Insomnia in Seattle - Part 3

Wow,

(this weekend was so big, it's taken me the rest of the week to compose this email!!)

That's a helluva lot of activity over a weekend. No matter i felt so knackered on Monday morning. A decidely more low-key approach to the next two days methinks.

Woke up Monday morning to yet another stellar weather day, all sunshine and blue skies, and a pleasant mid-teens temperature (altho they operate in farenheit down here - and i have no idea how that system works!) What's up with the weather? That's 3 days in a row down here! I was expecting the famous Seattle drizzle and grey skies, the depressing kind that isn't that heavy, but still soaks you to the skin. But hey, I ain't complaining!!

The Pike Place Public Markets (www.cityofseattle.net/tour/pikep.htm) are one of the most famous in America and an historical icon of Seattle, having been operating since about 1911. Situated virtually a few blocks from the Pacific ocean, it has the freshest of the fresh fish and other seafood imaginable.








I saw a Discovery Channel doco on this market once, and it can best be described as a free-form funhouse of sights, smells, sounds, and characters. When an order is placed, fish vendors throw 15 and 20 Pound salmon and halibut across the aisle with the theatrics and drama of a stage show - it's quite a spectacle! It's quite the touristy market, with lots of arts and crafts and prints and paintings on sale, as well as the usual fruit&veg, and flowers, etc. You can (and I did, at a very leisurely pace, I might add) spend hours checking out the 3 floors of shops and stalls.

Seattle is also famous for its love of coffee, and across the street from the market is the very, very, very first ever Starbuck's coffee house. Now, i'm not usually a fan of the big corporate behemoth, but made an exception in this instance, ordered a cappuccino, and bought a 1/2 kilo bag of it's 'Pike Place Blend', taking the obligatory "i was here" photo as well!



Wandering down to the waterfront, I got quite an unexpected surprise. There's a single streetcar line than runs along the docklands/waterfront area and on up to Pioneer Square, and they're using the old-school W-Class Melbourne trams that we phased out about 10 years ago. So for old times and nostalgia sake, i just had to take a ride on an old Melbourne tram in Seattle.



Pioneer Square is Seattle's oldest district and was the home of the original "Skid Road," a term born when timber was slid down Yesler Way to a steam-powered mill on the waterfront. It's fortunes have improved somewhat in the modern day, with all the old mills and warehouses being converted into art galleries, coffee houses, bars and apartments, and is very chic indeed. A planned quick stop in one of the chic-est cafe's cum art galleries, Zeitgeist (www.zeitgeistcoffee.com), had me sitting there about 2 hours later, just chillin' and relaxin' with a magazine and some damn fine coffee(!) as the events of the past two days caught up with my body (y'know I can still party like it's 1999, but the recovery is harder and longer than it used to be!!)



Aside from catching bands, the other supremo importo thing I had to do here was catch up with my good, good buddy Jennifer, an awesome, fun chicko I hung out with during my time in Edinburgh. She had visited me in Melbourne, and now it was time for me to reciprocate. So Monday evening I hopped a bus out to Wallingford and spent the evening with her and her boyfriend Ben. It was just like old times - 30 seconds in the house and i had a spliff in my hand!



They took me out to this cruisy little bar called The Sea Monster (club-vibes website review - Located in the heart of Wallingford, the SeaMonster is a dimly lit blue and green oasis for twenty, thirty, and forty somethings in Seattle that need exceptional music, intelligent conversation, and a good stiff drink.) Monday is Open Mic Night, and when we walked in, an awesome blues guitarist was plying his trade. But as can happen with Open Mic nights, you gotta take the good with the bad, and we then had to endure some homeboy dickheads doing thier worst bitch-slap-ho-suck-my-dick gangsta rap. Contrasted with that tho, to follow was some rapping of a different kind, an awesome stream-of-conciousness, power-positive social-politico verse, kinda in the Ani Di Franco mould. that was much nicer. The big bonus of the night was that one of Jen's friends was bar-tending that night, and gave us about 80% off the drinks! Did i mention i was having a GREAT time in Seattle?

