Month: November 2006

The Secret Life of Alcoholics*

“What are we going to get for Alex’s birthday?” Di asked. Alex is one of our housemates.

“I was thinking of getting him two boxes of Stella Artois. Do you remember how we were at Sainsbury’s that first week and how wistfully he looked at those boxes? We couldn’t carry them home last time.”

“That’s a great idea!” Di agreed. “Let’s go tomorrow afternoon.”

The next day, we left the house at 4 PM and rode 15 minutes down the road to the big supermarket. We found the beer easily. The special price for two boxes of 20 bottles was still available.

We took the boxes through the checkout and opened our backpacks to put them in.

“Uh oh.” I tried to rearrange the box to fit into my 30 L backpack but it was just too wide.

“It’ll fit in my backpack, I think,” said Di. She unzipped hers for the other box. Our hearts sank as it quickly became obvious it wouldn’t fit. “Maybe it’ll fit in my bike basket…”

We wheeled the boxes outside to the bike parking lot. Di picked up the box and carefully placed it into her basket. “I hope it doesn’t break the basket,” she murmured.

It didn’t fit.

“What are we going to do?”

We looked at each other and had the same idea at the same time. “We’ll have to take the bottles out and carry them,” Di said.

“I think we should put them in our backpacks, not in the basket,” I cautioned. “I reckon there’d be some law against riding a pushbike with 20 bottles of beer in the basket…”

We spent the next five minutes reloading the bottles into our backpacks. Then, with 10 kg of beer and glass on our backs, we gingerly hopped onto our bikes, turned on our lights (it was getting dark) and rode onto the street.

I laughed all the way, even as I struggled up the one hill in Cambridge. My bag tinkled with every pedalling motion. Rider after rider overtook the two of us. We did make it home without an accident.


*Don’t worry, mum, I’m joking.

Before walking

We were walking through the glasshouses at the Cambridge Botanic Garden when I spotted a sign that made me laugh. It said, “No perambulators beyond this point.”

“Look at that! Isn’t that funny? It says ‘perambulator’!” I laughed.

“What’s a perambulator?” asked Jon, puzzled. Jon is from Calgary in Canada.

“A pram.”

“What’s a pram?”

That stumped me. “Erm. It’s a chair with wheels. You push babies on it.”

“Oh, a stroller!” Jon clarified.

This exchange, too, was funny to me so I recounted it to Di when I got home.

“In Australia, we say ‘pram’,” I explained to Di. “If you said ‘stroller’, we’d understand but I think ‘pram’ comes more naturally.”

“What do the English call it?” Di asked.

“It said ‘perambulator’!”

Di started laughing. She laughed a lot. Yeah, I thought it was funny too, but not as funny as Di seemed to find it.

“That makes so much sense!” she said. “It’s like ‘before walking’.”

I was confused for a second, then I got it. “No, no! Not pre-ambulator! Per-ambulator!”

A tropical flower in the glasshouse.

The reason we went to the Botanic Gardens was that it was Apple Day.

I ate my very first toffee apple. My next task is to try a caramel apple.

Taking a punt

Perhaps it was the last warm, sunny day for the year. Something in the air told us that we needed to make the most of this Sunday in Cambridge. Dianne and I decided to take Jana punting before she flew out to Iceland.

We arrived at the Scudamore’s ticket box. “How much does it cost to hire a punt?” we asked.

“£16 an hour,” said the lady. She looked weary. Damn these tourists, she was probably thinking. Seeing how poor we looked, she asked, “Are you students? Which college? Okay, that’s £14 an hour. You’ll need a £70 deposit or we can take your credit card.”

We looked at each other. Di shrugged and took out her credit card. While the lady was swiping it, I picked up the punting guide on the counter and flipped through it. It was full of commentary on the sights we would see as we punted down the Cam.

“Hey!” A guy leapt towards the ticket office. “I’ve only got five people on my punt and I’m about to push off.”

“Only five?” said the ticket lady. “There were 15 just now!”

“Yeah, well, I’ve only got five.”

“How much for a guided punt?” I inserted quickly.

“Are you students? £10 each.”

“Give us a discount and we’re on the boat,” I replied.

He considered it briefly. “£9, then.”

