Monthly Archives: May 2017

Adventure, Learning, Road Trip, Travel

Shit I Learned In Cornwall

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For the bank holiday weekend, my friends and I hired a car and drove west to Cornwall for the weekend. I never actually thought that I would make it down that way however I am excited to say that we had an amazing time. And of course, because it is what I do, I learned some interesting shit. So here is the shit that I learned in Cornwall…..

The fabulous Cornish Pasty

Pasty’s were invented in Cornwall as a useful way for the miners that were working on the west coast to carry a hot meal with them that was filling. The pastry would act as an insulator for the hot meat and potato filling to keep it warm for a few hours. The crinkle part of the pasty was made so that the miners had a part of the pastry to hold and eat the hot contents from. Given that the miners would have trace elements of heavy metals and arsenic on their hands, they would throw this part away and not eat it. It was designed as a place to hold to eat and not for eating. Speaking also of pasty’s, we ate so many of them. The best ones are from Philp’s.

Munching down on a pasty outside Philp’s

When I grow up I am going to become a 70 year old nana in a choir

Whilst down in Cornwall we went to visit the Minack Theatre which is a giant, Roman style amphitheatre that was created by one woman in and around world war 2. There was a choir of 70 year olds there preparing for their performance that night. I will never forget the dancing of the people and the grooving of the nana’s as they sang Justin Timberlake’s ‘Can’t Stop The Feeling’. I have decided that this is what I want to do.

Chilling out watching the choir rehearse with stunning ocean views at the Minack

I’m clearly out of touch

Whilst driving down the road I spent a lot of time listening to the radio. I had no idea about any of the songs on the radio. So I learned the words to loads of those. Not only that, but I also learned a few other words of interesting definition:

Kleptopenia – a person who picks up other people’s pens and walks off with them. This is me. I have kleptopenia. Pens fucking everywhere.

Neglext – the art of ignoring the person you are supposed to be chatting with because you are too busy sending text messages to someone else.

Voluntold – when you get told you are volunteering for something but it isn’t really volunteering, it is more like being told.

Marconi tested his radio’s at Lizard Point.

Nuff said really. Pretty damn cool.

The coastline at Lizard Point

My home town was named after a place in Cornwall.

I grew up in a town called Launceston. We pronounced it ‘Lon-ces-ton’. The Cornish folk like to call it ‘Lawns-ton’. Their Launceston has a castle on a hill for a view. We have Myer 7th floor. They have a river Tamar. We have one too. They have a Tamar Bridge. We have a Batman Bridge that goes over the Tamar. We both have town halls, but theirs is older and cooler looking as it has medieval style. I am quite impressed with all of this. Our Launceston is bigger, but they are still both quite pretty towns.

You can call me the Queen of the Castle, the Launceston Castle!

Cornish Seagulls are HUGE

I mean seriously huge. They look like no neck rugby players of the gull world and the greedy fuckers sit around and glare at you while you eat. One said gull even tried to rip the  wing off of another gull in our presence and there was blood and gore everywhere. But luckily not on my pasty.

People walking from one end of the UK to the other is more common than one would think.

The route from Land’s End in Cornwall to Dan O’Groot’s in northern Scotland has been walked by quite a large number of people. Considering that this is 947 miles this is a huge achievement and one I think I will pass.

The Land’s End sign at the eastern most point of England.

Cornwall is such a stunningly beautiful place to visit with so much to see and do. You will need way more than the three days that we had to navigate our way around and see everything. Honestly you would probably need a couple of weeks. Just get fuelled up and away you go!

 

 

Learning, Life, Uncategorized

What I Reckon: Housemates

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I moved out of home when I was 18 and into the Halls of Residence at Monash University. Since this time I have lived in so many different places with all myriads of people. I have had some incredible housemates and then I have had some absolute doozies. So here we go. The worst of what I have seen in shared housing. (I will remove backpacker hostels from this equation because I would be writing, literally, forever).

Sprayers

I will start with the most recent. After coming back from Australia, I walked into my current house to find new housemates. “Oh hi, isn’t it nice someone told me about this’. Anyway, my first morning of getting up to go to work and I roll into the bathroom and not only are there a few drops of piss on the seat. But it is like the guy was dancing and not even holding it. There was piss everywhere.  All over the seat. All over the floor. All over the wall. I was so disgusted I decided I would rather go to the toilet with the junkies of Turnpike Lane down the road at the station than clean up that so I left a nasty note and hoped it would disappear before I returned. It did. Thankfully. I mean, who the fuck in any world thinks that this is acceptable.

