myself. It's actually a lot like living in a musical, except that the clothes are pretty contemporary. People describe Herrang as the Mecca for swing dancers, and it's so true. The world's best come and dance and it's damn cool.

Not surprisingly, people get addicted to this place and don't want to leave. I've personally extended my stay from one week to just under two. And it would have been longer if the camp kept going and i had more time. But at this stage while I'm willing to cut out a couple extra days in Stockholm, I not willing to cut out Amsterdam altogether. As such, a week from today, I will be in Amsterdam, hopefully with many more tales to share.

Herrang Dance Camp

2005-07-19T02:48:00.000+10:00

It looks like I'll be posting some of my tales a little out of order...

Ironically, at the place where internet access was free and I had plenty of time (the youth hostel after the contiki tour), blogger was being absolute shit and wouldn't work at all. So I couldn't update despite all my promises to do so. I have uploaded some photos which are just waiting to be blogged about, so it's only a matter of time.

Currently I'm at Herrang Dance Camp and I've just finished 4 hours of classes. This has left me in a pleasantly exhilarated, but exhausted state and all I want is a shower and to collapse in bed before the nighttime activities are to begin.

God, I love this place. I've been here for 3 days and this is the first time I've even thought of checking my email. And even so, it's only to check if there's anything important out there for me because i have a few hours up my sleeve. As many of you, I'm usually completely addicted to IM and email, checking it at least once daily. Here, I don't care. There's more swing dance than you can poke a stick at and every way you turn are people from various countries. Australia, England, Sweden, Norway, Finland, Russia, Poland, China, Singapore... the list goes on and on.

You get up in the morning, have a nice filling breakfast, then go to a class with someone of the likes of Steven Mitchell and Virginie, or Frankie Manning... then you potter around for lunch, chatting with random people from your classes. Then you go to another couple classes and do it all over again at dinner. Then there's the meeting at 9 where several hundred people cram into a smallish hall, and we get entertained for an hour by various funny people and videos. Social dancing starts after the meeting and goes on till the wee hours of the morning. What more could you want?

If it weren't for the contant need to change clothes and fend off mosquitos, I'd want to live here forever. But then, the fact that I've been swing deprived for a month might have something to do with that sentiment.

Some aspects of the camp are a little odd. The showers in the main accommodation are communal. For someone like me from little old Australia, it's quite confronting to wander into the bathroom and be greeted by somebody's breasts. I tend to be a little shy in there, and aim for the times when the least number of people is present. Many of the Europeans appear to have no qualms about it whatsoever, stripping off and wandering over to the shower like they do it with an audience every day and are quite bored of it, really. Apparently there are semi private showers down the road, but you have to pay for them... so it ends up being a fight between my wallet and my inhibitions. So hrm. Who would have thought I'd be missing the likes of a shower with a door? I could handle the toilets in Russia which were holes in the floor, or which involved a bush in the forest, but communal showers seem to piss me off.

Yes, well. That was a bit of a rant, wasn't it?

Aside from that, it's all good... I only have a dozen or so mozzie bites... :) Maybe they should move Herrang to a less mozzie infected region... lake and all!

To all you swing people - aren't you jealous? :)

Ha! I lied!

2005-07-08T04:51:00.000+10:00

No Stockholm tales for you just yet. Instead, I'm actually bothering to put some pictures from Copenhagen up. :)

It's amazing how much more of my time in Copenhagen I remembered, flicking through the photos. There's the Little Mermaid, which firstly isn't so little, and is greatly overhyped:

And then there are the stunning streets with more bikeriders than you can poke a stick at:

There is canal after canal, apparently this is one of the Venices of the North (St Petersburg also seems to lay claim to this title for some reason):

Following on from the fact that there are quite so many canals, there are almost as many cruises to go on. These are highly recommended, and apparently come at two prices, both with English descriptions of the scenery. There's the 30 kronor cruise which shows you the highlights of the city in an hour, and then there's the 50 kronor cruise which shows you the highlights of the city in an hour, leaving mildly more frequently and sometimes having a slightly prettier tour guide. Or so I'm told. I went on the 30 kronor one, and she was very pretty.

I also went to the Carlsberg Brewery. 3.50 Euro for entry, and this includes the following beer:

I saw the palace Princess Mary lives in (she was even there as the flag flying over the palace suggested), and even snagged a photo with one of the guards - Scandinavian royal guards aren't like British guards. They may be dressed similarly, but they're allowed to smile and speak and have some sorts of facial expressions rather than the somber and sullen guards of London.
There are at least two towers you can climb to see sights of the city (I went up both, and my legs were thanking me for it the next day), and just near the spiral one there's Christiania.

Christiania is a place where the rogue hippies have run away to, smoking dope and doing whatever they damn well please. Compared to the clean, crisp look of Copenhagen, Christiania is its complete opposite. It's more of a slum, with graffiti everywhere. While trying to enter from a slightly back street, we saw a bunch of cops doing a raid. Apparently this is common practice. Here's a picture I took while wandering through:

I couldn't really get any other photos, because they have No Photography signs up all over the place, and I can tell you now that I didn't want to get onto the wrong side of the locals.

Days blending together.... so much to tell...

2005-07-07T05:57:00.000+10:00

Sheesh. It's like day 24 of my 32 day tour in Scandinavia/Russia and I've barely blogged at all.

In my last entry i did give you a bit of a description of Copenhagen, so I probably won't spend that much more talking about it. Well, maybe a little. You'll get whatever i can squeeze out of my poor little brain in the next half hour before my internet time runs out.

Firstly, i'd just like to extend a thank you to my buddy Adam for linking my way. Cheers, dude!

Right. Copenhagen. The last thing i told you all was about my first day there. On the second day (my tour was meant to start at 6 pm of the day after i arrived in Copenhagen) wandering around the youth hostel I encountered other people from my tour (not surprisingly) and we decided to head off to the city together for some general exploration. This was a really nice idea and the three of us traipsed around the city making jokes and getting to know each other. In the course of our travels, we visited many sights including the palace and as well as going into an erotic museum along the way. The erotic museum was very very funny and i'll post pics if and when i feel like it - there's up in my room on cd for the time being. Don't have time to get them.
The erotic museum was an eyeopening experience. It seemed to have everything from random porn magazine covers through to a 10 by 10 wall of television screens showing porn non-stop. It even had a shock section, with beastiality and really enormous women. Shudder.
For any of you visiting the city of Copenhagen, at least go into the foyer of the erotic museum. it's filled with hundreds of tiny figurines in a million different suggestive positions. It's very cute and interesting. And free to look at. And really funny because you'll often find tourists like me zooming in for macro shots of the most disturbing things like... er... donkeys....

Clearly, the erotic museum made an impact on my little brain that day.

Other highlights from the day included hiring one of the free bikes available around the city. Now, please bear in mind that i had not ridden a bike in at least 6 or 7 years. I was never particularly good at it back then anyway. Also realise that I have never EVER tried doing in general traffic, let alone amongst many other riders.

Add those three facts together and you get me riding along in a very wobbly fashion. :) I was the source of great mirth for my fellow travellers, one of whom had to veer off into a side street because she was laughing so hard when she saw me almost tip over a man on a bike beside/in front of me who was going waaaaaaay too slow. He didn't look very happy when it happened, i can tell you, and although i speak no Danish, i'm sure a few swear words were flung my way.

That evening, we headed back to the youth hostel to meet our tour manager, cook and driver, as well as the rest of the 43 people on my tour.

But since time is running out, I'll tell you all about them and Stockholm tomorrow. :)

been too busy to sleep or write....

2005-06-23T00:51:00.000+10:00

No proper update today, I've only got a quick internet session here in Trondheim, Norway. It seems that as we go up to the far north of Norway to the Nordcapp, we'll be staying in tiny towns and internet access may not be possible for a few days/a week.

In other news, I'm currently recovering from a bit of a nasty hangover. Part of last night is completely lost to me. I don't think i'll be drinking that much for a while. But they're not kidding when they nickname Contiki tours Can-drinki tours. An awful lot of alcohol gets consumed most nights.

