Tet

luxury accommodations it aint

but the hotel i found a couple of nights ago is the best deal so far, just 100,000 dong or $6 a nite. clean, cute cleaning staff, good security and away from the tourist area. id rather not be limited to the backpacker district, which is much like staying in times square: catering to a ton of whiteys everywhere with hundreds of hotels back to back, travel agents ready to send you just about anywhere, restaurants with menus in english, crap souvenir shops, atms and of course plenty of hookers handy, some of them actual females. but once anybody knows better, 42nd and 8th ave is the last place youd want to be. wondering aimlessly, i found a lowbrow area (shocking) near the bus station in a district that caters to locals. essentially, ive stumbled upon queens, and while im not much of a fan of my parents', archie bunker's and rosie odonell's home town, im simply luvin how real it is. plus, as the token 6 foot tall Caucasian on the street, i may as well be vin diesel. i get so many looks, hellos from small children, i should carry a sharpie and distribute signatures.

but finding a permanent place to live is anything but easy. i had someone write down how "apt/room for rent" is written so i can recognize it when signs posted. prob is, i dont get any of the other copy on the flier. could say rat infested, or directly above a smelting plant and I wouldn’t know. calling the number, its unlikely anyone who picks up will speak a lick of English other than hello, which seems to have been adopted as the way to answer calls. i found two real estate offices with a list of rooms for rent that cost between $30 and $50, im guessing per week. Unfortunately, complete communication disconnect, so i took their card, and will return with a vietnamese friend. i am also considering enrolling in language classes. I don't do very much here that I need a large vocabulary, just the same stuff I trip over daily.

for instance, this morning, my coffee came black. So I motioned the universal hand language of pouring something into the glass. She held up the sugar, so it seemed like we were heading in the right direction, but then the communication lines broke down. She went into the kitchen for a long time and when she emerged with a tea kettle, I wondered what gesture that was not obcene could impart the idea of something extracted from a cows boob. Next she brought out a cup of tepid water. Not just room temp, but sort of half boiled. Lovely. I shook my head no once more, and was presented with a large mug of iced tea which accompanies most meals, and u dont pay for, no matter how many u throw back. Not the sickeningly sweet Country Time reconstituted chemicals and food colorings variety, but some unsweetened green tea. this shouldnt be so difficult a concept to impart!

Finally someone English speaking showed up and explained one possibility I hadnt considered. They were out of milk.

mythbusters: impossible to find a collie steak here

tons of dogs here, none on the menus of restaurants. while you dont see manicured upper east side prize winning pure-breads on a louis vuitton leash, they are free to run about on the streets, perilously close to moving traffic, the same as young children. fed plenty of scraps and appear healthy. all the people who warned me against bringing sparky because dogs are something put on a baggette with cheese and chili sauce have fallen for this. like the myth that says asian girls special place is a horizontal affair (to match squinted eyes?), theres not a shred of truth in it. busted!

thunder down under

Oz. Not quite how I expected it. Perfectly nice, tho not altogether different from the states. Most of the time, when I forget where I am, it seems like either San Diego or maybe Canada. Only the the abbreviated speech pattern reminds me that I'm in Australia. every word with more than one syllable is truncated. The other hint is that “men at work” still get airplay. AC/DC, midnight oil and of course Ozzie Ozzborne all hail from down here, but nothing gets everyone pumped like “I come from a land down under”. Its like playing “love shack”, “billy jean” and “we are the champions” in succession.

Had good fun, and want to return with more time and a camper van rental, really the only way to really see the vast place. but It's just hard to beat the utter insanity that is Asia, so while it's novel to see that the menu at Mcdonalds differs slightly, there's plenty of amazing places in the states id sooner check out if i wasnt so close-by.

Melbourne is a world class city, with all the fashion, shopping and restaurants you would expect, and this satisfies my wander lust for a couple of days, but soon I want to move on and see the real Australia, if such a thing exists. I quickly learn that its too spread out to get anywhere on foot, so i walk into cheap AZ travel (pronounced cheap ass) and in under an hour, swipe my credit card for $1000 worth of package tours, connecting flights, accommodations and pickup from airports. Not how im used to traveling, but this is like being in LA without wheels.

