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Luna tick

Tried to have quite a gentle day today so I wandered down to the St Kilda area of Melbourne to take a look at Luna Park.

Luna Park is an amusement park on the coast, next to the main beach for Melbourne (it's not a great beach though, I must say).

Now, when I said 'amusement park', how many of you were thinking of Disneyland (or at the very least, Eurodisney)?

Ok, take that image. