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April 26 - 30th Perth. - Reviving Busselton and song
Six hours of thrilling coach time, and two made-for-coach quality films, after I left Albany we pulled back into East Perth station, the exact place I'd left for Busselton ten and a half weeks beforehand. It was a little weird going back to a place that I'd been before, clearly I've become too used to constantly moving on and being in new places...don't know how I'm going to cope when I come back to the UK! I knew that, in spite of it not looking too great a distance on the map, the walk to my hostel, Beatty lodge, in West Perth would be a long one but I really didn't fancy jumping on another bs after finally being free of the one I'd been on all day so reasoned that the exercise would do me good. To be fair it was only the final half hour of the hour and a half trek that proved a challenge!
That (Monday) afternoon I met up with some fellow Busselton refugees, Franck and Kim. Eventually. First I walked one way for ages, got a phone call telling me people had moved, so I backtracked all the long way I'd just come and lay down in the new meeting place, a small park in the Northbridge district. There was a giant screen in the park, which was handy as it gave me something to watch (a discovery channel documentary about planets, as you ask) for the 45 minutes it took anybody to arrive. Punctuality is clearly not a Perth strong point...or maybe its just the people I know! Kim eventually put in an appearance...as did 9 other Koreans. I got led to a Korean food place (that in the maze-like suburban streets I doubt I could eben come close to finding again), made a 'not bad to complete lack of experience' attempt at using chopsticks and perfected my bemussed clueless expression as attempts were made to teach me Korean drinking games. These involved far too much rhythm and singing for my taste anyway...the slight language difficulties ended all hope of my success! It was a very surreal scene and honestly not where I would have predicted myself being had you asked me that morning! Still, it had a really good friendly, slightly insane, feel to it and I was happy to let the maddness carry me along.
Which would prove to be a necessary mindset as next we headed over to a Korean Karaoke place. Now I've had the dubious pleasure of being in m fair share of UK Karaoke places over the years so I knew more or less what to expect right? Wrong. After Franck and 2 other French people showed up there was a total of 15 of us crammed into this tiny 5 by 8 meter booth, on one side there was a giant screen and on the other a table that would become steadily full of empty bottles. Turns out that Koreans take their karaoke seriously, with all of them practically fighting for the two microphones and manically dancing around to the point of bouncing off the walls. It took a little while to become accustomed to but in the end I thought it would be rude not to join in. Leafing through the small English section of the song book I was surprised to find it to be mostly European power metal and American pop punk, not exactly what you'd find in the UK. However I decided this wouldn't sit too well with the Korean pop music and in the end wen, for reasons that now escape me, with 'the final countdown' by Europe. It could have gone down better, turns out being on the other side of the planet doesn't improve my singing!
On the Tuesday I headed over to Fremantle, which is about twenty minutes away by train. I had a slow wander up one of the main streets, that was mostly lined with coffee shops. I brought a large chai and sat down to consult my seldom-used guidebook about how to get my touristy kicks. First off I headed to the Fremantle arts center, which was housed in an impressive, imposing giant Gothic building that had previously been an asylum. There was art. I nodded as though I knew what I was doing. I passed the old prison as I walked back into town, I got a nice picture of its front but a mixture of the twenty bucks entry fee and hundred of school children prompted me to give it a miss. Down at the bay I went to the oldest public building in WA, the Roundhouse, which was where they kept prisoners untill it was decided it was too small and the prison was built. I can see that they meant, the place was tiny, taking 5 minutes to walk all the way around. Slowly. I also poked my head in the Shipwreck galleries, but didn't find it all the engaging so didn't stick around that long. Perhaps I was simply all touristed out for the day!
That evening I met up with even more Busselton refugees, plus somebody who had arrived after I'd left but that I'd met in Albany. Clearly WA is a small place! It all seemed the perfect reason for a bottle of wine really.
The Wednesday during the way was taken up with boring yet necissary tasks, such as sowing up a tear in my bag. I always knew those teenage years sewing patchs onto my cloths would prove beneficial someday!
If the day was somewhat boring the evening was anything but as I headed to the Rosemount hotel for a gig - The Revival tour featuring Chuck Ragan, Frank Turner, Tim Barry and Ben Nichols. The setup was a little different from the standard concert concept with all four of the named acts, plus two additional musicians on fiddle and pedal steel, taking the stage at 8.20 and running through an assortment of their songs. They then had their own segments each but these would typically involve everybody else helping out at various points and when not they'd stay on the stage singing and clapping along.It was a very loose show, with much of the song choices and order seemingly made up as it went along. Turner did has bit last, presumably in deference to the number of people who seemed to be there for him. It all ended as it had started, with everybody back on stage and the crowd moving. It's a testament to how great everybody was that the three and a half hours with no breaks stage time flew by and with a bit of luck the tour should make it to the UK one day. After I've come back of course!
Thursday was my last full day in WA, of the 4 nights I was in Perth it was the most uneventful, I didn't do anything more noteworthy than having a massive push to get last weeks series of blogs typed up and online (if you think they took long to read try typing the things!) and setting down in a couple of parks reading and soaking up the sun...oddly the weather here doesn't seem any different than when I was last here two and a half months ago...maybe Autumn is just an unpleasant figment of the imagination...
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