New things make me angry

One constant in my bourgeois, progressive middle class life has been the imperative to travel. Throughout my childhood and adult life, family, friends and society at large have all been absolutely clear that my life will be shallow and meaningless unless I obtain a number and variety of stamps in my passport. The mechanism by which travel is supposed to enrich and fulfil me is unclear, as are the exact prescriptions about what kind of travel and what sorts of destinations are desirable for whatever travel is supposed to acheive.

I have always been deeply sceptical about this insistence on going overseas. It may be awesome, but is it really culturally or personally enriching to trek in Nepal? I would argue that it's equally foreign and novel for eastern-seaboard dwelling middle class Australian to trek in central Australia. Given that everyone else you know has already gone dancing in Latin America, does a quick twirl on the dancefloors of Chile really make you different, or just another member of the crowd? And as for the people who rave about the museums and historical sites of Europe - have you been to the cultural institutions in your own country? There's nothing inherently authentic about trying to cram a lifetime's worth of capital A Art into the stops on your Kontiki tour if you're just going to ignore that stuff for the rest of your life. I would argue that the really enriching journeys are the ones we take within ourselves - where we take an emotional or psychological risk, where we challenge ourselves and learn and strive and succeed and fail. Perhaps these journeys can happen on the other side of a plane trip, but for lots of people they don't. And these experiences are readily accessible in our own lives and landscapes if we're willing to take them on.

In my case, overseas travel (which I haven't done much of) has a fairly predictable pattern. My reaction to a new environment has four distinct phases, and my impression of a place once I have left is not related to how deeply the plight of its noble peasant people has touched my sensitive soul. Rather, it is determined by what stage I am in when I leave the new environment for somewhere else. It is at once helpful and slightly frustrating that I recognise these phases as I pass through them, but I seem to be somewhat powerless to alter their progression. The first phase is:

Bewilderment:

At first I am confused. This can extend from simple mistakes with public transport systems, or difficulty finding the part of town where food is sold in large quantities at low prices, all the way through to complete geographical and temporal discombobulation. In Vancouver, I walked the wrong way down the street every time I left my hostel for three days. No matter how much I consulted the map, after a few blocks I had to turn around and head back the way I'd come.

Fortunately, this phase is usually over quickly. It's a pretty debilitating - there's a temptation to stay inside and hide until the world makes sense again, but it actually helps to go outside and get lost a few times, and at least I know that in advance. And within a couple of days I've moved to phase two.

False Familiarity:

Eventually the fog of bewilderment lifts, and the whole world is illuminated in the crisp sharp light of understanding. The weight of uncertainty is lifted from my brow and a sense of confidence and certainty is restored in the world. I know where the grocery store is. I know how the public transport system works. I may not have actually been there, but I know the names of the important nightlife venues and can readily recommend them to newcomers. Indeed, I am a competent and well functioning member of the local community. People start asking "Do you work here?"

Of course, all this confidence and clarity is complete bollocks. In fact I'm just some Johnny-come-lately and all the "local knowledge" I've got is readily available from a tourist brochure. It's only a matter of time until my status as a complete tourist is exposed. Which brings us to stage three:

Inchoate Rage:

Eventually, the facade of false familiarity has to break down, and when it does I am left disillusioned, confused, and most of all angry. It becomes immediately obvious that the place I'm in is a worthless hole, vastly inferior to everywhere else I've been, and the people who live in and love this place are ignorant or arrogant dupes. I can find nothing worthwhile in my new home, I consider leaving, I rage and rail against the injustice of being stuck in such a terrible, I swear at my ski boots, I bitch about Czech people. The list goes on.

Of course, this anger is both temporary and absurd. I will later be deeply embarrased about this phase and the petulant and childish things I have said and thought. In the depths of this phase in Chamonix I swore I would never return to that valley. Now, in the midst of this phase in Rossland, I yearn to be in Chamonix which is in fact one of the greatest places in the known universe. Now that I am accustomed to this pattern I find the rage less overwhelming. I think about slowly tortuting a small cute animal to death, but I don't actually start looking for an appropriately fluffy bunny. Unfortunately, being aware that this is just the third phase of being in a new place doesn't allow me to bypass it altogether, but with luck it will make it less intense and shorter lived.

One day, however, the rage will pass. I will ski, or hike, or eat something delicious, or generally roll around in my own filth and suddenly my new home will be wonderful place. Thus begins the fourth and final stage.

