Western Toilets, Suburbia & Ice Ice Baby!

On the 29th of December I flew to Perth, Australia. Bangkok Greg of "Perfect Stranger" post fame (end of September 2007) so kindly picked me up from the airport at 5:30 in the morning, took me to his home for breakfast, a shower and a nap. I reveled in the familiarity of his family's suburban home - comfy couch, big screen TV in the den, deck chairs, family photos, toilet paper...Oh how nice it is to sit on a toilet and know that a)it is clean and b)not have to clean oneself with a bucket of water and ones hand. Sheer bliss! It's the little things you miss.

We spent the rest of the day driving the sights, checking me into a hostel (until I moved into my temporary permanent home with a girlfriend I met in Laos) and finding out what was on in Perth.

Perth is the world's most isolated City with thousands of kilometers between it and any other metropolis of note. With only 2 million people in the greater Perth they have some, but certainly not all of the culture and musical acts coming through. An angel must have been looking over my shoulder when I booked my ticket to Perth, however, as just one day after arriving in town a legend was performing: Vanilla Ice!

Thankfully there were tickets left for the show (shocking, I know). The performance was delightfully horrific. Vanilla Ice, the early 1990's white-boy rapping one-hit-wonder turned reality TV star, made no attempt to pretend that he was in fact talented. He knew that the audience would be filled with 20 and 30-something hipsters who couldn't care less what the set was like as long as he performed his one song. And perform it, he did, right smack dab in the middle of his 50-minute set otherwise filled with Linkin' Park-esqe music. The emphasis was on entertaining the crowd rather than trying to convince the crowd of any sort of genuine musical talent and it worked for everyone involved. Bless him.

Although Vanilla Ice provided a nice "welcome back to the over-indulgent media-crazy West," I have continued to feel right at home in this lovely modern city. Since then, I've continued to enjoy the finer things the 1st World has to offer such as hot water, public transportation that runs frequently and bans livestock, department stores that carry bras that fit, salons, meals that don't include rice, lattes, Internet, movie theaters and more. It's good to be home...or at least somewhere like it.