Since then I have also discovered he doesn’t just like to spray his urine. He also likes to spray watermelon all over the benches and up the cupboard doors. His cleaner wife clearly hasn’t taught him hygiene.

Noise makers

Last night at 11pm my housemate decided that it would be an appropriate time to vacuum. So I got mad and knocked the door down to tell her to shut up. I’ve also had to do the same with other yelling housemates at 11pm while I have been trying to sleep as they have been having screaming matches with each other (don’t live with couples). Add to this the trance music at 3am from the high, and we have ourselves a trifecta. Respect people. Between the hours of 9am and 10pm, shut the fuck up and let people sleep!

Feeders

Once upon a time I lived with a guy whose girlfriend was always there. I mean always. She never left the room and he would wait on her. And when the 6 foot something active man cooked a pizza, he would eat half himself and feed the other half to his sedentary five foot something girlfriend. Over time she got huge. And over time the room they were in started to smell for the lack of moving and cleaning. One day, back before the days of wireless, my other housemate and I had to paper rock scissors to see who was going into his room to find the internet cord under piles of shit and I lost. I donned the gas mask I used to wear at the smelter because I just couldn’t handle the stench and a giant pair of dishwashing gloves for good measure.

Bacteria Lovers

There was share  house I used to live in that had 2 psychos. I will address the first here. I got to the point where I started cooking everything I cooked in the oven because the arsehole couldn’t figure out how to work it. It was one of those ones you had to light at the back with a lighter. Anyway, he would come home, peel onions all over the bench and not clean it up. Eat his tandoori chicken and then leave it on the bench overnight…. I repeat, leave it on the bench overnight!!! Chicken!! And then EAT IT for breakfast the next morning. And I wondered why the toilet always looked like someone’s digestive system wasn’t working properly. I also in this house had to resort to wearing shoes in the toilet and the shower because of the piss on the floor and the general lack of cleanliness in the shower. The guy who owned the place got a cleaner in to clean the house. She refused for a conventional fee and charged more because she said it was some of the worst she’d ever seen.

Psychos

So the other housemate was friendly enough. But his wife lived back in India. So upon the discovery of him having friends at university to study with that are women, she started sending ‘stay the fuck away from my husband messages’ . Great….

Druggos

Out of my bedroom window at 3am I could often hear the sound of spray cans as my artiste extraordinaire housemate made his new pieces. Not often being a fan of smoking joints outside in the cold, he would get back to his fifteen year old roots and smoke out of his bedroom window. Which is great when the fire alarms in the whole entire house go off at 3am on multiple occasions when you need to go to work. Grand. He used to lose his phone all the time, didn’t know how to use an implement of cleaning, rode a bicycle for transport everywhere and took all of his food from outside of the EAT store every night. Oh and if he did cook anything he would leave in in the pot on the bench for the next week. Didn’t these people’s parents teach them anything???

Landlords

NEVER, EVER live with your fucking landlord. The one I have currently is a slimeball. After taking 2 months to remove the mold from my room, and 6 weeks to fix the broken oven because he ‘just has no money this month’ but just bought himself a new motorbike, threats to go to the counsel were made. “Oh no, not the counsel!! Oh look I have money now to fix things! Surprise!” He also engaged other such activities as cutting the cord off the dryer when he left for the summer because ‘its summer’ and 6 people living in one house in England where it rains all the time don’t need a dryer in summer. He is also a fan of removing people from the electoral roll illegally and getting into screaming matches with people. Most of the time he is screaming with other tenants but this one special morning at 5am we woke up to a woman half his age that he’d bought home after a night out screaming at him to get the fuck off her and leave her alone. Oh and when I told him I was leaving with four months in advance, he told me it wasn’t convenient for him and asked for me to kindly move out when it suited him. I, less kindly, refused. Not my problem.

Thieves

There is nothing worse than coming home to find your milk gone. Or something else you wanted to eat, gone. Because your housemate has just decided to help themselves. When on res, my friends kept getting their food stolen. So one day I am in the kitchen and they are cooking up a mean curry and loading it with laxatives to teach the damn thief a lesson. I dare say they will shit themselves even looking at another curry. I have also threatened to put laxatives in my chocolate milk because that would also get thieved.