Basically, the last few days have consisted of being in Copenhagen, Stockholm, Oslo and staying in cabins in the Trollstigen region of Norway. That was absolutely unreal. Think snow capped mountains on each side of the campground and going on a fjord cruise through the second-deepest fjord in Norway. Not too shabby at all. :)

More as soon as I get a chance.

The Contiki Tour Begins

2005-06-20T01:40:00.000+10:00

I'm currently sitting in an internet cafe in Oslo, with about 20 minutes to rattle off as much as I can about the last few days before I go to meet up with people.

I've written heaps about the flights over from the states, but having only 20 mins to write isn't very conducive to sharing everything I've experienced. Anyway, after landing in Copenhagen where my tour began, I had to make my way to the youth hostel we were all going to be staying at. Rain was pouring and everything is disturbingly Danish. All the non-english signs are somewhat off-putting at first, but as many a traveller may tell you, you get used to it.

Being the middle of June, I was expecting mild, but warm summer weather. It was anything but. I waded through 11C weather, extremely jetlagged, along trainlines I was completely unfamiliar with, using odd-looking money that whole morning until I got to the youth hostel at around 11 am. I thought that was quite an achievement considering how tired I was and how little sleep I'd had that last night.
Unfortunately, check-in time was 2 pm, so I had to wait around for several hours before I could have a sorely-needed shower and collapse into bed for a few hours.

I woke up around 5:30pm and decided it was time to go out and see the city.

Copenhagen is a delightful city. It's clean and pretty and full of friendly people. The bus driver I had on the way to the hostel was sweet and helpful even though he spoke only a handful of english words. When I got lost and stood on the side of the sidewalk peering at my map, trying to figure out where I was, someone stopped almost immediately to ask me if I need any help. People ride bikes constantly (around 50% of the population ride bikes regularly) and almost everyone speaks English.
Not only do people ride bikes, but they don't feel the need to lock up their expensive road bikes much of the time. Literally hundreds of bikes are left at the entrances to stations, and they also hire out bikes for tourists for free. It seems like they are such a caring and trusting culture.

As one of my tourmates mentioned, they are also an extremely good-looking race of people. All tall, slim, and blonde with high cheekbones and tanned skin. This tourmate also mentioned that she saw a park in copenhagen with people relaxing and sunbaking. But it looked as though it had been staged with solely beautiful people.

On this first evening in the city, I just wandered around, drinking in the atmosphere. I walked along the main shopping streets and took many a snapshot. (photos will be posted when I have more internet time.) Tourists are everywhere, it seems.

After a while, I got tired and eventually went back to the hostel, around 11 pm. But the odd thing was that it was still very light outside. It does not get dark is this area till around midnight, and then gets light again around 3 or 4 am. It's not sunlight, just a perpetual state of twilight. But such extremely long days make for excellent touristing. You can get up late and still go out to the city for 10 or 12 hours, then come back to the hostel and chat and drink with friends for another 4 hours before wandering off to bed while it's still light outside.

Gotta run - more soon!

never fear

2005-06-18T02:18:00.000+10:00

Don'w worry people, I'm still alive, just busy on my contiki tour. Man they keep you busy on these things. It's been absolutely awesome and I have so very much to blog about. I'll try and type something up in the not too distant future... For now I have to just keep writing stuff up the traditional way, in a paper-based diary.

I hope all is well with all of you. :)

The last few days... can't be bothered keeping count any more. :)

2005-06-11T12:41:00.000+10:00

Ok... let me start with what i'd written about my last few days in the states:

Ah, America. 'Tis a land where there was enough of a need for 24 hour drive-through doughnut stores that Dunkin' Donuts has provided such a service.
Fed Ex and Kinkos have combined services so there's a place you can go to print your paperwork and also send it express post without having to leave the store. It's also a land where the roads are wide, drivers go really fast and roadkill is plentiful. I can't say I'm all that surprised to see roadkill every time I get into the car. Sometimes every few miles.

Unlike Australia, drivers won't necessarily slow down if they see you approaching a zebra crossing - it's treated as more of a race. If they can beat you to the middle of the crossing, they'll zoom through. If you get there first, they'll stop reluctantly and let you pass.

And so ends my visit to this place of fascination for me. It's somewhat of a love-hate relationship that I have with it, actually. This is because as someone raised in Australia I was taught to think of Americans as stupid, wasteful and slovenly. I can't say political decisions in recent years have convinced me of otherwise. Nor Jerry Springer for that matter.

Each time I enter the country, immigration looks at my passport and says 'welcome home'. They tend to then give me a funny look when they hear my accent and double check to verify that I was in fact in the right queue. I even got an interrogation this time, asking me what i do in australia, to the point of what my major is at uni and why i've come to america and why i live anywhere else.

My last few days in the states can really be described in one way: bl;oody stinking hot. Think 100F/40C. Several days in a row. And stifling humidity.

Coming in early june I was expecting mild spring/summer weather. Instead, I was confronted with chilly days to begin with, one nice day in the middle, then had a bunch of oppressively hot days when it's virtually impossible to do anything unless you're in an airconditioned space.

Not surprisingly, many of my final days were spent hiding in shopping centres, or at least in large stores where I bought more clothes than I could fit into my bag.

Shopping there is SOOO cool. Clothes are incredibly cheap. Most t-shirts (that's what i was buying, mostly - for Herrang) are around $10 US. You'd be hard pressed to find anything for $12 AU while maintaining reasonable quality. Though some of the check-out chicks leave something to be desired. At one point I was being served by this lady who took three weeks to scan 6 shirts and put them on the other side. I could feel my fingers twitching as I desperately held myself back from scanning them myself and doing it three times faster.

Interestingly, if you buy a t-shirt that is on a hanger in the store - you get the clothes hanger for free, too. I suppose it makes sense given you'll have an extra item of clothing to go into your wardrobe at home, but it sounds like you'd accumulate a lot of clothes hangers that way.

On the day before I left, I went to a balboa workshop with Steve and Heidi.... er... I can't remember their last names. But they were still really good. Steve talks a lot and does a lot of funny things while Heidi looks on in an amused fashion, and Heidi tends to join in the circle as a lead more often. I swear I danced with her like 5 times and Steve only once. Anyway. That particular workshop taught me some great balboa moves and let me feel how good it is when things actually work well. I found that with the best leads, if you're all nice and relaxed, it feels as though you're dancing while getting the nicest hug ever. I kind of felt like I was lifted of the ground and being twirled around slowly. It was just damn nice. Will have to do much more Balboa soon.

Anyway must get off the computer as there's a queue behind me.... more updates soon!

Day 7 - Central Park and Swing with Frankie Manning!

2005-06-09T03:16:00.000+10:00

On Monday I had a few errands to run, but eventually made it out to NY in the afternoon. It was one of those scorchingly hot days, where even breathing causes you to sweat profusely. While I was on the train, the weather must have clicked over into rain-before-the-storm mode, because when I got out at Penn Station, it was bucketing down, which was a welcome change. I'd brought my umbrella, so all was well.

As the last time I'd been in NYC had been in the dead of winter with delicate snow falling all around the city, I wanted to see how different Central Park looks in the summertime. Unfortunately, I didn't get a chance to go to the same places I went last time so I could get funky before and after pics, but here are a few green and leafy pictures, regardless.

Compare them with this from last time if you like.

After several hours in the park, I caught a subway down to where the swing class was meant to be. Going into the building, a man opened the door for me from the inside and I thanked him as I entered. I had to go up to the next floor. He started following me up the stairs and cleared his throat as he did so. Then it dawned on me that maybe he was one of those doormen I've heard about and was expecting a tip or something. But I don't know how much to tip! And he'd only opened a door for me, it's not like he did something dramatic and particularly useful. Given another second or two and I would have reached the door myself and opened it all on my own - I hadn't asked for his help. No cute puppy-dog eyes from me.

Silly country with its silly tipping habits!