Acceptance:

Acceptance goes both ways. I accept my location and it accepts me. Not only do I know where the grocery store is, but I no longer assume that its staff hate me. I continue to tell terrible jokes, but people actually recognise that they're jokes rather than completely inappropriate comments that I mean sincerely. They don't necessarily laugh, but provided they understand that I'm being facetious that's good enough. This is the stage you want to be in. Life is good, you're more than just a bumbling tourist and people no longer want to drown you in the nearest river.

So for now I'm waiting for my ski boots to stop hurting, the snow to fill in the gaps between the rocks and logs at the ski field, and the visibility to be good enough for long enough that I can actually work out where I'm skiing. Roll on phase four.

An exception

Normally, I don't like to mention the existence of other blogs on the internet for fear that my tiny audience will like the other blog better than mine and stop reading. We've recently moved from five to six followers everyone, and believe it or not that's pretty close to exponential growth.

However, on special occaisions our rules need to be broken, even when they are intimately tied up with our own selfishness. This is one such occaision. This is at once one of the most beautiful and hilarious things I have ever seen. It may (and perhaps should) suprise you to know that I genuinely believe that this website illuminates something fascinating about the nature of human existence and the orientation of human life within the world.

Please enjoy Kim Jong-Il Looking at Things.

Bringing light to the darkness

I'm not sure how best to describe this, but I often struggle to communicate effectively with Canadians. For a start, they don't laugh at any of my jokes. It's quite probable that most of my jokes aren't funny, but under the sheer weight of trash that I say you'd expect something to be funny at some stage. The probabilities are such that even if I'm very unfunny, someone should have laughed at something by now, if only just out of politeness. But the people of Canada don't even laugh in an awkward way at the things I say. Not even while backing away and deciding whether or not to report what I've said to child protection officers. No, they greet everthing I say with a kind of earnest, well-meaning bafflement.

One reason for this that is not related to my own significant limitations is the substantial cultural gap between Canadians and everyone else I've ever met. As an example, not one Canadian I've spoken to has heard of the "Beached As" whale cartoons. Given that 200 years from now, people will be looking at these cartoons as the early 21st century's equivalent of Rembrandt, I think this is a pretty serious thing to be missing from your life.

This is just the tip of the iceberg. The pop cultural chasm between Canadians and everyone else I've ever met is unfathomably deep. It is beyond the hope of any single person to bring the light of youtube to this dark and barbaric place, let alone an Australian. And yet, I feel like I can't stay here in good conscience without bringing one candle to light the intellectual and aesthetic cave that is the West Kootenays. And hopefully, with that candle the people here can start a blazing fire that brings civilisation and a better life to this whole land.

Perhaps here, in Rossland, a journey of a thousand miles begins with a single chup.

Reverse stealing

You know that mythical time that old people talk about where no one locked their doors? When the streets were safe for your kids to walk to school? When the bodies of the people who tried to sell methamphetamine in your town were found floating down the river?

Well, by virtue of some kind of eddy in the space-time continuum, Rossland has remained in that time. There are several virtues to this unusual temporal location. First off, old people can't say "Back in my day ..." about Rossland, because we already are back in their day. A few weeks ago I watched a semi trailer containing thousands of litres of sulfuric acid slow to crawling speed behind a parade of small children wearing reindeer antlers as they performed the annual "Reindeer Prance" down the main street of town. That street happens to be a highway and a fairly significant trucking route for the chemical wastes generated from the lead smelter in a nearby town called Trail. In much of the "modern" world, small children and large vehicles filled with corrosive liquids would be considered an unusual and problematic combination. In Rossland, they are considered a typical part of the celebration of Christmas.

Another neat thing is that no one seems to lock anything. The other day I opened the door to my car (which had been sitting unlocked in a public car park all day), started the engine, left the car running while I went to the bank, returned to the car (which was now warm and demisted) and drove off, all without having to worry about it being stolen.

In fact, things are so topsy turvy here that today I indulged in a bit of reverse stealing. I went to someone's house, knowing that they wouldn't be there, entered the building, slipped a large sum of cash into someone's backpack and went on my merry way. Ahh the past. It really was a better time.

Resolved: The Jenny Baillie Coincidence

On Monday I finally met Jenny Baillie, resident of Rossland, artist, and (in 1996) primary school teacher.

But she's not the Jenny Baillie I knew. She taught somewhere in New Zealand in 96, rather than Canberra.