Naked models

My friend lived with 2 models. She used to complain about them all the time because it seems that they also couldn’t pick up after themselves, were fond of stealing and smoked loads of drugs in the house. They also had an aversion to taking keys out when out on the town. They would come home at stupid o’clock and knock until someone got up to let them in. However, one of their redeeming qualities, in my eyes anyway, was that they liked to shower with the door open so everyone could see them naked. Cheers boys.

Anyways, if you have any horror stories, feel free to share below!Otherwise, peace out!

Challenge, Learning, Life, Travel

What I Reckon: Bullfighting in Spain

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Last year when I visited Spain I found myself in Seville at a special time of year for the locals. I found myself there during the bullfighting time. Many people told me this is a vulgar and awful practice. Many of the locals defended it saying that it is not a disgusting thing and that there is a lot of respect for the animal and that it isn’t cruel. Not being one to back down from things that are confronting, I weighed up whether I should or shouldn’t and decided that an informed decision was better than an uninformed decision and that I wanted to go and experience it for myself and make up my own mind.

Admitting this to people was a rather difficult thing. Some of my friends abused me for doing it because they felt I was supporting maltreatment of animals, others were not really understanding of why it is that I would want to go there to begin with. But as they say, when in Rome, and so I went. With reservation, but I went.

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The parading at the beginning before the fighting begins

I found myself sitting in the ring next to a couple of people that spoke enough English to be able to explain some of the things that were going on to me. Between this and the information that I learned from the museums I visited up until that point I could figure out what was going on.

I could imagine that the whole affair resembled a similar scene to that of the Roman Gladiators. There was a lot of pomp and circumstance with brass bands playing loud music and horses parading around. Each matador gets to fight 2 bulls each over the space of the evening. There are generally 3 matadors per bullfight.

So the bull enters the ring. The matador waves the cape and assesses the bull for aggression. After that they get the guys on the horse to come out and they lance the bull in the neck while the bull locks its horns into the side of the horse. For the first bullfight I ever watched, the bull actually knocked the horse over and the bullfighters assistants had to go in and distract the bull to get the horse safely up.

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2 of the horses in the initial proceedings

After they have checked out the bull with the horses, the matador’s assistants go in to face the bull. They have these pom pom like sticks that are decorated in streamer type material with sharp ends on them called banderillas. The aim of these is to weaken the muscles around the bulls neck and to agitate it. After they have had a go sticking about four rounds of these things into the bulls neck, in which the bull is now bleeding enough to see, the final stage begins.

The matador enters the ring to face the bull alone with his cape and a sword. He hides the sword under the cape and uses the cape to assess how the bull is moving and the kinds of passes the bull makes. After a few passes, the matador drives the sword into the neck of the bull. If done correctly, the bull will usually sit down within the space of 30 seconds and the matador’s helpers will come out and sever the spinal cord so that the animal doesn’t suffer anymore.

The first bull I watched was excruciating. The matador missed where he was supposed to put the sword. It took three passes and three swords through the neck for the bull to go down and it made me cringe every time. This part of bullfighting is most awful. The thing that I did find utmost heartbreaking though was the utter confusion of the bull in the ring for the ten minutes it is there to fight for its death. Sometimes the bulls look around and don’t want to fight. Sometimes they are so confused about what is happening you can actually read the confusion on their faces. Sometimes they get angry and they just charge and charge and charge. Despite making the decision to go here, I cannot say that I really enjoyed it. However I did now feel that I could make an educated opinion on what I felt about bullfighting. And my decision was that it is in many ways barbaric and cruel. At the same time I cannot say that it is any better in abattoirs where they slaughter animals for food. The entire thing left a bad taste in my mouth.

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The matador with cape and sword preparing to kill the bull

One thing I will say is that despite killing them, the matadors seem to have a great love for the animals. Despite meeting a horrid death, these animals are kept in really good environments with good standards while they are alive. They are well cared for. And their deaths also do not go in vain. Every bull gets sent to the butcher and used for meat. Many of the restaurants in Seville have bull meat on the menu during the bullfighting season. In this sense I have respect for the process. However I don’t think I will be going again. I just don’t think I could stomach any more of it and call it entertainment. Best leave me to a chick flick or something less morbid. But if the movie boys could wear pants like those of the matadors, that would be great. Their butts look hot in those things!