Scootin' in the rain.

The things you see being carried on motorbikes in Vietnam are worth a blog by themselves - at some point I will risk life and limb and camera to attempt to capture a few for you, my loyal readers ;-)

But today, I will just recount this evening's 'commute' back from uni. The trip takes about 30 minutes and is too much fun to be called a commute. Tonight it was pissing down as I walked out to my Xe Om man who lives next door to me and who picks me up at night. This was the first time I have hit the rain at commuting time but I wasn't fazed cos' I was armed with my trusty Vietnamese raincoat.

Vietnamese raincoats kick ass. Picture a wafer-thin opaque plastic sheet with a hood with a cardboard insert that gives you a dinky visor. There are popper buttons down the side which you can use to create arms and sides. The overall look, when in full regalia, is similar to the Abu-Ghirab-man-on-a-box electrocution look - but much more fun. The sides, however, are very rarely done up cos' the raincoat is hardly ever used by just one person. It mostly functions as a sort of wearable 2-3 person tent. We went past a school today on the way home and saw parents lined up on bikes at the school gate, waiting to usher their kids under the raincoat and head home. One dad had 3 little person-shaped lumps under his! Quite cool to see a elongated and lumpy person riding home and guess at how many people are under there.

Other tramspotting highlights today included the Mum and Dad who were heading home, with a 5-year-old-ish girl slumped asleep over the handlebars. I know some people can sleep anywhere but that's impressive.

The final example of Vietnamese ingenuity spotted tonight was the 2-person raincoat - the rainsheet with 2 head holes in which presumably is designed especially for bikes (or for 3-legged races in the rain). I assume they need to disengage before getting off the bike at their destination but you never know.

Can't even escape my geeky transport fetish on the other side of the world!

Sexy like a mofo!

Been at the place I am studying at for 3 days now and things are going ripper beaut. I have managed to settle on a price to get here with my regular xe om motorbike guy that is only twice the going rate (and still a bargain for me). What's more, I have been given the sexiest 'motorbike helmet' (read 'crappy bicycle helmet') in the world for my daily trip.

WHAT'S MORE: it's branded! That's right, I am now the proud owner of a helmet bearing the logo of the most expensive university in the country...y'know I considered a neon light saying 'mug me on my motorbike' stuck to my back but I thought this was more subtle.

Speaking of muggings, the nurse I live with works at one of the international medical centres in the city ('Gastro and bike accidents r us') and says that since the government has recently begun to crack down on unlicensed workers in the city (coming in from the countryside) the number of motorbike muggings has gone up exponentially. Their clinic is getting at least one case a week of someone who has been injured while being mugged as a passenger on a motorbike or while walking on the side of the road within grabbing range of a bike. The rule of thumb as a tourist used to be that you wore any handbags/shoulder bags across your chest so it couldn't be grabbed off - now you should be wearing them on one shoulder so they can! Even if it is across your chest they will have a go at grabbing - potentially pulling you off the bike at the same time. Even more fun are the crew that nick your bag/cellphone/sunglasses etc and then shove a stick in your spokes to stop you from giving chase....neato.

As for me, I wear a backpack on both shoulders and am more interested in staying on the bike that using a phone while doing so (the doctor flatmate had her phone nicked that way)...I know I am tempting fate but fingers crossed I am slightly reducing the prospect of visiting my housemate at her clinic.

Mr Bond, your transport has arrived.

So I got to Saigon, did a manic 2 hour 'settling in' period and then went out for the night with my ridiculously enthusiastic housemates who are serious ex-pat party bunnies. The house, as it stands this week, has 2 kiwis, 2 aussies, 1 irishman and a canadian....oh, and the live-in vietnamese house-keeper (I will burn in hell for that at some point in the future ;-).

That was Friday night, and Saturday morning was more food shopping/nerd-essentials-getting (SIM card, keyboard and headphones for mac). I also attempted to get a modem cable (try miming THAT!) which I did accomplish ('how long you want?' 'errrr, 4metres?', 'oi, 4 metres!' and the dude out the back makes me a cable!) but, in true Vietnamese style, it didn't actually fit the hole in the wall. So, using that very minor excuse for avoiding going back to dial-up hell, I have opted to stick with the ADSL net cafe 2 minutes walk from my room that is fully loaded with voip, webcam etc (and free iced tea when you arrive!) for a grand total of 3000 Vn dong per hour...and yes, that IS 20 Australian cents!

So, on Saturday afternoon it was determined that I had spent enough time settling in and was sent off to get tickets for myself, 2 flatmates and a friend of theirs to head to Vung Tau - the nearest 'seaside resort' town to Ho Chi Minh City.

Succeeded in doing that (100,000 dong for Vietnamese nationals, 150,000 for foreigners thank you) and we left last night for a whirlwind visit to the housewarming party of the previous tenant of my room who is now teaching english and living like a king in Vung Tau.

Transport was down the Saigon river on this fantastic Soviet-era hydrofoil which looked like something out of a 70s Bond film on the outside, and like my nana's living room on the inside...(paisley anyone?)


You got onboard by crossing 3 of them that were lined up next to each other at the dock - the top space on all top of them was conveniently occupied with wet clothing that was presumably drying.






There were also some very cool rubbish bins ('Winner! Waste Bin. Happiness to Everybody')...



...and emergency procedure signs (yay for emergencies!)




Got there, had dinner and 'hit the town' - as much as is possible in a country that closes by decree at midnight.

Went to the 'Ollywood' nightclub, tried not to look at the crusty old white guys with their by-the-hour Vietnamese companions and was serenaded with the techno dance remix of 'Happy Birthday' - no shit.

Woke up this morning and James the medical intern from Florida had acquired a spectacularly swollen lip from an insect bite (we assume)overnight - so he and I headed back a little early, in the direction of decent medical centres (well, one).

We hailed a taxi to the Saigon ferry and our driver, hearing the word 'Saigon' only, started driving us on a 3 hour road trip to Saigon...we put that to an end pretty sharply when we realised but not before being ripped off a few thousand dong.

Got to the ferry and the 11am was inexplicably cancelled so we went to the restaurant across the road ('captive tourists r us') and got some brunch. Mine arrived with a good 60cm-long Vietnamese hair wrapped so tightly through it that I literally had to unravel it. Was sitting there contemplating a little extra fibre and, to my amazement, another local diner had seen it, hailed a waitress and sent her to us. Within seconds my food had disappeared and the woman manager was flagellating herself and replacing it - I was seriously impressed. Yes OK, the hair wasn't a great look to start, but I didn't expect such an impressive response - customer service orgs in Ostraylia could learn something from that!

So, back in Saigon and guess I should be getting ready for work tomorrow - let the chaos begin!

My interim pad

First things first, this is the interim 'chateau Mad Hatter Saigon' where I will be hanging out and pretending to write a thesis in airconditioned bliss for the next few months. (I would have made the aircon unit more prominent if it was possible!). And yes, the geckos are complimentary :-)

And now, for something completely tangential dearest beloved.

Am sitting and sweating in a net cafe in the seaside resort town of vung tau which I will blog about when I get back to airconditioned saigon civilisation, along with the other exploits of the last 48 hours.

But in the interim, I though I'd post up this cute little semi-nigerian email scam fresh in the inbox this morning - the story on this one is especially nice!


FROM
FATTH KONE
ADDRESS/ AVE 11 RUE 45
ABIDJAN COTE D IVOIRE
Dearest Beloved

Base on your profile i am happy to request for your assistance
and also to go into business partnership with you, i believe
that you will not betaryed my trust which i am going to lay on
you.

I am FATTH KONE,20years old and the only daughter of my late
parents MR.and MRS ROSE KONE.My father was a highly reputable
busnness magnet-(a cocoa merchant)who operated in the capital of
Ivory coast during his days. It is sad to say that he passed away
mysteriously in France during one of his business trips abroad
year 12th.Febuary 2004.Though his sudden death was linked or
rather suspected to have been masterminded by an uncle of his who
travelled with him at that time. But God knows the truth! My
mother died when I was just 4 years old, and since then my father
took me so special. Before his death on Febuary 12 2004 he called
the secretary who accompanied him to the hospital and told him
that he has the sum of Ten Million United State Dollars.(USD$10
000 000) left in a security company in a mettalic trunk box, but
the security company didn't know the content because it was
registered as family valuables personal for security reasons. I
am just 20years old and a university undergraduate and really
don't know what to do. This is because I have suffered a lot of
set backs as a result of incessant political crisis here in Ivory
coast. The death of my father actually brought sorrow to my life.
Sir,I am in a sincere desire of your humble assistance in this
regards.Your suggestions and ideas will be highly regarded. Now
permit me to ask these few questions:-

1. Can I completely trust you?
2. What percentage of the total amount in question will be good
for you? Consider this and get back to me as soon as possible.


Thank you so much.
My sincere regards,

FATTH KONE

Hmmm...

Well I am sitting in Bangkok airport at the sardine-like internet cafe after a relatively good flight. Even though i didn't get time to get any of my mum's magic travelling drugs (8 hours sleep and a mouth that tastes like tinfoil thank you very much) I still slept for about 6 hours which is a miracle for me! Must have been seriously knackered - probably because of the departure schedule from hell last night.

I came home from saying goodbye to some mates about 4.30pm yesterday and wandered upstairs to find that Jack the deceptively charming sausage dawg had discovered the 4 blocks of very expensive chocolate that one of my vietnamese mates had asked me to take to her parents. By 'discovered', I mean, opened up my bag, located the plastic bag containing them, dragged it out from under other luggage and annihilated it. The spare room looked like a chocolate bomb had gone off - tinfoil, chocolate crumbs and wrapping were strewn everywhere. He had only managed to eat 2 of the blocks (not great given that choccy is poisonous for dogs in the first place) but had put little proprietary 'Jack was here' chomp marks on the other two. So, at 4.45pm I was to be seen on my scooter desperately heading out to find replacements. Lucikly, after 3 supermarkets, I had replaced them and came back to finish packing and chill out.