I must admit that I'm not exactly disappointed that this wasn't the same Jenny Baillie. Ever since I heard she might be in town I've been trying to think of ways that the Jenny Baillie I knew might end up as an artist in Rossland. Admittedly, I was a 12 year old when I was in her class, so I doubt I had a very accurate picture of her as a person, but she just didn't seem like the kind of person who would end up as an artist in a town of 3,000 people in a reasonably obscure part of Canada. For a start, she didn't ski or mountain bike, and there aren't really that many other reasons to live here. I was a bit worried that there might have been some kind of family tragedy that might have driven Jenny Baillie of Canberra to the Kootenay mountains, and finding out that this wasn't the case is something of a relief.

On the other hand, Jenny Baillie of Rossland had apparently heard from a few people that there was a possible former student in town, and she was a bit disappointed to discover that I wasn't one of her charges from her prior career. It occurred to me that this might be another reason for me to be relieved that this wasn't my former teacher. Jenny Baillie of Canberra might be a bit suprised to find that the model student of her year 6 class is now a skiing vagrant rather than something slightly more worthwhile.

As an indication of just how much my trajectory in life has changed, in year 6 (the final year of my primary school education) I was voted:

• Most likely to become rich. Well, I'm sure my classmates meant well. I'm not sure what went wrong here. At some point in life I discovered that being dirty and having fun was more interesting than whatever it is people do to become rich. Of all the predictions made, this is the least likely to come true in the remainder of my lifetime.
  
• Most likely to become famous. This is certainly not the case right now, and given the current course of my life it doesn't look at all probable. However, I can't completely rule out this possibility. After all, my classmates never said what I'd be famous for. Perhaps they thought I'd go on to commit a number of grisly and well publicised murders, or become a wildly successful internet blogger. Unfortunately, their reasons were never clearly stated.
• Smartest. This is a little bit complicated. Clearly, given the first two predictions were well off the mark, the veracity of my classmates is not to be trusted. However, it is possible that they made the previous mistakes because they were a bunch of muppets. If that was the case, then maybe I was the smartest class member amongst a grade of dullards. Unfortunately, I can't remember whether I also voted for myself in those categories, which would neatly counter this argument. It would be nice to believe that I didn't vote for myself in any of the categories, but unfortunately that's not a guarantee that I can make about myself in grade 6.
  

Don't get the wrong idea about my classmates. We did manage to successfully identify the tallest members of our grade by popular vote. Democracy works.

So perhaps not meeting Jenny Baillie here is for the best. It's nice to think there are a few people around who still think I'm a productive and contributing member of society.

Milestone!

Hi everyone,

I'm not really into posting about the actual blog, but I thought that this milestone is one I should share with you all. I recently noticed that this blog now has more followers than the other blog that shows up when I log into Blogger, the Canberra Ultimate Blog. They have 4, and this blog has 5. So thanks to all the wonderful people who made that a reality.

I always dreamed of having a wildly successful blog that provided me with financial independence sufficient to pursue my dreams across the globe, and although I haven't reached that yet, I feel like breaking through the 4 follower ceiling is just another sign that glory and riches are just around the corner.

Thanks to you all.

John

Primary School Redux

Ever since I arrived in Rossland, something has been bugging me. There's a poster at the hostel that features a painting of Rossland by an artist named Jenny Baillie. When I saw it I thought "Baillie, that's quite a distinctive spelling."

Then I thought:

"I used to have a year 6 teacher named Jenny Baillie, with that same distinctive spelling."

Then I thought:

"As I recall, she was really into art."

Then I thought:

"You know, the way the artist has signed this painting kindof looks like her handwriting."

But of course, it has been a long time since year 6, so maybe I was wrong about the handwriting, or even the spelling. I mentioned this to Brad, my coworker at the hostel, who also happens to be an artist living and working in Rossland. I get along very well with Brad, he's one of the few people I've met in Canada who are comfortable with the jokes I make, and better yet, can give as good as they get. However, I must admit that at times communicating with Brad can be a little difficult. For example, he once in conversation said I was a bus station. I'm not really taking that out of context. We were just talking about something and then he said I was a bus station. It was all a little unclear.

Anyway, Brad said that Jenny Baillie was from Australia, or maybe New Zealand, or maybe even England, that she might have been a teacher, and that she'd come to Rossland maybe 40 years ago, or 30, or 15. Or something.

It appears that Ms Baillie recently bumped into Brad, and it sounds like he may have narrowed down this range to "Down Under", that she used to be a teacher, and that she arrived more like 15 years ago than 40. This is all looking promising.