I started wondering whether I should stop and give him a dollar so he'd leave me alone... but by this point I was half-way up the stairs and getting away from him anyway, so I figured I'd just let it be. I'm a clueless tourist from Australia - I don't have to tip! If he thinks I'm rude, so be it. Maybe I am.

When I got to the next floor I went to the reception desk to sign in for the class. Strange Door Guy just kept coming. Persistent bugger, wasn't he? He lurked just outside the glass door outside reception as though deciding what to do next. Would he follow me in and ask me for a tip, point blank? After a few moments he came in and went past me at the reception into the hallway where people were waiting for the next class. Was he going to stop me off in the hallway, ensuring that I tip him on the way through?

Clearly, my brain had ceased to function with any semblance of logic guiding my analysis of the situation. Had I thought about it for a moment I would have decided that his hideously yellow short-sleeve shirt was clearly not what a doorman should wear, and his slow ascent to the reception was also indicative of the idea that he was a bit too old and a bit too tired to climb stairs a dozen times a day as a doorman might have to. It was only when he followed me into the swing class and I had to dance with him that I was truly convinced of his student status, rather than doorman. I hadn't violated some stupid tipping rule after all, YAY! :)

As for why he didn't stop to sign in for the class? Well, when Frankie walked up Door Guy greeted him warmly and was met with a similarly friendly greeting in return. Seems they know eachother. He's probably been coming for a while and has paid for several classes up front. Simple, isn't it? If only I could think this way at the time, not just in retrospect. I have to say, the do-I,-or-don't-I-tip - and-how-much? feeling is highly unpleasant.

The tiny class (10 people, 3 men, 7 women) was nothing like I'd imagined. 2 women were leads so everyone got paired off before we rotated partners. I think one of the women leading was a teacher/ aide so she knew most of what she was doing and it wasn't too bad.

I'd expected at least double the number of people in the class, and far more people who were advanced than the 3 or 4 that were present. Initially, I'd been worried that my intermediate abilities wouldn't cut it in a Frankie Manning class, but I shouldn't have been even remotely concerned. I could do the steps he taught us as well as anyone else and it worked particularly well with the advanced guys. Door Guy wasn't a very good lead at all and couldn't really keep time.

Frankie's pretty awesome, though. You can see he's getting on in years, but you wouldn't for a moment think that he's 91. He still moves with such grace and fluidity most of the time that you'd think he's no more than 65 or 70. And although his right leg is giving him a bit of grief and he can't balance on it very well any more, he still has a great sense of rhythm, timing and a fabulous imagination for appropriate moves that suit the music. We were doing a move that involved hopping on your right foot for 4 beats, and he was still demonstrating it. And then he showed us how to mess around to the music with such a simple set of moves to make them more interesting.

I want to be able to move like that. Even now, let alone when I'm 90. There's an awful lot to learn from that man.

As the class went on, I noticed that people weren't as talkative and friendly as they usually are in Sydney swing classes. But then, it was a very small class. After me making a few friendly comments about what we were doing, one of the better guys opened up a bit and started guessing which country I'm from.

England?
No.
Scotland?
Nope. Wrong hemisphere.

The idea of there being another hemisphere threw him for a moment. He gave me a puzzled look before continuing to throw guesses at me.

Hong Kong?
Nuh-uh.

Since when is Hong Kong in the Southern Hemisphere?

South Africa?

Just then, Frankie asked us to rotate partners, so I just shook my head in response with a smile and started walking away.

AUSTRALIA!

I couldn't help but grin when he got it, but it was probably in large part due to the fact that everyone else had stopped to look at him curiously for declaring the name of a random country so loudly in the middle of the class. :)

It seems it's not just the Americans who think their country is more important and better known than it is.

When I got back around to him the next time, he claimed that he'd known all along where I was from... he was just messing with me. Of course he was. And I was just playing along. :)

STC - Day 6.

2005-06-07T13:55:00.000+10:00

Sunday was mainly a day to relax. I was taken to one of the local churches by the parental, where a mysterious invisible choir sang quite nicely. I'm not sure where they were hiding, but they certainly did a good job of it.

There was this little girl in the row in front of us who decided she was bored and peeked over the seat looking at each of us in turn. Those big brown eyes were so intense! I'm usually quite happy to stare someone down, but damn, this little girl was a staring pro. After a little while I decided to throw my ear-wiggling trick and her and I still didn't get a reaction. But shortly afterwards she did make her way to the other end of the row where her mother was and I'm sure I saw her pointing in my direction telling her what a freak I am. :)
So hrm.... no wonder I frighten small children. This one was probably too petrified to react in front of me.

In the afternoon we went out to check out the Jersey beaches. Although they took over an hour to get to, they were indeed beautiful and very very flat. Took forever to get to the water because the sand just kept going. Of course, they pale in comparison with the beauty of Sydney beaches, but you can't have it all.

The beaches we went to were on a peninsula called Sandy Hook. Being a peninsula, it was also previously used as a defence position, Fort Hancock. It's only a ghostly memory of what it once may have been, but the crumbling barracks made the haunting peninsula that much more interesting to explore.

Here are some pictures of Fort Hancock:

Look at how much junk there is on the beach, too. I'm not sure why the photo has that white section on the top and left, but I'll fix it when i have a chance.

Other randomly interesting photos I took that day:

That last one was of a tiny stalagtite that was forming inside one of the barracks from the previous pictures. Yay for macro!

The other fascinating thing I did on the weekend was try to drive the car. I've been driving for years, you say, it's easy enough! Well, not exactly. It's quite freaky being on the passenger side of the car, even, because I keep looking up at the rear view mirror and getting frustrated that the mirrors are set up all wrong. When I'm on the driver's side, it takes concentrated effort to remember that the indicator is on the left, the windscreen wipers on the right, rather than vice versa as it is in Australia. My poor little brain was ok with driving along the highway, but I tended to drift over to the right, because I'm used to sitting in the right hand side of the lane. I found I would compensate for my off-positioning by putting the car in such a position in the lane where i was in my usual position relative to the lane markings unless i concentrated really hard.
Like many other things, it takes time to rotate things around in your brain. Personally, I found it a lot like trying to lead in dancing - you have to swap everything around, left instead of right for many many things. But not everything, thankfully. If the Americans had decided to swap the accelerator and brake, I can only imagine that utter chaos would result whenever people tried driving in other countries.

I'm not sure if i'll have many more opportunities to drive around, but I'll let you all know if I do.

STC - Day 5. The day in which the Lish FINALLY goes to NYC

2005-06-06T13:55:00.000+10:00

Ah, Saturday. A day of much fun and frivolity.

The day started out as a grey and drizzly morning, not really foretelling the nicest of weather for a trip to NY. Nevertheless we (the parental and I) headed out to the train station to board a train, of all things. :P As far as I can tell, most trains are quite similar, world-wide, so there's not that much to tell about them. But you can all have a photo anyway.

Feels like you're there with me, doesn't it?

Coming from Australia, my impressions of Americans have been tainted quite severely by the television I've watched and the movies flung my way. For some reason I wasn't expecting it to be quite as multicultural as it is. My viewing experiences have shown me a mainly white America, whereas my actual experiences show me large proportions of Blacks and Hispanics. I'm not saying it's a bad thing, I'm just saying it's different to what I expected.

However, regardless of what I may or may not have been expecting, the girl I was sitting next to on the train made me giggle. Her name, believe it or not, was Destiny. I never really thought people with that name actually existed! I was sure it was just a myth propagated by the media to make it seem as though the 60s never ended. And she spent the vast majority of the trip with her mobile phone glued to her ear as she called various people in a voice that could rival Mickey Mouse for the squeakiest ever invented.

Thankfully, she got off fairly early along the train line and I was able to resume normal functioning by gazing intently out the window at the Manhattan skyline as it approached. By this stage the sky was clearing and the sun was peeking out, giving the faintest hope of beautiful weather.

