Australia

Wow...I can't believe I'm having to back track this far! I keep promising to spend some time updating the blog but there is always something far more pressing to do when I finally get internet access...checking emails, downloading music, reading every Hollywood gossip story on e-online - you know how it is! But now it's 2007 and about time I pulled my metaphorical pants up and started writing about what happened to us five months ago!

SYDNEY - everyone knows where that is. Contrary to the belief of stupid people, Sydney is not the capital city of Australia (no Mum, I didn't think it was!). However it does have the highest population of people - and hookers from what we saw!

Sydney, seemingly like many Oz cities, is made up of a central business district (which will henceforth be refered to as the CBD because I am lazy) and many millions (slight exageration) of little town-like suburbs. Each of these has a personality all of its own so if, like us, you are travelling to Sydney and planning to stay in one of these wonderful, and far cheaper, areas of the city you might like to know about the one we stayed in.

If all suburbs are unique characters, Kings Cross is the filthy slapper who's a bit too old to squeeze into a tight Topshop mini skirt and boobtube but does anyway as she just doesn't care anymore...possibly because she's high on the skag! It's fantastic!

Disembarking from the train ride from hell (I'll have to give that it's own entry another time...where we can hopefully find a way to upload video because we entertained ourselves on the overnight journey by surupticiously filming the violent drunk women sitting behind us and the resulting footage would make Bernard Manning blush) we got to Kings Cross Station at 7.30am and we promptly surrounded by prositutes, pimps and drug dealers and most were doing pretty good business despite the time!

We were very early for our check in at the hostel but we hadn't slept for about 36 hours so we decided to try and find it anyway in the hope we might be able to get in early and get a bit of rest! But first thing was first...Maccy Ds for a well deserved brekkie and to ask directions! Slight hurdle there was that no one seemed to speak English but that couldn't stop us..ever the girl scout I always come prepared with addresses and phone numbers of where ever we're staying so I decided to find a phone box that wasn't the residence of a homeless person and call the hostel.

This might have worked had the hostel picked up its phone but such is life and we were both far too tired and sweaty to be too annoyed! Luckily, Andy spotted a little internet cafe where we could look up the address and directions so we were not entirely ost just at this point! So, armed with a takeaway Maccas tea and a map scribbled on the back of a receipt we went in search of our hostel...The Pink House.

The clue may have been in the title but when we finally found the right road, there was a huge building painted a rather vular shade of what I can only assume was once a pink-like colour! We were home and having been in the same clothes without a shower for two days, we were both very very grateful!

The Pink House isn't the most modern hostel we have ever stayed in, nor is it the cleanest or have the biggest rooms but it was an absolute blast that I would eagarly recommend to anyone going to Sydney! The staff kindly let us kip in the TV room until our room was cleaned - which they saw to really promptly - a TV room that had sky TV too! Comedy Central 24/7! Woo! The room was small and looked as though it was decorated by 'Changing Rooms - The Poor People With Bad Taste Hosted By Trishia' edition but it was quaint! The combination of pink walls and leopard print bedspread, although marginally harsh on the eyes at first, grew on me surprizingly quickly...this may have been due to our first major discovery about Australian culture!

GOON - noun. Defined as a very cheap wine in a box which is consumed primarily poor travellers and the homeless. Interesting fact: hobos drink the wine and then take out the foil bag which the wine is stored in, blow it up and use it as a hobo-pillow. "The More You Know"!

Oh yes, Goon! The fabulous fall back of the poor backpacker! We didn't know the conotations of drinking this foul excuse for an alcoholic beverage while in Sydney...and knowing the traditional Aussie name for it came later as well (Thanks to Aussie James from Subway, if you'e reading this!) We needed an alcohol fix so we headed to one of the bizarre outlets known as "bottle shops".

I don't remember how much we have told you of Aussie culture (no jokes now...they do have some!) so stop me if you've heard this one! In Australia you cannot buy beer, or any other alcoholic drink, in a supermarket - I know...it's a travesty! You have to find a place called a bottle shop which is a specially licenced shop, staffed by specially licenced people to get your booze! This confused us! That said, we found one and were stoked to find that they sold Lindenmans in 4 litre boxes for $12 (about 5GBP)! Back home my mum and dad buy wine in boxes from France when we have parties and they have class so I figured that if it's good enough for them, it can't be all bad! We bought a box of Merlot, or some other generic red wine, and wandered back to our hostel for an evening of drinking and watching South Park reruns on Comedy Central!

The wine actually wasn't bad...everyone in the hostel seemed to have one so we felt like we fit in pretty well! Unlike the awful hostel in Brisbane, this one really felt like a home and we quickly made aquaintances with both people who lived there and those who were passing through like us. This atmosphere was definately fostered byt he hostel staff who hosted regular party nights, of which our first night was one! We sat around answering quiz questions, playing childrens party games with balloons and getting steadily more drunk as the evening progressed and had a wonderful time! (As an aside - why do we always say "got steadily more drunk" when, in fact, there is anything but steady about getting drunk?!)

So, our introduction to Sydney was a good one! A great hostel with fun people even if there area had more strip clubs on one street than the whole of Soho! The woman on the reception desk told us Kings Cross is technically the safest suburb in Sydney because there are so many hookers, pimps and junkies that the police presence is the highest in the area! Fantastic!

For those of you actually curious to know things about the city, or for my mum who is currently praying that I am doing cultural things and am not just drinking my year abroad away, I promise I am getting round to that stuff but art gallerys and museums just aren't as entertaining to reminise about or write about as the fun stuff!

