The drisblog

The list of things on the Internet that you absolutely have to watch just increased by one.  This guy traveled around the world and danced everywhere he went, and he got paid to do it.  Watch it, it’ll make you smile.

…hey, it’s short but it’s something. Pictures from Matt and Jen’s wedding in Kendallville, IN. Enjoy!

Oh, and I suppose it’s a minor noteworthy detail that Cara and I have officially left our jobs and moved out of Washington, DC. Our travel blog for the big South East Asia trip is coming together as we speak at an undisclosed location, and will have all the details shortly.

…I upgraded lots of stuff, and added some things I’ve been meaning to get around to. Mostly, you’ll see changes in the gallery, where you should be able to easily add comments and 0-5 star ratings on images. Yay! Also, you can syndicate The Drisblog with RSS using the link at the bottom of the page. Oh, and I know about that mysterious “Wordpress Database Error” at the bottom of the page….still working on that one. Lastly…I finally got around to uploading pictures from the snowboarding trip to Mammoth in February here. Let me know if you run into anything weird.

…so, a little software upgrade in my blog turned into a big software upgrade, which turned into a lot of buggy pages. Things are broken, and the gallery looks dumb at the moment. I’m working on fixing it, hopefully things will be back to normal soon.

So in the past few days, the number of world class athletes I’ve met in person has increased from 0 to 2. Saturday night, a bunch of us went out in the Fitzroy neighborhood of Melbourne. It’s actually the same neighborhood in which I saw the 20 naked cyclists a few days ago, and I would highly recommend it for its great bars and fantastic live music. (Hey, how can a neighborhood in which people cycle naked not totally rock?) At any rate, you could say we had a few beers…and you could also say we had a few shots. You’d be right on both counts. At some point we found ourselves walking down the sidewalk with the Jamaican 400 meter hurdler who had just won the bronze medal the previous day. We told him we thought he was great, or something to that effect, and we may have bought him a beer…things get a little foggy at that point. Other highlights of the evening included trying to convince the cab driver who took us home not to kick us out of the car after my friend John decided it would be a great idea to open the cab door at 30 miles an hour or so. Diplomacy prevailed in the end, and he took us the rest of the way home. That, however, is not the best athlete story I have to relate.

Sometime last week, I was out in downtown Melbourne with a few Aussies and a kiwi I’ve made friends with out here. We decided to track down this bar called The Croft Institute that Lonely Planet claimed would inspire “Devotion or disgust, depending on who you’re talking to.” After getting directions from a few friendly, drunken locals, we finally found The Institute tucked down about 3 dark alleys in Chinatown. The downstairs bar is decorated like a high school chemistry lab, complete with sinks and gas nozzles in the table tops and test tubes behind the bar. The upstairs dance floor is more like a high school gym. All in all, not a bad place…if not a bit uber-trendy.

At any rate, the five of us were sitting around a table at the Croft Institute when this girl came up to us to ask how “five guys could be sitting in a place as great as this, and not be having a good time.” Personally, I think this was brought on by the fact that there’s something in male code that says you can’t look like you’re having a good time when there aren’t any women with you because you’re too busy looking distracted and cool. At any rate, we told her that we were, in fact, having a good time and ended up talking to her for a while. When I asked her what she was doing in town, she said she was a rower (though rowing isn’t in the Commonwealth games) here with her boyfriend-cyclist (who wasn’t competing in the games, but was just there to check out the competition). I told her I didn’t think she looked like a rower, since many of the female rowers I’ve met have been “big scary women.” She, of course, asked if she was a “big scary woman” which is clearly just fishing for a compliment. At any rate, the conversation went on for a while longer, and eventually her cyclist-boyfriend looked annoyed enough that she was talking to five dudes instead of him that she left.

After she walked away, the kiwi we were with exclaimed “Do you know who that was?” I, of course, did not. Apparently she was Nicky Coles, literally the world champion in coxless women’s pairs rowing (well one of two in the pair, anyway) and a favorite to win gold for New Zealand at the 2008 Beijing Olympics…and I told her she didn’t look like a rower: awesome.

