To add your support visit: http://ido.org.au 250 volunteers came together on a Sunday afternoon in Sydney Town Hall for Australian Marriage Equality. The aim was to create a “mega-mob” video to show the statistics in support of marriage equality.
Speakers include: Geoff Field, Julie McCrossin, Dave Graham, Mia Freedman, Carl Katter, Natalie Tran, Geoff Thomas.
Proudly supported by: Australian Marriage Equality, City Of Sydney, GetUp & Rock Your Box.
San Francisco (without its weather) is the city I’d love to live in the most if I ever moved away from home. The food, the BART, the chocolate, my favourite bakery and ice cream place, the house in the opening titles of Full House… I’ve been to San Francisco a few times now and every single time I go, I visit the park, sing the opening theme song and reminisce about Becky, Jesse, Michelle and Steph.
TV talk aside, I could keep gushing about how livable this place is but instead I’ll recommend my favourite tour to do here – Alcatraz. It’s a quick ferry trip out to the abandoned prison island (purchase tickets through the tour company) and from the moment you get to the island, you’re entertained. You hear about the escape attempts, the riots and the living conditions. More amazingly, you get to hear most of it through an audio tour featuring the voices of ex-prisoners, guards or people who lived on the island. I’m not really doing it justice, so just do it – you’ll have a ball.
ELVIS. I love you so much Elvis. I love you so much I went and walked into one of the numerous Elvis stores in Las Vegas and bought so much of your memorabilia I felt like the true Las Vegas tourist. Then I went to the casino, lost twenty bucks and realized perhaps I wasn’t a true Las Vegas tourist because that was as much as I was willing to gamble. Twenty bucks would have bought me a lot of Snickers Bars. I had to smarten my act. I exchanged my poker chips for tickets to a few shows and spent my remaining time in Sin City watching people act out stories intermittently interrupted by song and dance.
What amused me the most about this city was that after travelling to quite a few places around the world for the past few months, I arrived in Las Vegas to see most landmarks recreated down the Strip. There were all the things I had seen, the Pyramids, the Eiffel Tower, the Arc de Triomphe, the Sphinx, the Empire State Building… Now I’m not saying they were as good as the real thing but it was a little bizarre to see them. Then again, natural daylight was also bizarre to see in Vegas so hey.
I’ve always loved strolling down Hollywood’s Walk of Fame, with all the people holding pamphlets asking if you’d like to be an extra in a movie, audition for a potentially big role or see where famous people live.
I’d like to say I’m not drawn into the whole celebrity-spotting thing myself, but I admit I saw a few celebrities and immediately adopted the role of ‘Undercover Agent Must-Get-A-Photo’. Yes, I know, where’s my cool? To be fair though, I didn’t go after them, they came to me – well, in a shared-the-same-physical-space-as-me sort of way. Because I’m so terrible at remembering names though, at one point I referred to someone as ‘JUST SHOOT ME!’ and another as ‘SEX IN THE CITY!’ Isn’t it awful when you’re not even a fan of a show but you get excited when you see people from it?
Celebrities aside, I’ll tell you what’s impressive about LA: the roads. SEVEN. LANES? SEVEN LANES? I’m only talking about lanes going in one direction by the way. On one of my trips in infamous LA traffic, I found myself on a freeway that spanned 14 lanes in total during one stretch. I think that’s the size of my suburb at home. No joke.
LA is always an interesting place to visit, a place filled with too many talented people and too few movies/shows/songs for them to share. On the upside though, I’m not one of those people so my visit is purely for the theme parks.
One of the great things about Mexico is its incredible history. This country is filled with remnants of the many civilisations that have called Mexico home at some stage.
For example, Mexico City was built on top of an Aztec city so if you scratch below the surface, you’ll find acres of Aztec ruins. There’s a great site in Mexico City where you can see where some of the ancient city has been excavated and one of the modern roads is still running across the ruins. I asked a local guide why they didn’t just dig up the Aztec city and they responded, ‘why dig up a city just to find ruins?’ My internal dialogue and inner geek cried out loud at the thought of all the amazing things under the pavement I was standing on.
As I mention in the video, the structures of ancient civilisations are absurdly complex and often cater to moments such as stars aligning or the position of the sun at a particular time. Unfortunately, they were also incredibly mindful of acoustics when building these sites so my cursing would echo around the ruins as the guides told me the purposes of some of the architectural features.
Many people mention Chichen Itza when they talk about ancient sites in Mexico, but the whole country is decorated in ruins that I recommend you take a detour to see if you visit the country.
Hola. I had a lot of fun this week travelling from Mexico City through to Cancún and one of the things that was the most fun was watching Mexicans getting confused a little whenever a tourist asked for nachos.
The best part of it was hearing them describe things that most of us would know as Mexican food as ‘TexMex’. You might manage to find the Taco Bell menu in tourist hotspots that cater to the international market but if someone asked for it, the usual response would be ‘que?’ Oh Western World, how you have lied to us.
Despite this earth-shattering discovery, I found Mexico to be one of the most beautiful countries I’ve visited so far (I would recommend you skip Cancún though). Sans Cancún, all the other Mexican destinations had central squares called zócalos where people would gather, market stalls would set up and bands would play. In Mérida, you could even come and charge your laptop if you felt like it.
