In Moscow subway stations are underground palaces. Amidst the grandeur passengers rush in an orderly fashion from platform to platform on marbled floors. Grand archways, tangled iron bridges and chandeliers mark their progress. Commuters march back and forth under the pressure of roads and buildings above. Elderly trains rumble and crash along worn iron tracks. Security guards and attendants sit quietly behind glass. While I, I stop and admire the stained glass. Guess it's because I'm the only one with time to spare; being a tourist.

Millions of lives traffic through buried palaces every day in that grand old city. I visited Moscow for a week last summer and, while I learned very little during my stay, I saw enough to be dazzled. The scale of things was most surprising: everything was just so big! Walking between the Moscow River and one of the many concentric multi-lane highways which ripple out from the city center I saw a car advertisement which spanned over 200 meters. A life-sized model of the road below was positioned perpendicular to it. Real car shells hung from it, suspended above our heads as we walked the shore, in the distance one of the huge state buildings glittered over the water, its many towers and pillars adorned with stars and heroic statues.

That week in 2008 was an eventful one. Two major events were occurring which interested and concerned me. Firstly, Beijing was hosting the 29th Olympiad. Having lived in China four years ago I was keen to see that country open its doors to the world, which they did in a magnificent, proud and very Chinese way (lots and lots of fireworks). I was happy for China to see everything go well, during my stopover in the Shanghai airport (I place I have spent many a long hour waiting in) everyone ignored the first boarding call for our flight because we were too busy cheering on the women's archery team. I figured it was safer to cheer for China than their English opponents, given the country I was in. I just want to add here that Shanghai Airport has the most ridiculous transfer system I have ever encountered. Instead of keeping us securely inside the airport and just ushering us from arrivals to departures, we were given temporary visa's only to walk out and catch an escalator upstairs, walk past check in and back through customs. It struck me as quite, quite mad, however, I took the opportunity to walk outside and take photographic proof that I was in China during the Olympics. Note my cheesy "I'm in China" grin.

The second world event to occur that week was Russia, my fun-filled holiday destination, attacked Georgia over a its mistreatment of an ethnic minority. I didn't really understand the whole situation because the news media I viewed on the topic were completely conflicting. On the one hand I saw Western coverage saying that Russia was using peacekeeping to take back some soviet land, or it was about natural resources and pipe lines. On the other, the Russian news channels were accusing Georgians of genocide and showed their peacekeeping efforts in nothing but a good light. It was all quite a to-do at the time but now, not even a year later, I have no idea how the whole situation panned out. I guess I better do a web-search and get informed.

Rainy Days in Tochigi

It's raining today, started last night and has kept going with ever increasing intensity. Usually I ride my bike the short 5 minute journey to work. It's great 'cause I absolutely hate getting up early. Total night person me; I get up at 9am to work at 10am. Most people would consider that lazy but I think it's a clever use of time. Anyway, on rainy days I tend to walk rather than ride because of the beauty. Maybe I watched too many BBC shows when I was younger but to this day the experience of walking under an umbrella and dodging deep puddles holds a certain romanticism for me.
Small things leap out: water glistening on a smooth rock or flowers vibrant with colour despite the grey sky. It's nice taking some time to actually notice things. My favourite author said that if we went around noticing things all the time we'd never get anything done. And he's right, however it is such a nice thing to indulge in. Momentarily forget what you're doing or have to do and waste some time in contemplating the shape of rain drops.

Confessions of a triva buff.

When I was a student I took advantage of free* university and a scholarship to generally have a good time and live out some Edwardian fantasy I had about university life. Shamelessly I enrolled in an Arts course studying humanities, history and literature. Without even a though of my future job prospects!
University was weird. There's so much going on there you really can try interesting and different things. Like... Fencing club: the place where nerds do battle. Or, the Young National Party: where being racist is OK!
Seriously though, all the political club people were unbearable. Like this one guy I dated for a while in my second year. He worked part-time for a local member of Labor and was, in the midst of John Howard's long and exacting run of power, a dedicated Labor Party supporter. Which was fine, until Kim Beazly failed to convince everyone that his inflated self would be able to steer the Nation well through troubled waters whilst illegal immigrant babies were being thrown overboard!
At least, that's what that media lot said anyway.
So, not as too much a surprise to most, Labor lost and poor unseen-of-late boyfriend, having been kept awake and campaigning for the last 43 hours on caffeine pills and alcohol, showed up on my doorstep. He was a pale and wasted image of his old self. He stumbled in and collapsed on my couch babbling about Keep Left signs mocking him and how only oral sex would make him feel better. So you know what I mean about political types being a little too dramatic.

University is where I learned really useful stuff; like my favourite author when I was a child was a paedophile, or that the South Pole was reached first by Roald Amundsen's and then Robert Falcon Scott's teams. Admundsen was also the first to reach the North Pole too. Anyway, the point is everyone remembers Scott and not Amundsen because Scott's name is much cooler. It's true if you don't believe me.
The point of the Amundsen and Scott story is to say something about trends: Only the most popular names, books, faces and films survive. Only that which is talked about most can survive Samuel Johnson's 'test of time'; the rule that if a work can survive time it is truly good. So, according to Johnson, can it be true that Madonna is on par with Shakespeare?
We used to discuss that kind of thing in class. I kept wondering why I had worked so hard in high school at trigonometry if this was higher education. University filled my brain with interesting yet essentially useless information. That is, useless in the workplace yet deadly on Trivia Night down at the pub.