It was definitely a uniquely exciting experience to be here in this city that’s been trying to show it’s best side to the rest of the world (or the rest of the Commonwealth at least) for the past two weeks, and it’s an equally uniquely deflating experience to be here in the aftermath. It feels a little like all the life has been sucked out of the city. Streets that were packed with excited spectators just a few short days ago are now back to business as usual, with just a few Commonwealth Games 2006 banners still flying from buildings and a few games volunteers still walking around in uniform. With Australia’s final total medal count at 221 and England trailing a distant second with 110…I think it’s safe to say that the home team cleaned up. I wonder if I’ll remember to check the results for the next Commonwealth games in Delhi in 2010…

I recently read a story on the top 10 adventure trips in Australia in Outside Magazine. Because Australia is massive I probably won’t be able to make it to the majority of them, and the few that are in easy reach all involve horses….which generally don’t get along with me. This is fine, however, because there is more than enough to do in and around Melbourne.

One of the great things I learned from this article in Outside is that there are a great many animals in Australia who would be happy to bite, sting, or poke me to death. On average, this process generally takes about 20 minutes. Apparently, there is even a seed that can kill you: a non-breathing, non-moving seed for crying out loud. This killer seed allegedly causes death (not generally in humans, usually in dogs and cattle…forgive me for being slightly over-dramatic) by getting stuck in a part of your skin when you eat it and burrowing its way into your brain. If it weren’t for the jovial, friendly locals with their always-entertaining and occasionally incomprehensible accents…one might almost call Australia inhospitable.

I posted some pictures here. In particular, don’t miss the bright yellow naked guy riding through town demonstrating for Greenpeace. Also, the pictures of the 2006 Commonwealth Games Opening Ceremonies are pretty spectacular. I haven’t been to many…make that any…opening ceremonies before, but I have to guess that this was on par with those of the Olympics.

There’s something magical about looking out the window of an airplane as it lands you in a country you’ve never visited…even if that country is a sort of bizarro United States. It’s like at that moment your whole trip is this wide-open canvas and you could end up meeting any of those tiny people in the tiny houses and miniature cars you see from the air. I love it.

What can I say about Melbourne? Well, it’s very different from Amman, that’s for sure. It was a shock getting off the plane after a 14+ hour ride and finding myself in a country where I’m not constantly trying to remember how to say please, thank you, and can I have three shawarma in another language. Melbourne is a very metropolitan town, sort of New Yorkish I think. Drinking at all times of the day seems to be more socially acceptible here, as evidenced by the two guys I saw today at four in the afternoon sitting at an outdoor cafe with several empty beer steins and a tray full of tequila shots in front of them. The number of bars and restaurants is mind-boggling…and they all seem to be full all the time. I’ll try to post some pictures soon.

Traveling with co-workers has its advantages and disadvantages. On the one hand, it’s nice to have people to hang out with. On the other, though, that pressure to meet new people just isn’t as pressing, which is too bad. Also, one of my coworkers appears to a bit more bigoted then I’d previously realized. She actually commented at dinner the other night that she was glad Brokeback Mountain hadn’t fared better at the Oscars because “Actors shouldn’t be rewarded for making films ‘like that.’ ” Who says stuff like that? It’s certainly been an eye-opening experience and an interesting view into how the conservative right thinks…but I think I’ve had enough of it.

Fortunately, I got my liberal fix the other night. I was having a beer with Drew, one of my other coworkers, and I had my big-ass Nikon camera sitting out on the table. A guy at the next table asked to take a look at it. I trustingly handed it over, we debated the merits of Nikon vs Canon, and that was the start of my evening of getting good and drunk with Paul, a flaming gay Australian photographer and Frankie, his lesbian photographer friend. One of the more memorable moments was Paul dumping an entire pint of beer in Drew’s lap spending the next hour trying to pat Drew’s crotch dry for him. I do have to give Drew credit, though, for staying open minded about the whole evening. I think all the other guys I work with would have been running for the hills for fear of getting gay cooties or something.