We checked out and headed down to the bus stop by the beach. There follows a series of bus driver pictures by Yang. It is a story of love.
One lonely bus driver.
Two bus drivers but with something in between them.
Two bus drivers finally united.
The bus driver on the left took us to the ferry terminal. At one junction there were three or four cars coming down the road so he had to wait before he could turn out. He said jokingly, “What? Traffic on Magnetic Island!”
On the ferry I was reminded of something that I had not heard for a long time, not since we used to take the ferry to France when I was a kid. It is also the kind of thing you never think about except when you are on a boat. I am of course talking about Muster Stations. Me and my sister thought they were funny years ago because muster sounds so much like mustard. Why would you need mustard if a boat was sinking? Is it because if you eat enough you get really hot and so can survive the cold waters of the sea? Would Jack from Titanic have survived if he had only had a pot of English mustard?
Back in Townsville we got information about buses to the airport because we had chosen to fly to Brisbane rather than take the train. You see, by train it takes 24 hours but by plane it takes just one hour and 45 minutes. They were both around the same price so it was an easy decision. We had some time to kill before we got the flight so we left our bags in a storage locker and went to find an Internet café.
I can’t remember the name of the place but it was really relaxed. Yang was looking through his wallet for his student card so we could get the student rate but the guy said, “Relax, I can tell your students, you don’t have to prove it.” The place felt much like his territory, we had to be as relaxed as him if we were going to do business. So not asking the usual questions, like how much it was, in case we got sent away for not being relaxed enough, we sat down at a computer. We had to book a place to stay in Brisbane - somewhere for that very night. There were two places available at around the same price, one offered a free airport pick up and a free breakfast as well though so we decided on that one. From our experience with the three person room we wanted to go large and stay in a 12 person dormitory, where there would be so many people you would not have to worry about awkwardness and being friendly.
Yang did some studying, we printed out our plane tickets, paid and then went to a free art gallery. Downstairs was a mixture of paintings, including one called, “The Line” which was a long line going along the wall. A woman sitting behind a desk asked me where I was from and then talked a bit about her daughter. She mentioned the exhibition upstairs and said, “It’s one of those.” I heard her talking about it to some other people who went up before us, she said, “If you clap then the spiders come down.”
The lift doors to the first floor opened to this.
It was a mixture of big spider toys amongst stuff hanging in red material that looked like drooping flesh. I had seen these spider things before in Bristol Airport, but never as art. There were loads of them and the woman was right, if you clap loud enough they scuttle down and then slowly climb back up their strings waving their legs and flashing their eyes.
The exhibition also had some interesting crutches.
There was Hairy Crutch.
Spikey Crutches for the recovering cowboy.
Some shoes, like this one called Soule Cutter.
These shoes with a trapped bird.
Whatever this was.
The exhibition was called Props For Barcelona Two Step.
On the way out the woman behind the desk asked me, “Did it blow your mind?”
“In a way,” I said.
We were hungry and poor so went to Woolworths and bought cheap snacks. We got Home Brand coke, Home Brand chocolate fruit and nuts and some crisps. We sat at one of the tables in the centre of Townsville and ate our nutritionless lunch. Lots of birds joined us too.
There was a really good sculpture on the street based on the idea of a human anthill.
The objects had been collected from various groups of people, ranging from school children to army personnel. The objects had been assembled into the anthill pattern, moulds were taken, something else complicated happened and finally it resulted in solid aluminium sculptures.
I guess the objects were all things that people didn’t want anymore and they included Shrek's head .
An old controller and video.
Even a Leaning Tower of Pizza.
Back at the ferry port we caught the bus to the airport. Our flight was with Virgin Blue and the woman behind the counter said the picture in my passport was, “Cool.” It is slightly side on and might not be accepted these days, but I am stuck with it for three more years. I have to make sure when I show it at Check In that I also look at the clerk slightly side on so that I look exactly the same as my picture, yet not so much that they think I have a problem with my neck.
On the plane and in my seat pocket was a paper bag. The top of the bag said, “Please use this bag if you are affected by motion sickness.” Underneath this line it continued, “Digital photos from 17 cents! Free Internet Viewing. Free Sharing for Family & Friends. Just send your jpg images on memory card, CD or DVD in this strong coated bag. You’ll receive back photos by mail in 7 – 10 days!” Advertising gets everywhere these days, even sickbags. But the two purposes of this bag are so completely different that it’s just asking for trouble surely. Imagine if you got on the plane and filled out all the details, put in your memory card and then sat back looking forward to receiving your prints. Then during the flight you felt ill and in a moment of forgetfulness ended up vomiting all over your memory card. Your photos would be ruined and even if they weren’t then fishing out the memory card would be quite unpleasant. Conversely I wonder if due to elaborate clerical mistakes the company ever receives just bags of vomit.
We got to Brisbane and after baggage collection made our way to the train for the city centre. I called the hostel to ask them for the free pick up. The first time I called the phone rang but then cut out as if someone had answered but then become chronically shy. The second time a woman answered who sounded a bit drunk. I couldn’t really work out what she was saying and she had a little difficulty understanding me too. She said something about cars blocking in cars and that they couldn’t pick us up. I was a bit annoyed by that since the website promised a pickup and we were quite tired, it was about 7pm. She said taxis would be about 15 dollars but she wasn’t sure. I asked her about walking and she said, “Well you could try.”