My partner was supposed to be coming straight home from a late night at work, picking me up and taking me straight to the airport, which would have been cutting it a little fine but not a problem....providing, of course, that our car was going. At 8.45pm I got a call from him in St Kilda cursing our crappy little car whose starter motor had died at the crucial time.

Sooooooo.....at 8.55pm I was seen getting into a taxi to the airport, about the same time that my partner was catching one from St Kilda to the airport in order to say goodbye in person (NOT a cheap fare - that really is love! :-). We both got there in a timely manner and I promptly hit the trainee-who-follows-every-single-luggage-rule-to-the-goddamn-letter at check-in, and had to go and put some of my overweight hand-luggage (sex text-books anyone?) into my check-in luggage and then queue up again, only to hit the been-here-forever-couldn't-give-a-rat's-arse check in lady who didn't even weigh it!

Ah well, got there in the end and now waiting to head on to Ho Chi Minh City to begin a few months of talking about sex with students and attempting to write something resembling a thesis. Next blog stop: HCMC.

Here I go again...

Going back to Vietnam tonight, this time for 3 months instead of a week - expect more blogs about the joys of being a tubby westerner in an exotic and exciting place :-)

Help me, for I have fallen and I can't get up.

I have probably mentioned in the past that my partner and I have a small sausage dog, formally known as Jack, informally known as 'weasel'.

Jack has us both wrapped around his paw and also works his magic on all visitors to our place (unless you're tall, in which case 'little man syndrome' kicks in and he woofs his head off at you for the first half hour). He even wins over 'non-dog-people', which, until they met, included my partner who swore that I would be getting a dog over his dead body. (Current score: 1 Mad Hatter, 0 the dead body of dog-loving partner).

Anyway, Jack, being designed like a sausage on small runty legs, comes from a long line of silly little dogs that are prone to back problems. We are painfully aware of this but it doesn't stop him from roaring around the house like a looney and leaping on to couches, beds etc at full speed.

He was bounding up the stairs on Sunday night when we heard a serious yelp, resulting in one rather sore looking sausie dog who was still mooching around but a little more tenderly than usual. We did the professional pseudo-vet 'poke bits of dog and see if he yells' technique but couldn't find anything wrong (or any bits that resulting in yelling) so we headed out for the night leaving him to chill out in the house.

Coming back, we decided to take him for a walk, only to have him boycott it by sitting down in the middle of the pavement and refusing to go any further about 100 metres down the road. Anyone who has owned or walked a dog knows that this is not typical dawg behaviour so we took him home and set about fussing over him.

In the time we had been out it looked like his pulled doggy muscle had seized up a bit cos' he wasn't doing stairs well at all. So, in true overly-soppy owner fashion, we decided to carry him upstairs and make a bed for him by our bed for the night (not that we can do anything to help him if he has problems in the night, or that it is any more suitable than his perfectly adequate dawg basket in the laundry downstairs.

Not content with bringing his basket upstairs and putting it by the bed we decided to instead create a little uber-snuggly-bed out of my partner's mum's handmade quilt (which we would hang for if she found out about!) and a towel for a blanket. Jack-the-now-milking-it dachshund thought this was most adequate thank you very much and snuggled up and went to sleep, not before sitting up looking perfectly alright when a liver piece was offered his way.

We began to suspect that he might be healing up rather faster than he was letting on but went to bed and left him to it. At 4am when the supposedly invalided dachshund came flying from a standing start onto our bed and under the covers (as dachshunds are wont to do), we thought that perhaps he might be on the mend....possibly.

Are we pushovers or what?!

Chairs may move suddenly when sitting.

Phew! Thank god officeworks warned Tezza and I about this - there could have been a disaster!

Speaking of rants...

There's nothing that beats a good rant about inconsequential crap - and this guy gets paid to do em'. Jealous deathrays being shot about now.

These things better not come in threes!

OK, having ranted about my poor AWOL lappy (the insurance process for which is only just beginning after the uni insurance dude came back from 6 weeks in Spain learning flamenco guitar (i kid you not)), it is time to do a little rant about the next piece of evil luck to befall me last Friday.

I was scooting to catch up with a mate who was visiting from Noo Zulland on Friday night just after 5pm. Dumb time to be scooting and, I will conceed, dumb of me to take the busiest (but most direct) route at death-to-scooters-o'clock.

I was at the entrance to the Elizabeth Street roundabout of death, waiting to merge, go round and carry on to whence I was headed. Unfortunately the sleep-deprived doctor coming off his shift at the hospital behind me decided that I was going when in fact I was doing nothing of the sort (as much as I would have liked to mow down the cyclist coming towards me on the roundabout I just wasn't in a sufficiently vindictive mood).

So, in his nice shiny Holden, he floored it, as you would when entering a busy roundabout - into my poor little scoots rear end.

Me, being on the scoot, got shunted towards the oncoming roundabout traffic and, in one of those marvellous survival instincts that we occasionally manage, jumped off and dropped the scoot, in order to not become the mowen down.

I turned around, ripped off my helmet and swore at this poor bastard (standing there looking mortified) in a manner that would have left Captain Haddock blushing. He kept apologising and asking if i was ok, at which point it occured to me that yes, my leg did hurt, but closer inspection only revealed what would become the mother of all bruises as opposed to something more to swear about.

I suggested that we get our respective vehicles off the road and calmed down a bit in the process (adrenalin produces most unladylike behaviour!), did the insurance thingo with him and took my rather sorry looking scoot home again.

Then the insurance game began.....

Was very impressed with the lady at the call centre whose first question after I called was 'are you allright'? Ye gods, I thought, they're actually starting to get the hang of this customer service business. I was allocated a case manager, told to get an insurance quote and to fax it through on Monday which i duly did. Tuesday morning I called to ask for 'David' (people who work in insurance companies don't have last names it seems - I wonder if their hiring policy means they can't hire 2 people with the same name, or whether it means that David #2 becomes 'Claudio'?). David was on the phone apparently but the nice call centre people said he'd call back shortly, which of course he didn't.

Wednesday morning: I call and ask for 'David' again to be told that he was still on the phone. I asked if they could confirm whether the insurance quote I had faxed through had been recieved and the dude on the end of the phone asked what number I had sent it to. Turns out the nice lady in the call centre had given me the wrong fax number and that my quote was somewhere in the wrong state. I asked if they could retrieve it and was told, 'no silly, you can't call a fax machine to find out where it is'...Well yes numb-nuts, but I would have hoped you might know where the feck you're wrongly telling poor customers to send their quotes to!

So, insurance call centre monkey asks me to resend the quote, which would involve me going back to uni to do so.

A few minutes later I get a phonecall from the elusive 'David' - he of the long phonecalls and IQ akin to a retarded chimp. David efficiently informed me that he would be booking in an assessor to come and assess my bike. I interrupt and tell him that there is already an insurance quote and that the grand total was less than $600. He says, 'oh well in that case, your excess is $800 so we can't help you' to which i reply (slightly paraphrased) 'no, monkey boy, I was not at fault, the person who was at fault is also insured by you'. He goes 'oh, well in that case, you need to supply their details so we can contact them' to which i reply 'but i fucking did that on Friday night'.

Thus ensues a painful process of me dictating the details of the foreign born doctor to 'David', who promptly repeated it back incorrectly to me about 4 times.

He then informs me that despite me having obtained an insurance quote for a negligible sum, he will be sending out an assessor tomorrow, in true Australian customer service style 'between 8.30am and 5pm'. I ask if the assessor can perhaps call me before he comes but no, apparently this is not an option.

So here I am, waiting for an insurance assessor to come 'between 8.30am and 5pm' and bitching to fill in the time. I leave for 3 months in Vietnam on the 24th (at which point this blog will revert to being a vietnam blog again) and am hoping that this run of shit luck really doesn't come in three. Or if it does, if the universe can just get #3 out of the way so i can carry on with my life!

Not suitable for readers under 36 years of age.

Fucking fuck fuck fuck.

.....

............


..................

Fuck.


........fuckity fuck fuck fuck.


NZ was fabulous, came back to uni on Monday raring to go, got stuck in to it and got heaps of work done.

Tonight, Tuesday, I had to go to a farewell for a staff member at 6pm and play badminton at 8pm. There were 3 postgrads still in the office when i left, putting my beautiful little 12" ibook G4 to sleep for an hour until i came back to pick up my lappy, bag, bike jacket and helmet before scooting to badminton.

Went across the road and had a good time until 7.10pm when I wandered back across the road to uni and up to the locked and darkened office.

"Hmmmm, odd" thinks the Mad Hatter as she enters the postgrad office. "Someone has packed up my laptop and put it somewhere safe, thinking i wouldn't be back. They haven't done that before but it's nice that they care."

"Hmmm, even odder and slightly disconcerting" thinks the Mad Hatter as she scans her desk and opens possible hiding places for her laptop and notices that her schoolbag and the charger are also AWOL.

"Oh fuck" thinks the Mad Hatter, realising that some asshole has decided to use a key (!!!) to get into the locked room, steal her laptop, bag and charger and wander out the back door.

The Mad Hatter proceeds to verbalise this thought loudly for a minute or too - accompanied by slamming of filing cabinet door and kicking of chair.

The Mad Hatter then calls her mate who was the last one out. We have had the 'lock it or lose it' mantra beaten into us so of course she locked the room before leaving to catch the 7.13pm train.

She left the building after 7pm.