Now I have to say I hold Jen in pretty high esteem. She's fun, she's awesome, and she's cute. Her stock rose even higher when she told me what she does for a living - she is the nanny for Dave Matthews of Dave Matthews Band! (www.davematthewsband.com) Get this - she gets to tour with the band, travelling most parts of the world, looking after his twin 3-1/2 year old daughters, and lives pretty much rent free in one of the places he owns (the one in Wallingford i was at). How cool is that!

After we returned from the bar and had another spliff, it was kinda past the last-bus-home time for me, and so i was put up on the mattress in Dave Matthew's kids playroom. It's bigger than my kitchen and lounge combined, and is full of all the awesome toys you could want as a 3 year old. What a life.

Tuesday. My last day in Seattle. All over already? Damn, so much to do, so little time. As previously mentioned, this town has an awesome rock'n'roll pedigree. As an illustration of this, as I was walking around town, I passed theatres advertising gigs for no-less-than-legends Joe Cocker for 'one night only' and Bob Bylan (for 3 nights!). Oh, and David Byrne of Talking Heads fame was in the Robyn Hitchcock audience on Saturday night. This town is awesome for star-stalking name-droppers like me!!!!!





I just realised I haven't made mention of my-main-man Kurt Cobain in this 3-part epic. I did some research to see if I could visit his memorial gravesite as well as Jimi, Bruce and Bob's (i'm on first name basis with them all now!! ;-) ). It turns out he was cremated and had his ashes scattered in the Wishkah River by his home town of Aberdeen, Washington. Given that that is a few hundred kilometres away, it weren't all that feasible to pay homage there. The home where he killed himself is closer to town, but that has apparently been demolished. Oh well.

So, after a few quiet beers back at the hostel it was time to bid farewell to the rocking-est of rockin' cities this side of the black stump, Seattle, and jump a 4 hour bus ride back to Vancouver.

That concludes my magical mystery tour. Hope you enjoyed it, and wasn't too long for you!!

Adios, Tony

Insomnia in Seattle - part 2

Hi,

Well refreshed after a sweet 2hour nap (I literally crashed and burned into a deep, deep slumber until I was thankfully woken by my roommate mosey-ing about the room), it was time to check out the Seattle nightlife.

It was THE one essential thing I had to above all else while here, and that was to check out some live music. I didn't really have much of an idea of what was on, or where, or how much, or if a particular band was crap or good or not, so I just wandered around town, taking random streets left or right without any particular notion of which way I was going or where. This I find is a great way of finding your way around town, and inevitable bumping into some scene or event you'd never find otherwise.

Before i knew it, i'd wandered about for 2 hours, and found myself on the rise of Capitol Hill overlooking the main freeway entrance to the city and the brightly lit night skyline of Downtown and the Space Needle (which dwarfs everything around it).....just as well I had my camera with me also!!!!

Finally, I made way to Belltown and ended up, after covering a good 10Km on foot, at the Crocodile Cafe (http://www.thecrocodile.com/)- 5 blocks away from my hostel!! The Croc, it turns out, is quite the famous little bar, having hosted little known bands like, oh...NIRVANA!! and PEARL JAM!! in their early, early days before world domination beckoned. A small bar, with an even smaller sign at the entrance declaring its maximum capacity of 381 patrons. The closest I could equate it to would be Melbourne's former Punter's Club, or a much smaller Whelan's of Wexford Street in Dublin. But like both of those bars, I LOVED this place - no frills, no pretensions, LOTS of history and nostalgia and an all-in-all rollicking good vibe! My kinda bar.





This Saturday night, there were three bands on for $15. I missed the first one completely, but I then caught a very, very good local Seattle punk rock band called The Cops (http://www.thecopsmusic.com/), supporting an old English tripped-out, folky guy Robyn Hitchcock (http://www.robynhitchcock.com/), who apparently was famous in the 70's and 80's fronting a band called The Soft Boys. These two acts were as far apart on the musical spectrum as you could possible get, but both were excellent, and this kind of eclectic line-up is typical of a Croc gig. I bought The Cops excellent 5-track CD for $5, and the one lyric resonating in my head several days later from Robyn Hitchcock - quite a favourite with the crows going by the numbers singing along with him, went along the lines of "Viva Viva Seattle, Viva SeaTac, this city has the best computers, coffee and crack". Make of that what you will.

