Jim Travels The World

finally saw the flaming lips in concert last night, and i had to come all the way to australia to do it. what a crazy show, filled with a giant hamster ball, tons of confetti, beach balls, dancing people in cat and frog suits, a giant inflatable caterpillar and sun... two hours of craziness. and on the way home we got to see several opossums snacking in the park. they are at once both cute and scary

this restaurant is a fixture of Toorak street, with its ducks and chickens hanging in the window. It's always packed with people. Best takeout food. Just about every restaurant here has the "best _____ I've ever had". This is a good town to be a fat kid in.

signed up for a bank account at the NAB branch near my house when i got here. they told me would receive my debit card and PIN in the mail. received my PIN in the mail, two weeks go by, no debit card. went to NAB branch by my work, and they tracked down my debit card. They had sent it to the NAB branch by my house. So, when they said they were going to send the debit card to my house , they didn't actually mean to my house . so logical.

yesterday, long trip to nearby Werribee park, an open range zoo and Victorian mansion built by some Irish immigrants, then later it was a seminary school. the crazy one on the right is the Bunya-Bunya tree mansion interior: path to a nearby grotto. the flora & fauna was really trippy:

this weekend, a trip to the NGV to view the Salvador Dali exhibit and then the queen vic market. never seen anything like this market: it's like competitive shopping, with individual vendors screaming out the prices for their meats and vegetables to entice you to their respective booths. a cacophony of price-gouging madness (think the "ice cold beer" guy at a ballgame, except there's dozens of them trying to yell over each other) and we found at the end of the day you can get crazy deals as the vendors are in a frenzy to dump their stock before closing time. I needed a rest after this one.

one thing they don't have in this country is "All you can eat" places. One would think maybe that's because they don't have that American obesity problem, but not true: I just saw a study that 40% of Australian males are overweight. And everyone here smokes too, which is disgusting. I've been spoiled living in Colorado, the healthiest and fittest state in America, where no one smokes (cigarettes, at least). no all you can eat; their internet plans have "caps"... you get a max download bandwidth of 5GB or 15Gb or whatever per month (they tried to enact this in America and there was Nerd Outrage a few years back) depending on your plan; the Aussie Netflix-equivalent Quickflix has plans like "Unlimited DVD rentals for $19.95... but a max of 8 DVDs per month". It's like in Oz they're just afraid people will use too much of anything. Also, had my first brush with the (quasi-) law this morning. On my normally sleepy Alamein line train rid...

as i've mentioned before, i've become quite enthralled by all the various graffiti in melbourne, some of which is really quite artistic. Melbourne graffiti considered for heritage protection Living in Boulder for the last 5 years, I've only seen one piece of graffiti there: On West pearl street, there is the "Cay Stone" rock sales yard. Some vandal changed it to the Gay Stoner rockyard at least 5 years ago, and it's stayed that way ever since the only logical conclusion is that the owner of this rock yard is actually a gay stoner so therefore doesn't mind the graffiti. anyway, enough about boulder. I heard in Melbourne it's illegal to carry around a can of spraypaint in public. more on this later

lisa and i were going to plan a trip to Ayers rock (the hunk of rock in central australia that always makes those 'things to do before you die' lists) but we've been told by multple locals that it's not all that impressive. Instead we're going to visit tasmania, the island state that's 33% percent national park and mostly uninhabited wildreness and coastline. took lisa back tht 1000 steps trial last weekend. it had just rained so it was all shrouded in mist: and then also a visit to the melbourne zoo: roo chillin and finally, lisa and i visit the melbourne zoo's platapusary

and it folds out into a futon, so all of you people who swore you'd come visit, now's your chance