I came into the office at 7.15pm.

In 15 minutes some shit [nastier word edited out on recollection that several family members now read this blog!] with a key has stolen my thesis, my emails and my digital life.

Thank god for backups (the last of which was 2 weeks ago - one week of which was holiday and thus not working time) is all i can say.

Anyone on for a little vigilante crime busting?

Actually, I've got my rose-coloured lenses on for both sides of the Tasman.

I thought I might balance out yesterday's one-eyed but very satisfying rant with a little rave about just one of the things that makes Melbourne a bloody marvellous place to live (Noo Zulland will always be 'home' but the fact that I am living by choice in Melbourne speaks for itself). And that is (discussions about appauling immigration policies and latent racism aside for the time being), the fact that Melbourne has so many incrediblly vibrant cultural layers (and if you look at Melbourne's immigration history there are definite 'layers' or 'waves' of immigration over quite distinct time frames) co-existing and even, at times, blending, in a reasonably civil way that makes this city really quite special.

After getting up suitably late in the day today I went for a wander through my home suburb of Flemington to get some bribery bones for the dog who we will be leaving with a house-sitter for a week when we're in Noo Zulland (I doubt that he'll notice we've gone actually but we feel guilty nonetheless).

So I wandered past the Ethiopian restaurant full of taxi drivers mid-shift, past the Vietnamese & Malaysian food hall, past the Chinese doctor's surgery, past the Halal butcher (noting that they are now authorised Australian Camel meat purveyors as well) and into the 'authentic Australian' butchers - established in 1974 by the same Italian bloke who is still running it today. The butchers is before the KFC and McDonalds which are on the same side of the road, and which are also, bizzarely, Halal certified.

I got some extremely nice bones for the dawg and wandered back, past the cool old eccentric lady with the dog that can get dozens of sticks into its mouth by loading them up its leg (our dog often says hello and looks envious), and past a young woman from the Horn of Africa who was clearly on her way to or from Tae Kwon Do lessons (the white Tae Kwon Do outfit that beautifully complemented her headscarf gave it away).

I went to a lecture by Geert Hofstede last week, a 77 year old Dutch cross-cultural research pioneer who looks bloody good for his age and is still touring giving seriously entertaining lectures. This dude produced a piece of research so mind-bogglingly difficult to replicate about 30 years ago that he can still reasonably legitimately rest on his laurels and refer to it in his lectures - something all of us wannabe academics should aspire to!

Anyways, one of the things he reckons is that in an immigrant family, the first generation 'belongs' to their homeland (the place they emigrated from), the second generation is caught in the middle of the two countries and cultures so to speak and the 3rd truly becomes 'Australian' or whatever country they're living in. I think, in general terms, this is probably correct - the mates I know who have been 2nd generation Kiwis or Aussies have definitely struggled at times with their cultural identity and the family pressures that might accompany it.

But it was interesting to see it so fabulously demonstrated in the young woman coming from Tae Kwon Do who was, I'm willing to hazard a guess, either a 2nd generation Australian immigrant, or who immigrated with her first generation parents. Although with her there didn't seem to be any signs of struggle - she was just getting on with being fabulous on a beautiful Saturday morning in my fabulous suburb in my fabulous city :-)

What's strange and foreign for you might just be home for me.

Me and the boy are off to Noo Zulland on Sunday for another frenetic round of family and friends and decent cafe indulging. We decided a few weeks ago that it was time to do it, hopped online, got our tickets and called in the dog-sitter. When we go we will only take hand luggage with (and a few plastic bags for the mountains of my favourite breakfast cereal that will be coming back with us).

But one of the Oztralians from the office is also going there in a month or so, and another Oz mate is there at the moment. The office mate has been planning her week at a conference in Christchurch for months - flight bookings and accommodation through an agent, travel insurance yadda yadda yadda. The mate that is there now emailed me 2 weeks before she left to ask if Noo Zulland has the same power supply and plugs as Oztrailer! (the answer is 'yes you bleeding idiot' BTW).

So that got me thinking in a minimalist non-theoretical way about what is foreign to us - I am off to Vietnam again in late June and have been planning for yonks - travel insurance, travel plugs, guidebooks, visa etc etc etc. But my mate whose family lives there is just as likely to do what I do with Noo Zulland and grab a ticket at short notice and pop over.

Now if I was Hammy or Tezza I would probably start raving about globalisation and shrinking worlds and conceptions of the 'other' and probably some social inequality (if I was Hammy) for good measure.

But I couldn't care less cos' I'm going on holiday!

And what's more, I'm going 'home' - where people pronounce the letter 'H' properly, don't drive like they're on a pedestrian assasination mission, have a decent version of the warehouse instead of the anemic piece of crap they have here and where you would get slapped if you asked for a Chicken Parmigiana in a decent cafe (and they're all decent!).

Rose tinted glasses? Hell yes! But it's my blog and there's nothing you can do about it :-)

See ya in a week!

On the basis that secondary school students would probably not respond to the concept...

This was in today's Noo Zulland Herald and they in turn stole it from a little poxy suburban paper...I wonder if the reporter was able to keep a straight face while writing the last line...
_________________________________________________
Hugging grannies soothe meningococcal jab fears

10.05.05 2.00pm

Coming to a school near you: granny cuddlers armed with a stack of warm hugs.

Red Cross volunteers, or granny cuddlers, have been dishing out a bucket load of cuddles to Northland primary school children as they get their first meningococcal B jabs.

Northland Health vaccinators moved into schools last week to deliver the meningococcal B vaccine. They have been accompanied by Red Cross volunteers on hand to deliver the comfort of a gentle cuddle and to wipe away any tears.

Maureen Moseley, Whangarei's Red Cross service centre manager, said the organisation had been approached at the start of the campaign to assist the programme.

"They asked if Red Cross could provide volunteers who would be able to cuddle a kiddie or allay their fears if they were a bit afraid of getting an injection," Ms Moseley said.

"We call them granny cuddlers and poppa cuddlers. They've had children and grandchildren and the little kids just respond to them."

The granny huggers are only visiting primary schools on the basis that secondary school students would probably not respond to the concept.

- NORTHERN ADVOCATE (WHANGAREI)

Dealing on furniture, plastic.

In the absence of inspiring blogs from Mouse who was meant to hide the fact that I have become even more slack of late, I have decided to plagiarise an email that came through my inbox this morning.

It read as follows:
__________________________________________________________

From: cmiec_group@tlen.pl
Date: Tuesday, 10 May 2005 1:13 AM
To: cmiec_group@tlen.pl
Subject: Work From Home As Our Representative

Dear Sir/Madam,

I am Mr.Liu Peijin ,managinig director of China Metallurgical Import & Export Henan Company (CMIEC HN). we are a company who dealon Furniture,plastic and export into the Canada/America and Europe.

We are searching for representatives who can help us establish a medium of gettingto our costumers in the Canada/America and Europe as well as making payments through you to us.

Please if you are interested in transacting business with us we will be glad.

Please contact us for more information,Subject to your satisfaction you will be given the opportunity to negotiate your mode of which we will pay for your services as our representative in Canada/ America and Europe.

Please if you are interested forward to us your phone number/fax and your full contact addresses.

Thanks in advance
Mr.Liu Peijin
Managing Director
CMIEC HN
WWW.CMIEC.COM
________________________________________________________

"Wow!" I said.

"All my life I have dreamt of becoming a medium ofgetting to costumers in the Canada/America and Europe, but especially for being a money laundering/subsidy service for a dodgy company with a polish email address that purports to be Chinese. How is it possible that all my dreams could have been answered at once?!"

So I clicked through to their VERY impressive website, www.cmiec.com, complete with scrolling pictures of business people, a computer generated building and Chinese language dead links. Sinosteel Trading Company was truly a partner to aspire to!

If anyone else is interested in joining me to do this exciting business venture ofgetting to costumers, simply send me your bank account details, eftpos card, PIN number and home address...oh, and your passport would be handy too :-)

N.B In the spirit of plagiarism I also have to acknowledge the inspiration of Max the uber-time-waster who amused himself by doing this late last year. The saga continued for some weeks and some blog entries - you can seach on fighting talk to see the whole deal if you're really keen.

Back to thesis procrastination.

Another addition to the blogosphere.

I would just like to welcome Mouse - a fiesty friend of long-standing who will brighten up this blog no end - I am looking forward to rants about taiwan, useless boys, shoes, shopping and yes, scooters :-)

Stay tuned for her debut blog!

I am scootergirl, hear me roar!

OK, I promise this hasn't turned into a scooter blog...much. Just let me get it out of my system over the next week or so and we'll move on to more important issues - like THIS.

But I have to do just a leetle rant about last night's excursion, another of those 'holy shit, that was FUN!' experiences that the scooter seems to bring on an almost daily basis.

You see, not content with being tertiary educated nerds on little scooters, Tezza and I decided to join up with other nerds, and whizz around the city in a pack - 14 of us, blatting around Melbourne town and looking seriously silly!

What's more, Tezza and I, complete with L plates hanging off the back, were by far the nerdiest of the nerds - UBER nerds if you will. Not only are we on our 'Ls', but we're also the only ones with 50cc bikes - the rest having 90cc and up. There was only one bit (110kph freeway section) that we wussed out on (and, for the record, it was Tezza doing the wussing - although I have to admit that the plan, which involved 4 people riding abreast behind us to ensure we didn't get mown down didn't sound all that appetising...) and for the rest of the time we more than held our own.

Funny how the sight of 14 scooters riding in convoy makes people stop, stare and then piss themselves laughing. Can't possibly think what might be humorous about that scene. At least it means people see you, and the constant horn honking from cars around us left no doubt that the Melbourne Scooter Club (we even paid our $2 each and bought the official stickers!) were on the loose.