An easy short wander back to the hostel, I caught up with the girls and a few more of the hostel long-termers, and picked up where i'd left off the previous night. One fella in particular who was as good a laugh as anyone i've ever met in my life, was Dee, this Afro-American wide-boy with a cutting sense of humour and kick-arse laugh, who had us all in continuous stitches thru the alcohol-infused early hours of the morning. I could have kept on keeping on further into the wee hours with these guys, but I had a minor dose of the sensibles at around 3am Saturday night/Sunday morning, and went to bed. There was another incredibly full day ahead on Sunday, and I wanted to be somewhat compis-mentis for it.

Fast-forward to 8.30am, and I'm up and ready to go, already showered and breakfasted,....but where were the girls???? Getting thier girly shit together still it seemed, but by 10am we were all good to go. Fun-loving Fremont was the destination of choice this morning, for the Sunday Flea market, a haven for the hippy/alternative/hipster/retro/altogether wierd and wonderful people of the Seattle scene.



A good couple of hours here, a prime opportunity to pick up a couple of mementos from Seattle, some cool funky bits that weren't of the touristy tacky variety that had SEATTLE emblazoned all over it. I had lost another of my precious crocheted beanies recently, and found a more than suitbale replacement, along with a edgy, goth-rocker style leather wrist-cuff (no, I know Chelsea, it's not a 'bracelet'!!).

Fremont is also famous for its public sculptures and street art, and most famous of all is 'the troll under the bridge', a massive concrete installation of a troll devouring a VW bug - a prime fun-pic opportunity, the best of which was looking up his nostril pretending to search for boogers (I know, I know...how old are we????!!!??) Sooo much fun.



It was after the market shenanigans that I had to say goodbye to my newest buddies, as they were off to sunny San Francisco (jealous I am, girls, jealous), and I was left to my own devices from then on. So, another bus ride in search of a beach apparently "20minutes away". Yeah, 20 minutes on a bus, then a 2mile walk. Nevermind. While wandering thru Golden Gardens park on the way to the beach, i happened across a small group of people playing hacky-sack. Now, those who know me well, know that i CANNOT walk past a Hack without joining in.It is simply the most sociable of sports, and is anathema to the Hacky Code of Conduct to refuse a passer-by's request to join in. So, another group of friends, Casey, Crystal and Justin from Seattle, and I hack away for thebest part of an hour when the inevitable question arises...

"so Tony, do you Smoke?"

"why, Yes I Do!"

"well, lets take a walk into the woods up the way, and have a Puff"

"Okaaayyy!"

This is another of those Les Higgins "doesn't get much better than this" moments. Sitting in the woods up on a hill with Seattle's Puget Sound away in the background, with the sun out and beaming down, talking about music, and bands, and movies with a bunch of strangers-cum-new friends, sharing a puff of the Pacific North West's finest green. I do distinctly remember saying, "yep, i'm pretty content with life right now". I also got a ride part way back into town, saving me that 2mile walk back to the nearest bus stop. Nice. These guys in Seattle are just too friendly!

Anyway, back to the hostel, more than a little stoned, another power-nap,and another night to spend out in Seattle checking the band scene. I opted to head back to The Croc, if for no other reason than laziness - it was 5 blocks away, whereas the other venues were upwards of 10blocks away! Besides, I loved the bar, and knew that whatever I saw was bound to be good.

Once again, I missed the first band, but the second support act was a 5-piece Swedish grungy power-pop with a very, very sexy blonde on keyboards, called The Shout Out Louds (http://www.shoutoutlouds.com/).

To pinch a paragraph from a local magazine review:
"The Shout Out Louds, an up-and-coming but been-around-forever quintet from Stockholm, are the grungy by-product of their concrete utopia. They have five o'clock shadows. Their bangs swoop over their eyes. They drink beer. Their videos are set in sleazy laundromats. They don't belong—and they want you to know it."



They were supporting a Sunderland, England outfit called The Futureheads, a group I'd never heard of, but are apparently one of the new darlings of NME Magazine, which means they are either going to go supernova, or they'll crash and burn. Kinda sorta along the lines of Franz Ferdinand in parts, but rock out harder with fuzz and distortion, and manic energy and stage presence, I can just see all the teeny-bopper girls getting dreamy ga-ga eyes and falling at their feet. Oh, by the way, they were very, very good!