So, the latest entry on my list of things to do is to meet the Jenny Baillie of Rossland and see if she's also the Jenny Baillie of Hughes Primary School. If so, it would be a crazy coincidence indeed.

And in other primary school related news, it turns out my best friend from Hughes Primary, Parri, is a few hours drive away at Fernie. It's like I'm prepubescent all over again.

What makes a house feel like a home?

Yesterday I moved out of the hostel where I’ve been living for a month (it was free – I’m not one of those sad people that lives in youth hostels. At least not any more...) and into a house right in the beating heart of Rossland. One of the doors in the house opens into the pizza shop, and I’m right across the road from the main pub. It would actually take longer to have a pizza delivered (since they’d have to walk around to the front door) than it would to just go and pick it up, which is not something that most people can say that about their house.

One of the many odd features of this house is the number of empty picture frames hanging on the walls. They give the house a slightly derelict air and of course we’d like to fill them during our stay here. Now I was going to give you the long and detailed explanation of what I want to put into the picture frames and why, but it occurs to me that this idea is so excellent that it should simply by allowed to stand on its own. It ought to be judged on its merits as an independent concept, rather than the product of some kind of mere historical process.

A tasteful nude.

Yes people, a tasteful nude. Ideally it should be of a man, it should be black and white, it shouldn’t show any really rude bits, although perhaps a bit of butt-cheek would be OK, and it should be unclear whether the photo has been taken by a profession or simply a dedicated amateur. But we don’t want something smutty or crass. This is all about taste and class.

At the moment I’m a little unsure about what approach to take to make my dream a reality. There are several obstacles. First off, I’d need to OK this with my housemates. I have considered the possibility of simply taking said tasteful nude, placing it in one of the picture frames and insisting that it has been on the wall all along, and that no-one has noticed. The risk with this approach is that it might be difficult to get the image I’m after (see below) without making it somewhat obvious that the picture hasn’t been on the wall all along, and if I got caught doing this I’d be seen as something of a weirdo. So, assuming I want to get the housemates on board with this plan, I need to explain to them how the whole thing will work, and I need them to share the joy that I would experience from having such a picture in a public place in the house. There is a risk in this, because if I explain it to them, and they don’t share my enthusiasm, then I’ll look like a weirdo. To further complicate matters, there is a language barrier. Two of my three housemates haven’t arrived yet, and the one that’s here now has good English, but perhaps not good enough English to pick up the subtleties of this particular plan. Again, there’s a strong risk of looking like a weirdo.

But, let’s say that I manage to get the housemates to buy in to this project. There are also some genuine difficulties in getting the right image. What we’re aiming for here is something that will make any guests who see it uncertain as to whether this is a status item that suggests pedigree and culture, or whether it’s a rather creepy and slightly homoerotic photo of one of the housemates. I’m sure the internet is teeming with photos of naked men, but once you narrow it down to the tasteful ones it’s going to be a much smaller pool. And then within that pool, you don’t want something that’s too arty or slick. If it’s a genuine tasteful nude that some beret wearing New York photographer has taken it won’t be any fun at all. Finding something that’s just the right balance of legitimate and creepy is key here, and the internet is a difficult place to find that kind of thing. Also, to find such an image, I’d need to spend days looking at naked pictures of men on the internet. No thanks. So then, we’d need to actually take the photo. This is ideal in a sense, because it guarantees the kind of creepiness we’re after. Plus it means that the photo will be of someone in Rossland, and if possible, we might be able to make it just obscure enough that people think they recognise the subject without being sure. In any case, this is a difficult balance to get right.

Finally, we must print the photo. This is also a bit delicate, because getting caught printing a large-format nude photo that you’ve clearly taken yourself in some kind of commercial printing place is another obvious foray into weirdo territory. That said, I’m sure there’d be a way, and if not, I could always do it in a nearby town that I’d never go back to again.

In all honesty, the biggest hurdle is getting it OK’ed by the housemates. If I can get that done, I’ll be well on the way to creating something special. Wish me luck people – I’ll keep you posted.

All U Can Eat Spaghetti Night, part 2:

So, I promised in the last post to talk about the culture that drives people to eat a lot. I’m not talking about those challenges they have in the biggest loser. I’m talking about those people we all know who seem to eat way more than the people around them without getting fat. Instead, as they eat they become stronger, faster, more resistant to radiation etc. In the technical literature this is referred to as “voluntary massive eating”. Some people manage this through monumental feats of exercise (Myall), others by storing this energy to sustain them through long periods of hibernation (Mica), and others still wear baggy clothing so that if they do get fat you can’t tell (me). But have you ever wondered whether they still eat the same amounts when you’re not looking? Could it be that the big eaters of the world can perform their culinary deeds because they’ve been starving themselves while no-one is around? If a tree made of butter falls in a forest, and no one else is around, will Myall still eat it?