I feel the need for a Tim Allan-type grunt right now but a scootergirl type snigger might be more appropriate - let's not get TOO carried away in the moment ;-)

Not all that goes brooooooooom is made of speed.

I resent the automatic implication that scooter rider = speed freak.

Tezza and I have discussed this many a time and I am proud to stand on my soap box and say that I do not like going fast on my scooter. There, I've said it.

Sure, I like zipping around - but zipping is very different to belting down a freeway at a zillion miles an hour - 60kph is the upper limit of my 'feeling more or less ok about being a moving projectile with very little protection' threshold.

So to all the Goonanism and Flash hoons who are raving about bike racing (yawn, boring!) let it be known that speed is not everything.

Hence the fact that I felt only mildly inferior last night when I found myself burning off a guy on the street near my home.

Why inferior you may ask? Well he won of course, but the fact that he was on a bicycle made it sting just that little bit more.

And on a slower note...

Ok, so cycling is not quite scooting... but I can at least manage 15kph on an uncomfortable seat in the rain. ;-)

Was sent the following. Laughed my tiny ass off. Thought maybe the world wanted to know.

*******************************************************

Cyclists are the biggest sandbaggers and secret trainers around. They'll say anything to soften you up for the kill. Don't let this happen to you. Study this handy rider's phrasebook to find out what they really mean when they say:

"I'm out of shape"
Translation: I ride 400 miles a week and haven't missed a day since the Ford administration. I replace my 11-tooth cog more often than you wash your shorts. My body fat percentage is lower than your mortgage rate.

"I'm not into competition. I'm just riding to stay in shape"
Translation: I will attack until you collapse in the gutter, babbling and whimpering. I will win the line sprint if I have to force you into oncoming traffic. I will crest this hill first if I have to grab your seat post, and spray energy drink in your eyes.

"I'm on my beater bike"
Translation: I had this baby custom-made in Tuscany using titanium blessed by the Pope. I took it to a wind tunnel and it disappeared. It weighs less than a fart and costs more than a divorce.

"It's not that hilly"
Translation: This climb lasts longer than a presidential campaign. Be careful on the steep sections or you'll fall over -- backward. You have a 39x23 low gear? Here's the name of my knee surgeon.

"This is a no-drop ride"
Translation: I'll need an article of your clothing for the search-n-rescue dogs.

"It's not that far"
Translation: Bring your passport

*******************************************************

Love and Hugs
GBFSB

Trucks + rain + scooters = bad and soggy.

In my unfettered enthusiasm to scoot everywhere I go I decided to learn how to scoot in the rain on possibly the most pizzling soggy wet godforsaken day in the history of the universe (slight overstatement but you get the gist).

Having splurged out on scooters last week Tezza and I had decided to be sensible and wait until we got paid before getting some extra bits and pieces for our scoots. Unfortunately one of these 'optional extras' that we were scheduled to buy today was waterproof pants...

Scene 2:

9am Thursday morning, Scootergirl enters postgrad room, dripping happily. Squelches over to Tezza's desk and grins like idiot.

Tezza, having arrived a little earlier (after abandoning his bike somewhere completely inconvenient on the other side of university because he was too wet to scoot any more apparently) is equally wet and quite concerned about his students hassling him for having a visibly damp crotch.

Scootergirl takes shoes, socks, raingear etc off and sits in front of heater in pathetic attempt to dry off, politely suggesting that they go and buy raingear that afternoon before the scoot home. She also warns Tezza that if he ever has occasion to be scooting next to a truck in the pouring rain that keeping the feck away from it is not a bad idea, unless he really wants to be covered in more water than he thought existed in the world.

___________________________________________________________________________________

I love scooting!

Karma at work

Went to an Avril Lavigne concert tonight (long story involving a mate and a free ticket and a spare evening and a need to feel very very old and to hanker after a cup of milo, a jazz album and an early night).

Anyway.

Went with mate, drove in her car to Rod Laver arena, paid twilight robbery price of $9 to park car in secure parking and went to concert. 1 hour and 15 minutes of concert later (the last 20 minutes of which Avril had completely screwed her voice over in - funny how the 'everybody!' bits increased exponentially during this time and at exactly the tricky parts of the songs) and we're walking back to the car. A bumper sticker catches my eye - i'm sure everyone else has seen it but it was the first time for me and I liked it - entertaining on so many levels:

"Your karma ran over my dogma".

Anyway.

Carry on back to the car and my mate stops at the drivers door and says 'oh fuck'. Sure enough her window is wound down and the door is unlocked. Weird thing is, her drumkit (acoustic), drumkit (electronic), industrial grade minidisc recorder, mobile phone, stereo etc are all still there - and there is no damage whatsoever to her car. We can only assume someone disturbed them and they buggered off before nicking anything .... but just maybe they read the same bumper sticker as me on the way there.....

Brrrrrrrooooooooooooooooooooooom!!!! (putt putt putt)

The name of this blog could very well take on a new meaning.

I have just this week purchased a sexy little 50cc scooter and am happily flailing around learning how to avoid trucks, cars, buses, people, other bikes and, yes, trams. Please wish me luck (and lots of it) to ensure that I (or my next of kin) don't end up blogging about literal tram spotting (or scraping spots of alice off the side of a tram).

I have long hankered after a scooter with which to zip around on - I fully expect it to be a short-lived phase i'm going through but i thought, what the hell, you only live once (possibly for a shorter time with the assistance of a motorbike but who's splitting hairs?).

My mate Tezza and I embarked on our scooter odyssey together. Not content with having matching laptops (he was first) and schoolbags (I was the trend setter on that one), we now have identical black Bolwell Jolie scooters, matching jackets and - thank god - different coloured helmets. We are trying to come up with names for our new scooter gang - 'geeks on bikes' sums it up but it's not catchy enough. Does anyone have any suggestions?

So I called my mum and told her I had bought a scooter - her first response was 'darling, did i tell you about my cousin who has been in a coma for the last 15 years because someone opened a car door on her while she was on a scooter?'

Me: "Ummmmm, no, I don't think so, but thanks for that'.

After wobbling around my neighbourhood for a day or so, I took a deep breath and scooted to uni yesterday, a distance of about 4kms as the crow flies. There was minimal trafiic and I took the quietest roads I could think of but I still shat myself whenever I had a car 'coming from behind', so to speak. But my god, what a buzz it was! Got to uni in one piece, grinning like an idiot and buzzing all over the place. The fact that I had hardcore helmet head was a small price to pay. Also got a real buzz out of pulling up at the lights and having another biker (on a real bike) doing the 'eyebrow raise' acknowledgement that I have craved for so long. Now I am truly cool!

Got to uni and was joined a few hours later by Tezza, also grinning like an idiot. He had ended up at uni having 'taken a wrong turn' while testing out his baby, which he got today.

We were standing around our new office (the excitingly named 'postgrad research precinct' - unfortunately its exciting name doesn't really make up for the fact that I have been ejected from my cosy private office into open plan hell) and one of the nicer admin ladies comes in to chat to us - she sees Tezza's helmet and starts happily telling us about the injuries she sustained (splintered femur, 5 months in hospital, bone grafts, walking stick yadda yadda yadda) after being driven into by a car when she was going at 30km. Off the bike, through the windscreen and into another car.....

At this point Tezza and I were considering taking a bus home to our respective houses. She finished her little anecdote by saying that if you ride a bike you just have to accept that you will be injured at some stage.

This story was also pretty consistent with the advice of the dealer who sold me my bike, who said, 'just remember, everyone is out to kill you'.

Thanks for the tip - trying hard to keep my nieve enthusiasm going - maybe it's time for another ride :-)

Look out Siagon Here we come

Time to check the Tortoise and the Hare blog again

http://www.uberflash.blogspot.com

On a wing and a prayer.

Hammy is blogging about the end of the world thanks to climate change and Tezza is blogging about seal clubbing so I thought i'd blog about something equally serious - my friend Wing.

Wing is a singing superstar in Noo Zulland and increasingly overseas as well. I first heard about her a couple of years ago when my fabulous mate nic who is an all-singing all-dancing drama gal told me about hearing her at some of the all-comers concerts that the musical community holds.

At this point in time international attention had not yet been focussed on her and she was working away, financing her own CD recording and production. Little did she know that, in the vein of a predecessor of hers, Florence Foster Jenkins, her perseverance would pay off tenfold with singing immortality.

I urge you to visit her site and sample her free music downloads - 'My favourite things' from her early album 'The sound of music and the prayer - performed by Wing' is one my favourite things.

Ladies and Gentlemen - I give you Wing!

GBFSB - Hanoi Uno

Please check The Tortoise and The Hare for first day update.

Come to think of it, check the same link for day 2 also. :-D

GBFSB

Bonsai Kitten gets Tobyfied!

You've got to love animal cruelty hoax sites. The latest, save toby, is bloody funny in that sort of sick and twisted way that we've all come to know and expect from the internet.

More so because it highlights just what hyppocritical little beggars we all are - most people would happily pay through the nose to have a rabbit meal in a restaurant but the second you see a cute one being ransomed on a website (I love the recipes which include '1x Toby') people go through the roof! This reminds me of the 'vegetarians' who will eat a type of meat UNLESS it resembles the animal it came from. Cute and fluffy = 'bad' but nicely packaged on a plate = fine. I know someone who will happily eat a burger from Maccas or somewhere equally evil but eschews meat in any other form....WTF?!! I'm sorry - but in my book that makes the transition from being principled to spineless - if you're not going to eat meat then it has to be in any form - otherwise, you're just salving your conscience.