So, once again, great rock n roll in a more-than-decent venue makes Tony a happy boy. Exhausted, but happy. Straight to bed. No late night shenanigans tonight.

Insomnia in Seattle - Part 1

whooooooooo-eeeeeeeeeee!!



damn, am I exhausted.

I write this on the final afternoon of my 4day short break in Seattle, and my energy levels have been seriously depleted by the non-stop action-packed time i've had. It has indeed been a mad, mad, wild one! where to start?......the beginning is usually pretty good! as mentioned in my last email, i'd met these 2 chickadees, Lisa and Leslie in Vancouver last week, and they had made the offer of a free ride down to Seattle, as they were heading down to visit their boyfriends for the weekend. How could i refuse such a kind offering.....2 hot babes cruising the I-5 to possibly the funkiest city Stateside, with me riding shotgun! Take out the minor fact of the boyfriends, and to quote that Aussie legend, Bush-Tucker-Man, Les Higgins..."it doesn't get any better than this!"



So, Friday straight after work I hooked up with them for the 3-hour drive to the U.S of A. Crossed the border without any complications (surprisingly!!), and then stopping off at a gas station along the way, we took the opportunity to stock up on some tasty beverages. In the fridge beside the usual Bud and Miller offerings was a beer rather quaintly titled, I kid you not, 'Arrogant Bastard Ale'! I just had to buy a bottle of this. Reading the label, it got even funnier....

"This is an aggressive beer. You probably won't like it. It is quite doubtful that you have the taste or sophistication to be able to appreciate an ale of this quality and depth. We would suggest that you stick to safer and more familiar territory - maybe something with a muilti-million dollar ad campaign aimed at convincing you it's made in a little brewery, or one that implies that thier tasteless fizzy yellow beer will give you more sex appeal. Perhaps you think multi-million dollar ad campaigns make a beer taste better. Perhaps you're mouthing your words as you read this.".....!!!!!! (http://www.arrogantbastard.com)

Having arrived in Seattle, I said my thank-yous and goodbyes (the girls invite only extended as far as the free ride - they had a pretty full weekend planned since before i'd met them), and got dropped of at the Green Tortoise Hostel (http://www.greentortoise.com) - a grungy, funky hostel right downtown on 2nd Avenue, right in the middle of all the action. This was it! Here I was in SEATTLE!!!! Let me say that this moment has been a loooooong, looooooong time in coming. the phrase 'excited' doesn't come close to describing how I felt as we drove down the freeway, and over Puget Sound, with the bright lights and skyscrapers of Seattle, and not forgetting the futuristic Space Needle building, looming large.



Seattle has been pretty close to the top of my list of cities to visit in the world, for pretty much the past 15 years. I was very much a grunge-o-phile as a kid, having been incredibly fortunate to have spent my teenage years from the late 80's to mid-90's, when the Seattle 'scene' came to the forefront as the main exponent of the musical revolution named 'grunge'. Nirvana, Soundgarden, TAD, Screaming Trees, Mudhoney, Pearl Jam to name but a few of the more famous names hit their peak around the time i hit my 16th birthday, and I totally got caught up in the swell of adoration that swept over these, and other, bands worldwide. The music from this city had a huge, profound and long-lasting impact on my life, and still continues to do so, so it's pretty damn amazing for me to be here right now!!

So, with the pilgrimage, as it were (I use the term with the religious context and fervour with which it is meant, considering the reverential status i hold this city in), to my personal Holy Grail, Seattle, finally under way, I was going to have as mad a long-weekend as I possibly could, treating myself to a kaleidoscope of all the sights - and sounds - on offer. My first night tho, was spent in the confines of the Hostel.....I found it pretty hard to leave because IT IS SOOOOO MUCH FUN!! Aside from the fact that I'd bought a variety of beers at the gas station earlier, which i needed to consume - and quickly! - The Common Room, and Smoke 'Em If You Got 'Em room were abuzz with travellers shooting the shit, getting to know each other,swapping stories....the usual deal, I suppose. With my selection of beers at the ready, I sat myself down at one particularly boisterous table in the smoking room, occupied by, among others, a coupla loud and funny Queensland chicks, Chelsea and Danella (hi girls, by the way). The majority of my weekend was spent in their company, and i don't think i've laughed so much in such a long, long time. That first night in itself ended at a boozy 4 or 5am, with the plan 'to be up at 9am for some sightseeing'.....yeah, right!!



