Today, Friday, I saw a poster for Big Day Out -- a huge annual music festival down here -- that the Hoodoo Gurus are headlining. This B-side is a little on the perverted side, so I can see why they didn't put it on the Mars Needs Guitars album, but it's still a good song."Turkey Dinner"
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On Thursday, I got up a little after seven in the morning. I headed down to the Brasserie again. Got pancakes and a glass of OJ.
After working on my fiction, I walked about a half-mile down the road I'm staying on. At a used CD store, I found one of the three albums I'm looking for, Turkish Delight by The Persian Rugs, a Hoodoo Gurus side project.
I then headed to another record store that was a few blocks away, though they only sold vinyl. So I walked over a mile to the next used record. They didn't have what I was looking for. By this time, it was about one in the afternoon. I bought a two-hour tram ticket to take me back to the hotel.
The tram system here is interesting. You can buy all sorts of tickets. The two-hour ticket is only $3.50. It's kinda cool, it doesn't take effect until you slip it into the machine on the tram. Also, what's fascinating is that there's a bit of an honor system going on here. You slip your ticket into the machine so it gets stamped, but you only do this the first time until it expires (I took three trams on my two-hour ticket, but I only slipped it in the machine on the first tram). And the tram drivers have no interaction with the passengers. They're just in their little bulletproof booths, keeping an eye on the road. Oh, and unlike in Philly, where at the end of the line the trolley goes in a loop to reverse the route, here there are two conductor booths, one at each end of the tram. When the tram reaches the end of the line, the driver exits the booth and slides into the other booth at the other end. Neat!
I had a late lunch at an upscale Chinese restaurant a few blocks from the hotel. I ordered their seafood combination and some hot tea. I liked the meal: they served the seafood in a mountain of white rice -- all on one plate.
I was way past due on some laundry, so I did a few loads around the corner from the hotel. The washers were weird because you needed to pay for a token . . . looked like something from Batman's utility belt.
With a suitcase full of clean clothes, I wrote the blog for Wednesday, but when I went to upload to my site, the Internet wasn't working. The hotel switched providers on Wednesday and the installers apparently fucked up. I was pretty pissed off about that, since this is a four-star hotel. The front desk did what they could, but it was 7:30 p.m. and the Internet provider's phone help were pretty useless.
In a bad mood, I blew off my original plan of Indian for dinner. I stalked down a couple blocks to get a pizza with everything on it. It was OK -- they had pineapples and shrimp on there; not really my scene.
I closed out the day by chilling out in the hotel room, grateful that my cold wasn't too bad all day.
One of the two tram lines that run on the road my hotel was on.