The first point to note is that if the big eater in question is seriously hungry then nothing will stop them from visiting their wrath upon the edible products within range, but this would be an “involuntary massive eating event”. The case we are interested in is where the eater in question isn’t monumentally hungry – if they’re just a normal level of hungry, or not even hungry at all – will they force themselves to eat big, or will they let sleeping dogs made of chocolate lie?

There are a number of factors that place pressure on people to eat big. The first is the cost of food. The appetisingness of a foodstuff item X is proportional to its price according to the following relationship:

Appetisingness of X α average cost of X under normal conditions / cost of X

If the item you’re considering eating costs more than normal, it is not very appetising. As the price decreases to normal levels, appetisingness is not strongly influenced by price. Once the price drops below what you’d normally expect to pay, appetisingness starts increasing pretty quickly, approaching infinity as the cost gets closer to zero. In the spirit of XKCD I’ve drawn you a graph, but I don’t have paint on this PC, so you’ll have to settle for this:

Yes, people, I do have a maths degree.

This relationship explains why there’s such a strong compulsion to eat free food, and why the words “Reduced to Clear” cause my heart rate to rise by a good 40 beats per minute. It also explains why an unfavourable exchange rate can make everything in Europe tastes like ashes.

The second significant factor in voluntary massive eating is peer pressure. The critical feature that underlies this behaviour is reputation. Most big eaters are known within their communities to be capable of great feats of consumption. And for many, the hunger that leads to involuntary massive eating is uncomfortable and deeply distressing. Thus, most big eaters have a strong interest in maintaining access to large volumes of food, in case genuine hunger should occur. This means that big eaters need to impress the people around them with their feats of eating regularly to maintain their reputation and improve the chances that others will give them leftovers or overestimate the necessary quantities during food preparation and so on. The pressure to maintain their reputation often induces those prone to involuntary massive eating to eat a lot even when they’re not ravenously hungry.

This pressure is magnified when several large eaters eat together. When big eaters dine with regular folk, a system of territorial dominance develops over other people’s left-over food. By eating more than the people around them a diner gains control over the best territories and the right to any leftovers contained therein. It should be noted that this usually operates at a subconscious level. This is the “Is he having more? Maybe I’ll have some more,” effect.

And finally, big eaters provide a collegiate atmosphere in which to chow down. You might feel a bit awkward at All U Can Eat Spaghetti Night if your fellow diners have just had a bowl or two of pasta and you’re eyeing off your 14^th serving. After all, watching other people eat is kind of creepy. However, if there’s a whole pack of you, there’s a collective spirit that encourages all of you to just keep asking for more.

So, to answer the question about the tree made of butter, Myall would eat if he was hungry, or if it was free, but he probably wouldn’t just eat it just for fun. But if Myall and Mica were both there when the tree fell down, they would eat that tree, and probably also another regular tree made of wood, just to make sure that neither one felt like they’d got the upper hand.

All U Can Eat Spaghetti Night, part 1

I know what you're expecting. You're thinking "This is going to be one of those stories about how John tried to eat enough food in one meal to survive for several days, and experienced acute and lasting discomfort as a result of his actions."

Well, you're wrong. I did quite a lot of spaghetti, but there wasn't really a critical mass of big eaters to help me push the envelope, so I didn't eat more than was prudent. In fact, I got home a few hours after the spaghetti meal and ate a snack, so clearly I wasn't too ambitious.

Instead, this post is about two things, the culture of competitive eating and why a tip based service industry is weird. However, since this post is turning out to be very long, I have decided to separate my thoughts about the culture of competitive eating into a different post. Which means, for those among us who like to be irritatingly pedantic, that this post is not actually about the culture of competitive eating.

So, let's consider a tip based service industry. I accept that there are many complaints about service in Australia. Let me say outright that I'm not someone who shares those complaints. Yes, I've been to places where it took a long time to get served. That was a bit annoying, but I accept that sometimes it's busy and the staff don't get around to you as quick as you would like. No doubt you've got some story about the time the staff took ages and your meal was so cold your tongue got frozen to your fork and when you tried to call for help the waiter-folk got angry and spilled tepid water filled with live jellyfish all over you. Guess what. I don't care. This is my story, and I'm tired of pre-empting your interruptions.

