One Week in Sydney...

G’Day you flaming drognogs, you bloody Galahs etc!

We got to Sydney no trouble and with such an early arrival time we thought it prudent to walk around and get a feel for the surroundings. This of course came with the customary walk around a foreign supermarket to point at things that are slightly different, like this ridiculous confusion:

And to take note how amazingly expensive everything is in Australia ($1 = 65p). So when I saw this item, my mind was completely blown:

Other examples include a small pint of beer called a schooner costing 6-12 Freddos or a cooked breakfast ranging from 10-17 Freddos.

At one point we went for a breakfast run by some lovely Chinese lady and the food came out with no ketchup, well that isn’t a breakfast. So I asked the lady,

“can I have some ketchup please?”

The polite lady nodded a scuttled off to somewhere and reemerged with a straw, plonked it on the table and started to walk off. I was startled but managed to compose myself enough to swivel on my seat and catch her attention.

“sorry I meant, can I have some ketchup please?”

The lady apologised and again scuttled off to return with the much anticipated red elixir. I turned my head to look at some Chinese “artwork” on the wall and turned back to see a pepper grinder placed on the table. At this moment I was faced with a difficult choice; accept the pepper grinder and continue with my rapidly cooling breakfast without the lubricant needed for the morning’s best activity, or risk it for a potentially embarrassing situation. It was just like deal or no deal.

I took the risk, and explained the lady that I would like some “ketchup… you know…. red… tomato sauce.”

“Oooooh” she said, returning with the bottle of the delicious loveliness.

“Sorry about that” she said.

“Not a problem” I replied.

She then pointed at the pepper grinder and stated “I always think that is ketchup”.

I spent the rest of the day wondering who taught her English, and how one would ever get the two confused.

We also walked around Sydney; seeing the famous sights, humorous signs and bald rats:

After that we went back to the room and got hit by jet lag due to not having a Sunday I guess and slept for 16 hours. But after that we were alright and headed over to Manly, a super lush beachy suburb of Sydney to stay with Mark and Michelle and the Babbas.

It was really good to have nice rest point to sleep, shower, eat home cooked lush meals and forget about lumbering around stupid annoying backpacks. We also had an awesome day trip a some fish markets full of Chinese people and fish as well as Bondi Beach, which was raining but still good; and we saw a group of gay deafs doing very flamboyant sign language. Cheers M&M.

Literally a 2 minute walk from the Bilsons was my old mate Ed Hunter the former Head Hunter. So we went out with him in Manly, #Referee. I decided to record the events in a real time note:

The next morning we worked it off with a trip to Palm Beach, which is where they film Home & Away. But seeing as I’ve seen probably 20 mins of Home & Away accumulatively in my life it was a little wasted on me; but you can’t argue with 31 degrees!

The next night it was back to Michelle’s and went out in Manly again with no Ed (because he couldn’t hack it) but unbelievably weirdly I bumped into an old mate, Rohan from Marlow. He lives here now so was literally just a coincidence, bizarre. Unfortunately I only have this terrible picture.

Saturday rolled around and Ed had recovered so we went central Sydney with Ed’s gf, Em. We went out in the area where we arrived and slept for 16 hours, Kings Cross. Famed for its prostitution and drug ridden tramps; these had proven to be very vocal earlier in the week, unlike LA tramps. Nether the less this was a good night out with plenty of shape throwing. We left the club at 3.30 but for some reason no cabs would take us home, so we had to take two buses eventually arrive home at 6am after Ed ate 2 burritos. I don’t do buses.

After more sleeping we eventually left Sydney, great town. Oddly it was cheaper to fly to out next destination (including transfers) than it was to get a bus or train. So another flight we took, off to Byron Bay.

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The End of Chapter I...

So it’s the end of the USA & Mexico leg so I thought I’d tie it all up. After Acapulco we got to Mexico City, we were only there for 2 days so not a lot happened. We looked around the Anthropology museum which was just more Mayan shit; I’ve only just noticed that at no time, in 3 weeks in Mexico and walking round numerous Mayan based places, did anybody mention the end of the world 2012 thing. You would think that that would be a big tourist attraction, maybe that’s what all the masks were about? We also just walked around the town, and saw a yellow monument.

Aside from that MC was pretty ordinary, except there was an Irish bar we went to where everyone was signing along to a band playing Cosmic Girl by Jameroquai (no idea how you spell that)

Here is a map to show you where we went, covering 2500 miles.

Following Mexico we headed to LA for a 2 night stay over before heading to Sydney. This flight, Mexico City to LA was provided by Alaska Airlines and was populated by mostly Chinese passengers. That sentence seems odd to me but it’s true. Oh and they definitely weren’t Eskimos heading to Alaska, they were completely Chinese.

To Summarise Los Angeles I will no present our stay in statistics.