Day Two (we slept the first day if you remember)...

From 8 to 22 degrees centigrade really isn’t that much. In fact in Australia, most of the weather forecasts have about that much disparity between what they think the high temperature might be for the next day in any given town or city. But I’ll bitch about the failings of Australian broadcasting later on. To stay on point, 22 degrees felt like an oven after the Britain-esque Kiwi weather we had endured over the previous month.

After leaving the airport we got on a suburban train to Roma Street where the good folk at our hostel were to pick us up. The journey was interesting in that everybody seemed to know everybody else. It was like Cheers on rails, minus the wisecracking psychiatrist. And the beer. With us and our backpacks no doubt stealing some local’s regular seat, we felt a little out of place and intimidated… a little different to the LA - I’m gonna get shot - subway intimidation we experienced some months before. But we still received some discerning looks from the locals who were probably sick to death of backpackers running amok in their city. But we weren’t backpackers. I consider myself to be a traveller who happens to carry his stuff in a backpack because a suitcase would be stupidly impractical. So there.

The hostel was pretty good, except for our room being almost directly above the bar and next to the beer garden….and so inevitably a whole bunch of considerate guys and gals who adhered strictly to the “no loud noise after 11pm” rule. An interesting decree, given that the bar and its absurdly loud MC would keep the party going well into the early hours. I know I sound like Victor Meldrew when I make comments like this, but there really is a time and a place for it. The place shouldn’t be right next to people’s rooms if the time is after their official no-noise hour!

Brisbane itself is a city of many food courts. There’s about 3 very large shopping centres, each with eateries and food vendors coming out of their bottoms. On top of that, there seemed to be other random food courts underneath office buildings, car parks, train stations, brothels and crack houses. Okay, so not in the crack houses, but the point is there are at lot! Still, as is always the case, we struggled to find something that we really wanted to eat. It’s the indecisive person’s nightmare…and we are some of the most indecisive people you’ll ever meet! But one evening we finally settled on some Portuguese chicken outlet that wasn’t Nandos. We had to eat quickly as our showing of Pirates of the Caribbean 2 was starting soon, and of course Kate would be devastated if she missed the trailers, or even worse, any Jack Davenport screen time. We should have taken our time. The food was good and the movie, well, wasn’t. Nor was Birch, Carol and Coyle’s presentation. If anyone ever gets the chance to be a projectionist, just bear in mind you’ll never be able to watch a movie at the cinema without critically analysing the work of your counterparts. In Australia their pre-feature programme is annoyingly different to the UK. They intersperse ads and trailers, making it really difficult for those of us who try to arrive at precisely the moment the former finishes and the latter begins. So, we had to sit through the dreadful ‘Fair Dinkum Sheds’, dreary ‘G’day Mate Sunbeds’ and the quite frankly shit Bonza Swimming Pool commercials to see any of the latest movie previews. Annoying! Anyway, I digress once more, the point was that our cinema experience wasn’t the best. We love UCI Norwich, and to a lesser extent, Odeon Leeds/Bradford (No offence guys, but UCI will always be my spiritual cinema home!)

Other points of interest in Brisbane included the Roma Street Park. Apparently the first, second or third (can’t quite remember which) largest parkland within a city in the Southern Hemisphere. I would hazard a guess that a trillion European and North American cities’ parks would be far bigger, but that’s not to say it wasn’t impressive. As we’ve since discovered to be common a fixture in Australian public places, there was a large barbeque area where mainly Koreans and Japanese people, (with a smattering a Caucasians) hung out and consumed vast quantities of greasy food. A great idea, but I wouldn’t be too trusting of the cleanliness of such appliances - I’d basically take a Fair Dinkum shedload of sanitizer and cleaning utensils, and spend a good few hours washing it down… if you’re a paranoid clean-freak such as myself. But besides the free cooking facilities, there’s a vast amount of open space for picnickers, frisby players and agoraphobics to mad. Also within the confines of the park are the Botanic Gardens which were actually quite interesting - there was also some claim to fame about being the Xth best/biggest/nicest-smelling/prettiest gardens in the Southern Hemisphere too (I really should do some research!). It was big, smelt nice and looked very pretty.
One other interesting feature of the Roma Street Park is the set of modern apartment buildings that overlook it and their corresponding network of car parks laying beneath. We managed to spent about 25 minutes taking a ‘shortcut’ to the street about 15 metres below and 10 metres dead ahead. Without doubt this was the Southern Hemisphere’s number one most annoying car park. We kept coming across locked exit doors, gated off areas, and lifts that wouldn’t go to the ground level. Eventually we managed to sneak down the ‘cars only’ ramp only to find the entrance to be blocked off with a heavy security gate. As we were about to scream for help, one of the residents (who eyeballed us like we were fugitives on the FBI’s Most Wanted list) pulled out of his parking bay and opened the gate. He drove through quickly (probably to inform the feds of our current whereabouts) and the gate started to close immediately; it was one of those that rolled down from the ceiling. So, seeing our only opportunity for escape, in true Indiana Jones style, we crept under the descending metal screen that threatened to entomb us in the unearthly and vast car park-labyrinth of death. Of course I had to wait an extra ten seconds so it was necessary to duck a little bit to get under it. Daring huh? Oh yeah!

Anyway, that was just about all we did in Brisbane. Actually its not, but the rest of it is relatively boring. The story gets interesting as we leave Queensland and head south to Sydney on the overnight train. Stay tuned for stories of drunken crazy ladies, stupid town names, and red light districts! Oh, and for the slagging off of Australian TV!

Andrew.