Don't get me wrong - I am not on some moral high horse here - I eat meat and dead animals with the best of them - although if I had some more willpower and less of a fondness for meat I might not because i'm not really keen on the whole eating other beings thing...but I have enough trouble making a meal for myself in the evenings, let alone making one sans meat so it's always fallen into the 'to do one day...maybe' basket.

For those dedicated web procrastinators among us, Save Toby brings back fond memories of Bonsai Kitten - a vintage site that is sick yet oh so funny.

It also reminds me of Michael Moore's comment about his first film - Roger and Me. He commented some time afterwards that the inclusion of the infamous 'Pets or Meat' bunny skinning sequence, attracted more negative feedback than any other aspect of the film, which, judging by the response to toby's plight, sounds about right.

And, in case anyone really is falling for Save Toby's premise - visit here, to reassure yourself and chill out. The Age was getting itself worked up about it today - you would have hoped they might do just the tiniest but of web research to check it out first.

As a young Vietnamese acquaintance said in a recent email to me - 'Peace out'.

Beautiful big square. Hard endudring!

Beautiful big square. Hard endudring!
Originally uploaded by wonder geek.

I have long been a fan of sites such as www.engrish.com - so i was surprised to realise that i had missed a lovely example that was right under my nose.

When in Thailand recently, I bought a Thai plug for my laptop. I ended up using part of the packaging as a bookmark and, when it fell on my head last night while reading (i generally know it's time to go to sleep when the whole book falls on my head - the bookmark is a less painful pre-warning system), I looked at it and my evening was brightened up no end.

'SOAV' brand tells you that 'This product be applicable the home appliances'. What's more, it is 'Beautiful big square. Hard endudring' with Usage conveni ence'. What more could a girl ask for?!

Another one bites the Vietnam... ??

OK, GBFSB signing out from America. Next message from the land of bicycles and conical hat (preferably together).

In just a few days we will be on a search for Dalat (no other cyclo will do). If I can figure out how to attach pictures I'll post a few choice shots throughout the trip.

Big hugs everyone. And don't forget to check the Tortoise and the Hare blog (see link to the right under "mates and acquaintances").

Lots of Love
GBSFB

Strike one for academics vs. bureaucracy!

As an occasional staff member and general lackey at my university I am on the staff mailing list for the school - which specialises in communication.

It was thus a little perplexing when all staff recieved this email this morning:
______________________________________

"Good Morning all,

To assist Property Services in the management and use of both Reverse
Osmosis or Deionised Water, could you please give me an indication of
your current and future use of these products.

We will rely on your responses to assist us with the future management
of these services and I would appreciate it if you could supply me with
this information by COB Friday 1 April 2005.

Thanks for your assistance in this matter."

_________________________________________

I had to do my damndest to bite my tongue and not fire off a smart ass reply to everyone - but thankfully someone much higher up did it for me:
__________________________________________

"Reverse osmosis is a preferred pedagogical method of mine. I learn from
my students, and I would be against any university attempt to minimise
its use in classes.

The increase in reverse osmosis has also been one of underlying reasons
for the increased colocation of cognate disciplines - I don't know how
the university can contradict its own strategic directions.

As for deionisation: It can only lead to teaching staff wearing more
crinkled shirts, and in such a competitive environment as tertiary
education, we need every bit of competitive advantage we have - any
potential increase in crinkled shirts is a pressing matter. Ionise,
ionise, ionise, I say."

____________________________________________

Sometimes I love academics :-)

The house inspection (wo)man cometh.

My approach to the topic of tidiness in the years following my metamorphosis from a teenaged slug to a semi-adult baboon could perhaps be summed up in the phrase 'messy but hygienic'. There might be crap throughout the house, office etc but the desk and carpet under it will be more or less clean. This has worked well for me thus far and I have even managed to find myself a partner who seems to operate on a similar basis give or take the odd 'right, clean up your shit, i can't find the dog'-type comment when it all gets a bit too much.

My desk at university is the same - technically there are 3 people in my office, but in their regular absences my stuff seems to creep (run?) for freedom to desks where they won't be suffocated by piles of other important but unreachable stuff. Not a good look I know but my junk takes on a life of its own and things just seem to spread out despite my best intentions (no doubt much to the annoyance of my office mates!).

My brother, on the other hand, is a neat freak. When I was 17 I went travelling with him to Europe via Argentina. Unfortunately this involved us sharing a hotel room - sort of like putting Barney from the Simpsons in the same room as Marge (or Joey from Friends in with Monica - funny how it's always the guys that are messy in those stories). But I digress. The short version was that after about 24 hours in Argentina (our first stop on the trip), when I had spread out in my usual fashion, my brother literally drew a dividing line down the middle of the hotel room. He strictly enforced this for the rest of the trip, much to my amusement - I couldn't see why he had a problem with my underwear, books, clothing, CDs, toiletries etc invading his space but clearly there were some unresolved issues that I wasn't going to push too far given that he was paying for the hotel room.

Which brings me to my current dilemma - the house inspection this afternoon. We live in a fabulous rental place in the not too dodgy side of town, but I suspect that the rental agent will not take my word for it that the house is clean - give or take the mountains of shit liberally sprinkled everywhere. So last night and parts of the preceeding week have been spent relocating our crap. I always thought it was a humorous exaggeration when you saw people putting things under the carpet in films but there is now a suspicious 'pile of misc clothes-shaped-lump' under my duvet (and no, dammit, I will NOT say 'doona', no matter how long I live in Oztrailer!).

The house is, as always, hygienic - but I'm just hoping that the agent has at least a smidgeon of my tolerance for mess....

Word of the day.

Just used the word schadenfreude in a reply to a comment from my charming nemesis Jo.

I am sure I have provided a definition for this fabulous word before but I really feel like it is something that does not get enough publicity. Who else but the inventors of sauerkraut could come up with such a marvellous expression to encapsulate so much?!

Just as the Eskimos have given us 256,324,674 words for snow (approximately), the Germans gave us "a malicious satisfaction in the misfortunes of others", how cool is that?!

Kudos my man!

If I could pick someone to burn down part of my old school it would be this dude. Funny how dreams come true eh?

Even weirder, the dude was in the care of an organisation I used to work for - and I used to work with his support worker!

I LOVE NOO ZULLAND!

Sigh, feeling a little homesick. - This is essential viewing for any Kiwi away from home - and anyone else who might be curious about why we love the land of the long white cloud.

And the moral of the story is...

As a wannabe academic (similar to the wannabe gayboy number that Tezza the pink fonted man is doing over at Project Maya - minus the sense of style), I have a more than passing acquaintance with commas and semicolons. At times it is tedious, nay, even dull, to be so hung up on such small things but this more than demonstrates the importance of spellchecking.

Let this be a lesson to you the next time you think 'she'll be right'.

Why bother?

Walking up from the train station this morning I was unfortunate enough to overhear this complete waste of space and energy. It was one of those inane bollocks 'can't stop because i'm so damn important and busy' conversations so it went like this [verbatim minus stage directions]:

Scene 1: A man and woman cross paths walking in opposite directions.

Woman [walking full speed past man]: 'Hi!'

Man [walking full speed past woman]: 'Hi'

Woman: 'How are you?'

Man: 'Good'

Woman: 'Good'

Man: 'And you?'

Woman: 'Good'

Man: 'Good'.

Man and woman exit stage right and left at full speed.

How NOT to do sponsorship.

In a former life I was a greasy PR consultant. But I'm pretty sure it takes only a basic knowledge of PR to know that this is not a good idea.

I can see the conversation:

Exxon man: "OK so we fucked up the environment good a few years ago but that was a long time ago and everyone has forgotten about it. So how can we promote our new corporate social responsibility?"

Thick-as-pigshit-sponsorship manager: "I know! How about we sponsor something cute and fuzzy that will help people to forget about it and brand it Exxon?"

Exxon man: "That is GENIUS! But I have one better, how about we make the name REALLY clear?"

With no further ado ladies and gentlemen, I give you the Healesville Sanctuary 'Exxon Chemical Rehabilitation Aviary'. No shit.

For my next trick...

Soooooooooo.... [stretches and cracks knuckles].

After the great Tourettes Man comments war of '05 what do you think I should blog about now? Funny how the pickled babies comment didn't get a rise from anyone but tourettes man did (regardless of whether he really is Mr Tourettes or Mr Something Equally Unfortunate But Quite Different Altogether). Maybe I'll ask him when I next seem him to settle it for once and for all.

Have been thinking for a while about changing the general theme of this blog actually. Public transport has been fun for the last year ['and oh what a year' - looks wistfully back while flicking through mental photo album] but not so many things strike me as odd as they used to. Am I turning into a hardened metropolitan commuter? Am I becoming blind to the quirkiness and wonder that is around me? Am I running out of ways to describe a train ride?....perhaps there is a little bit of truth in all of it.

So, for lack of a more imaginative brain, after the 2nd Nam tour of duty that Flash and GBFSB will be undertaking in just a few weeks I hereby declare this a 'GENERAL RANT BLOG'. From then on it wil be no holds barred! no excuses given! no spelling checks made hot and heavy blog on blog action! There will still be the odd bit of PT commentary for old times sake but this will be all new and even more nerdy!

You have been warned!

I have a clone!

Mwoah hah hah! Soon our evil plan to take over the world will be complete...

good likeness eh?

Feeling guilty.

I saw my old friend Mr Tourettes Man today. According to this blog I haven't seen him since May 31 last year when he and I used to share a tram line.

Mr Tourettes, who I am now convinced is actually Mr Schizophrenia or similar, was not having a good day. I heard him about 3 blocks away as I walked up Swanston Street. He was standing on my side of the street in his suit, facing the traffic but not focussing on anyone in particular and going off his nut at someone that I couldn't see. As always, his motions were very slow and controlled - I'm sure he's not a danger to anyone.