Number of haircuts: 1. I went to a barber shop and it was just like a film, where they were watching Sons of Anarchy and talking about ridiculous subjects like one guy had “a terabyte for sale, Dawg” because he said “my homeboy hooked me up and fixed by broken terabyte so now I got two terabyte but I only need one terabyte, Dawg”. One well-dressed chap was caught eating a salad, when quizzed he claimed he was going vegan to lose weight. Moments later a delivery man turned up with chilli cheese fries for him, he said they were vegan chilli cheese fries.

Number of Andy Ball look-a-likes from behind: 1 uncanny chap. 

 

Number of racist taxi drivers: 1. We couldn’t have landed a funnier first cab to take us to our hotel. He was an Iranian guy who looked and sounded almost exactly John Toturo in Mr Deeds (look it up). En Route he got into a monologue explain all the areas we were driving through. The opinions quoted below are those of the taxi driver and not those of the author of this blog.
 
“this is Santa Monica, its is full of gays and lesbians, so if your going out in the evening stay away from here, I am Iranian and we not used to this. When I first arrive I pick up this girl and I say, you are beautiful you need a man, she say I am lesbian and I say Whaaaaa? Get out of my cab.”

“this area of LA is so so… for gays”

“In LA there lots of blacks, I’m not racist but every time you get black they make problem. You drive slow you drive fast, either way they be making trouble, it’s difficult for me”

Classic

Number of ridiculous conversations with Jack: Various, here’s an example.

Number of tramps: stopped counting once we reached 100. I like to think they are all failed actors just looking for a big break, not getting it, and resigning themselves to life without shoes and clipping toe nails.

Number of lifts with strangers: 1, Jack got a lift back to the hotel from two ladies names Shakira and LaQueesha. I’m still laughing at this.

Number of lush cars spotted: loads and loads.

Number of celebrities spotted: 1. Matthew Perry (Chandler off of Friends)

Number films watched on the LA to Sydney flight. 5. Katy Perry: Part of Me is truly harrowing. The plane had the stupid ability to chat to other passengers on some internal text system, pointless
 

Anyway we got to Sydney, but missed Sunday. The flight took off at 10pm on Saturday, we landed at 6am Monday; mind boggling!

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Going Loco Down in Acapulco...

So we got to the little coastal town of Puerto Escondido and got the wet clothes insta-washed and it worked out fine. Stayed in a nice hotel with this American geezer called Tom; who for some reason had an interesting take of traveling light. He had one small rucksack containing football boots (as in soccer) and a deflated football and I guess the odd piece of clothing, bizarre.

The town was nice and the current in the sea completely insane, like you’re going to die insane. But after a couple of days of not really doing a lot and jack finding a maggot in his spaghetti we thought we would move on and it looked like Acapulco was close enough on the map and I like the Four Tops song so went for it. Tom was claiming that it was “very dangerous” and that he would “never go there” but seeing as everyone else who had told us that anywhere in Mexico is dangerous has been as wrong as Coke Zero we chose to ignore him.

Good thing we did, Acapulco is not dangerous just like everywhere we have been. We checked into a hotel. Then we got ribs. Then we went out. Below I have included a compilation of clips to summarise our first day, from the weird singer on the bus to trying to find somewhere to drink at 4:40am after a night of all you can drink for £9.50 in the rain.

I'd like to say that Acapulco was free of street vendors but it isnt, same old mix of idiots and children who should be in school selling nothing new, although I must say that the blind chap selling chewing gum was impressive at singling us out considering he was blind!

We went out again and it rained, again but this time some nice Mexican bloke was like “use my table mang” which was pleasant. However things started getting odd.

He began to get quite friendly exclaiming that “if someone got a problem with you man, they got a problem with me man!” and he showed us his VISA credit card to prove he was something, not sure what. He also claimed to be the head of security in the bar, but no one knew he was so I’m skeptical. While all of this was going on his wife sat in silence at the side. After a few hours things got very serious; ten points to anybody who can guess the conversation taking place during this photo.

Answer: the Mexican man is telling Jack to have it away with his wife while he watches. Jack turned down the offer and Mexican man got annoyed.

We stayed in the bar for some time as the all you can drink drinks started getting extremely strong, this may have been due to the barman getting progressively more drunk as he decanted vodka directly into his gob. I’m glad that a man with no shins approached us and got us into that place.

We also got chatting to Raj from Austin, TX who was on holiday by himself which he didn’t think was a big deal but I disagreed. He had exactly the same mannerisms as Will Smith but he was Indian and for some reason he had paid for his taxi driver to enter the bar. He just kind of stood at the side, like a teacher at school disco overseeing proceedings, except there wasn’t a disco; it was just be people conversing.

The next morning we checked out the hotel to head for Mexico City, the problem was that we were super hungover so we sort of/definitely checked back in and slept it off. Then we got ribs. Then went back to sleep. Then went to Mexico City.

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