Letters To Australia

The other day, in chinatown, I saw the greatest milk ever. It had a red label and in big white letters accross the front it said ‘HOMO’ and in smaller letters below it said ‘milk’

I was like, oh homo milk, I wish I drank you.

So today was a wierd day. Apparently the housekeeping job I was assured I had, I don’t have. Apparently they’re not hiring at the moment. Apparently the sign they put up three days ago that is still up today that says they ARE hiring, is a big lie. Apparently this whole thing was a giant waste of my time and I DON’T get a job, I DON’T get use of the staff fridge and I DON’T get reduced rent. I also don’t get a snazzy t shirt but that’s not very upsetting.

This morning I set out in search of work. On the computer in the worlds prettiest library I found a listing on craigslist for a job fair, and hurried my ass down there. I’d never been to a job fair and it turned out to be three tables, about as many people and some forms with the whole thing being run by some smarmy reality show host looking guy. So I sat down and filled out my little form about please give me a job I’ll be good I swear and then, because I am the luckiest person in the world, the red head woman working there happened to be the one interviewing me.

Seriously… this woman… when she smiled she was so hot I could hardly speak. Which is probably why she offered me a job peeling fish in a factory. Ha.

I turned it down, even she wasn’t hot enough to get me to peel fish (but oh so very close) and she said they had lots of factory jobs like hauling tires and gave me a card and told me to call Herman.

So I called Herman and he spent a long time saying nothing and eventually set up an interview in Richmond tomorrow for me to work at a call centre. YES. I have ALWAYS wanted to call people during dinner and harass them.

But hey, even shakespeare got to get paid, son.

After that I was walking back and noticed a help wanted sign for a hostess at the two parrot inn, and I thought, I can tell people where to sit for money. So I put a smile on my face and walked in and ended up having a really silly conversation with the girl at the bar, and giving her my resume.

Then, walking away, my phone goes off and I get this message like (and I’m paraphrasing): ‘This is really forward and maybe a bit creepy but i thought maybe we could hang out while you’re in town’

Wtf. So I wrote back asking who that was, thinking probably a wrong number, and the girl from the bar wrote back saying it was her.

So like… what do I make of that? Is she friendly? Bored? Hitting on me?

I’m meeting up with her tonight and some of her friends. I figure it’d be stupid to say no. Maybe I end up with a girl, maybe I seduce my way into a job, maybe I make some friends, maybe I just spend a night NOT watching family guy in the TV room and feeling lonely.

She promised not to drug and kidnap me so I feel relatively safe. If not, I’ll bust out my moves and beat her up. Bitch.

It should be an interesting night.

A joke Lynda told me:

Q what’s the capital of australia?

A whistler

I would find that funny if I could remember meeting any Australians at Whistler, but I don’t so I think my version is funnier

Q what’s the capital of australia?

A the samesun backpackers hostel

oh… us.

Tonight there is a hot finnish woman in my room. Or swedish. Or something. Who knows whatever, she’s better than the heavily drinking Australian woman who was in that bed last night.

I made friends with the dreadlocked Aussie at the front desk (I forget his name) and he put a good word in for me with someone called Ditzy, who is head of housekeeping. I can speak to Bitch and say her name to her face so I ought to have no trouble calling someone Ditzy, but I probably will. It just sounds like an insult.

I went job hunting today, since the losers at the taco place didn’t call even though their desperate for staff and the women I spoke to basically jumped on me they were so excited I was applying and assured me I would be hired. But I don’t want to make Tacos anyway. I left resumes at a bunch of places and of the realistic options, here are my preferences:

Housekeeping, here at the hostel ($8 an hour but good hours and reduced rent)

Job at the pet store (full of dogs and funky young people, located on Commercial drive where all the lezzies are)

The end.

I have a trial at a pizza place that will probably give me a job but it’s hot and smelly and has lots of serbian people yelling in serbian or whatever and I don’t speak serbian so it will be like when I was working at the steakhouse and Fabio and Luci spent all day yelling in portugese and I was the only other person there and I didn’t speak portugese so I was lost. Only I’ll be hotter and more unhappy and making less money and I won’t even have Fabio to do entertaining things like one inch punches.

