This is my 100th day in Australia. Crazy!! I go home in 5 weeks! I'm not ready to go back. I love it here!
Anyway, I don't know if I have explained this before or not but the city of Perth is split into sections. Much like New York City with Brooklyn and Bronx. Today I went with my class to an area called Northbridge. It received this name because there is bridge over the river and this district is North of it. I know...super creative. We were to meet there. So I went with my friend Anna and a couple other kids from our class. Our directions were to meet in front of the Western Australia Art Museum by The Caller statue. We got there 15 minutes early and walked all over the place and could not find the statue. We even asked 3 workers and they had never heard of it. Turns out there was some heavy remodeling construction going on and the statue was covered up by a giant wooden box that had since been spray painted with graffiti. No wonder we couldn't find it. After finding our teacher and our tour guide we set off.
Our guide was John Aitken. He was a very nice and charming old man. I think he must have been in his 70's. He told us historic facts with a few side stories of when he was growing up as we walked around.
He took us around and described old buildings that weren't there anymore, and showed us areas, like where public hangings used to take place, that had now been built over or torn down. John has been involved in theater most of his life and he took us to a tine theater called The Blue Room. This was one of the very few historic buildings that has stayed up. The reason it could not be torn down was because there was a mural inside that was painted by someone famous (that I have never heard of before). But here are some pictures. It was really cool to see the mural. It is located back stage so only the actors (and people on this tour) get to see it. The mural covers all 4 walls and the ceiling of the room.
The ladder is not part of the mural. Workers were doing something up in the attic. If you look closely you can see that the mural incorporates a lot of famous actors, starts, characters, and play writes.
Yes that is the air vent coming out of the wall that is serving as the plane's front end.
This is a picture of the ceiling. It was just paint and a cardboard saw blade but still looks like an actual hole is getting cut.
He then showed us around some more and we went through Chinatown. I've been to Northbridge before but only on the main strip. If you deviate from the main road by 1 street you get Chinatown. I've talked my roommate into going with me on Friday for a girls day out. Everything is cheap in Chinatown so we are going to et our nails done, massages, authentic Chinese food!
This is some man in Chinatown's bike. Looks like he had a pet bird. This is the type of bird that commonly found all over. So it is unusually that it is trained as a pet (like us having a pet robin, or blue jay)
Oh yeah and John kept telling stories about boarding houses. He kept calling them boardies. He then mentioned a story about a mistress at a boardy who had a pyramid shaped diamond ring (pretty descent size) and when there was an issue with one of the "mugs" male customers she would take him outside to have a discussion and swing the back of her hand across his face and knock him unconscious and then call the cops to pick up the unconscious body. That was when it clicked for everyone that when John said boardy he was really saying "bawdy" which means a brothel. Suddenly all of his stories became much more interesting.
After the tour we went our separate ways. Anna stayed in Northbridge to participate in some alcohol study. She had to give feedback about alcohol advertisements. I went back to campusto go to work for 3 hours. Then I came home and made a fabulous dinner of garlic and parmesan chicken sausages and lemon and herb cous cous stir fry. Follow with a bowl of vanilla ice cream with chocolate covered shortbread cookies crushed and mixed into it.
Then I studied economics for 3 hours. Way exciting. I took a study break in the middl and watch the season finale of the 20th season of Survivor with Nicky and Gavin. It was actually pretty intense. They had been watching it every week. I would catch episodes here and there. So yeah, now I'm back to studying.
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