Aside from the grunge movement, Seattle is way famous for being the hometown, musical making, or burial site, of many more musical and theatrical greats from the past, among those being Jimi Hendrix, and Bruce and Brandon Lee....this city certainly has seen its fair share of a decent pedigree of folks! With this is mind, it is absolutely key and essential as a visitor to this town to pay your respects to these artists and legends. After a rather slow, late and hungover start, we began our rather hectic Saturday by hopping a coupla local buses to a cemetery 45 minutes out of the city in the suburb of Renton.

I should mention a couple of things before I go any further. The Green Tortoise Hostel offers a free breakfast every morning, which includes as much filter coffee as you like. WIth my two bits of toast that I could stomach, I had ONE cup, to wash down the two Tylenol i took for my hangover. I dunno what the hell was in that coffee, or if coffee and paracetemol aren't a great mix, but BOOM did that one cup send me spinning off into an hours-and-hours long hazy mist of a caffeine-fuelled speed buzz! Throw into the mix two half-crazed lunatic-chicks from Brizzy (that's Brisbane for all you non-Aussies out there) and Cairns, and the beginning of the all-day-laughter fit I mentioned earlier was well-under way, with the Tony-led karaoke soundtrack of Eric Calpton's "Lay Down Sally" as accompanying music (abley doo-wop backed by Chels and D)....(I really need to start compling a soundtrack of my life - all the songs that spontaneously entrench themselves into random episodes of my travelogues). Oh yeah, I shouldn't neglect to mention on the bus renditions of "the wheels on the bus go round and round", The White Stripes/Holly Golightly duet "You know that we love one another"and countless bursting-with-laughter incidents that quickly became pop-culture references from "The Simpsons"....As Danella would say - "Oh, not another person whose lives revolve around The Simpsons"....yep, 'fraid so!

Anyway, back to Jimi. We got out to Greenwood Memorial Park, having successfully negotiated the somewhat vague directions supplied by the hostel....and then proceeded to spend the next 30minutes wandering in vain search of 'a grave next to a sundial'...helpful instructions, not! Then it turns out there's TWO sundials in the cemetery!! THEN, it turns out that they'd had moved his site because some crazed "fan" had at one staged attempted to dig up his coffin to steal the guitar he had buried with him. In the end, it was the most obvious burial plot in the entire grounds - a huge granite domed memorial some 20-feet high, with a 1/2 dozen fans mingling about.



Now, I wonder if there's any truth to the rumour that if you leave your guitar pick at his grave overnight, you can pick it up the next day and play Purple Haze left-handed.......!!

Okay, so we paid our respects to Jimi, got our photos taken...time's a tickin, and we've got a lot to do today, number one priority of which was LUNCH!. So back on buses into Seattle, get a little lost, skip said-required-and-much-craved-and-desired LUNCH in deference to time and the ticking away-of, find the right bus route, and head out to Capitol Hill to the Lake View cemetery, where Bruce and Brandon Lee are buried. It was getting on to 3pm at this stage, and we'd been tooling about on PT for a good few hours now, so we gave ourselves 5minutes max to find this particular site.....



I reckon about 6 and 1/2 minutes had passed when a resonating Aussie-twanged 'FOUND IT' bellowed out over the peaceful grounds...good work girls! More paying of respects, photos, and really bad Hong Kong cinema-styled "My name is Bruce" impersonations, where the mouth moves even when there is no dialogue, then it was time to move on....AND GET SOME LUNCH!!

Back in town, almost 4pm, and we hadn't even made it to the EMP (Experience Music Project) (or had LUNCH!). The EMP is a monolithic, interactive music museum, dedicated to the sounds of the Pacific North West, completely built and paid for (at the measly expense of some US$100 Million), and donated to Seattle by local rich boy and Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen. Its like the rock 'n' roller side of the computer geek realising a teenage fantasy wet dream, and making it accessible to the world. There were displays on the history and evloution of the grunge-era, old school doo-wop, jazz and blues, scenes, a permanent exhibit on Jimi Hendrix, and a retrospective on Bob Dylan, to name but a few of the displays. The Liquid Room bar, and a live band room rounded out the complex. Those in the know recommend devoting a minimum of 3-4 hours in the place, but unfortunately for us, the museum was closing at 6 rather than 8 that night for some wanker-corporate function.

