Ozone, plane rides, and the skyscraper that wasn’t…

So… in no particular order, a few anecdoctes from my summer
1.A drunk hunter mentioned to my travel mate, the Texan, that he’d blow him away with not one but two glocks—poof poof poof, he motioned with both hands. He then turned to me and asked what I would use to bag a buck (kill a deer), I figured a truck mounted .50 calibre would do the trick—he frowned and shook his head.

2.Sydney—my friends live right underneath one of the inbound/outbound flight pathes for Sydney international airport… I was shocked that they would’ve have built the airport in such a way that planes would be obliged to fly over a residential area at such a low altitude… you couldn’t hear a thing when one was overhead. And if that wasn’t dodgy enough, I woke up one morning to find the garden full of jet A-1 fuel fumes…

3.I survived a train wreck in New Zealand.

4.Did you know that boston is one of the east coast’s most important square dancing centres… who would’ve thought! I sashayed and doseydoeyed all over the dirty dance floor with lovely ladies, octogenarians, men with dancing shoes, and Scandinavians (one a massive Viking of a man!)… Good times, old school, primary school PE class good times…

5.Boston also boasts a caribo-centric carnivale… not since the cypress hill show at lalapalooza ’97 have I heard gut moving bass like what they were pushing out of the lorry-mounted walls of speakers, towed all-around downtown boston.

6.My day with dan talstra—not only did we eat gyros made by latinos… not only did we stumble across a windowless skyscraper in downtown manhattan… not only did we see bad buskers fail to rouse a crowd… we followed quebequois tourists through wall street and caught them molesting the Meryll-lynch bull… we also saw the conspiracy theorists down at ground zero (a truly awesome and troubling cavity in the centre of downtown) and while chatting them up, we also saw the deusche bank building (the one being deconstructed methodically due to massive damage and contamination when the towers came down) catch fire…500 firefighters made their way to the site, it took all afternoon/evening to put the fire out—2 men died.

7.On two occasions, I found myself boarding with new friends only to find out that old friends were no more than 3 blocks down the road… how strange is that?

8.There are no vegetables in New Zealand. Just kidding, in fact, cudos to the farmers of the deep south of the southern island for bringing a delicious winter crop to the Dunedin farmers’ market…truly an institution.

9.There is no shortage of vegetables in Sydney… which is strange given that the whole region has been racked by drought for 3 years running (apparently)… unlike Dunedin, the farmers’ market of Sydney is a massive warehouse full of EVERYTHING you could possibly hope for from a market—even squid. Mesmerizing.

10.Car-free-day, commercial drive, the day before I left… not only did I stumble across someone who reads this blog…not only did I run into everyone you’d expect to meet on the drive…not only did I stumble into Lucy Clift, who was suppose to be in Sydney and to whom I was going to write a note that very day…I ate giant portugese sardines with Johnny koehn (always pleasant company!) and while resting my brain and body at the foot of the drive, drinking coffee with none other than nicolina and anya, I spotted three kids taking advantage of the whaning moments of the day—playing leap frog in the middle of the street while others packed away their booths and displays… but wouldn’t you know it, these kids were minding their own business and whammo, a 20 something came along, then her man friend joined in…a couple toddlers (with moms in tow), a few more tattooed 20 somethings, a proper round of leap frog! A precious moment, with no other artifact but memory (and maybe this post)