So, back to customer service. I don't like to be bugged. If I'm eating a meal and talking to people, I like to do those things. I do not want to be quizzed by the staff about whether I enjoyed the meal. If your restaurant is any good then I probably did, and the staff should probably just assume so unless told otherwise and move on. Besides, what if I didn't enjoy the meal? I'm much too Anglo to actually say so to the staff, so asking would just make me uncomfortable. I've already made a big effort by leaving my home to come to your restaurant. Please don't make it any harder by actually talking to me. I know you're trying to be friendly, but if I wanted friends I'd be nice to people. What I want is a kind of professional, distanced indifference.

Besides, if someone actually didn't like the meal, and was un-Anglo enough that they were willing to tell you so, do you think they'd wait for you to ask them? No, they'd stand up in the middle of your establishment and bellow their disappointment and anger like a wounded wilderbeest that has been hounded into shallow water by a pack of wild dogs, ready to make their final kill. Asking me if I'm having fun just seems like a way of feeling good about your work, and the last thing I want in life is for other people to feel good.

This is made even more awkward in situations like tonight, where you're the only customers in the restaurant. For a start, being the only customers when you enter a place is unsettling. One immediately wonders why no one else has come in. Is the food terrible? Are the staff unkind? Will I wake up in a bath-tub full of ice with an empty feeling in the small of my back?

A tip based service culture only makes this discomfort more intense. Tonight, we were asked by three different staff members whether the spaghetti was good. Two of those staff members appeared from the back of the restaurant just to ask us this question. There was a degree of desperation in their desire to please us. Normally, such enthusiasm would be spread across a busy room and it would just be a bit odd as described above. When it's all focused on one table, however, this becomes creepy. And speaking of creepy, one guy told us that the pasta sauce had been brewing for several days. Clearly, we didn't realise the deep significance of this fact, so he went on to explain that leftover sauce from each week was saved and used as the base for the next week's sauce. This means that the sauce has some kind of Jung-esque proto sauce deep within it that remembers the very first All U Can Eat Spaghetti Friday at Clansey's Restaurant. In any restaurant there will be a range of facts that are best kept to the staff, and at Clansey's this is certainly one of them.

Besides - no one goes to All U Can Eat Spaghetti night expecting gourmet food. They go expecting a monumental quantity of spaghetti. They want to be awed by the sheer magnitude of your pasta. They want, in short, to eat a lot. Telling them that some small part of their pasta sauce is ten years old won’t make them happy, telling them that you have 4 cubic metres of cooked spaghetti out the back that you can bring to their table on a moment’s whim will. They want portions that will make their bowels move in mere anticipation of the bombardment that awaits. They don’t want a meal, they want an epic journey through the writhing landscape of gluttony.

And on that note, Clansey’s restaurant does quite well. It’s not clear exactly how much pasta there is, but they seem happy to produce more on request. Of course, I didn’t push their limits at all, but that is an issue for another post.

Zombie Hostel

Zombies are very fashionable at the moment. There’s a popular new TV show here involving zombies and a host of computer games, parades and all kinds of other undead stuff. In keeping with this theme, Rossland has a zombie hostel. Not in the sense that it is a hostel for zombies, because the undead do not shower, sleep, or use communal cooking facilities. Instead this hostel is what a hostel would be if it was infected with zombie-ness. “But that’s absurd”, you’re no doubt saying, “How can a hostel be like a zombie?”

Let’s start with:

1) Disaggregated decision making

Zombies are characterised by a breakdown of the usual decision making processes. Instead of the brain acting as a centre of thought and decision making, zombies’ body parts are animated and governed locally. Each limb and organ within a zombie makes its own decisions and regulates its own behaviour. The actions of the organism as a whole are determined by broad, common desires that are shared between the decision making loci within each body part. This explains both a zombie’s inability to formulate and act upon complex intentions and their durability. Since a zombie’s arm is self-regulating, it will continue to hunt for fresh brains even after it has been severed from the rest of the organism. Zombies act the way they do because each of their constituent parts wants to eat brains, shamble around and moan.

This disaggregated decision making structure also applies to the hostel in Rossland. This hostel is unique in all the businesses I have ever seen in that it seems to have no centralised decision-making system or any way of assigning responsibility or tasks to its staff members. In most business there is a boss, an owner, a manager, or someone who basically decides what’s going to be done. Here, no one decides what will be done. Instead, there are four people loosely affiliated with the hostel, none of whom seem to take any kind of meaningful responsibility for the operation of the place. Somehow the actions of these people magically coincide to ensure that when things do inevitably catch fire (and a few small things have caught fire while I’ve been here) nothing of importance burns down.