Nevermind.....(pardon the pun, I needed to throw that seminal Seattle reference in somewhere!), it was money well spent (by us to get in, and him to build it!). I guess if I had a few billion dollars lying around in the bank, I'd do something similar to! Needless to say, it was awesome. But also needless to say, the experience was the better for having had some LUNCH!!! Prior to getting there, Danella and I said au revoir to Chelsea who had a hot date, and made our way desperately to a shopping mall food court, and finally got some LUNCH!!! Finally satiated, we opted to spend money to save time and hopped the Monorail (cue The Simpson's vaudeville song-and-dance scene of THAT episode) to the Seattle Centre and the Space Needle where the EMP was located. These two constructions were Seattle's ode to the future, having being constructed for the 1962 World's Fair, and while being cool and adding to the cities character, wouldn't look out of place in The Jetson's cartoon.

Having had an AMAZING Saturday adventure of epic proportions, all that was left to do for the day now was to head back to the hostel, recharge batteries with a power nap, and hit the bars in the evening.

More later. Tony

What a mad week it's been

hey there,

(i wrote this about a week ago, but somehow got distracted and never sent it!!).........

well, i'm settling into life in vancouver nicely now, and have met some more local folk and made some new friends.

last friday was the last of the month of february, and for those who are in the know, the last friday of every month is 'critical mass' day in many a city
across the globe. what the hell is critical mass?

well, it's a bit of a cyclist community group with an activist bent, promoting alternative forms of transport to the evil empire of the automobile -
promoting cycling as a healthy, non-polluting, ecologically and economically sound form of transport in the cities. this is done by a 'random coincedence'
of a group of cyclists in one place at the one time (here in vancouver, its the city art gallery on dunsmuir street), and a collective cycle thru the
streets of the city in peak hour together in a friendly non-threatening awareness campaign, chanting slogans along the lines of 'we're not blocking
traffic, we are traffic!', and 'if you love your car, set it free!', and 'imagine if we were all in single-occupant cars how much worse the traffic would
be!'

needless to say, this was me in a nutshell - i'd been to many critical mass events in melbourne, and to discover one in vancouver was heaven on a stick for
me!! having arrived at the allotted time, i knew absolutely no-one of the gathered masses (later to be counted out at 109 riders this month), but i struck up
a conversation with a small group of folk, who it turned out, was also their first critical mass! Lisa, Leslie and Arthur became my cycle buddies for the
evening's ride as we followed the crowd over 90minutes thru many of the main streets of Vancouver, over the Burrard Bridge crossing False Creek and ending up at
an artists collective gallery off Main Street for a combined artists opening and musicians gathering. They call themselves the "Butchershop Collective", having
established themselved in a space previously occupied, appropriately enough, by a butcher shop, and converted into a very cool art space, with room for live bands,
art installations, and paintings, as well as any other art space that can be accommodated within its walls.

I truly landed right in amongst the 'underground activist' scene here by joining this ride, where i feel completely at ease and at home. This scene is a
complete throwback to my University days in Melbourne - and boy how do i miss the feeling of solidarity and collectivity you get from these events!!.

As it turns out also, Lisa is a recent arrival in Van also, but originally from Seattle, and Leslie's boyfriend lives down there,...and i was planning the
spend the first weekend in March down there....so they were like 'why don't you hitch a ride down with us!!'.....'Okay then, its a deal!!

The next day I had arranged to attend a volunteer session for the citie's 'Celtic Festival' to be held from 11th-17th March, and cycled downtown to be there.
The whole point of the thing was to celebrate St Patrick's Day on the 17th - Ireland's biggest public holiday - and try and turn it into a huge expat's and
Celtic descendants party, with a parade along the main street of downtown Vancouver. Obviously, this would be no where near as big as it would be in Ireland, but I
thought it'd be fun to be a part of this, having spent the previous year in Dublin. I'm now officially entrenched in the volunteer group and have been given
the role of 'crowd controller' for the parade, and sales and merchandise dude for a couple of other gigs.