We got off at Penn Station and then hopped on a subway which took us down to South Ferry. Interestingly, while the walls in the subway cars may have been mostly scrubbed free of tag-paint, you can still see where the graffitti has been... pretty much on about 90% of the available wall/door space. I guess it's just an indelible part of what NYC subway system is like. Many of them also have an American flag painted on the outside near the door. That's just in case you forget which country you're in. At least the ones we were in didn't smell and contained a minimised proportion of creepy old homeless men due to the large number of friendly looking tourists heading downtown.

Saturday must be Tourist day in NYC. As such, when getting off at South Ferry, the easiest way to find the ticket office and the queue for the ferry to Liberty and Ellis Islands is to follow the hoardes of tourists flowing towards them.

And where there are tourists, there are buskers. And what buskers there were! None of this silly busking by playing regular popular songs on a guitar business! Each one was meticulously dressed in a ridiculous outfit. From posing as the Statue of Liberty herself, with that lovely green complexion, to standing around with a large (around 2 metres long) live snake, hoping people will pay to hold it, each busker was an individual.
My personal favourite was the one standing by the queue to the ferry. He may not have had the brightest clothes, but he certainly made up for it with his rainbow wig and quick thinking. Every few minutes he'd speak to someone in the queue, asking them where they're from and ask them to join in in his act. At one point I saw a man juggling beside him, a few minutes later he was asking a lady from Germany to dance a German jig for everyone. She declined, but when she did so, he launched into a random German song, playing on his guitar and cramming in more German phrases and jokes than you'd think were possible. Between acts he'd keep telling everyone to smile, for today is a happy day and there is no reason to look so miserable. He made it impossible to hold back a smile. Not surprisingly, his tip hat was brimming with one-dollar bills.

Alongside this smattering of street entertainment came the tourist-leeches. You know the ones -- the merchandise sellers, with a million mini Statues of Liberty, Empire State Buildings and I [heart] NY t-shirts. There are the fake/stolen watch, sunnies and Prada handbag salesmen. You know it's suspicious when they start unzipping suitcases and call out "Prada Handbags" to you as you walk along, minding your own business. And you can see they're keeping it all together for a quick getaway in case a policeman strolls by.

Now that I have set the scene, let me give you all some general advice in case any of you decide to visit the Statue of Liberty one day:

Do:

Bring plenty of water and good food with you.

Don't:

Rely on the local vendors to provide you with good food or honest service. The sandwiches we bought gave one of us a nasty case of indigestion, and when I purchased two drinks it cost me $5.50. The nasty drinks vendor tried to only give me back $3.50 change from a $20 note. I had to go back and demand my change.

Do:

Buy your tickets at least 2 days in advance. Also, make sure you get a time pass observatory ticket to let you into the monument itself.

Don't:

Leave it to the day you arrive and then stand in a ferry ticket queue for 20 minutes in the blazing hot sun only to find out that you won't be allowed up the statue at all. You're only allowed onto the island with the ticket. If you want to go into the statue, you need some silly time pass, which will let you up to the Observatory level (16 floors up), apparently... I wouldn't know for sure. Plus, these time passes are pretty much only available well in advance. But don't assume you're getting anywhere near the face or crown of the nice lady of liberty even if you do have a time pass. I think there'd have to be some bribery/sexual favours involved to get up that high.

Do:

Send someone over to the ferry queue STRAIGHT AWAY when you get there.

Don't:

Go la la la... oh let's get some ferry tickets, then meander over to the ferry queue and go SHIT! A 40 minute wait?!

Do:

Bring a hat, sunnies and sunscreen for the time you will be waiting in queues.

Don't:

Turn into a baked vegetable, like I did.

Do:

Allow heaps of extra time for all sorts of delays. Allow at least 5 hours for the whole experience of ticket-buying and getting through the queues and sightseeing on Liberty and Ellis Islands.

Don't:

Don't look at it rationally and think 'an hour to get there, an hour in each place, half an hour to get back' because you will be SORELY disappointed.

Do:

Bring a healthy sense of humour. And only a small/medium-sized backpack.

Don't:

Take it the wrong way when you realise that the 40 minute long ferry queue was actually for the queue for just the security tent where they make you take off you belt and shoes and anything even remotely metal. The Americans are WAY paranoid, and not only do they tell you to take all locks off your luggage at airports as your bags WILL be searched, but they also figure that each visitor to the Statue of Liberty is a potential terrorist and they will go out of their way to inconvenience you. It doesn't matter that you can't even go into the damn statue, you're a threat for just walking AROUND it.

Makes you feel so proud to be an American, doesn't it?

Do:

Go on some of the complimentary group tours run on each island by the people who work there.

Don't:

Pay the extra money for the audio tour. It's mostly a waste of time and money on Liberty Island, unless you're really interested in knowing in great detail just how many years it took to build, etc. I did like the audio tour in the Ellis Island museum, but it went on and on and on ...

All in all, Liberty Island was kind of disappointing, though very pretty:

Check out the vultures with cameras:

Look: A Liberty Island cup on Liberty Island with a SWAT team member in the background. Why do they need SWAT team members there?

Ellis Island was very interesting; the audio tour gave you lots of information. But then, I don't know how much I might have gotten from the free tours put on by the people who work there. It makes you appreciate the age we live in when you hear about the appalling conditions people went through. If you were female you HAD to have a male escort to leave the island after arriving. As such lots of women married on the spot. Can you imagine marrying someone you'd met that day just to enter a country?

After months in ships to get there, you could be sent back if you were deemed unhealthy. Not only were they concerned about basic illnesses, but if you were considered mentally unhealthy it could be just as bad. They'd mark an X on you with chalk and then try to determine whether you're crazy or not. One of the indicators of mental instability, apparently, is EXCESSIVE SMILING. Call me crazy, but I couldn't stop grinning after I heard that.

Ellis Island museum pics:

It ended up taking us all afternoon just to see the Statue of Liberty and Ellis Island, so don't think you can squeeze too much more in.
On the way back to the train, the last few impressions were that being in NYC is very much like being in all those movies and TV shows that I've seen... everywhere you turn is a surprise. Outside Madison Square Gardens were a line of women sitting on the footpath, meditating. Just before the station I saw a large black woman telling her friend: : "You gonna regret that, girlfriend!" Cliches! Cliches are everywhere!

And finally, some more random pretty pictures I took. One in Battery Park, the other on the train home.

STC - Day 4

2005-06-06T00:23:00.000+10:00

Friday started out as at least one of my days here had to. I went in to my dad's work and got introduced to all his workmates. I can't begin to count just how many times I explained the rough direction of my trip to people. I'm thinking of investing in a sign on my forehead that says*:

NJ/NYC -> Copenhagen (June 13th).Contiki tour around Scandinavia and Russia.
-> Stockholm (July 15th). Herrang Dance camp - YAY!
-> Amsterdam (July 25th).
-> Munich (August 1st), followed by traipsing around through Austria and Poland, ending up in Prague.
-> London (August 26th), and another month of further UK wandering.
-> Frankfurt/Bonn (September 28th).
-> Beijing (October 2nd), then I take a tour down to Kunming, then make my own way to Hanoi where I join another tour which takes me through Vietnam and Cambodia to Bangkok. I take another tour in just Thailand, which brings me back to Bangkok.
-> Sydney (December 13th).

* Please note, all flight dates are currently approximate and subject to change if and when I feel so inclined. But they are unlikely to move by more than 3-4 days.

Unfortunately, that sort of message would take up quite a lot of room on my forehead, and people might get a tad distracted while I try and talk to them like a normal person.

In any case, after visiting with the funky physics people here at Rutgers, I then went to chat with the Psych people to see if they had any interesting seminars or lectures running that I could join in on. Unfortunately, the Summer Break status of the uni meant that nothing was on at all. And the maze-like design of the psych building meant that I couldn't find the main psych office at all. I was just lucky to find my way out of there. :)

I couldn't go to NY that afternoon, either as we'd been invited to go to dinner at the house of some of my parents' friends. This was good fun, food was yummy, and their 2-year-old is extremely cute. And although I tend to scare small children most of the time, he got fairly used to me by the end of the evening and was happy to play ball with me. Woo.
They had fun, too, apparently, since we've been invited back again next Friday night.