Not much of a cut, but hey, that’s AUD2.50. “Okay! Deal.”

Punts are flat-bottomed boats. Punting is a popular activity at both Oxford and Cambridge.

Jana took this photo. I put on my Asian tourist pose.

There was a lot of river traffic on Sunday.

The amateur punters kept causing traffic chaos, like this river jam. Our guide was a seasoned professional — David from Pembroke College. Mostly, we sailed blithely passed the traffic tangles. We asked David how difficult punting was. He said, “I would put it on par with ice-skating.”

This is the Bridge of Sighs (check out the weblink!). It is one of three in the world, the other two being at Oxford and the original one in Venice. David told us the the Venetian one was called the Bridge of Sighs because it linked the prison to the court house. Prisoners would sigh as they crossed the bridge towards their fate.

On the other hand, students at St John’s Cambridge would sigh as they crossed because the bridge linked their college rooms to the examination halls.

Unlike at Venice and Cambridge, the Bridge of Sighs at Oxford crosses a road rather than a river. David told us that as the students at Oxford crossed over the noisy traffice, they would sigh and wish they went to Cambridge instead.

Why study when you can fish?

Postscript
Oh, and remember the punting guide I mentioned? I tucked it into my bag. When I got home, I gave it to Jana, saying, “Here, Jana, you can have this as a souvenir of your Cambridge punting experience.”

“Thanks, Joan,” she said. “Hey, did you pay for this? I didn’t see you do it.”

“Pay? No. Was I meant to?”

“I think so.” Jana flipped the booklet over and there, at the back, it said ‘£2.50’.

Whoops!

World’s biggest slide

A few weekends ago, I went with a group of friends to the Tate Modern in London. This is what I wrote in my organising email.

On Saturday, I am taking the train to London to see the Carsten Höller exhibition at the Tate Modern. It features the world’s biggest slide
— it’s six storeys tall, and you can slide down it to reach 30 mph.

It’s free, too.

Where does the ‘art’ come into it? The description asks, “How might a daily dose of sliding affect the way we perceive the world? Can slides become part of our experiential and architectural life?”

I’m really only going for the thrill factor, though. Thought I might like to leave Cambridge a bit past 9 AM.

We arrived at 11 AM and got tickets. We were scheduled to slide at 2:30 PM.

In the mean time, we saw some really interesting exhibitions on the top floor of the museum and grazed around Borough Market. Borough Market was good but I wouldn’t recommend anyone go at lunch time on a sunny Saturday, which also happened to be the 150th anniversary day of the market. We could barely move.

When we got to the slide, a couple people in our group said they were feeling sick in the stomach. I was unfazed. “You can’t fall out of it. What’s there to be scared of?”

So I put on my safety cap and kneepads, and climbed into the potato sack.

The first bend was much scarier than I expected. My heart jumped. I giggled madly all the way down. It wasn’t exactly comfortable; the slide was assembled in segments so it was bumpy. My head hurt afterward.

In the evening, we went to see the Blue Man Group at London’s West End. Being students, we paid £15 for the best seats in the house. That’s a 75% discount.

If only I didn’t have to study, I could have fun all the time instead of just most of the time.

My friends made me prove that I was tall enough to ride the big slide.

There were three slides, I think. Kids could only go on the slides that began on the second or third floors. The six of us asked for tickets to the tallest slide on the fifth floor.

People kept falling off the sides of the slide when they came down. I think they fell because they try to halt their sliding. I was too busy giggling to think about stopping so consequently, I flew in gracefully and was poured onto the landing mat.

The faces of Intel, The Blue Man Group. It was very, very random. It was funny and clever, too. Worth seeing, especially if you have a student card.

Fasten your seat belts

I carry my books in a backpack, which I strap around my waist and my chest. Those straps were way too nerdy to use in high school but now that I’m more mature and self-confident, I’m not afraid to clip them in. They’re really handy for distributing the weight around my little frame.

So you’ll find me zooming around Cambridge with this backpack strapped around my body. The other day, though, I was riding to my dance lesson. All I had was a bag for my dance shoes, which I had tied around my handlebars.

I felt unusually free — and vulnerable. After a while, I realised that I felt bad for not wearing my seatbelt. Of course, the ‘seatbelt’ sensation usually comes from wearing my backpack.