What? I’m tired.

Today I went into the kitchen after it got cleaned and found the most wonderful things in the free food fridge. I got peanut butter and apples and butter and soy sauce and vinegar… you have no idea how excited I was. I’m unemployed and I’ve been eating pasta for days.

Anyway, so skip ahead to tonight, I’m in there cooking dinner for my hungry self when this loud, rude american woman comes in, looks in the fridge and announces to me and some germans that somebody has stolen three bags of her food. So I’m like oh, poor loud obnoxious american woman, do you want some of my dinner? And she says no and starts rifling through everybodies stuff. In the fridge. That she doesn’t own.

So I’m like whatever and I keep cooking and I’m busily ignoring her until I turn around and not only is she rifling through my stuff, but she’s pulled it out of my basket and put it all on the floor. And she’s telling the germans about how I stole it and everybody stole it and look at all this food she’s stolen back off of all the people who stole it off her.

What the hell. I don’t even really care that she took all the food back, I’d have GIVEN it to her, and it doesn’t even really ruffle me that she went through my stuff. It’s that she did it roughly and not only put it on the ground, she LEFT it there while she got busy rifling through everybody elses stuff. Roughly. People doing shit like that is how people lose food, because it gets knocked out of their labelled bags and then the staff put it in the communal fridge and other people take it coz thems the rules.

And I also think, this entitled little bitch couldn’t be bothered to label her food properly, so it was given away just like the ten or so signs around the kitchen warned her would happen, so why is it her right to steal it? And it IS stealing. If people had stolen it off her it would be one thing to take it back, but they didn’t they got it legitimately and SHE is stealing it back.

A woman on staff came in and caught her going through the staff fridge (because she is a self righteous asshole and thinks she can do whatever she likes) and spent five minutes arguing with her and telling her she was absolutely not allowed to go through peoples stuff, and the staff absolutely did not steal anything from her. Then, as soon as she left, the woman went right back into the fridge and moved onto the cupboards.

She made me so mad. And what made me more mad was that when I called her on it, she was like ‘Oh sorry I didn’t mean to leave it on the floor.’

Really you shouldn’t have meant to PUT it on the floor. You shouldn’t have meant to TOUCH my food at all in the first place.

The day was mostly good though (I’m just venting because this just happened just now just just just), and I got free cake at some store because it was somebodies birthday. Good for them.

I can’t seem to call australia. I don’t know why it won’t work but it absolutelt refuses. I’ll figure it out eventually but I’ve already wasted a few dollars trying and it’s getting expensive, man.

It’s been a little quiet on the blog, huh? I bet you all think I’m dead. I bet.
Well I’m not, just unorganised.
Let’s recap:

A bit over a week ago, in Denver, I  boarded a Greyhound bus bound for Vancouver, city of glass. Over the course of the day and a half that I was stuck on that bus I ate some very bad burrito’s,  made friends with got talked at for four hours by a forestry major, woke up to find myself being groped by an insane woman (accident? she said it was) and nearly got caught up in a brawl at 1am* and locked myself in the canteen with a vietnamese woman.

Eventually I made it to Vancouver, and Lynda picked me up. We were both impressed that we recognised each other, but there was still a moment of ‘Is that- is she… I  think… HI!’
As it turns out, Lynda rocks. Lynda is Debbie’s sister (Lynda’s sister married my mother’s brother, which qualified me to sleep on her couch, see?) and the last time I was in Vancouver I met her and spent the week at her house with Debbie. I remembered liking her but I didn’t really talk to her much, so I wasn’t worried about getting along with her but I was curious to see how well it would work out.

Turns out, the woman likes Buffy, need I say more? I stayed at her place longer than I meant to because it was so much damn fun. I mean Buffy.

A friend of hers introduced me to the term ‘gayly forward.’ As in, a person is straight, a road is gayly forward.

What genius.

Also Vancouver has totally broken my gaydar,  fest overloaded it but at least there you could assume homo until proven straight . Vancouver is full of people who are just way too trendy and  I’m having trouble picking us. And I’m not hip enough, I need to fix that. I feel inadequate here. My hair is not dykey enough, my jeans are not tight enough and my sweaters are not nearly expensive enough.