For reasons I don’t properly understand the people who would normally assume responsibility and command in this situation don’t do so. And the people who are left over, to whom decision-making power might conceivably fall, are not really empowered to fill this void. I am one of the people who might possibly be expected to take up such a managing role but I don’t actually get paid to work here and I certainly have no idea how the business normally operates. It thus seems slightly unreasonable for me to, say, decide to spend the owners money replacing the chairs with ones that are bit less fall-overy.

The net result of this is that the hostel stumbles ever onward, maintaining the basic functions required to keep operating without ever performing any of its tasks well. Each process that the hostel relies on has been put together by a number of different people over the last twelve months without any of those people every communicating their thoughts and intentions to the other “staff”.

For example: If you go to clean the bathrooms you’ll find that someone bought a massive tub of toxic cleaning goo a year ago. Someone else found this tub some time later, but couldn’t find any sponges, so they used an old tea-towel to apply said cleaning agent. Realising that the next person would also have no sponges, they kindly left the tea-towel in the tub of toxic goo. When you finally unearth the tub some months later, the tea-towel has partly dissolved into the goo, leaving a kind of crusty discoloured residue. This raises concerns about the safety of the goo, and you buy a box of latex gloves – bequeathing this to the next person who comes to clean the bathrooms. Eventually, the goo will run out before the gloves do, and someone will be left trying to rub the filth off the sides of the showers with nothing but a pair of latex gloves. At this stage, the toilets will go uncleaned indefinitely.

I should say that it’s great that zombies lack the capacity to plan and actualise complex tasks. Otherwise they could ride bicycles, and that would be bad. However, if this hostel could plan and actualise complex tasks, I might not have had to install 20 light bulbs when I first started working here. And my room might have had a door handle. And those guests who turned up the other day might not have left with a grumpy look after their first night when they’d booked to stay longer. Who can say?

This common organisational trait also explains another similarity between this hostel and a zombie:

2) A dishevelled appearance

Zombies need to look shabby. The whole point of being undead is that you get to let yourself go a little. You can bleed and rot and have bits falling off and no one will ask you dress more appropriately for work tomorrow. Zombies can handle the small, day to day tasks of shambling around, eating brains and wearing enough clothes to cover their naughty bits (consider: you never see zombie naughty bits – and if you’re about to send me some website that proves me wrong I’d rather you didn’t), but if one of their limbs falls off they don’t really have the capacity to stop shambling and sort that out.

In a similar fashion, this hostel is quite run down in many ways. Brad and I (the two grunts who stay here for free in exchange for a few hours work a day) can keep the usual tasks of washing sheets and cleaning the kitchen ticking over. We cannot, however, fix the window in my room that is supposed to be double glazed but instead manages to be single glazed in a way that allows a continuous stream of cold air to blow in from outside. Nor can we fix the heaters that don’t work in some guest rooms. Nor, it seems, can we authorise the annual audit of our fire safety system, which worries me a little.

These cosmetic challenges would normally hinder a hostel. Potential guests might decide to stay elsewhere, robbing us of valuable funds. Fortunately, the third zombie feature of this business steps in to save the day, because this hostel...

3) Does not require normal sustenance

Zombies do not seem to require food. Yes, they certainly seem to like to eat brains, but it doesn’t look like they suffer too much if there aren’t any brains going around. Similarly, this hostel manages to survive with no guests. I’d say we have a paying guest here (and I literally mean a single paying guest) maybe 50% of nights. We’d be pretty damn fortunate to have two guests at once. Three people? All paying? At once? Certainly not on my watch. That means this whole building generates a whopping $100-ish of revenue a week. If that’s not an iron clad get-quick-scheme then I don’t know what is.

Of course, the most important test of the zombie-ness of this hostel would be to see if it would devour the brains of any other hostels in town. However, there ARE no other hostels in town. Coincidence? I think not.

Lost and Found

One of the neat things about the small towns I'm shuffling around in is their online notice boards. Revelstoke has "The Stoke List" which has a pretty simple (and slightly frustrating) layout, but it's absolutely packed with people trying to buy and sell stuff or annoy each other. In Rossland, they have the "Bhubble List" which is much niftier in terms of design and function but doesn't see as much action. I guess Rossland is a fair bit smaller than Revy, so that makes sense.

