The quiet weekend

Visited my local for the first time on Saturday morning, a little pub called the Mitcham Mint. Never expected much, and was completely satisfied. The decor is reasonable and the Guinness was very good, but I found myself mixing with a lot of English men who were busy drinking bitter and whinging about the state of English cricket. I was cheering their collapse quietly, it seemed the safest thing to do. It seemed to me that everyone there was named 'Fark', thats what the incredibly large man with a bad skin condition was calling everyone he saw. 'Hey, faaaaaarrrrrkkkkkk!'. He was only quiet when he stopped to shovel more food into his gob, it was quite a performance, one that saw me leave after a pint.

Then visited the pub that Rossco recommended in a previous comment. Despite the review, the place was half full of Aussies watching the cricket. This lasted until the innings break, when the television was changed to the racing. As soon as that happened, loads of dark looking people appeared from the shadows and shuffled their way towards the lonely television clutching piles of betting slips. Once that happened the place lived up to its reputation.

The pub after that looked quite fancy from the outside, but was just as bad on the inside. There was only one other person there, a wiry guy with a lot of tattoos who sat at the bar and stared at me with a little grin on his face, most disturbing. About halfway through my beer an asian girl came into the pub armed with a sackful of pirated dvds that she was selling on the cheap. As I was looking through them she said 'I have this', and shoved a wad of pornos under my nose. Went back to the Mint after that and found that the cricket had been replaced by the football. Had a pint with fark, fark and fark before going home and ironing. It seemed the best thing to do.

Queensland seems like a very backwards sort of place this morning for one reason only, that being that your average Joe or Liz simply isn't trusted with fireworks. Thats very different here, my local convenience store sells them for quite a reasonable price. If that doesn't seem dangerous enough, it is forbidden to set off fireworks in public places, like parks, leaving pyros with no choice but to do so from the safety of their tiny backyards.

Saturday night was Diwali, one of the big hindu festivals of the year. My area has a large Indian population. And so with ads on the radio telling you what to do in case you were hit by a firework in the eye, most of my close neighbours were setting off full blown fireworks in their backyards for about 5 hours on Saturday night. If that doesn't get you here for a visit I don't know what will.

See ya