That wasn’t very encouraging. My Lonely Planet book had a map of Brisbane which detailed both the station and where the hostel was, but I am sceptical about maps in guidebooks. I find they tend to be too large in scale (or do I mean small), with not enough road names and if there was a park inhabited by a man eating giant they would just draw two trees, write “park” and leave you to discover the rest yourself.
At the train station Yang took my guidebook and looked at the map in the station to get our bearings. We walked down some stairs and stepped out into Brisbane, and this.
After the electric lights of the plane, airport and train the dark sky and warm air was really refreshing. After the smallness of Townsville and Magnetic island seeing a city again was almost a shock.
We talked as we walked and saw the city slowly passing by. The lights of a huge bridge appeared and disappeared from view as we walked between large buildings. We saw churches, parks and interesting looking buildings far from the modernity of Cairns. The walk to the hostel was pleasant to say the least.
We found the road in the hostel’s address and at the appropriate number there was a huge metal door. A bell was screwed to the wall but it didn’t work so we called the reception again to say we were outside. We could hear some people talking from within and Yang said, “They sound Korean” but he wasn’t sure. We both expected the hostel to be full of Europeans, my sister said the whole of the East coast was full of, “Drunk British People” and I was slightly dreading sharing a room with ten of them. Yang had said again that he would probably be the, "only Asian."
We heard several locks being rattled about and then the door opened. The receptionist was not drunk, she was Asian and had a bit of a lisp which gave a strange tone to her English. As she led us through the hostel to the office we saw that the previous voices did indeed belong to a group of Koreans. Walking through the rest of the building there were more and more of Yang's countrymen. There were Koreans sitting in the lounge, cooking in the kitchen, walking down the stairs, smoking in the carpark etc. Everyone we saw was Korean. I found it hard not to laugh at how wrong we both were, and how it was me who was going to be the one standing out.
There was a problem. They had overbooked the large dormitories and there was only space in a four-person room for that night. Since the four-person rooms cost more she wanted to charge us extra for this. We complained since this was not our fault and we didn’t get the airport pickup either. She said, “Ok” and we got our cheaper rate – another success for polite complaining. Yang said to her, “Excuse me, are you Korean,” in a slightly, “Let’s drop this silly speaking English act.” She looked at him with the kind of weariness like she had been asked this question a hundred times before, “I can see you want to speak Korean don’t you, but no I’m not Korean.”
She gave us our key and we climbed the stairs, walked passed more Koreans standing about and arrived at the door to our room. While I was feeling amused at how, like in Japan, I was again in a group of people where I was the outsider, Yang was instead looking a bit nervous. We knew that there were two people already in the room and chances are they would be Korean so I waited for Yang to knock and go in first but he didn’t want to. I knocked and then entered. About six Korean people sitting on the beds looked up at us in shock. I didn’t know what to say, “Hello, we’re staying here. There are two people staying in here already right?” Without saying anything and looking sort of embarrassed they all left the room in a swarm. Suddenly alone we were completely confused about which two people were actually our new roommates.
Whoever they were, they had chosen the bottom bunks so Yang and I took the top ones. We unpacked, looking for space inside the dusty wardrobe. There was a TV, a set of lockers and strangely a DVD player under the bed. A girl knocked and came into the room. She nervously greeted us in English and I gave her a chocolate raisin – not as a reward. Yang spoke to her in Korean and within thirty seconds she was laughing and smiling. I liked her immediately; her name was Mea – though I am not sure how it should be spelt.
Yang asked me in Japanese if I knew where the bathrooms were. I didn’t, but he didn’t seem to want to look for them on his own so we both started exploring. There were two bathrooms on each floor, and only two showers between the maybe 40 people who were living there. The bathrooms were old and rotten. The water around the shower collected in a big puddle on the floor, there was a hole for it to drain through but because someone didn’t understand the laws of gravity it had been given no reason to flow through it.
Back in our room our other roommate appeared. He was called Dongjun and he was also friendly. The four of us talked for a while and then me and Yang decided to venture out into the night for some food, yes like possums.
It was 9pm and everything seemed to be closed. We walked down the streets we had walked up a few hours before. Eventually we found a 7/11 and bought some sandwiches. We ate on a park bench and talked about our roommates, we both felt like it might be better to stay in that room rather than go to the bigger dormitory. I had assumed they were a couple, but Yang told me that was wrong – they had met on the plane from Korea and decided to stick together
That day was Saturday the 29th of March and it had been one year since I left the UK and arrived in Japan. I felt a bit nostalgic, it had been a strange year. “You know it is one year today that I met you for the first time,” I remarked to Yang. He said, “So?”
Back at the hostel Mea and Dongjun were in our room. I went to find the receptionist to ask her whether it would be possible to stay in that room for the rest of our stay, but she wasn’t there. When I got back a Korean girl ran ahead of me and through the door. She sat down on Mea’s bed looking slightly manic. She introduced herself as Rachel, because she looks like Rachel from friends. It was true, her face was quite similar. Not long after Rachel another Korean girl came in, called Jay. I went to have a shower and when I returned there was yet another new person in our room, a Korean guy who introduced himself as Jason.
The seven of us sat and talked about all manner of things, including the room next door whose occupants often had loud sex. Mea said that when it happens she runs to tell Rachel who always wants to listen.
At about 1AM everyone returned to their own rooms and we went to sleep, except for Yang who stayed up with his laptop to study.
It had been a strange strange evening but in an entirely good way.
1 comment:
The pictures makes the blog real. really amazing! Guess you had a bash. Did you take any pictures during your channel crossings?
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