I've always felt like getting involved with these lists will help me assimilate into the local community, but I've never had anything good to say. I should point out that "Wanted: Room to rent for winter" screams "I'm a visiting tourist and I've come to ruin your pleasant little town." so that doesn't count as something good to say.

Fortunately, as part of some work that I'm doing at the hostel in Rossland in exchange for free accommodation, I've finally found something worth posting. You see, one of the rooms at the hostel is notorious for having local youths sneak in through the window and sleep the night without paying. It's very very quiet here outside of the ski season and it's no suprise that people get away with this pretty regularly. It turns out that I've been treated to an extra special variant of this ruse, because recently it appears that not one but TWO local youths snuck through the window, and they did more in the bed than just sleep. My suspicions were first aroused that some bedroom gymnastics had occurred when, after washing the sheets from that room (I'm currently washing and remaking all the beds here, since I'm the only guest) a pair of impractical women's underpants fell from the newly cleaned laundry. A more detailed examination of the room provided other fairly convincing clues to confirm my suspicions.

All this presented me with an excellent opportunity. Someone had lost something (their undies) and I could use the Bhubble list to reunite them with their forgotten G-string. And, in so doing, I could helpfully point out that usually people who stay overnight at hostels are encouraged to pay for that priveledge. Yes, I can assure you that the light of righteousness shone from my eyes and the fire of justice burned in my laptop as I prepared to enter into Rossland's finest online forum.

Behold! I have posted on the Bhubble List!

As an aside, it baffles me that women bother to wear underwear like this. It clearly lacks the structural integrity to perform any kind of standard underwear functions. It also looks pretty damn uncomfortable (and before you ask, I haven't tried them on and won't because they're way too small). As mentioned in my lost and found notice, I suspect that the same function could be served by simply drawing one blue triange below your belly-button and another just above your bum crack.

As a further aside, this is the second pair of leopard print undies that have randomly turned up on my travels (look carefully at the photo - there's a section of leopard print across the top at the front). Is this a sign?

Cultural Differences: Part 1, Parties

Last Saturday I attended a Halloween party in Rossland. This was a fine opportunity to observe the locals in a time-honoured native ritual. I was a bit caught out because Halloween was actually on Monday, and I thought I had all of Sunday to prepare my costume (I was planning to go as a lounge chair). But people here are pragmatic about timing and the party ended up being on Saturday night. I cobbled together a costume out of things that were lying around the hostel, including a hat made from a pizza box and a T-shirt, but I felt a bit outclassed by the other costumes in the room.

1. When it comes to costumes, people here go all-out. Just about everyone dresses up: There were maybe ten people in the pub throughout the whole night who weren't dressed up (out of well over a hundred), and I suspect that they didn't realise the party was on until they arrived. But not only do people dress up, they also put heaps of effort into their costumes. This is not some lame-arsed "I'm just wearing what I normally wear, WITH THIS CRAZY HAT" costume event. One guy came dressed as a LEGO man, complete with gigantic yellow papier-mache head and hands. There were two girls dressed as Tweedle-Dee and Tweedle-Dum complete with roly-poly stomachs (and watching them dance in those costumes was awesome). There was a lady dressed as a jellyfish. It was nuts.
2. Nobody cross dresses. The men all dressed as man things, and the women all dressed as woman things (except Tweedle-Dee and Tweedle-Dum). If you had a costume party in Australia, you could guarantee that there would be a bunch of guys in drag. In fact I don't think I've been to a costume party at a pub or nightclub in Australia and not been in drag. I was certainly the only guy at this party wearing a dress (although I wasn't really in drag - it was part of my "robes").
3. People here stick with their costumes. It was pretty warm in the pub, and the dancefloor was packed, but the dude who was wrapped up in a blue foam mat didn't abandon his costume for a minute. In Australia, if people get into the whole costumes thing they usually turn up dressed to kill, but as the night goes on they typically revert to more normal clothing. Or they end up wearing bits and pieces of everyone elses costumes, which leads me to...
4. Everyone here wears their own clothes all the time. Maybe this is just a feature of who I end up with at parties, but in Aus there's always at least a couple of items of clothing doing the rounds among the crowd. Whether it's a particularly cool hat, or a wig, or a pair of hotpants, there's usually something being passed from person to person that you don't need a urine test to identify. Here, everyone enters, parties and leaves dressed the same way.
   
5. Over here, the character from the popular kids-book series "Where's Wally?" is called "Waldo". Some cultural barriers are just too big to comprehend.