What does the future hold for me? I hope I end up some kind of trivia buff who travels from dusty frontier town to dusty frontier town. Taking on the local buffs at their own trivia nights and surviving on the spoils: free drinks, dinner coupons, meat trays and magnum bottles of wine.

*free means I owe the Australian government loads of money. I don't have to start paying it back anytime soon though so I think it's free.

I am visually disturbing.

I was going to start again but that would probably lead to 'paramnesia' (isn't that a lovely word, looked up the spelling for deja vu and got that little gem). That and well... it's just the Internet and I and our one-sided love affair.
The Internet teases me you see, gives me glimpses of things I would like then leads me to a US and Canada website only. It will let me fill in all parts of a booking form then reject me on a whim. It will, as you see, let you write an entire blog: fabulous and witty and then will return mysteriously to the previous page, deleting my material forever. Condemning it to the realm of lost data. What a horrible fate.
So I won't start again. And I'll have a 10 second silence for all of the data I've lost in my life.

Tokyo is one crazy town. I think I might actually love and hate it in exactly equal portions. There is a law: for every lovely nice thing that happens to you there an unexpected and unpleasant thing shall also occur. Last weekend is a very good example of this law. My flatmate and I, riding on the back of a recent windfall, booked into a posh hotel, rode the shinkansen to town and cruised around the bay in a floating night club.
It was a wonderful night out, I even got chatted up by a tribal pattern enthusiast, although I think his fascination was caught more by the patterned top I wore than my own, ample, charms. So one night I experience the high life, the next afternoon I'm chucked out of an onsen on account of my very small spiral tattoo. It wouldn't have been so very embarrassing if I hadn't been completely nude during the "Please leave, you're visually disturbing the other clients" conversation. The staff member had me, I couldn't very well say "what tattoo" innocently!

Back to the boat for a moment though. It struck me as odd early in the evening that the groups we were sitting near were all really stereotypical. It was weird. On our left we had a group of party-happy young gay boys, swilling champagne, which was provided by an older, but not elderly, European man. They were quite fun actually by the end of the night they were all pole-dancing and removing their clothes, providing muscle displays for the keen to see. To our right were the Goths. I guess they're Emo's now. They sat quietly, smoking and drinking red wine with their dark, lank hair draped artfully across half the face. It was easy to think they weren't even enjoying the music until you saw the odd foot or finger tapping; the odd fringe moving to the beat. If that wasn't enough across from us were the crew-cut army boys in ties and shirts with scantily clad South East Asian escorts.
I started to feel worried that there wasn't some cliche sub-culture I was a part of!

No matter where I go I just can't get a full mental picture of Tokyo.
It just seems to stretch forever, in variation.
No matter the vantage point, it won't be revealed to me.
From air, sea or land
it remains a mystery:
Unfathomable.

Or maybe it begins with a G?

Jerrymander? I don't even remember what it means exactly, something to do with politics maybe, anyway, the point is, we were in the middle of a game. That's where the story begins really.
Tim, Matt, Bri, Meghan and I were engaged in a game I've always known as Fictionary, however Tim believes it to be Balderdash. I thought he judged the game a bit harshly really, a little bit silly sure but balderdash? Surely not.
Are you familiar with the game? I hope so, all you need is some paper, pens and a dictionary. Common items about the house really. The game involves guessing at the meaning of uncommon words found in the dictionary! Points are scored for correct answers and, and here's the good bit, you receive points if players choose your answer.

It was quite a popular game with my crew for a while. We were like that: restlessly shifting from thing to thing. Constants like one apartment, lived in for more than 2 years, became a bit of a hub. It had a sense of solidity in the midst of what was otherwise mutable and shifting.
Ha! the number of stories that could be told about that apartment building. It should be heritage listed, maybe it even is. I wonder if it's still going? The endless string of friends passing a rental property on. That in itself is a bit of a Brisbane tradition; another way to grow some roots.
Nostalgia, I feel, is yellow and slightly sticky. Like some kind of viscous resin. It has a strong smell too, one that makes you feel slightly ill if you breath it for too long.

So we were in the middle of a game of fictionary. People had long since abandoned the strategy of guessing the correct answer and were playing for points from their peers. Or, to put it another way, we were all being a little bit silly and voting for the funniest answer, this, as you can imagine lead to a lot of puns. There was the definition "a refreshing drink for vampires" given for 'tamponade' and "the economic practice of making new vets from old ones" for revetment. Gerrymander, it is spelt with a 'g' thanks dictionary, was defined as "when a geriatric goes on a little wander."

Since then, jerrrymandering or gerrymandering has become a bit of a pastime for me. And you would be right to question how someone who is clearly not a geriatric goes on a jerrymander. It's easy if you know how: start without knowing the end and see where you end up.