So I have a job, I’m reasonably sure. Minimum wage making tacos, hellz yeah. I’m waiting on boss lady to call me right now.

I need a job so that I can buy cupcakes, see? Vancouver has a chain of stores called Cupcakes (simple and to the point) and I want to live in them. Also, when I caught up with Caroline and Maija briefly on their last day here, C introduced me to a pastry shop on broadway that I NEED to investigate further.

I would post photos of the three of us, but this computer has no USB PORTS. What kind of useles hunk of shit computer has no usb ports? Excellent.

So this hostel… holy shit. I actually think it’s probably not too bad, but that has not been my experience so far.

Last night they had no female dorms with spare beds, so I had to sleep in a co-ed. It didn’t really phase me because mostly I’ve been in mixed dorms anyway, it’s cheaper most places. But like… holy shit.

It seems that the rest of Australia had the same idea as me, and this hostel is about 95% Australian, with some Irish people and a handful of Germans. The Australians  are doing their BEST to tarnish our image.

I shared a room with two aussie bogans who started coming in and out of the room at 1am, talking and laughing and fighting and crashing around, drunk out of their minds. But that was ok, because it was briefintervalls of assholery and I figured eventually they’d get so drunk they passed out and we’d all enjoy some restful sleep. Not so.

At two this fucking Irish girl joined them in their late night invasions and at first I didn’t mind so much because I found her accent charming, but the intervals got longer and eventually they all stayed and  at some point I was seriously considering busting out some Krav and cracking their skulls.

The Irish girl tried to engage me in conversation, at 2am, by insisting I was her new best friend (the only word I’d ever said to her at that point was ‘no,’ in response to the question ‘are you awake?’) and I should come to Ireland and together we would have ‘the best crack of our lives’
It seemed though, if she is to be believed, that she was already on the best crack of her life, because she told me so. Several times.

Evantually she tired of me and sat talking loudly with aussie asshole #1 until four am, at which point they stopped talking and even The Mountain Goats at a million and one decibles could not drown out the things that went bump in the early morning.

I watched the sun rise over Granville street and plotted ways of causing them pain.

THEN – no! it’s not over!  – THEN! I went to reception and got dicked around trying to change rooms and when I got to breakfast at 11:03 – THREE MINUTES LATE! – the bitch in the kitchen refused to give me so much as a CUP, not a SINGLE CUP, of the pancake batter she was holding in her hands and preparing to empty into the bin. THE BIN… the bitch was THROWING IT OUT but those are the rules.

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Rules my ass I was three minutes late what the hell kind of rules are they?
I’m so hungry. Poor little starving waif with no money, no food, no patience and a whole lot of sleep deprivation.

I’m off to go cereal hunting so let me end by just saying I am having bad morning, but on the whole I’m having a fantastic time. No really. I am.

*not because I had anything to do with it, just because the guys were nuts and one nearly landed on me

GREYHOUNDS ARE HORRIBLE. But cheap and that’s why I take them.

The ride up from Colorado took about a day and a half (I don’t know exact hours because I deliberately avoided finding out) and lots of fun things happened, like the druggy woman trying to sit on me while I slept tried to sleep, almost starving to death and/or eating enough salt at truck stops to kill myself, nearly getting flattened by a fat indian guy when a fight broke out between him and a very tall, very muscular black guy, locking myself in tha cafeteria with the woman who ran it, listening to a guy named either Lyle or Kyle tell me about forestry until 3am (when somebody told him to shut up), and trying NOT to butt heads with a soldier, just back from Iraq, who declared “I’ve met Bush three times now and I can garuantee, this war is not about oil.’

Then he went oustide and got stoned to make the bus trip more pleasent, explaining to me that it worked for the war so it ought to work for Greyhound.

When the bus got to the border I got nervous, like I always do. But being nervous is only justified going INTO the US, because then you deal with US officials. Canadian officials are great. I could have entered the country with $3 to my name and a backpack full of drugs and they would have just waved me through because they didn’t check. I didn’t do those things though, I’m just trying to make the point that the border was way easy.