It should be a lotta fun!!

But wouldn't you know it, on my way to the bike shop to get some fine-tuning, the bike i bought a week previously gave out a flat on me on the way back home,
and i have zero tools to fix it with (the joys of living hand-to-mouth, eh!), so i dropped it into The Bike Doctor on Commercial Drive, previously mentioned
as the hip-and-coool funky street in town right by my place, where i happened to discover they sell a whole range of cool pro-bike stickers - 'think globally,
bike locally', and 'bicycle - the vehicle of the revolution'.

the same night i deicded to check out, and introduce my new housemate and friends Ceri and derek, to some of the 'experimental art' on offer at the 'butcher
shop collective' - a varied combo of super-8 video footage and computer&keyboard generated sounds. mostly crap (in my humble opinion - and, as forrest gump
famously says, yer never know what yer gonna get) - but over the 3 hours i was there, a few really cool surprises and sounds were thrown into the mix.

a wierd, but ultimately super-cool, house-party option was presented to myself and Derek, halfway thru the night, one which we couldn't turn down. "Vincent", a
random guest at the art-event we were at (a guy clearly not altogether with everyone else's concept of the modern living world - ie, a freak - even by my
reckoning of standing) invited us to a house party after the art show writing the address on a gig flyer.

Derek and I, pissed as we'd become by the time we decided to leave (early), thought we (derek and i - ceri decided earlier to leg it home) could check out
this party invite.

vincent was wierd, the party was even wierder (but don't construe this in a bad sense, please)..we jumped out of the cab, and bounded up the stairs of a house
party where we knew absolutley no one, with a greeting in the front room of a 3-piece punk band consisting of drums, hammond organ and epileptic, throat-gargling,
wild-eyed lead singer....and we hadn't even found our inviter yet - we wondered if he was a resident here, let alone if he even was here!...we finally saw him,
albiet briefly, and then found our way out to the balcony for some meditative, and medicative smoking and cheap-booze sessions. it was a very, very funy
situation.

the punk band was wierd-arse to the extreme (doesn't mean they were bad - the singer was psychotic tho), but the backyard balcony seriously provided some
respite in the form of relaxants in the vain of liquid (voddy-and-pepsi in a bottle) and smokeable kind. needless to say, we partook in said offerings but soon
reached our fill, and promply decided on ther cab as the best venutre home....if only we could hail one!

at an estimate it was a good 20-blocks we walked towards my gaff without a cabbie sight, by which time, we were practicaly home.....seems like no matter where
in the world u are, when u need a cab, they simply ain't there. Needless to say, Sunday was a write off.

Something i've wanted to do for a long, long while, is life drawing. The Butcher Shop Collective Art Centre provides such a space for such and event. Now, I have
never claimed to be an artist of any kind (other than maybe a photogrpaher), but I have always wanted to try my hand at life drawing. Generally, to be completely
honest, I suck at art, but I am willing to give it a shot when the opportunity arises. My high school attempts at any kind of art, no matter the form were
shot down by less than enthusiastic teachers (a big F-U to Dakin and Rundle by the way). After session number one, consisting of one female nude, 2 female
and 5 male sketchers, and comparing the results....I really do suck. never mind the fact that 1/2 the other folk were to be enrolled in the 3D Animation class due
to begin at UBC (University of Britsh Columbia) the following week. The point is, I realise my deficiency, and am willing to accept criticism and advice and work
on it.

The other big news of the week is that i've enrolled in a class here - a TEFL (Teaching English as a Foreign language) course. I'm actually doing it
online, so can work on it in my own time at my own pace, without having bother with going to physical classes. It's a 60 hour course, and on average takes
about 6-8 weeks to complete. Cost is reasonable - A$530. This will give me a qualification that i can take to non-english speaking countries and allow me to
work, teaching english. This is something i've wanted to do for a long, long time, and i've finally pulled my finger out and got into gear.

So yeah, it's been a busy week for me. Oh, and this weekend coming i'm heading down to Seattle for 4 days - a bit of a pilgrimage tour to the home of grunge and
one of the best music scenes in the United States. I can't wait for that!!

Anyway, talk soon,

Tony