Down Under Letting Up/PERTH

Over the next week, things started looking up for me.  Jessie was very resourceful in finding activities that required the least amount of movement on my part, and I was very resourceful in not killing myself after struggling through a morning routine of ripping my dressings and old bandages from my leg hairs, showering, reapplying said dressings which is just as gross as it sounds, moisturizing, sunscreening, and finally putting on my stockings that exist just to itch the back of my knees and make people think I have skin cancer.  A morning routine that after practice I whittle down to just under an hour.

And so, first on the agenda is a renaissance fair, because I guess Australia really wants to prove they can play the medieval nerd game just as well as anyone else.

And they were right.

I spent the bulk of my ren faire time standing in line for ice cream and spiral potatos and watching people in homemade armor beat the ever-LARPing shit out of each other with foam swords.

Briefly, I found myself locked in stocks, and simulated what times would have probably been like for myself 500 years ago.

History.

There was also Irish step-dancing and camel rides, which cost a pretty penny so I snickered and made fun of the people riding them, but deep down...down deep...I was jealous.  It was jealousy, people.  I wanted a camel ride, and I don't know why I couldn't have been more honest with myself.

Damn this pride of mine...

That night we meet Dan and a number of his friends for dinner at a brewery, where I try baked date pudding for the first time (it's pretty okay), buy a single oyster for 3 dollars, and drink a tremendous amount of beer to help speed up the healing process.  My legs aren't going to fix themselves, or something.  It was good beer.

Next day and next on the docket Jessie and I went to check out a big street festival that seemed to be one part Burning Man, one part the same street performers I was seeing a couple days ago around a mall, and one part me getting free kimchi because I was sly enough to speak some Korean around the bulgogi vendors.

And one part whatever the hell these guys were, who must live every day like it's free kimchi day.

Later in the day we head to Fremantle and walk around their Aussie version of Pike Place Market.  Feeling saucy, I make some impulse buys, like some Turkish Delight, and a Yorkie bar.

Which I, unfortunately, could not share with Jessie.

Oh, and a goddamn ostrich egg:

Conversation Starter Tip: Stand in line for something and hold an ostrich egg.

Now before you go hoping this is some kind of Chekhov's gun/egg, we never actually got around to eating the thing.  Turns out you have to boil it for a day and then crack it open with a hammer and chisel or something.  Instead, we left it alone in Dan's apartment for awhile until it became rotten and smiled exactly like you'd expect a rotten super-egg to smell like.  It also cost about 12 bucks, in case you were keeping a tally of how much money I've wasted so far.

While in Fremantle, I noticed a sign for a place called Chocolateria San Churro.  There being at least 2 things great about that name, I suggested we check it out.  Speaking from experience, if you ever find an artisinal chocolate churro emporium, do yourself a favor and burn that motherfucker to the ground because otherwise you might go in and order a dark chocolate milkshake that is so good that you'll only feel a sad emptiness the rest of your life without such sweet ambrosia.

I'm at half-mast just looking at this picture.

I spend the night again sleeping shamefully on Dan's couch, idly dreaming of churro dipping sauces.  On the following day Jessie has booked us a wine tour through the Swan Valley, which I'm told during the tour is the second closest wine valley to a major city in the world.  So, seriously hot shit.  And the wine was going to be good for weening me off the milkshake habit I had developed, enabled by the omnipresent milkshake cartons they sell in grocery stores.  For real, every Australian every second of every day is drinking this stuff.

Go ahead and ask one, but you won't get a reply because they're too busy already drinking a carton.

The tour takes us to three wineries, one brewery, and a chocolate factory.

I buy a bottle of white wine and some goat cheese, and during a nougat tasting laugh at how Australians pronounce "nougat" (they also don't know how to say "Chupa Chup", and convincing them to try never gets old).  Now, dinner was something special.  To pair with my exquisite 16 dollar Verdelho...a goddamn kangaroo filet.

Eating a national icon tastes exactly as good as I had hoped.

Word of mouth tells me kangaroo is supposed to be a very tough meat to cook, but these steaks came out perfect.  It definitely took the edge off of having ditched out on a hospital appointment, but that was a lot of noise and additional hospital bills that I was not interested in.  Before the night is through, I am also told about blackboys: a native plant to Australia that grows a long flowering spike that makes the plant look supposedly like an Aborigine holding an upright spear, if you are awfully racist.  I make it my mission to find and photograph one.