A few hours after that we pulled into the Greyhound station (I thought I was going insane because I totally recognised the place, but it occured to me later that it was where Debbie and I left from to go to Whistler. way back when) and Lynda and I managed to recognise each other – both confessing we feared we wouldn’t.

Lynda took me back to her way way hip place where I’m staying a couple of nights (thank you!) and we ate lunch, then she went back to work and I pondered my day. Or what was left of it.

What I expected to do, was pass out on the couch and maybe try to wake up when she got home, just to be polite. What I actually did was walk down to Kits beach, lie in the sun, look at at the city and the mountains behind it and let the weight of it sink in – I actually made it back to Vancouver, I’m totally in love with this city, and I get to LIVE here for a few months (fingers crossed). I spent a while pondering my situation, my good fortune and my graititude, then I accidentally got a job.

I walked past a Taco place with a help wanted sign in the window, turned in on a whim, and got an offer. Basically I have to get my Social Insurance Number today (the equivalent of a tax file number, I need it to get paid) and after that if I go back to the Taco place before friday she’ll give me some shifts this week, if i miss the friday deadline then next week.

I’m not sure I’ll take it – for one thing it’s minimum wage, at $8.46 an hour (but then, I really really don’t want to waitress and maybe that’s good for a nonwaitressing gig, we’ll see) and for another it’s probably a good idea to try and find somewhere closer to the hostel I’m going to end up staying at. Of course, that means I have to find a hostel first.

Still, I got a job within like three hours of being here, without even trying really, which bodes well. And it’s a huge relief to have that to fall back on. Like if all else fails I can work at a taco place, makin’ tacos.

It’s 10:44 right now (at some point last night, watching Medical Mysteries (Lupus!) Lynda turned to me and told me that she was going to bed, only I was already alseep on the couch, exhausted from sitting still for a day and a half) and I just got up like half an hour ago. So I’m thinking this is my plan for the day:

Breakfast

Figure out the buses

Get a SIN

Find a hostel

Find a job

Is that kind of a hopeful plan? It IS very productive and I’m really not a very productive person. So we’ll see.

happy happy happy happy happy happy happy I’m so happy

Right now I’m in Denver, Colorado (and there are Krav Maga ads everywhere! My kind of city), getting ready to hop on a greyhound and haul ass to Canada, but I had a little downtime so I thought I’d waste it blogging.

I always feel like such an asshole when I say I have a blog. A pretentious asshole.

I also felt like an asshole when I went through my photos just now and realised I have a MILLION AND ONE boring boring boring shots of mountains and plants and sunsets and moons that I’ve decided not to inflict on anyone. You can thank me later.

Chilis in Hatch, New Mexico. Hatch is this tiny crappy little nothing town, with tiny crappy little nothing restaurants, that you could drive through and never think of again. Except that as it turns out it’s world famous for having the best chili’s and chock full of world famous restaurants.

The whole town is full of dark, unlit shops and roadside stalls that sell chilis every way you could think of. raw dried roasted pureed ground up mashed up tied up in ristas.

The whole town was red and green with chilies, it was beautiful.

Roadside vendor

Most of the stores had their roofs covered in chilies, drying in the sun

We ate at a restaurants, Ace was concerned about his do.

Here comes the airplane – yes I ate mexican food. You should have seen the waitresses face when i requested it be vegetarian and made with no chillies. NO CHILIES? WHAT? THERE IS SUCH A THING AS NO CHILIES?

Bombs, just chillin

Uncle Sam, just chillin, near some bombs… what the fuck Hatch?

A roadside vendor

Again

The actual Vendor.

‘Where’s the best place to eat around here?’

‘My house!’

Chilies, just chillin

Santa Fe. Santa Fe is GORGEOUS. Nearly every single building is adobe, it’s incredible.

The downtown tourist walk around area, above, was beautiful and full to bursting with adobe buildings, but the whole city looks like this. It’s like something out of a movie.

Anyone who’s ever made as general a statement as ‘I hate America’ is an ignorant moron. There are plenty of things to hate about the country, as any country, and the government really is a peice of shit here, but saying you hate america is about as intelligent as ‘I hate Europe.’ Like, all of it?