You could see the first year uni students who have recently moved from the country to the big smoke crossing to the other side of the road to avoid him and I felt very sorry for him - and more than a little guilty for not talking to him to see if I could snap him out of wherever he was or direct him to somewhere where he was less likely to get arrested...but apathy and a meeting appointment were the winners on the day - and I feel like a heartless rat.

Small town flashback twilight zone

I have lived in Malburne, Oztrailer for over a year now. During this time I have randomly met 2 people from Noo Zulland that I know.

"So?" I hear you say?

Well, I have met these 2 people in the last 4 weeks....at my home stop on my train line...and they're from my high school.

This is not impressive until you take into account that my home town in Noo Zulland had a population of 12,000 people and 28 chickens at the time I lived there, and my school had a total enrollment of 800. The school had years 8-12 in it, of which I knew maybe 50% of about 2 years - not many in other words.

Anyway, this is probably only weird for me. But today's encounter with random NZ chick was truly surreal. We're standing on the packed train after getting on at my stop. We stare at each other blankly for a while as commuters do before we realise we're actually staring at each other. We do the funny eyebrow scrunching mutual recognition thing before I say 'Are you from Cambridge?". Turns out this chick was in the year above me at school.

I'm pretty sure neither of us could remember each other's name but we did the obligatory stuck-on-a-train-making-smalltalk-with-someone-from-your-childhood-until-you-can-get-off thing, which covered the standard topics - my answers to her questions were:

Yes, I live here
I've been here for over a year
I am a post-grad student/lecturer
I live in Flemington
No, I don't miss Cambridge.

In return, I asked her if she lived here, how long she'd been here, what she was doing and where she lived.

Small-talk obligations fulfilled, I asked if she'd been back to our home town recently - she'd been back for xmas. I asked if she found it weird being back there, going to the town's skanky old pub etc - she said 'not really' and commented that all the people we'd gone to school with just got 'taller and hairier' as time went by.

Luckily at this point it was time for me to get off - in fact I might have considered getting off even if it wasn't my stop.

A little extra decoration to help you sleep at night.

A little extra decoration to help you sleep at night
Originally uploaded by wonder geek.

The charming centre tile between the two beds in my Ho Chi Minh City hotel room :-)

Will work for bulk bananas

Will work for bulk bananas
Originally uploaded by wonder geek.

The privilege of catching a lift on one of these incredible animals does come at a price - as many bananas as you can supply.

Once they've got the taste for them their amazingly flexible trunks snake out and relieve you of your banana stash...or if you're brave enough you can deliver them straight to the mouth!

Mad Hatter comes to the photo blogging party a leetle late.

Errrrrr, ok, have just figured out how to post up gratuitous piccys. Have not yet figured out how to put them into old postings (suggestions team?) so you will have to play 'match the random pic to the equally random blog' until i get up to speed. Enjoy!

Introducing a newbie blogger

I've never blogged before. I'm afraid to go out and blog alone. The MadHatter (my younger sibling) has invited me to add this "tramspotting" blog, until I loose my blogging cherry and become wise in the ways of the blog.

Soon, a friend and I will also be travelling to Vietnam (we're not very orginal in my family ;-). My friend has his own blog... I'm so ashamed. In a future installment I'll make you a link to it, if he lets me. We'll be going to both Hanoi and Ho Chi Minh City. You might expect to hear more about cyclo Dalat when I get to HCMC. Until then...

GBFSB

Don't mess with the cyclo man.

Tonight is the first full moon of the new Chinese year and thus an important date for Vietnamese who pay their respects to their ancestors etc. They also flock to the fabulous pagodas that are dotted around HCMC and so I took the opportunity, with the assistance of my trusty cyclo man Dalat, to check out 3 of the pagodas and see how much passive incense smoking I could do in one morning.

The pagodas are amazing - incredibly intricate carvings and decorations with people carrying incense sticks absolutely everywhere. At the first one that I went to the door assistant gently thrust a bunch of incense sticks into my hands as I entered, which I then wandered around with feeling all warm and fuzzy until I copied the others and planted them in various bowls around the pagoda (I skipped the holding the incense to your forehead and bowing at everything in sight bit that came before).

I thought when I first went in that the people who looked like they were crying as they left were simply overcome by religious fervour. Turns out the incense smoke is so thick that your eyes start watering within seconds. The original plan was to visit 5 pagodas but after 3 I looked like I had been bawling for a week so I decided that 3 was enough.

When I left the 2nd pagoda I found my cyclo man in a full-on fist fight with another cyclo dude. This was serious biffo so I wandered down the road a bit and waited for my man to extract himself, which he did after a minute or so more. We carried on and he explained that the other man had mocked him...made mental note to never mock the cyclo man.

After my fit of religious enthusiasm I reverted to a bit of the old ultra-shopping. Hit the An Dong market which is mercifully free of tourists like myself (oh the hypocrasy! (and bad spelling!)) and cheaper again than the tourist areas. Bought a gorgeous wood chopstick box set for the magnificent price of $8 australian - and I was probably being ripped off. It's great to be in a place where even the tourist rip off prices are fantastic!

After that we headed to the Saigon War Surplus Market 'Dan Sinh' to pick up some obligatory American War remnants for my partner who is keen on that sort of thing. The vast bulk of the market comprises very (and some not so very) convincing replicas of war memorabilia ('american GI' zippo lighters that have been beaten up to look old, helmets, bags etc) that you can see the stall holders whipping up with their sewing machines. But if you ask the right questions and look carefully it is still possible to find some original stuff. I picked up 2 medals/badges from North Vietnamese (Viet Cong) and American Marine units as well as 2 American dog tags ($3US each). I am almost certain that the dog tags are real (I was offered both real and replica versions and there is a definite difference) so my partner and I will check their authenticity and maybe see if we can return them to their original owners.

I have been here for just on a week, and am very much in love with Saigon. I have long been in the habit of randomly smiling at people in the street - in Australia this usually results in a blank look but here you are repaid tenfold. Amazing smiles and 'hello's abound, especially off the main tourist strips :-)

I have also had the opportunity to see the extreme other side of Saigon, a world that I think many people don't know exists.

I caught up with a mate from 'Uc' (Australia) who, as it turns out, is one of Saigon's nouveau riche young elite. He picked me up and took me to his mum's place for drinks. For starters this was one of the most opulent private residences I've ever been to - and we're standing on the balcony overlooking the Saigon River when he points out the next house which apparently belongs to Ho Chi Minh City's President. To say that I felt somewhat underdressed in my cargo pants and t-shirt would be a monumental understatament. We then went for dinner with his cousins at a BBQ goat meat restuarant (thankfully not a dog meat one - had one of those, complete with dogs hanging in the window, pointed out to me by my every-helpful cyclo man the other day!) and then we hit the clubs.

The first place, the surreally named 'Apocalypse Now' had pretty good if slightly cheesy music, a mixed western/vietnamese crowd (complete with 2 bored looking 'ladies of the night' dancing with yukky overweight balding western men) and 2 security guards in full military uniform standing guard on the stage. A leetle bit of overkill I thought but you never know when a westerner riot might break out to the accompaniment of the dance remix of 'I will survive'.

At the 2nd place my mate's friends met us at the door and took us past the bouncers (I was the only non-Vietnamese there) and up the stairs to an incredibly plush bar/club. Beautiful young Vietnamese things were lounging around on comfy leather couches and armchairs, drinking diabolically expensive wine and spirits by the bottle. All but one of our party were studying in Australia and were back in HCMC for the holidays and made for very good company. It turns out that rich young vietnamese guys dance as well as gay white men - they were the ones standing up and dragging the girls up to dance! Much fun and drinking was has by all, and, as has happened every time I have been the guest of someone in Saigon, regardless of their income, I wasn't allowed to pay for anything. I think I have a lot of repaying of kindness to do when back in Australia.

So there you have it - one tourist's burblings about a very funky city. Can't wait to get back here later in the year :-)

By bus and boat to the mekong and back.

Ended up going on a Mekong river tour instead of the tunnels and temple, figure the tunnels will still be there when I come back next time but that China's spectacular damming efforts upriver on the Mekong might mean it was not so good later on.

So I went to the appropriately named Sinh Cafe, booked my tour and handed over the princely sum of $7 US for a full day tour, with aircon bus, tour guide, 2 river trips and lunch.

Boarded my bus at 8am in Saigon. Not normally a tour bus kind of girl but there was no way I could have done it cheaper so there you go. The Mancunian midwife on her midlife OE (beginning with an unplanned volunteer stint in Banda Aceh) that I sat next to was more than enough to keep the tour bus blues away.

After an entertaining toilet stop in which all the women piled off the bus and ran for the loos, only to recoil as they realised they were squat toilets (I on the other hand don't leave home without ample supplies of tissues or the ever-handy immodium: 2 of the traveller's best friends!) we carried on to our destination and were loaded on to a dinky authentic rickety tourist boat on a tributary of the Mekong.

From then on it was foreigner hijacking happy hour as we conducted our tour of the nifty rice paper making/coconut sweet making/puffed rice thingy making village while running the gauntlet of postcard sellers and everything else sellers. After tea and a prolonged opportunity to purchase the items we had seen produced it was back on the boat to have a look at a very cool floating vege market. It was pretty amazing to see that all the things you see on the movies are for real. Vietnam outside of the main cities doesn't seem to have changed in hundreds of years (give or take the postcards and the fact that the old wood boats now have outboards on the ends!).

Then it was on to the Mekong proper which is - to put it mildly - fucking massive! Crossing from one side to the other took about 40 minutes but was pretty mindblowing to do. The rivers I know come in smaller packages.