STC - Day 3. Wow NJ is dull.

2005-06-04T01:25:00.000+10:00

I was planning on going to NYC yesterday, but didn't quite get around to it for a variety of reasons.

First we had to go to the post office to go pick up my registered letter from Germany which contains my funky sim card. The post office is technically only about 3 mins drive away (that's how long it took us to get back), but getting there was a right-royal pain. They're changing the roads around here at the moment, so we had to go right around the whole university to get there, and then we weren't sure where the street was and didn't go far enough down the road, then went back the other way, thinking we'd gone to far.... short cut to 20-30 minutes later and we finally found the silly thing. Lord knows why they didn't leave it at our local post office on campus here which is less than 5 mins walk away.
Not that everything was peachy when i got to the post office, either. Apparently my Australian driver's license wasn't enough to convince them that I was in fact the person named on the envelope. They needed something with the address. It's a good thing my dad and his driver's license came along, or else it would have been a wasted trip.
I don't get that, though. It's not like my names very common or anything, surely they should be happy to give it to the right person, not just someone from that address. Anyway.

Well, after that exceedingly riveting ride to the post office we came back and i had to decide what to do with the rest of my day. There's a whole problem with going to NYC in that it takes around 2 hours to get there, and 2 hours to get back, and local buses stop running at 11pm because everyone here is on summer holidays. So I'd have to leave NY at like 9:30 to get back here to New Brunswick in time to catch the bus back. So that puts a serious spanner in the works if i want to go to any swing dance socials given most start at 9 pm.

So, given such transport issues I decided to go to the local town and ask about what else there is to see in New Jersey. Maybe I could go use my afternoon productively without needing 2 hours to get there. I walked into a local book store and even found an interesting book on sale. While paying for it I asked the nice-looking salesperson what there would be to see in New Jersey since i don't have time to go to NY that day. He looked at me and told me flat out that there's really not that much to see in Jersey. It's pretty boring, he said. "The best thing about Jersey is that it's fairly close to New York." Can't argue with a local, I guess.

During my campus explorations the day before I came across a flier for a Summer Session Kick-off party near one of the local fraternities. Cool, I thought. Maybe I'll get to go to one of those famous frat parties I've heard about. Who knows what wild tales I could come back with. Some of those Buffy episodes made frat parties look like an awful lot of fun, and they were often inspired by the lamest of events. The Somebody-Sneezed party idea was pretty funny, after all. :)
What could be more fun Summer session party? Here was my chance to go and check one out, my brain filled with thoughts of beer kegs and spiked punch bowls. There was even meant to be a live band playing. And free ice cream.

The free ice cream should have set alarms going in my poor little stereotype-filled head. No self-respecting party would be advertising "free ice cream" as a major attractor. But, lo and behold when I came up to where the party was meant to be, the ice cream was by far the star attraction. I think they had vanilla, chocolate AND mint... or some other green flavour I'm not familiar with. Not a drop of booze in sight. A pretty decent band was playing to the 3 people (including me) who were standing about. The other two people left as soon as they finished their ice cream. I must say I was thoroughly disappointed to the point that I went shopping instead.

Speaking of shopping, I must say that having a large backpack instead of a suitcase for a 6 month trip is annoying for one major reason. Anything I buy, I need to carry on my back for the next 6 months, or else post home. This is an excellent incentive to NOT buy much. But, at the same time, it's very frustrating looking at so many enticing products and needing to tell myself no each time. It doesn't matter how cheap or cool it looks, if i don't need it for the next few months, I shouldn't buy it. Phooey. Stupid tempting shops.

I bought a pair of shoes yesterday, but only because I'm going to European countries soon where it should be very hot and I had no sandals. See? I had an excuse. I'll need them. It's not just me being frivolous. But I think I might send some other items home, if i can decide which ones it is that I don't need so much. Eeny, meeny, miney mo...

Never fear, dear friends, tomorrow, Saturday June 4th will DEFINITELY be a NYC day, as will Monday the 6th. And Monday will also be a swing dance day. Mmmm.... swing. Exciting stories coming soon, I promise.

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It has come to my attention that some of you people who have been reading my adventures would prefer to receive them via email and not put in that massive effort that is involved in clicking on a favourite. Due to few requests, I'm going to both send out my blog entries to people via email, as well as post them up on here. If you would like to be one of these special email people, please send me an email to swishlish@gmail.com from the address you would like to have it posted to. I'll see what I can arrange.

STC - Day 2

2005-06-03T02:50:00.000+10:00

It's the weirdest feeling being here in the states, to be honest. It's somehow familiar because it's so much like on all the movies and on the TV; the people talk and act the same... and the stereotypes seem to all be true. Big cars, big meals, lots of black people, industrial size packs of food/toilet paper, flags outside houses, the lists go on and on.

Just looking around my parents' place makes me laugh because of all the products I find which look so stereotypically American. From the super-huge packs of cereal (5lb/2.2kg! We have 3 of them.). To the massive rolls of paper towel. They're standard sizing here in the States, but in Australia they're the super-size variety. When my mum came home last week she bought us some huge paper towels because that's the size she was used to in the states, but they looked huge to us.

The thing that really makes me crack up, though, is looking at the paper towel that we have in the cupboard. It looks EXACTLY like the guy on the Burly paper towels in that episode of the Simpsons where Marge gets a crush on the guy in the picture. Big bulging manly muscles, manly-looking flannel shirt, reasonably hunky-looking guy on a background of tall trees, suggesting he's a woodcutter of some sort. Everything suggests testosterone and virility. :) The paper towels even sound manly. They're called Brawny paper towels. I'm not making this stuff up.

And guess what, toilet paper doesn't come in just standard sized sheets. Why have just one size when you can have four? Regular, Big, Giant and Mega. Our thirty pack of Giant toilet paper is apparently equivalent to seventy-five regular rolls.

As you can tell I've spent a bit of time around the apartment for the last day or so. I was still pretty whacked yesterday after the flights on Tuesday so I spent most of the day sleeping, exploring the 65 channels of TV and I went out walking around the university campus that we live on.

It's the start of summer here and everything is just so very very green. The grass is green, the trees are lush and green, especially after the colourful non-green leaves of autumn that we have around the house back at home in Sydney that I'm used to. When I was out walking yesterday afternoon I was almost blinded by the brightness of some purple flowers in the sun. It was incredible. All that sun and vibrant colours were actually exhausting to a poor little jet-lagged vegetable like myself yesterday so I wasn't out for too long.

Look at the green and brightness:

It's pretty interesting, though. Being in a slightly cooler region of the world than Sydney means we can find all sorts of berries and animals in the local forests. My dad brought home some wild strawberries yesterday and said he saw a deer. And today we drove past a flock of wild geese which had at least a dozen fluffy down-covered goslings within it. They're so cute. :) Shy, too, but I'll take photos next time from a distance.

The Swish Travel Chronicles - Day 1

2005-06-02T01:04:00.000+10:00

Yes, people, as threatened, I have finally gone overseas. Woo! :)

I'm currently at the parents' place here in New Jersey, and recovering from what would have to be one of the longest and most exhausting Tuesdays in history. Not only did I spend about 20 hours flying (13 hrs on one flight, then 6 on the other) but there was also the added fun of sitting around in airports at Sydney, San Francisco and Newark.

Tuesday started out as many other first-day-of-travel days have done: sleep deprived due to staying up till 4 am packing. (Speaking of which, wow I had to cut out a lot of stuff I wanted to take. Even so, I think I packed too much.) But I figured it didn't really matter since I could sleep on the plane, right? Technically, yes. In practice, well, not so much.

Due to me wandering a little at the airport and seriously underestimating the time to get through immigration and to gate 60, I ended up getting there as one of those people being paged to rock up for the plane. (I was there half an hour before the scheuled take-off time, so I don't know why they were already paging me, exactly.) And since my boarding pass was one of those "best seat available" ones, on a 400 seat plane with me being one of the last 5 cattle-class passengers to board, I got a damn crappy seat. Row 54 (yes, they do go up that high), one of the middle seats with at least one person to crawl over whenever I wanted to get out. Good ol' Economy. There's nothing else like it to make you feel more like a battery animal.