Not unusual. The whole city is full of breathtaking little things like this door, located in an out of the side alley you’d only ever end up on if you were totally lost. Ahem…

Adobe houses.

North of Santa Fe is Bandelier National Park, which is full of mountains and cliffs and ANCIENT INDIAN RUINS. Wow. I was so excited.

I forget what the brochure said, but it was something like ‘These dwellings were built by the Anasazi people but ‘Anasazi’ is actually a Navajo word which translates to ‘ancient enemy’ so now we call them the ‘Ancient Pueblo People.’

I don’t think they name is as exciting but I guess I’d be pissed off is somebody else got to name me something mean and then everybody stuck to it.

There were a few deer along the trail. They were the chillest deer in the world. A little boy was throwing shit at this one yelling ‘CATCH DEER! CATCH!’ and it just chilled and looked at him.

This building was one two stories high, had four hundred rooms and housed about a hundred familes. Just wow.

Lots and lots of years ago a giant volcano erupted and covered the whole area in ash. That ash turns into rock which ended up being very susceptible to water erosion and millions and millions of small caves formed in it. Lots and lots of years after that but still lots and lots of years before now, people carved out larger caves from the small ones, treated the ceilings with smoke to stop them falling in on their heads, built ladders and began living in the cliffs, planting corn and such in the valley.

So I chilled in their homes.

In the largest one open to the public. I really was happy to be there honest. I look a little bit like I think the whole thing is lame in this picture, but I really didn’t. I’m just being emo because it was about a hundred million degrees and the air is SO THIN at that altitude that I got winded walking on level ground, never mind hiking mountains and climbing ladders.

Cliffs with water caves.

This is what New Mexico looks like… Mars with grass. I really seriously failed to capture it with my little holiday snaps digital camera, but the whole state had me wide eyed and speechless for days.

The desert stretches forever out there, and the sky even further.

CHEESE but it’s true.

Time to bus it up to Vancouver, see you all on the flip side.

OK so.. basically we are in the desert and I’ve never been to the desert so I’ve gone photography MAD.

Going through the photos I’ve taken over past three days is like this: desert… rock.. desert… cactus… desert… another rock… more identical desert… a slightly different rock… cactus… cactus by a rock… desert… cactus…

I think it’s fabulous, but I remember once I was staying in a hostel and some Canadian girl was like ‘I worked as a cook on an expidition north do you want to see my photos?’ and I was like HELL YES. Turns out all there is in the Canadian north, according to this girl and her camera, is snow. Snow… more snow… snow on a tree… snow… falling snow… snow… snow on two trees… snow with rabbit prints in it… snow on a slightly taller tree… snow… tree… snow… tree… snow… tree…

I wanted to tear my eyeballs out by about the seventh photo but she was so into it that I couldn’t leave.

With this in mind, I’ve decided NOT to post the hundred and eighty nine amazing gorgrous breathtakingly wonderful pictures I’ve taken of desert until tomorrow. By that time I’ll be less enchanted with them and I can sit down and go through them rationally and with a critical eye.

Tonight I’m going to post the less self indulgent ones.

This cross is the largest cross in the western hemisphere, so said the signs. We saw it from miles and miles away on the highway and though it terrified me just a bit, I insisted on stopping to see it – how could you drive by that? A 19 story high crucifix in Texas… no way we weren’t stopping.

I stood under it, feeling vertiginous and afraid, thinking how very apt the symbolism of the situation was. There is something about the religious fervor of this country that, when I come into contact with it, makes me feel as if ice is trickling down my spine and makes me want to run.

I considered working the crucifix and my reaction to it into a short story, but as interesting a tale as it is in a real life context… as fiction the metaphor would be about as subtle as a brick to the face. At least in my hands.

The moon over New Mexico.

That fucking space shuttle is ALWAYS late. Why do I pay taxes for this shit?

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I went to Roswell and scrubbed in on an alien autopsy being conducted by some shop manequins.