After staying what was to be my last night at Dan's, I spend most of the next day at Jessie's au pair house playing with my netbook and waiting for her to finish her work duties and being responsible for strangers and all that.  I'd like to take a second here to observe how fucking intense the security is on busses here:

There's the bus driver in the little cage on the right.  I guess if you have to fend off gasoline-thieving motorcycle gangs, you want some precautions.  Also, so long as I am writing about Australia, my Mad Max references will never cease.

Come night time, I get to beam with pride as she delivers a lecture about the sub-sub-subculture of furries to a college class, and then eat Domino's because it's Tuesday.  I also check into a hostel called the Old Swan Barracks, where I drink a beer at the bar, win a hat, and promptly lose it.  My life is pretty good at making its own metaphors, I guess.

The next morning is a dull series of travel-specific chores: look for another hostel, hike back to the Old Swan to grab my stuff and schlep it over to my new digs at Grand Central, and make an appointment to get my stitches out later in the day.  Since I didn't have insurance, I fretted over how viable it would be to just pull out the stitches myself and not pay the doctor his likely-extortionate fee, but I decided to err on the side of caution.  For once.  Just see how it felt.  Meanwhile, to kill time before the appointment I hung around the shopping center downtown, where a couple things happened.

I noticed KFC had an intriguing flavor of milkshake unique to Australia:

Golden Gaytime.  That nostalgic taste you remember from childhood.  From your Golden Gaytimes.

And I found a man championing a cause very few in our society are brave enough to acknowledge:

A true hero.

Once I'd had enough of watching the loneliest protest in the world, I sauntered over to the clinic and had my stitches out.  Turns out, it's a piece of piss and I absolutely could have done it myself, probably with minimal infection and only moderate excruciating pain.  Oh well, there's 85 bucks into the live-and-learn jar.

Seeing as how the rest of my day was free, and my sunburn had finally healed, leaving my skin uniformly soft and lesion-free (massive sun poisoning=cheap chemical peel?), I decided to take it easy and celebrate.  I scoured downtown for wifi hotspots, and eventually found myself in a small alley cafe called Tiger Tiger, face-to-face with some of the stupider Perth city laws.  I order a mocha at the counter, and get told I have to sit down, then wait for someone to take my order, then they'll serve me, all because they have a liquor license, and apparently if you have a liquor license you can't have counter service after 12pm.  I am referred to their sign:

Even the tiger looks like half a 'tard standing next to that law.

They also won't let me plug in my computer, because I guess electricity something something Mel Gibson.  On the plus side, my flaming-gay waiter burst into dance when "Crazy" by Gnarles Barkley came on the radio.  I must not have been the only one drinking a KFC Krusher that afternoon.

Night falls, and I wander over to Dan's, cutting through the local university.  I spy some placards advertising a gallery opening/fundraising event for some women's cause about cancer, or breasts, or periods, or something.  Period cancer?  Who knows.  Then I further spy that they have a couple boxes of wine they're opening inside the gallery.  It couldn't hurt to help a good cause, right?  And oh was I glad I stepped inside and checked out the art:

Georgia O'Keefe was more subtle, I think.

It was wall-to-wall awful vagina photoshops up in here.  Big, small, floppy, extra-floppy; every kind of pink taco you could think of was arranged in geometric patterns that would give Fibonacci the weirdest boner of his ancient life.

I loiter around the completely middle-aged female crowd for as long as I can, but they aren't giving up the wine anytime soon, so finally I move on.  What Dan lacked in starfish gash photos, he made up for in leftover wine from our wine tour and a functioning TV with which to watch Australian indie films and play Batman: Arkham Asylum.

Luckily, the walk back to my hostel wasn't too far.  Unluckily, the first wave of drunks were starting to get kicked out of finer drinking establishments during my walk.  I pass one bar, and a big guy in a wife beater out front starts to follow me.  He matches my pace and stays right on my back, getting closer and closer, until he's practically stepping on my heels.  We walk about two blocks like that, him right behind me, so close I can hear his angry breathing.  I come to an intersection, and he circles around and gets in front of me, glaring.  He hasn't said anything so far, and I'm the first one to talk.

"Can I help you?"  He doesn't respond, and stands there, drilling me with that dead-from-the-eyes-back stare.  He's only a couple inches from my face, and I'm tensing up, ready for this guy to throw the first punch.  Never seen him before in my life, no interaction with him whatsoever until a second ago, and here I am quickly considering the best ways to take this complete stranger down.

Instead, his friend intervenes.  Half a block away, I hear someone call out "Hey, what the fuck are you doing?  Let's go already!"  The raging drunk in front of me eyes me for a few more seconds, snorts, and walks off.  The rest of my walk back to the hostel, blessedly fighting-drunk free.

Sleep was becoming routine anyways.  Lucky for me, my trip wasn't going to let up that easy.