Anyway, I was seated between a self-absorbed 40yo-ish couple on my left, and some exceedingly untalkative moderately cute 25yo guy on my right. I tried making conversation a few times with the guy on my right but got fairly minimal answers and gave up in the end. Oddly, simply because we were of roughly the same age, one of the flight attendants thought we were married.

The main good thing about Untalkative Guy was that he tended to get up every 2 hours or so to stretch his legs, so I got to get up fairly regularly to stretch my legs. And what did I do in such a confined space as a plane to stretch my legs? Well, after going up one aisle and back down the other a few times, it was getting kind of dull so I did some Charlestons. 20's and 40's. Think about that for a moment. Imagine you're on a cramped plane with 400 other people and you see a loony up the back bobbing up and down as she kicks her feet around a lot. No wonder people gave me some funny looks. :)
But I'm sure the guy who saw me doing the Shim Sham must have thought that there was something seriously wrong with me. At least with 20's Charleston it kind of looks like stretching. With the Shim Sham I probably looked like I had something stuck on the bottom of my shoes. :) Or that my feet were possessed. Whatever. :) Swing is good for getting the circulation going in one's feet during long flights. I heartily recommend it.

I tried sleeping, but being in one position for lengthy periods of time doesn't really promote it so much. Also, the lack of a window or friendly shoulder to lean my head against didn't help, either. Ended up dozing for about an hour or two before being fed breakfast at 9am San Fran time (2 am Sydney time).... and herded off the plane an hour later just when i was getting particularly sleepy.

So, there I was, the first day of my 6 months of fun-filled travels, wondering why people were being so untalkative. Some might say this could have been to do with the fact that I was being a weirdo making funny kicking gestures at the back of the plane, but I was kind of disappointed, regardless. Until some nice American guy started chatting with me as we were on a travellator at SFO. Apparently he hadn't been on one before and he needed to tell someone. :) I suppose they are pretty cool the first time you go on one, what with it feeling like you're walking super-fast and all. :)
He'd just come back to the states after his first trip overseas, which happened to be to Sydney for the Mardi Gras. I lost him when we went through Customs and Immigration, but it was nice to chat with someone after being trapped between not-so-friendly people for 13 hours beforehand.

Flight number 2, although being much shorter was more tiring for me because I was already pretty tired after the first one. And since it was a much smaller plane there was only one aisle to move around in, and thus my leg-stretching was much shorter.

Flying across the states was pretty interesting. I was hoping to see the Grand Canyon, but either we went around it, or I slept through it. I did a lot of dozing on that flight. Pretty much whenever I closed my eyes I'd doze for a few minutes. We went over a mountain range which was all white and snowy, I think they were probably the Rockies. And then there were a few massive lakes. I'm talking HUUUUUUGE. The plane was going at like 1000kph, but it still took us like 10 mins to cross the damn thing. I got up and went to the bathroom in the middle of crossing one of them and when I got back it was still under us. Then, as we got closer to Newark the views started getting really pretty because it was getting close to sunset. At one point the clouds were all odd and scattered and I was thinking it looked as though some giant naughty puppy had torn a massive couch cushion to shreds and strewn the cottonbally goodness all over world.
The last half hour of the flight was particularly pretty. The sky was slightly cloud-filled, and the sunlight shining through it was all orange and red as it got low over the horizon. You could see reflections of deep crimson off the tops of various buildings in New Jersey. There was a Manhattan skyline in the distance on the other side. I can remember thinking I should take a photo. So sleepy. Several photos. So very very sleepy. Need to get my camera out of my bag. Too sleepy. Don't want to move. And then we landed a few minutes later and all the pretty views were gone. So, no photos just yet.

Came off the plane feeling pretty much like a boiled vegetable. Thankfully airports are frequently designed for the boiled vegetable to navigate in, and I was able to find my way out to the baggage collection carousel with minimal hassles, and then was found shortly afterwards by a familiar-looking parental. All was well. Walked up to the car on the passenger side before realising that it was actually the driver's side here in the states.
Got home, chatted a little, but mainly was soooooo glad that somebody had invented the shower and beds. There's really nothing like a good lie-down after 20 hours of flying. This bed is sloped and kinda hard, but anything beats a seat in an airplane.

Thus ends my first travel-related entry. Stay tuned for further tales from the mind of Lish as she is unleashed upon the world.

John Lennon. Must. Be spinning. In. His grave.

2005-05-13T22:05:00.000+10:00

Please note: the clips in this entry were taken from this website. For many entertaining snippets, go there.
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Oh, the humanity. To reduce a beautiful piece of music to this (266K). It's one of those horrendous creations that confirms for me that William Shatner cannot be taken seriously. Ever. He will forever be known as James T. Kirk, and even that's not much. To have the highlight of your career in the 60s? Must be a pretty rough ride, 40 years on.

OH GOD. Somebody kill it. Kill it now. I vote that William Shatner is never again allowed out of his home. Let alone near a microphone. I couldn't even bear to listen to the whole clip.

Stick to what you do best, Bill. Which, at this point, means aging gracefully out of the frigging limelight.

GAH!!! Stupid frigging red tape.

2005-04-29T12:15:00.000+10:00

I have a current Polish passport. It expires tomorrow. Not surprisingly, I started lodging an application for a new passport in November last year, thinking that five months should be more than enough. HAH! What a fool I was! I may have a current passport, but apparently I don't exist. Nup. I'm just a figment of my own imagination. And yours, if your reading this.

There's no record of me in the polish records because I wasn't born there. So, now I need them to acknowledge my existence. This will take around 7-9 months, apparently. Isn't that nice? I can jump up and down and scream all I like but I won't exist for 7-9 months. And then there's another waiting period for the actual passport itself. That can take up to 6 months. Wonderful. So it's looking like 13-15 months (minus the 4 that have already passed since i was able to submit the application) until I can have a nice little book with my photo and my name in it. Given I'm hoping to go to Europe in about a month, having a Polish passport would be exceedingly helpful.

Fortunately, they issue temporary passports while passport applications are being processed.

I called up today to find out how long it takes for temporary passports to be issued. The first person I spoke to had absolutely no idea what I was talking about. She didn't even speak Polish very well. Everything I said to her in Polish she replied to in English. That threw me. Pretty much the only place in the world where I'm usually guaranteed to be better off speaking in Polish is the Polish consulate (and Poland, of course.... and, well, when caught with a student ticket on a train but no student ID). So I switched to English and then she worked out she didn't know what was going on and put me onto the phone with someone who had half an idea.

This woman tells me it can take 4-5 weeks for a temporary passport. FOUR to FIVE WEEKS? A MONTH! My friends and family get a full ten-year Australian passport in TWO WEEKS! I want to leave in a month, and I don't like the idea of cutting it that close, especially since i'll need a new visa to be allowed back into the country. And that's bound to take a few days, too.

After 30 minutes of trying to get through to the consulate, 5 minutes on the phone and 10 minutes waiting until she called me back, she worked out that YES, i have submitted an application. And YES I just need a temporary one in the meantime. And YES that should only take a few days, maybe a week.

Red tape is evil. Avoid it if you can. And if you can get a passport in just a few weeks, be happy. Be very very happy that it's that simple for you. For the rest of us it can take over a year EVEN WHEN WE HAVE A CURRENT ONE.

Misspelt word of the day.

2005-04-28T23:14:00.000+10:00

Seen in a Turkish kebab place in Camperdown:

Latai.

As in a type of coffee.

It's almost as good as the time I saw hommous spelt with 3 Ms. As far as I know, that kebab place at Broadway continues to spell it with 3 Ms.

I suppose it could be worse. At least here they're trying to do it phonetically.

No Williams were harmed in the making of this quality product.