Lunch at a restaurant up one of the tributaries was allright but the monkey chained to a tree at the back for our benefit was not. Nor was the classical Vietnamese music performance given by a woman who worked there with her band. Full points for angst-ridden enthusiasm but I can now see why the overal effect has been compared to cats being strangled.

Back on to the boat after lunch and to the waiting tour bus. A quick whip around a local market and then home made for an exceptionally good way to spend $7 US and a good chance to check out the world outside the HCMC chaos.

My heart will go on....

Music and mobility seem to go together here, just like the bows of ships and the impulse to stand on the railing and spread out your arms.

Highlights include the taxis that play 'happy birthday' as they reverse at you at full speed, the people on push bikes who inexplicably cycle up and down the road clacking some sort of jingly thing, and the bloke who pushes a tall speaker up and down the road blasting out 'my heart will go on' for no apparent reason.

I wondered if it might be a mobile karaoke thingy but I can't see a microphone - a little mystery for me to ponder at night as I lie in bed listening to it wafting through the window :-)


***BREAKING NEWS: It is the next day, I have just stopped the 'My heart will go on' man in the street and asked him what the hell he does for a living. Turns out that fact is even weirder than fiction, the music blaring tall speaker is actually a pay per use mobile height and weight machine...with added music as a bonus. So there you go, measure your height and weight on the street while listening to Celine Dion. Perhaps 'my heart will go on' is some sort of cryptic heart disease message...?

Wheeeeeeee!

So this morning I woke up after 11 hours of what I will generously call sleep. The rock hard bed and brick for pillow were fine but the extremely busy 24/7 street below my window took a little getting used to. Popped into my local dodgy street phramacy first thing and the woman laughed when I asked for earplugs - I suspect it might be a frequent foreigner request.

As my friendly cyclo man was nowhere to be seen (millions of others were of course but I am a loyal customer) I bade farewell to my insurance and hailed (or agreed to be hailed by) a 'Honda Om' motorcycle taxi, which in fact is usually just a bloke who fancies earning some extra cash with his bike. Negotiated a reasonable foreigner rip off price for our 7km journey to the Cholon china town markets and off we went. Not only was it not as scary as I thought it would be (remember that we are talking about literally hundreds of bikes on any one street at any time with no road rules to speak of), it was actually a lot of fun, give or take the layer of grime I was covered in at the end of it).

I'm not sure what overtakes tourists when they're off their home patch but riding pillion on a motorbike in insane conditions with no helmet while wearing shorts and jandals seemed feasible. That said, I will make the distinction between riding a motorbike in Samui, which I wouldn't dream of, and riding in HCMC. The difference (apart from the squillions more bikes in HCMC) is that the traffic never gets above 30/35kph in Saigon whereas in Samui it's what you can get away with. I know perfectly well that your head will split just as easily at 35kph as it will at 100kph but it somehow feels different. Riding in HCMC seems to be more an ongoing negotiation between reasonably civil madmen whereas Saumi is a suicide mission. When I come back here for a few months I may even considering riding myself (WITH helmet and appropriate safety gear), but we'll see about that when I get to it.

Anyway, enough of that. Saigon is a lot of fun. Am just about to book a ridiculously cheap tour to check out the Cu Chi tunnels (aka an e.g of exactly how the Viet Cong kicked the US's ass) and the temple of some mad religious sect or another for tomorrow so I'd better go do that - quite fun being an unadulterated tourist for a few days.

Jetlag, pedal power and hallucinations of pickled babies.

I left England, land of the uninspiring everything what I think was this mornimg, although I've had 2 of those in the last 18 hours as I am now in Vietnam and jetlagged out of my skull.

I think that is how, within 1/2 an hour of making it through the 2 hour long queue at Ho Chi Minh airport and not getting tooooo badly ripped off on the taxi on the way to the guest house (the first offer was $15 US to which I laughed and took my bag back - his next offer was $6 US which I couldn't be bothered haggling down), I found myself perched on a cyclo, weaving through insane Vietnamese traffic with scooters and cars galore and looking at pickled babies.

OK, let me start again. After the taxi ride I got to the guest house which is a leetle dodgy but clean and perfectly acceptable (the dodgyness is mostly only cos of the large centre tile in between the beds which is a modern soft-porn picture (didn't know that the porn industry was expanding into tiling but there you go). The bed is clean, it has aircon and a shower/toilet, costs $9US a night and the only gecko i've seen so far was squished in the sliding shower door. More than any girl could possibly want.

Within half an hour of arriving I was walking round the streets. I literally got about 10 metres down the road before Dalat the cyclo driver pounced and charmed me into hiring him for what turned into the afternoon (funny how that happens). Dalat has an entire book of references from clients (of which I am now one) but it was the lady from Timaru who clinched it for me!

We spent three hours (at the princely sum of $2 US an hour) with him pedalling me round HCMC, dropping me off at attractions, waiting for me and carrying on. My role in this was to dutifully go into the attraction I had been dropped at, look at it and resume my task of looking like a tubby jetlagged western idiot in a cyclo. I think I held my end of the bargain up rather well.

It was V. weird going through massive roundabouts with cars and motorbikes flying past and us just sort of cruising - as a normally paranoid backseat driver of the worst kind it was bizarre not to feel scared at all. But if I thought that was weird, the 1st stop was a doozy. Dalat dropped me off at the war remnants museum (formerly known as the american war atrocities museum or some other equally neutral name). The museum starts you off gentle with photos and historical info then gets progressively more stressful and before you know it you walk around a corner and find yourself face to face with 3 jars containing pickled babies with agent orange deformities sort of tucked into a corner of the room. I wondered, nay hoped, that it was the jetlag kicking in early but instead had to get all serious and emotional for a while before hopping back on my magical mystery cyclo tour.

Next stop was the history museum which was presented lots of very funky ancient cambodian carvings and 3 more preserved bodies! I was starting to get worried about the emerging trend but the jade pagoda temple (next on the list) was just amazing - a working inner city temple with people in suits turning up and praying and burning incense, and a huge moat that is chokka full of turtles that people bring to 'set free' - part of the monks' job is to look after them.

After that we were back where we started, except that we stopped at Dalat's local haunt and had a drink on the street on the traditional Vietnamese children's plastic tables with his mate Ton who is a motorbike taxi man and whose services I may well use in the next few days as well. I shared a drink with them (not without noting that my kid's seat had had another one surreptitiously added for strength!), added a glowing reference to Dalat's book (a 3 hour tour for $7 US including drinks and tip!) and staggered back to my funny old hotel, not a bad start to my week in HCMC at all!

Public transport that goes 'brmmmmmmm'

Have been enjoying trying out some new forms of public transport while in Samui.

Our favourite so far is the equivalent of the local bus service which involves utes with large open-ended hutches on the tray. You just hop onto the back to head to wherever you fancy. There is a buzzer fitted into the ceiling that you press when you want to get off and you just relax, sitting in the tray of the ute with the wind in your hair, admiring the hand-beaten metal work and paintings that decorate the passenger area.

On an island that is 21x25kms total there aren't too many places to go so generally you're on the main ring road, which gives you lots of opportunities to watch the myriad motorcyclists with a death wish hurtling along. It's funny how when people are on holiday they do things they wouldn't dream of at home. So you see Swedes, Fins, Brits etc hooning around on scooters with no helmets and safety clothing that consists of a pair of shorts and jandals (make that thongs or flip flops if you're not from NZ). Clearly death and injury are not concerns when you're on holiday.

The road rules in Samui involves flooring it until you're behind a car or motorbike, at which time you toot twice and swing round them into the oncoming traffic and then duck back in. Woe betide the motorcycle or dog that gets in your way while doing this.

I guess i've lead a sheltered life until now - but I have to admit that seeing entire families on scooters or girls riding sidesaddle still amazes me. Saw a pair of girls today with the one on the back (riding sidesaddle) clearly in charge of indicating and doing so beautifully by pointing her bottle of Singha beer in the approximate direction that they were heading. Another pair were seen at about 80kph with the passenger holding a large silver fish, sort of casually hanging down near the tyres.

Also gave in to tourist temptation today and did an elephant 'trek' (I use inverted commas because 1/2 an hour can hardly be called a trek). Pretty sure the aim is to make the tourists as uncomfortable as possible, heading up exceptionally steep hills and over rocky terrain but I still loved it - albeit silently being grateful for the rope 'seatbelt' that we were tied in with! Any form of transport that runs on bananas and cleans itself has got to be good!

Anyhoo, enough rabbiting on - am off to London tomorrow night where the transport will no doubt be much less exciting and MUCH more expensive - ciao!

Your correspondent decides to test some airborne public transport.

Have decided to undertake a trip that involves hanging around at Bangkok airport in transit for as much time as possible in a 3 week period. The itinerary is Melbourne-Koh Samui (via Bangkok), Koh Samui-London (via Bangkok), London-Vietnam (via Bangkok) and Vietnam-Melbourne...you guessed it, via Bangkok. Bangkok airport is not one of the world's most enticing places and is designed like a rabbit warren...but more of that later.

The flight from Melbourne was reasonably uneventful save for a few highlights which included a harassed mother of 3 at melbourne airport waiting to board that 1.15am flight telling her eldest, who was doing the classic 4 year old 'and then what?' question routine: 'and then you'll get on the plane and sleep for 9 hours without waking up'.

Had the pleasure of meeting the Thai airways air cabin crew on my first Thai airways flight - was especially charmed by the older women who bore haircuts with dead straight fringes that honestly made them look like Vulcans.

