Sunday, June 19, 2005
The Magic Tractor
Soundtrack: “Final Straw” by Snow Patrol. An album that I don’t actually own and keep on meaning to get, but it was being played that night. More of that later.
Tuesday 7th June. I woke dauntingly early to catch the plane first to Melbourne on Virgin Blue (an airline I’d never heard of until I came down here. It’s the most efficient and reliable Australasian budget airline). From Melbourne, I connected to Auckland via Air New Zealand. On this flight, I was sat next to an ageing Thai couple, which I found to be a thoroughly disagreeable experience. Not because of the couple themselves, but because of the way that the flight attendants behaved. They all just assumed that I was with the couple because the three of us were Asian, and they couldn’t tell the difference. The couple barely spoke any English and kept on refusing the tea and accidentally pressing the call button and stuff, so I didn’t get any tea unless I yelled after the flight attendant in a plummy English accent, and they got really annoyed with me because they thought that it was me who kept on pressing the button.
I think that the thing that annoyed me the most was that they just assumed. Lots of people that I’ve met have said that they really loved Melbourne. I enjoyed myself there, and it’s a pretty cool city, but I wouldn’t say that I loved it. Now, I really hate to say this, because a) it shouldn’t be true and b) I’m going to sound as if I want to be persecuted to make white people feel guilty, but: it’s a very different place to be if you’re white. Because there are so many Asian people in Melbourne, and many of them haven’t got a very good grasp of English and the white Australians perceive them to be flooding their schools and stealing their jobs, lots of people looked down on me and patronised the hell out of me when I was in Melbourne. My accent just got posher and posher when I was there. The same thing happened when I was in Auckland, another city full of Asian people. For example, I wasn’t paying much attention to the direction in which I was going, so I nearly walked into an old lady. As I apologised to her, I heard her mutter: “Another f*cking Asian.” It shouldn’t make me angry, but it does. Nobody tell the Boy, or he’ll go ape-shit. Rant over.
I arrived at the Fat Camel Hostel at around 7pm. Dinner was being served, so I went to claim my free meal, and ended up sitting with these two American women called Joanne and Nahpi who had just quite their jobs with Air Alaska. Joanne was there to work in Christchurch for a year, and Nahpi was just visiting. We sat there for five hours whilst they aired their grievances and disenchantments about the state of the country.
I thought I’d better go to bed then, but there was a party in full swing in the lounge on my floor, so I figured I’d join in because I wouldn’t be able to sleep anyway. Consequently, I met a whole bunch of drunken people. There was Simon, a very funny Irishman who is just like Dylan Moran, who’d been traveling for 21 months and was going home for the summer after Auckland. Martin had been working in Sydney for 6 months, and kept his pink-haired head in “How To Be Good” by Nick Hornby for most of the night, occasionally saying something in an odd Cardiff-Sydney accent. Four Irish girls (I’m a magnet for Irish people), Trish, Rosie, Kate and Louise, had just come from Fiji. A goodly proportion of people in Auckland have either come from Fiji, or are on their way there. I can’t see the attraction, myself. Then there were three Welsh with mystifying Cheshire accents who were living in Auckland for a month and trying to find a place: Ben, Rich and Sean. Their mates, the two Marks, were already in bed.
By the time I got to them, they were all already drunk, so we’d got to the talking-about-random-nonsense stage (similar to Mo’s birthday when Big Chris kept on going on and on about all those times he nearly got killed in Middlesborough mosh pits). And then we got onto the crap jokes.
“Did you hear the one about the magic tractor?!” piped up Simon from the hole in the sofa.
We were laughing for ages before we even heard the punchline – that line is absolutely hilarious when delivered in an Irish accent.
Incidentally, the punchline is: “It went down the road and turned into a field.”
Tuesday 7th June. I woke dauntingly early to catch the plane first to Melbourne on Virgin Blue (an airline I’d never heard of until I came down here. It’s the most efficient and reliable Australasian budget airline). From Melbourne, I connected to Auckland via Air New Zealand. On this flight, I was sat next to an ageing Thai couple, which I found to be a thoroughly disagreeable experience. Not because of the couple themselves, but because of the way that the flight attendants behaved. They all just assumed that I was with the couple because the three of us were Asian, and they couldn’t tell the difference. The couple barely spoke any English and kept on refusing the tea and accidentally pressing the call button and stuff, so I didn’t get any tea unless I yelled after the flight attendant in a plummy English accent, and they got really annoyed with me because they thought that it was me who kept on pressing the button.
I think that the thing that annoyed me the most was that they just assumed. Lots of people that I’ve met have said that they really loved Melbourne. I enjoyed myself there, and it’s a pretty cool city, but I wouldn’t say that I loved it. Now, I really hate to say this, because a) it shouldn’t be true and b) I’m going to sound as if I want to be persecuted to make white people feel guilty, but: it’s a very different place to be if you’re white. Because there are so many Asian people in Melbourne, and many of them haven’t got a very good grasp of English and the white Australians perceive them to be flooding their schools and stealing their jobs, lots of people looked down on me and patronised the hell out of me when I was in Melbourne. My accent just got posher and posher when I was there. The same thing happened when I was in Auckland, another city full of Asian people. For example, I wasn’t paying much attention to the direction in which I was going, so I nearly walked into an old lady. As I apologised to her, I heard her mutter: “Another f*cking Asian.” It shouldn’t make me angry, but it does. Nobody tell the Boy, or he’ll go ape-shit. Rant over.
I arrived at the Fat Camel Hostel at around 7pm. Dinner was being served, so I went to claim my free meal, and ended up sitting with these two American women called Joanne and Nahpi who had just quite their jobs with Air Alaska. Joanne was there to work in Christchurch for a year, and Nahpi was just visiting. We sat there for five hours whilst they aired their grievances and disenchantments about the state of the country.
I thought I’d better go to bed then, but there was a party in full swing in the lounge on my floor, so I figured I’d join in because I wouldn’t be able to sleep anyway. Consequently, I met a whole bunch of drunken people. There was Simon, a very funny Irishman who is just like Dylan Moran, who’d been traveling for 21 months and was going home for the summer after Auckland. Martin had been working in Sydney for 6 months, and kept his pink-haired head in “How To Be Good” by Nick Hornby for most of the night, occasionally saying something in an odd Cardiff-Sydney accent. Four Irish girls (I’m a magnet for Irish people), Trish, Rosie, Kate and Louise, had just come from Fiji. A goodly proportion of people in Auckland have either come from Fiji, or are on their way there. I can’t see the attraction, myself. Then there were three Welsh with mystifying Cheshire accents who were living in Auckland for a month and trying to find a place: Ben, Rich and Sean. Their mates, the two Marks, were already in bed.
By the time I got to them, they were all already drunk, so we’d got to the talking-about-random-nonsense stage (similar to Mo’s birthday when Big Chris kept on going on and on about all those times he nearly got killed in Middlesborough mosh pits). And then we got onto the crap jokes.
“Did you hear the one about the magic tractor?!” piped up Simon from the hole in the sofa.
We were laughing for ages before we even heard the punchline – that line is absolutely hilarious when delivered in an Irish accent.
Incidentally, the punchline is: “It went down the road and turned into a field.”