2005-04-24T12:26:00.000+10:00

It was my brother's birthday recently. And, as many people his age and gender tend to be rather immature, a friend of mine got him this as a gift:

A bubble-making kit. You know the ones. You dip the wand in the bubble-goo and blow through it to make bubbles fly wild and free. It's good fun. Particularly when you're bed-bound and are trying to annoy nurses. :) Suffice it to say, my brother loved this gift and couldn't get enough of it for a good 10 minutes.

But take a closer look at the packaging. At the warnings, more specifically:

Yes, you read right. It says WILL WANG INSIDE. And it can't just be a typo because it's written in the pink-coloured bubble on the left, too.

Now, this just leads me to wonder what the manufacturers meant by this charming declaration.

Is there a small Chinese man inside called Will Wang? Can I rub the side and be rewarded with three wishes of my choosing coming true? I wouldn't mind keeping him as a pet, to be honest. He would come in handy for eavesdropping purposes.

Or did they just strip him of his manhood and squeeze it into the bottle? Does that mean that I don't want to know what the key ingredient in these bubbles is? Is this the Chinese human equivalent of milking rats?

Alternatively, they may have used wang as a verb. The bottle my brother used may have been rather defective. It didn't transform into anything even remotely wang-shaped when brought indoors. Unless that's the size and shape of remote chinese wangs in sweatshop conditions. Who knows. If so, I pity the women.

In any case, god bless Engrish. There's nothing like it for providing unending amusement to people like me. :)

the camera never lies

2005-04-20T13:49:00.000+10:00

Couldn't have said it better myself.

Brain sex

2005-04-15T12:05:00.000+10:00

In a similar vein to Ms Fits' post where your writing style is analysed by a machine and it tells you whether you write like a man or a woman based on your vocabulary, I link you all to the Brain Sex test. Does your left or right hemisphere dominate? Can you mentally rotate 3D objects? Do you have freakishly mutated fingers because you have older brothers? These questions and more are answered in this approximately half-hour series of tests.

Go, be enlightened.

Apparently, I have the brain of a boy. I'm right in the middle of the guy range. Not that I really give much weight to the results of this online test (I saw no figures of reliability or validity on the website whatsoever), but I can't say I'm particularly surprised. Being able to read maps upside down has to come from somewhere, after all. But then that doesn't explain my penchant for funky shoes.... hrm...

So yes, now that you all think I'm an utter nutter in the wrong body, go and see whether God misplaced your mind as well.

Who ever thought parents could be so cruel?

2005-04-14T10:08:00.000+10:00

My brother's birthday's coming up in the next few days. He'll be 32. My parents, being overseas as they are, tend to just send us birthday cards for the most part. This year, they included a small gift in with the card. It's a pack of "Healthy Aging" pills.

I realise the sentiment behind this gift is to encourage him to be healthy and well, but I can only wonder if they realise that by sending him a pack of pills aimed at the senior geriatric market - the people really worried about aging gracefully - that they're telling him he's old. Very old, in fact.

The thing that really cracks me up, though, is that clearly, they're serious about the gift. It's not just a poke in the ribs to make fun of his ever-increasing years. Most people would give him walking frame or something similar to make that point. But no, they said in the card that if he wants more of the Healthy Aging pills they can order him a few boxes and send them over. They're more than willing to.

The final icing on the cake, however, is that the envelope containing the card and the pills got searched by customs on the way through. People concerned that the contents of the card is both safe and legal. And while it's disappointing that the pills got through ok, I can still say proudly:

My parents are turning into drug dealers. :)

Things you don't expect to overhear in a supermarket #512

2005-04-11T11:09:00.000+10:00

"When I put my hand on your weiner and said it was small, I didn't really mean it. Well, it kind of is."

I really don't want to know the background behind that comment. Nor why they felt that the frozen food section of a Woollies was the best place to discuss it. And I can only hope that they were referring to some sort of small edible sausage.

Something tells me they weren't, though.

Reason #381 why schoolkids should not have mobile phones

2005-04-07T13:34:00.000+10:00

Yes, I was eavesdropping. Deal with it. Not that I really had much choice at the time, given I was trapped on a bus full of people.

"Today?..... Serious?...... Really?.... Really?.... REALLY?..... You're joking!.... Really!?"

And people wonder why I hate schoolchildren.

Oh, what has become of good customer service?

2005-03-31T10:28:00.000+10:00

Also known as Ding Ding #2.

A few weeks ago I embarked on the very noble cause of finding myself some sort of employment to fund my overseas gallavanting. In this cause I sent off my resume to half a dozen highly esteemed recuitment companies and waited patiently for the job offers to roll in. As mentioned, I had one quasi job offer which she took back as soon as she saw me, (the polite equivalent of a shriek, run and hide) with the promise that she'll let me know if anything else comes up. Of course, I have not heard anything since from her.

Recruiter number 2 advanced towards me with a reasonable role, only a few minutes drive from home. I took up the position and then proceeded to have my world turned upside down by a certain sibling landing stupidly in hospital on the weekend before I was to start said work. Needless to say, I had to turn down the delightful offer after only a week of working there based on the fact that I now do not have enough time to work there, visit him and maintain some semblance of a social life.

I know, it's a selfish thing to say, but with him likely to stay in hospital for another month or so, I wasn't particularly thrilled with the prospect of forgoing my beloved swing activities. As such, I've toned down my working hours to just part time. The second recruiter was very understanding with regards to my situation and told me to let him know when I next need his services. Not to make him sound like a male prostitute, or, well... a pimp, but, you know. Consultants are evil. :)

In any case, I've been working part time for the last 2 weeks and had all but forgotten the remaining 4 recruitment agencies I'd sent my resume off to. It's been three weeks; if a man had promised to ring and hadn't in that time, I would have plotted his untimely demise, executed it and reaped many financial benefits by now. :) But as this is a slightly different case, I just ignored them ignoring me and forgot about the insult they were presenting to me.

Until this morning. When I received a phone call in regards to my resume sent three weeks ago. Needless to say, she was told that I am currently employed and that I might call her when I need her services. That, of course, will happen right after I voluntarily poke out some vital organ of mine with a spoon.
And yes, I PRETENDED to take down the number she told me to call. I said all the right 'uh-huh's and she went away thinking that she may one day get a call from me...

But no, she'll have to wait. And wait. And then she'll get NOTHING! NOTHING AT ALL!

Mwahahahaha. :)

Woo! Minus One!

2005-03-28T10:00:00.000+10:00

psychojellybean.blogspot.com

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That's right, minus one Yahoo links to this page.
Good ol' anonymity. :)

Ding Ding #1

2005-03-10T10:02:00.000+11:00

Round one of Swish Lish versus the Recruiters has begun.

As part of my plan to do 6 months of travelling, I have to stay at home and earn lots of money first. Given I only have 3 months till I leave, I figured that temp work was probably the easiest to acquire and hold on to, since most proper jobs won't want me for just 3 months. And I don't feel like saying how devoted I'd be to the position only to run away on a long trip when the time for my trip arrives. I think they might get suspicious that it's been in the works for a while and I'd neglected to tell them.

In any case, I've sent off my resume to 5 or 6 recruitment agencies, and now the waiting game has begun. They were sent off around 10-11 am yesterday morning. The first one to call me back did so last night at about 6:30 pm. It's only 10 am now, but I've already been to an interview with her this morning. She seems quite nice and reasonable.... and dear god she talks fast. But there's an air of knowledge and experience about her that I like. It's funny, actually, how recently I've been dealing with various customer service people and the ones I like turn out invariably to be either team leaders or directors, like Naomi (the recruiter from the interview this morning) is. It's happened 4 times now. Usually with travel agents, actually. You can really tell if they know their stuff.
Naomi only really had one position for me to consider, but as much as I enjoy doing reception casually, working at a switchboard with 10 lines and 80 extensions doesn't really sound like that much fun. Particularly not when it's full-on work and you barely have a moment to yourself all day. Which is how she described it. Part of me is quite glad she figured I was a bit too green for the role. And I think I'm worth more than $18-$19/hr.

Coming second on the recruiters' side is Jay from an agency in North Sydney. I've just received a call from him and I have a second interview for today booked at 3 pm. It sounds as though he has a number of positions he can put me into, which would be nice from the perspective of having a choice.