So i'm blogging from Koh Samui, Thailand which is a bloody marvellous bit of the world. Samui is on the cusp of surrendering completely to tourism and tackiness but for now, it's just what the doctor ordered. That said, the airport is like some surreal Thai-Disneyland. In a neat bit of monopolistic wangling Bangkok Airways also owns and operates Koh Samui airport - hence they can do what the hell they want with it and also decide who gets to play in their sandpit.

You arrive and get decanted from your plane into disneyland-type tuk tuks that you all sit on looking like jetlagged idiots and get driven about 100 metres to the 'customs area' (aka a large open sided hut - albeit a very classy one) with two rather ineffectual fans lazily swinging around on the ceiling and a lone customs officer in full military regalia who does the most vigorous triplicate passport/visa stamping routine I have ever witnessed), all a reasonably surreal way to start your trip. It was rush hour when I arrived early on a Saturday morning, and the massive queue of 8 people ahead of us meant that our tuk tuk load of people got ushered to wooden seats around the sides while we waited for the jam to clear.

And now I am working hard at shopping, basking on the beach, having daily massages (1 hour for $7 AUD thank you very much!), practising my seriously crap bargaining skills and contemplating trying a 'fried bug' (grasshopper is rather good I hear) from the street vendor near our bungalow. I LOVE being bourgeois!

Over and out.

All priorities are relative.

Sometimes body language is all you need.

I was at the Flinders Street train station and felt the call of nature, so much so that I found myself contemplating the dreaded train station toilets. No matter where you go in the world, they're all the same. It could be the Paris Metro, the London Tube or somewhere in New Delhi, Cairo or New York - regardless of location or wealth, train station toilets all maintain the same exacting standards of putrid filth and dodgyness.

I remember when I was a kid in Noo Zulland, visiting my dad in Auckland. I was waiting to take the train back to my home town and needed the loo. The Auckland train station is in a beautful old building but beauty or no, the trail of blood leading down to the women's toilets convinced me that I could just cross my legs and wait.

Fast-forward a dozen or so years to today and my present dilemma. I thought I could hold on but the accursed train was even later than it usually is (thanks Connex!) so, after much hopping around, I finally gave in and strode purposefully towards the toilets. I had just reached the door to the toilets when a stream of five women ran past me in the other direction, holding handkerchiefs, bags, shirtsleeves or whatever came to hand to their noses.

It's funny how every urgent task is, at the end of the day, relative to your current situation. I may have been desperate for the toilet but in that moment I realised that yes, i could wait just that little bit longer. I'm sure there's a moral in there somewhere.

More acolytes for my nerdy cause....

Everyone's getting in on the tramspotting game! :-)

Fridays will do that to you.

It is the time of year when I notice that my various parts are that much rounder or nearer to the ground. I would blame gravity or other scientific anomalies but the fact that I attended nine xmas lunches (but no dinners for some reason) this year MIGHT have something to do with it.

Anyhoo, that's the reason why I was on the late afternoon train last Friday - heading out to a new recreation centre to begin atoning for my deadly xmas sins (gluttony mostly but i'm sure sloth snuck in there somewhere as well) by playing a few rounds of badminton with some equally guilty mates.

We pulled up to the station that I was getting off at and a super laid-back ocker voice comes over the intercomm saying "don't try to get off just yet ladies and gentleman, we're going to back the train up a tad as I appear to have missed the platform by a smidge". Sure enough, the train proceeds to reverse (I didn't know they could do that actually) with us pissing ourselves laughing inside and the people standing on the platform waiting to board looking rather bemused.

The train stops and the voice comes back through the intercom saying "there, now that's better, have a great weekend!"

And sure enough, I did.

Feeling warm and fuzzy on the #57 tram

Have I mentioned that I like trams?

They rock!

Take today's trip into the city for example. Waiting at my stop with an Asian woman and her young daughter. As the tram pulls up the Aussie driver spots the woman and her daughter and starts waving to the girl. As they get on he proudly says hello in their language and they exchange xmas greetings.

I settle into my seat and watch the hijab-wearing West African woman search in her purse for coins for the fascist coins-only ticket vending machine. She realises she only has a $5 note and starts to panic at which point an elderly Australian woman taps her on arm and points to the old Chinese man who has noticed and is holding out $5 worth of coins. She accepts with a lovely smile, sitting down and then shuffling over to make space as a young pregnant woman gets on.

At the next stop an 'Aussie working bloke' gets on the tram carrying approximately 3 cubic tons of scrap metal, perfect for gouging eyes and piercing lungs when the tram stops suddenly. The driver, having had no response to his 'you can't get on with that mate' warning, comes barreling down the tram and an almighty altercation ensues, with the exceedingly grumpy bloke getting back off after the driver stood his ground with the silent support of the whole tram.

We carry on and the tram gets progressively fuller as more and more xmas shoppers get on, heading towards the city. An elderly woman gets on and gratefully accepts my seat. She rewards me with an entertaining evesdropping conversation with the young pregnant woman about her grandchildren, their ages, schooling, plans for the future etc.

I reluctantly get off at my stop, amply reminded why it is that I love trams.

Ashley who?

"So I was sitting on the train right? And these 3 kids were sitting behind me and one of them was like SUCH a try hard!"

Y'know, one of those girls who has just just got her slappa L-plates and is revelling in the fact that she's a grownup girl now and super proud of her newfound sexual prowess (rrrrroawwwww!). There were 3 of them sitting there but she was the only audible one, sort of excitedly talking and being all grownup, dishing the dirt on exes ("He can't get it up!") and the various bitches who had crossed her ("Just cos' I slept with her boyfriend she gets all seppo!")

A highlight for me was an exchange between the guy she was sitting with where he asked "Ashley who?" and she replied, "You know, the one who looks like me who gave you head who you kissed right after! Remember? I found out and asked you 'how's the sperm?' [cue: maniacal self-satisfied cackling]"

Nothing like a good sperm joke to end the day :-)

Boogie Mamma!

I usually take the train home in the evenings around 7pm - a commuting time now reknowned for its smiling faces and good vibes. A couple of weeks ago though, my partner told me about a passenger he had seen, who sounded like just the solution. Last night I had the pleasure of sharing his company.

I boarded the carriage and found to my delight that a man in workman-type clothes was playing blues on his harmonica - not busking for money mind you - just playing for the love of it. He looked maybe one baguette short of a gourmet picnic but boy could he play.

Initially it was short set-pieces of a few chords (I suspect designed for serenading the passengers or simply announcing his presence) as people boarded at each station. As we pulled away from the city and the train got faster between stops the pieces became longer and more vigorous, incorporating foot stamping and tapping the harmonica case against the back of a seat. At the end of one particularly vigorous piece he yelled out 'Boogie Mamma!' All songs were timed to last the distance between stops so the longer you stayed on, the longer the concert.

I was sitting immediately behind him, facing in the other direction, and it was great to watch all these jaded commuters discretely smiling and looking appreciative (after the initial WTF?! - type response of course), although no one clapped or let on that they did like it.

As I reluctantly got off at my station, I murmured "Have a good night mate" to him (in my best pseudo-ocker accent - notice the cunning placement of the 'mate' for authentic effect). The result was a broad grin and a "You too, merry xmas" from the Boogie Man. Brightened up my journey no end and left me feeling rather warm and fuzzy and just a wee bit seasonal (but don't tell anyone).

Lost in translation?

Chilling out on my usual 10.14am train ride into the city (hardworking student-type that I am) and find myself spending most of the journey staring at a woman's chest.

Now this is not really typical behaviour on my part (honest!) but the chest in question belonged to a middle-aged Vietnamese woman who was dressed in the standard 'tidy-casual mother' attire: exactly the right length blue jeans, black undershirt with black jacket over the top and gold 'Mum Jewellery TM'.

I was staring because the black shirt under the black jacket appeared to be one of those blokey humour t-shirts. You know the kind, "my other car is a porsche', 'if you can read this the bitch fell off' ad infinitum titter titter titter. This one read 'So you're a feminist? How CUTE!'. What's more, the word 'cute' was in those fabulous pink sequin thingys that mums of a certain age are so fond of. Have to admit that it looked a little incongrous emblazoned on the chest of this particular lady but there you go, I guess there's a misogynist (or poor interpreter?) in us all.

no hoWARd

The central train station had a big fire yesterday morning that resulted in us being kicked out a station early and all being late to our respective destinations.

Subsequently, I took the tram home last night, after another marathon essay marking session at uni.

A bloke got on and sat down opposite me, conveniently burying his head in a book, allowing me to stare at him properly for the bulk of the trip (yes, I am the annoying person that does that :-)

He was middle aged, with a colossal multicoloured goatee (if you can call it that - maybe a narrow beard would be a better description) and beautiful plastic multicoloured rings in his ears and nose (I assume they were UV reflective or something), with a large lumberjack type jacket (with a 'save the...' something or another patch on the back), accessorised by a series of badges/pins.

The first badge, inevitably, had a cross through the word homophobia, the second had 'no hoWARd' on it (very clever use of capitalisation for seditious effect) and I can't remember the other one. To top it all off, there was a gorgeous large red woman's handbag with a stylised stick person throwing a nazi swastika into a rubbish bin (culture jamming all the way baby!).

The problem was, that for all this, I could only sit there thinking how much he looked - sans goatee - like a middle aged banker. I guess some people are suited to the non-conformist look and some aren't, which probably implies something about my perspective on conformation in the first place.

Al KeyDa train.

Pulling away from my local station this morning heading towards the city. Everyone in the carriage looks up as this bloke of indeterminate arab origin (almost definitely a terrorist ;-) runs up to the door that has just closed, punches it angrily and then uses some sharp metal object or another to scour the side of the carriage as it passes, making an incredible noise.

Now i've heard of people 'keying' cars, but train carriages? That's taking it to a whole new level!