all of the evils of this town

for barbecue reasons i went out to rachel's parents last weekend, barbecueing some ever-so-funny-looking veggie sausages and eating a salad with top players such as mango and honey-roasted macadamia nuts. good times! but it is not really the point of this post. on the way back, we were going to catch the usual train to the city, but alas, repairs and improvements were being made on the train tracks and there were replacement buses that were very slow (but air-conditioned). on the bus, a guy started talking to me, first asking how long the bus would go, then the usual where i'm from and then, after a while, we pass a hospital and he says "see that, that's windsor hospital, i have to go there". silence. "i've got cancer, but i won't do the chemo cause i saw how it hurt and killed my dad". he then talks about how he would be alright with dying, but that it would just kill his mom. then he starts crying.

i won't say that it's something about australians and being open, because he was actually irish, i'll just stick with the fact that i don't think any stranger has been that open and honest with me before, and i'm sure i'd never be. we go on to talk about music and he asks me about alex harvey, jim morrison, jethro tull and a lot of other old rock bands that i sometimes know and sometimes don't know. he starts talking about his junkie life and hows he's wasted his whole life on drugs and how they've taken everything from him - money, house, wife and screwed with his brain, how he's been in mental hospitals, had paranoia and some of the worst things he did while on drugs. i feel genuinely sorry for him and think that life certainly isn't fair and an easy thing, and how this guy is just beyond any hope. life wrecked by drug addictions and terminal lung cancer, hard to top that for bad situation. i think that he's just incredibly strong to be able to deal with that and not be ashamed of it and talk about it. when strangers start talking to me on buses i usually get very uncomfortable, but i'm genuinely happy that this guy did and it made my day an interesting one instead of an annoying one spent on a slow bus because the trains were cancelled.

also, this is the second person i've met here that's got terminal lung cancer and decided not to get it treated. chances of treatment success are pretty low, and it's very painful. so please, people i love and care about, don't smoke.

peter and the dream of horses

yesterday it was melbourne cup day, which is the day when people on horses get more attention than any other people in this nation. except possibly people with extravagant hats glued (or at least so it appears) to one side of their head, coupled with expensive, often extravagant and almost exclusively horribly looking clothing. this is because the powers that be are not stupid and have created something for the women to do when the men waste their money on betting. and yes, that sounded very sexist and is not really true anymore (rachel was certainly more uppity about betting than me and i saw several reports on fashion contests for men at the race track), so maybe you should disregard that statement. attribute it to the overly cynical part of me.

the race this year was won by japanese horse "delta blues" closely followed by "pop rock", also japanese and the horse i decided to place my hard-earned $$$ on. i won a whopping $4.20. i also bet on another horse for both win and place and my total betting expenses were $8, but hey, a $4.20 win is still a $4.20 win.

that's all i got for now. another day, another quintessential australian experience experienced.

everything's coming up zoidberg

my life is thoroughly unexciting. however, that never stopped people from updating their blogs and shan't stop me.

i am in sydney and it is somewhere between vancouver and lund. minor differences at best, such as the vegemite selection in the supermarket, the mysterious absence of black beans and the ubiquity of very small lizards. in vancouver it was the ubiquity of normal-sized squirrels, in lund it's...people on bikes. (side note: in minneapolis last summer, i borrowed betsy's bike one day to speed up my exploration of the neighborhood. funny thing was, there was never anywhere to park the bike. not a single bike stall graced my eyesight over the day and i was forced to chain the bike to various road signs and such. i am not mentioning this to reinforce the cultural stereotypes of americans, it's just that i really like bikes.)

i have seen weird animals. they were cool. previous to this journey, my only encounter with the platypus was in the south park episode where kenny turns into a duck-billed platypus (which, on a side note, is a tautology as far as i can tell), but now i have seen them for real and fellas, they are the shiz-nitz. an egg-laying mammal with a duck-bill and waterproof fur that searches for food in the water with electrical sensors AND has got poison in the back claws! i may not know much, but i know that it totally kicks the kronhjort's ass. and it does it so much that i had to get a platypus plush toy. does it rock? do you even need to ask?

there are also other very cool animals, including but not limited to: wallaby, echidna, wombat, bilby, cassowary, emu and of course the ever-so-loveable kangaroo.

the echidna is a very hip and stylish animal, similar to the hedgehog but with a hipper and more stylish snout, and some additional curl-up-to-a-ball capabilities. i really like hedgehogs so with the echidna it was love at first sight.

also, we have cats. the guy who has the house we're renting a room (or, more correctly, a granny flat) in is one of the biggest cat-fans to ever grace god's green earth and has three of the nicest cats ever. i'm slightly allergic to cats, but as long as they are kept outside the room and i don't touch my eyes with my hands after patting them, things are working out. i like cats. and if you for some reason doubt my statement that graeme, the owner, is a rather large fan of cats, here's a little story: about when i arrived, he started to become really sick. coughs and blood clots and other nasty things making it tough for him to walk and fatigued and other less than stellar things. after a couple runs to the doctor he was finally admitted and stayed there for a week and a half or so. we were planning to visit, but before we got there rachel got a call where he asked if the cats were okay, rachel asked how he was, he said that he had lung cancer and had decided not to get it treated and the doctors were giving him four months. but he just called to make sure the cats were okay.

he's home now, he's gotten an oxygen-making machine and his family has come over from britain and thailand. it's been nice to have some people in the house, when he went in to hospital it was just us and the cats and it's just not enough for a house that could easily fit three or four more persons. i think it will be pretty horrible when he starts getting worse, i don't like death but i hope i can handle it alright. he will most likely die while in the house and either me or rachel will be the first one noticing. death's a natural part of life and all that, but it's still pretty crap.

so anyways.

i got a job. it's a pretty nice job, but doesn't pay that well. i'm translating health and safety information from english to swedish, and boy am i learning about parts of the body i never knew existed and illnesses i never wanted to know existed. it's pretty interesting and at least related to my degree in some way. it's also part time and work at my own pace, which is pretty good. the only thing that's bad is that i don't meet any people, i just sit on my own in a cafe or computer center all day.

ok, there's a guy making extremely irritating noises in a microphone now, so i am out of here.