I’ve got to be honest, I was a little hesitant to visit Mexico after seeing it in the ‘warning’ zone of countries to visit and watching news story after news story about gang violence but it offered nothing…except the depiction of a peaceful and very friendly country. According to my guides, crime here is about as common as nachos… but it’s the other way around – you usually find it away from tourists. Basically, stay away from gangs or dangerous areas, none of which I saw while travelling through. So, if you’re hesitant about traveling to Mexico, I urge you to reconsider. It’s a fantastic place!
I had a lot of fun this week travelling from Mexico City through to Cancún and one of the things that was the most fun was watching Mexicans getting confused a little whenever a tourist asked for nachos. The best part of it was hearing them describe things that most of us would know as Mexican food as ‘TexMex’. You might manage to find the Taco Bell menu in tourist hotspots that cater to the international market but if someone asked for it, the usual response would be ‘que?’ Oh Western World, how you have lied to us.
Despite this earth-shattering discovery, I found Mexico to be one of the most beautiful countries I’ve visited so far (I would recommend you skip Cancún though). Sans Cancún, all the other Mexican destinations had central squares called zócalos where people would gather, market stalls would set up and bands would play. In Mérida, you could even come and charge your laptop if you felt like it.
I’ve got to be honest, I was a little hesitant to visit Mexico after seeing it in the ‘warning’ zone of countries to visit and watching news story after news story about gang violence but it offered nothing…except the depiction of a peaceful and very friendly country. According to my guides, crime here is about as common as nachos… but it’s the other way around – you usually find it away from tourists. Basically, stay away from gangs or dangerous areas, none of which I saw while travelling through. So, if you’re hesitant about traveling to Mexico, I urge you to reconsider. It’s a fantastic place!
New York, New York. So important that they named it twice *drumroll *. Seriously though, New York often sells itself as the greatest city in the world and while I’d argue it has some good competition out there, it’s certainly busy.
I can’t think of another city that has so much going on 24/7. They really ought to call New York something like ‘The City That Never Sleeps’ rather than its current slogan – ‘The Late City’ or whatever it’s called.
Oh, fun story for you. I was waiting around to buy tickets to The Merchant of Venice and The Importance of Being Earnest when someone came up and offered free tickets to David Letterman. I wasn’t sure who this was but figured it was too cold to stand outside so I accepted. When I waited in the audience line, it was announced that Justin Bieber was going to be the guest star. Teen girls were screaming with cameras ready outside the door, paparazzi were armed with their SLRs and all I could think about was, ‘Oh man, is this the High School Musical kid?’ Turns out it wasn’t but they have the same hairstyle.
For the nerds out there, The Importance of Being Earnest was great! It’s my favourite play so it was amazing to finally see it on Broadway. Suprisingly, Al Pacino was in The Merchant of Venice. It was like watching The Al Pacino of Venice, if that makes sense to anybody.
As soon as you step off a cruise ship and onto the shore of any Caribbean island, you realise one of two things. You either realise how tough your life is, or you realise how tough your life is.
Every morning the ship would dock at a new island destination and I, along with my rowdy fellow-passengers, would slather on the sunscreen and pick which umbrella to claim. That’s a lie – being a nerd, I would buy tickets to a historical tour of the island first and then find an umbrella.
It’s hard to believe (because the islands all look like slices of paradise today) that they’ve had incredibly busy histories – and this leads me on to one of the great things about this area: the combination of many languages into one. Papiamento is a Creole language spoken on a few island countries in the Caribbean. Its influences include African languages, Dutch, Portuguese or Spanish, English and other native languages/dialects. I understand mixing languages myself, sometimes I speak English, sometimes I speak Hunger, but this amalgamation impressed even me.
When time came around to setting up camp on a beach, I would look around and see the other passengers of the ship, many of whom were now a deliciously dark shade of sunburn. Admittedly, I do feel bad being a part of a swarm of people who arrive at an island, set up shop at the beach for a few hours and then hustle back on to a floating hotel, but on the other hand many of the islands rely heavily on tourism. What an interesting leg of the trip.
![“I Do” – Australian Marriage Equality [MEGA MOB]](http://natalietran.mycdn.co/img/i-do-marriage-equality-615-250-1-80.png "“I Do” – Australian Marriage Equality [MEGA MOB]")
Week 15: Mexico (part 2)
One of the great things about Mexico is its incredible history. This country is filled with remnants of the many civilisations that have called Mexico home at some stage.
For example, Mexico City was built on top of an Aztec city so if you scratch below the surface, you’ll find acres of Aztec ruins. There’s a great site in Mexico City where you can see where some of the ancient city has been excavated and one of the modern roads is still running across the ruins. I asked a local guide why they didn’t just dig up the Aztec city and they responded, ‘why dig up a city just to find ruins?’ My internal dialogue and inner geek cried out loud at the thought of all the amazing things under the pavement I was standing on.
As I mention in the video, the structures of ancient civilisations are absurdly complex and often cater to moments such as stars aligning or the position of the sun at a particular time. Unfortunately, they were also incredibly mindful of acoustics when building these sites so my cursing would echo around the ruins as the guides told me the purposes of some of the architectural features.
Many people mention Chichen Itza when they talk about ancient sites in Mexico, but the whole country is decorated in ruins that I recommend you take a detour to see if you visit the country.