The next day

The next day I asked Yang if he could remember our last conversation, when I had scared him by coming back in from the bathroom and waking him up. He said he couldn’t remember but that he always speaks Japanese when he gets scared. I hope I don’t develop that habit.

After a few hours of him studying and me browsing through my guidebook for where our next destination should be we left the house and caught the bus to Cairns. Yang had never seen the lagoon at the edge of Cairns, or the big swimming area and beach kind of thing. The name for all this together is the Esplanade, and that is where we went.

We walked along near the lagoon for a while and played Guess The Nationality with the people passing by. Cairns is full of Japanese people, which also added to my feeling of culture shock: everything was in English but it was not England because there were palm trees, it wasn’t Japan either but there were loads of Japanese people. My Lonely Planet guidebook mentioned a nearby modern art gallery with the beautiful description, “Admission Free.” So we went there.

Downstairs in the gallery was a display of impressive Aboriginal art, each picture with its own price tag. Upstairs were a few more displays, including a great video of ants congregating on a plate. The ants were all busily collecting sugar but all together they made up the shape of Australia. The artist had carefully drawn Australia on a plate using sugar and then left it in a garden with a camera filming the plate from above. Since the ants always started from the outside and worked inwards Australia got smaller and smaller as the video progressed. I wondered if you could do the same thing with humans picking up money.

On leaving the gallery Yang happened found the comments book and said, “What’s this?” On learning its purpose he filled in his name, country and then as a comment he wrote one of his favourite English words. It was on the second “i” in the word “Rubbish” that I complained, “You can’t write that!” He finished his comment however and asked me if it was spelt right, it unfortunately was. “Let’s go,” he said.

After the gallery we went to the library until Yang realised he had lost his phone. We called it from a payphone and it turned out to be inextricably in my bag. Later on we found an Internet café to and booked a trip for the next day on a thing called Skyrail, a cable car into the rainforest. The Internet café was called Global Gossip and this franchise turned out to be a big part of our trip. The guy in the Cairns branch was very friendly, he gave me a membership card which could be used as a phone card too and said the Internet was just 1 dollar an hour. Bargain.