That made me hungry so we went to Ihop, which as far as I can tell isn’t very International at all, even for a House of Pancakes. It doesn’t even really try.

The waitress there said things like ‘Can ah get y’all folks come coffee?’

I loved her accent, but the food… not so much.

Driving through the Chihuahua Desert, bullet riddled signs are about as common as cacti. I met some Canadians today who theorised that it was the symbolic rebellion of the repressed farmer. I tend to think it was the mindless vandalism of the drunken redneck.

Still… it is poetic, isn’t it? The shooting of a stop sign.

The sign shooting made more sense when, about ten minutes later, we accidentally went to Texas. I’m not even lying about this, we got lost and went to texas. This gate is the state line.

Here I am, chilling on a fence, in Texas. Seriously guys.

NeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeOW! Ace got out of the lone star state as fast as his rMobile would carry him.

Only you can prevent forest fires – Smokey the Bear

Oh look at the little boy with the little emo haircut. I spent hours and hours styling my greasy, dirty, mid-camping trip hair this morning and LOOK what the wind did to me. Wrecked everything. My life is pain.

We went to a beautiful waterfall in the middle of nowhere called Sitting Bull Falls. The sign said it was either named for the Native American Medicine man OR some white asshole just made it up.

I met some friendly Canadians (the woman, Linda, said about four words to me before I knew she was from Toronto, I LOVE Torontonian accents!) and they took a picture of me, for me. Say Myspace!

(also, fest wear)

Making the arduous trek Strolling back from the falls we found a flower, out of place in desert of such harshness and intensity, growing horizontally from the rock face. Linda said ‘I love the improbability of it,’ and I stole its soul with my photography machine.

Here’s a plant.

Here’s a cactus. I think this one is called ‘Horse Crippler.’

Here’s another cactus. This one is a Prickly Pear.

This is the sunset over the Chihuahua Desert, as seen from our campsite in Carlsbad, New Mexico.

Tomorrow we’re heading to Las Cruces, daytripping it out to Hatch, and spending the night before heading to Santa Fe the next day.

I’ll try to blog about what a surreal experience Roswell was and post some pictures of the landscape here tomorrow night if I get a chance.

And, just because I got it yesterday and like it, here’s a picture Juliet sent me from fest:

Juliet, Me and Lori (dressed as a bumblebee) on the very last night. Awwwww…

Richard drove all day and I slept.

Weird moment just now: Outside, somewhere in Oklahoma, walking the dog, I see a little flesh coloured turtle alien chillin’ under a street lamp. I walk towards said alien, wondering aloud: ‘What on earth…?’

‘That there is a Armadilla,’ says a happy toothless man in a beat up station wagon. ‘Ain’t you never seen one before?’

No, happy toothless man, I ain’t never seen nothin’ like that…

I didn’t have my camera, but this is what thelittle flesh coloured turtle alien looked like:

Juno the wonderdog stood with me, two metres away from it, for at least a minute before she noticed – then she wanted to eat it. The alien didn’t seem to mind us too much, just kept chillin.

First, a disclaimer: Yesterday, in a fit of coordination, I managed to smack myself in the side of the head with a house, and I’m still feeling a little groggy. So if this blog seems like it was written by somebody not quite all there, maybe it was.

Moving on.

I don’t actually have anything interesting I want to write about here, it’s just an update of my plans so y’all know what’s up. (Try dropping ‘Y’all’ into a conversation, I bet you’d get more wierd looks in Oz than I do here).

On saturday Ace and I are heading out in the rMobile and driving towards New Mexico. We’re going to chill there for a little while, check out Roswell, eat some chilis in Hatch and mosy on over to Carlsbad if the bats are still around. Apparently the picky little shits leave for the winter, it’s just selfish really. Don’t they know they’re a tourist attraction?

When we’re done chilling in the Wild West we’re heading north to Denver, Colorado, to check out the scene there, after which I’m going to put myself on a bus for a really long time (you’d think I’d have learned) and see what’s happening in Vancouver.

My current plan is to get to Canada on the 16th, but I’m sure at some point along the way I’ll blog and let you know bombard you with photos of the trip.

Meanwhile, here’s a political lol to keep you company