The tour of the Great Ocean Road is beautiful, but like other bus tours, it suffers from having to do shit with a dozen other people you have nothing in common with. the majority on this trip were a rather dull bunch, spending the entire time on the road snoring or plugged into an ipod. the fun ones were a couple of cute girls, sapna, a physical therapist at NYU and judith, a swiss high school graduate, an english soccer fan named Luke, and David, the Catalunian, who was especially into human tower building. though my family too comes from the Catalan region, the reason for why you would build a ten story tower of people, with a small child on the top no less, was lost on me. still, well worth checking out on youtube. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Nly_FQFNcr4

I post a request on Couchsurfing.com for someone to have drinks with when i get to Adelaide, but it gets just a single response. Need a sexier photo or perhaps one of a cat to make my sex ambiguous. They go to great lengths to remind members that its not a dating site, but just like personal ads, I'm going to guess that postings by chicks get a thousand percent better response. there was a weekly get together. I was planning to attend, but just when the thing was starting, I am hit with complete exhaustion. zero sleep on the bus from Balarat the nite before, so this was a complete battery drain I should have seen coming. I miss a the big jam session at the Grace Emily Hotel that is supposed to be one of the best nights in Adelaide. shit.

the beach community of Glenelg (a palindrome!) where Im staying is something like choosing to stay at the Brighton Beach instead of the the hustle and bustle of the city. Great by day, only a block from the beach, the place is populated with the types of people who work on their tans all day. I share a dorm room with a couple of members of a semi pro girls volleyball team. but at night, theres precious little to do. At the backpackers (what they call hostels), people are watching Pretty Woman and Slumdog Millionaire. Good cheap entertainment, and a good way to beat the intense summer heat, but when this double feature is done, i need to get out. Based on a recommendations, i head into town to Couger St, where Chinatown and the central market are. But tues is not a spectacular night out anywhere, and everything other than a few Chinese restaurants are closed. Mongolian bbq dinner for one costs almost $40. Earlier today, I purchased a half liter of ice cream for $9. True, it was the nicely packaged stuff, burnt fig jam and honeycomb, not the huge box of supermarket variety vanilla which cost half that. I dare not stay out past the last tram, since after that, it's a $30 cab fare home. this place is spendy.

"She woke up the frech in me", says the guy on the stairs when we see the two girls I met earlier in the supermarket come out in their panties to brush their teeth before going to bed. Our view from below was quite accidental, just a right place at the right time kind of thing, but absolutely exquisite. somewhere tucked in there was a thong hidden between perfectly round, tanned and toned cheeks. for all intents and purposes, their asses were bare. Im not a religious person, but this was something of a Praise the Lord moment.

Gott in Himmel!

homesick?

Perhaps a little. A flight from the states must have landed because there are slopilly taped up boxes circling the carousel that say home depot, uhaul and solo cups. I can't say it brings a tear to my eye, but I think to myself, hmmm wonder when I'll be back. What I'm missing most? Familiar faces. Tho I meet people daily, these friendships are fleeting.

Mandy and Matt; She's totally hot east German girl with a great smile. Travels with matt, a hottie in his own right, a bearded brad Pitt, but maybe a lil shorter. Who can tell, arent Al Pacino and Tom Cruise so puny that they have to stand on a platform? His story is amazing, from the heart of Montana, somehow he left his white trash, hunting culture behind and traded it in for a well stamped passport and a Euro babe.

more profiles of the cool people ive met to come...

Sushi dinner for a fiver

Strange concept, unemployed, but have full time housekeeper who do your wash, clean the house, prepare meals if you ask. Handed her the one belt I had which was totally gross smelling, mildewy from many swims and then never a proper drying to see if she could save the thing. In the meantime, to keep my shorts from falling off my ass, and to give myself some kind of attainable goal for the day, i go on a shopping adventure, and find that unlike stores in the states that wont do shit for you, anyone who sells a leather product has some basic tools and the skills to make adjustments. In a few minutes, the shop im at removes the buckle of a something i picked out, cut a couple of inches off, punch a some extra holes, and voilà, a custom fit. Try doing that at the GAP.

Most kiosks are selling the same shit, knock offs of calvin klien, levis, whatever. You will find sunglasses with the mercedes benz logo on it. Only one kiosk sells something highly original: crazy patterned underwear named Pull-In (as opposed to pull-out?) Super fun, might have been a good sexy valentines day gift if I knew anyone who would let me see them in their panties. But the price is something impossibly stupid, about the cost of 8 sushi dinners!

The street curves following coastline, across from which is a huge construction site on a AAA prime location. Someone told me that the Vietnamese are like the Chinese and Jews. Communists, sure, but they sure know how to turn a buck. While the rest of the world is still suffering a bad hangover, their economy grew 6%. The ground has yet to be broken, but surely, a beautiful glass tower with unbelievable futuristic architecture and unbeatable river views will soon sprout in this location. The little winding streets in which I live will be lucky to stick around.

Down an alley are a bunch of cafes, an ad agency or two judging from the cool logos and The Cage, a cheesy looking club the likes of which I'd never attend at home, but am highly curious about here. The street dead ends into a super trendy looking Sushi Bar. It's 11:01 when I walk past, just a minute after the doors have opened, like some crazed bargain shopper on black Friday waiting at the front gate to snap up some of the door buster deals. A little early for sushi, normally, but I've eaten fish/rice for brekky every day for a couple of months, so it's not a huge stretch. The prices are very enticing. Beautifully presented raw fish for just 90,000 dong,