I guess I'll see how the interview goes.

Speaking of interviews, it's funny just how nervous I wasn't this morning. It's like my brain decided that 'eh, it's just a recruiter, who cares what they think?' and I wasn't nervous at all.
I rocked up to their office at 8:30 or slightly before, and was greeted by an empty front desk and a sign asking me to dial extension 100 for assistance. Was this a test, I wondered. Usually, if you're arriving for a planned interview, there's someone there to greet you. There appeared to be no one in the office at all - I could have nicked off with a whole lounge suite if I'd felt like it... and if it'd fit into the teeny weeny lift. :)
I called out to see if any one was there, but was answered only by my own echoes. Strange. So I picked up the phone and dialled the extension as requested and within minutes Naomi was by my side.
The various cubicle/offices in this office all had funny names, too. We went into the Hillary room, right next to Einstein. I wonder if there's some symbolic meaning behind which room people are taken into... aside from which one is both available and closest.

It must be my psychologist brain doing funky analytical things, but there were a few things I thought of on the train home. It looks as though a lot of what a recruiter has to rely on is her own gut feeling. They have to make snap decisions, and a lot of them. That'd probably get very stressful, but if you had a knack for judging character, you'd most likely be very successful. I have to marvel at the time and effort these people put in, too. Apparently, Naomi was talking to a client around 8 pm last night regarding the position she was thinking she would put me into, but said she'd be in the office from 7:30 this morning. That's a bloody long day. And if she's going a mile-a-minute all day long like she was with me during this morning's interview, then wow, she must get through a lot of stuff. No wonder she's the director. And I wonder how addicted she is to coffee and cigarettes.

The other thing that came to mind was me analysing my own behaviour. I didn't feel even remotely nervous this morning, but I must have felt out of my depth because looking at where I sat in the Hillary room, I went for by far the least intimidating seat. The room had only a small round table in the middle, surrounded by 3 chairs; two of these were on the side of the room with the door, the other was towards the back wall. I sat in one of the chairs on the door side of the room, but not the one with its back facing the doorway. My back was facing a side wall. In retrospect, it's by far the safest seat in the room. Easy access to the door (ie, no table blocking the way), but also little chance of someone sneaking up behind me. It's funny how defensive you can be even when you don't realise it.

RIP

2005-01-28T15:28:00.000+11:00

I wandered up to a few of my friends the other day as they were sitting in a bar, watching a slow-moving procession on the news.

Me: Whose funeral is it?
P: America's. It's Bush's inauguration.

Meet Mr Kitty

2005-01-02T23:29:00.000+11:00

meet mr kitty
Originally uploaded by Flicklish.

Known to those nearest and dearest to him as Mr Kitty, this feline actually transforms into various creatures on a day-to-day basis. On days when he only comes inside to eat, meowing loudly, he becomes the Evil Squeakball; on others, when he hides under the dining table waiting for tasty morsels to fall from the sky, he reveals his Little Grey Monster nature.
Sometimes, when too sleepy to come inside he becomes the Lazy Pile of Cat.

Mostly, however, while greedily eyeing off your meal, he purrs loudly, trying to lull you into a false sense of security. He whispers that just the tiniest taste of your food or milk would make a world of difference to him. And he, the Purrball of Innocence, insists that he would never even think of taking your food from you without your will.

But the moment you look away, your food magically evaporates and the Purrball of Innocence is mysteriously replaced by the distinctly guilty-looking Worm Which Cannot Be Trusted.

Exposed for his treachery, the Devious Worm is banished to the back yard where he lies in wait amid the knee-high blades of grass. Here, the Snake in the Grass plots his next entry into the stronghold, at which point the cycle begins again.

This may look like a simple and innocent domestic cat, but be assured that this is not your run-of-the-mill feline. This grey coat of fur houses one of the most calculating minds on the planet. He cannot be trusted and must be kept in sight at all times.

Look after your dairy products, people, and watch for claws and teeth - the Worm has been known to use these razor-sharp weapons to defend his meal against intruders.

Your next bowl of icecream may be your last.

i can stop anytime i want... i think...

2004-12-21T17:51:00.000+11:00

It's probably a good thing I never took up drugs or cigarettes. I'd end up selling my soul on the local street corner just pining for another hit. Or selling my panties for a quick buck as requested by a few random ICQ freaks. I think I have one of those adddictive personalities. But not in that fun-filled good way. No, I just get completely addicted to stuff and become utterly incapable of normal rational thought as I'm consumed by the passion of my craving.

This is how things are with my current addiction. I'm getting hits 3-4 times a week, but all I can think about is that it's five more hours and then two hours of bliss in that swing-related buzz.
Then I go home on a high and even wake up still on the high. Till mid-morning arrives and then it's back to rocking in my bed under the covers in an autistic stupor "three more hours till swing... three more hours till swing... maybe I should practice the Shim Sham in the meantime..."

Personally, I think I'm already in deep. In fact, I've already signed up for a rehabilitation program for a week at the end of January. A week of solid dancing should get it out of my system, right?

What a load of wank

2004-11-22T16:37:00.000+11:00

Oh my god. How could the aus idol grand final have taken three frigging hours? It's a 30 second announcement. If you add in 4 and a half minutes of the winner actually singing the song that they're releasing, then it shouldn't take more than five minutes in total. Hell, you could squeeze it in between programs like they do with the winning lotto numbers. It was bad enough that each Monday's verdict took an hour for them to say which poor sod had been kicked out. But three whole hours? The mind boggles.

With all the advertising channel 10 puts in, they make it sound like the Australian idol announcement is the most important thing to happen all year. Notice that they pulled out all the stops: they had a red carpet for the finalists to walk up (from their convertible, that is), and they brought on a massive amount of fireworks just to show how special the occasion is. It's a competition, people. Not the freedom of slaves from oppression. Nor even a religious occasion. It's a frigging overhyped overproduced competition where the producers probably pull eachother off based on just how many ad breaks they can squeeze in between the start of the show and the actual point of the show.

The frightening thing, however, was the crowd outside the opera house. All those people must have queued up for hours waiting to get in. To stand around a see a couple weirdos performing. They didn't even get to see the winner performing live, it would have been shown on the screen. What a waste of time. I can only imagine what tiny proportion of the time they were actually being entertained.

That's if they were entertained by the likes of Flynn and Marcia hines singing songs that should never have been exposed to air. What the hell was Flynn trying to do? That wasn't music. It vaguely reminded me of this. Yes, that's right, it's a song using the words of the psycho from Silence of the Lambs. Except that the Silence of the Lambs thing was actually half decent. Flynn's thing reminded me of the repetitive mindless words and demented musical sounds. But where the SotL song uses them to produce decent creepy effect, the only effect Flynn's song had on me was switching channels.

If all that wasn't bad enough, then they couldn't even finish the show on time. It was meant to finish at 10, so if you tried tuning in for the last few minutes just to see the verdict itself, then you were stuck waiting for another half-hour.

I'd be grateful that it's finally over... except, well, this is coming. And then this. And then another one of these. And then aus idol will start all over again. And then again we will be subjected to week after week of being told to vote. To spend my hard-earned money on something as pointless as someone else's position in a singing competition. I can't believe people actually invest in this. Every week. For months on end. Surely the money could be better spent.

There are some evil money-sucking producers out there who have made a tonne of money, I expect. Because they've manipulated the idiotic population into giving up their money. I suppose that's the whole point of marketing, but if a whole generation of young girls can be manipulated that easily then Australia is really going downhill. As if the election results weren't bad enough already. I'm surrounded by morons!

Hello world. Again.

2004-11-20T18:43:00.000+11:00

It would seem that I have returned to the blogger world. After a delightfully entertaining night at Grogblogging, I now feel compelled to show the blogosphere a little bit more of what I have to offer. Or have a place to rant at the very least. For those who are to date quite unfamiliar with my works, I tend to post a variety of goodies. From random photos to obscure analyses of just how stupid people are, the possibilities are endless.
For now, I welcome you, gentle blog-reader.