I’m in AUSTRALIA!
So far it’s been nice, we’ve been going to Tilde Festival which is a Trans and Gender Non-Conforming Film Festival. It’s been awesome! We also went to the beach multiple times, rode a 100 year old wooden rollercoaster, saw a cockatoo being chased by some other birds, watched a jellyfish bloob around in a river, and five minutes after leaving the airport saw some kangaroos hanging out. Also I ate a kangaroo burger and we’ve spent lots of money on food because it’s pricey here. Tomorrow we go to Phillip Island to see some kangaroos, koalas, Tasmanian devils, and penguins. We actually did see one penguin by the pier, some people said it wasn’t but it was small and fat and looked like it was wearing a tux so I am pretty sure it was a penguin.
I still want to eat some oysters, we are gonna go to the UGG and Blundstone Outlet stores, there’s an old prison we want to tour because it’s creepy. I was in a haunted hotel having a pee and then we walked to Bourke street just a couple of hours before this guy did a terror attack there by running a ute filled with gas canisters into Target or something and then running around stabbing people. My Mom was like “You are getting close to danger I think you should come home!” but obviously I haven’t left. It’s getting fucking ridiculous my proximity to terror attacks and this is probably the closest I have gotten. To think if we hadn’t got tired and gone back to the hostel we could have still been there is so bizarre.
But like that time in London, no one here really cared about the attack. No one was doing hushed whispering or looking around with paranoid eyes. People just went on with their lives. Which is really all you can do.
It’s pretty amazing what the land and climate is like here. They have trees so unlike the ones we have back home. Like, just really fascinating land and flora and fauna. I feel pretty lucky to be here to see this place finally. I’ve wanted to come to Australia since I was a kid because it sounded like such a fantastical place. And it really is like, SO UNUSUAL. To my Canadian eyes anyway.
The festival is over now, we saw some good films. Tonight we saw Man Made which was about trans men bodybuilders and was so good! It covered a wide variety of life experiences of these men and didn’t just like, end with transitioning. Like it went into parenting and relationships and meeting birth moms and Black Lives Matter and homelessness and being trans and unable to access shelters, and top surgery, and lesbian partners and I really liked it. Some of the docs we had been seeing were like, trans 101 and I was disappointed by those, but this one was just really complex and lovely.
I’m sleepy. The flight here was so long. Two planes to get to Los Angeles and then a 15 hour flight from Los Angeles to Melbourne. SO LONG! We were taking ativan on the way here and basically passed out, but they kept putting food in our faces and we’d be like, all groggy trying to eat.
Anyway, I am having a good time. I’ve been trying to sleep in but we are staying in a hostel and if we wake up early enough we have the showers to ourselves. So yeah. The hostel life is not for me anymore. This one is a party hostel basically and all these youth from mostly Europe are like, drinking every night and being annoying and sitting in front of the front door drinking and smoking weed and being obnoxious. And running up the hall when we are trying to sleep. I’m glad we have a private room, small mercies. A larger dorm room would fucking SUCK! ALSO doors don’t lock from the inside, so every night after we pee before we go to sleep we stack our suitcases against the door to keep drunks from wandering in.
NOT ONLY THAT but we are the only butch dykes here for sure, and the only visibly queer people. So that’s always like a weird fucking situation to be in. But no one has said shitty things to us at the hostel, they are only interested in drinking and flirting and making pancakes and smoking. We are probably really invisible to them also, since we are older.
They walk on the opposite sides of everything compared to Canadians. Like we walk on the right and they walk on the left. They stand on the left on escalators. When we ask for cream for our coffee they ask “Do you mean milk?” They call an Americano a Long Black. Their paper money (actually plastic money) makes sense because smaller denominations are smaller and large denominations larger. but the 2 dollar coin is smaller than the 1 dollar which is way smaller than 50 cents.
Riki says their queer/trans community seems to have people who are very similar in appearance to people we know back in Toronto. Like there is a finite number of queers in the world that just repeat in different locations. She called it The Upside Down. Also the fashion here is not as hoity toity as queers in Toronto, which is kind of nice. It’s true, Toronto queers have some weird fashion thing going on that I don’t really mesh with being like, slob butch from Saskatchewan who dresses like an urban farmer.
Anyway there’s my blab for the day! It’s 11pm and I gotta sleep!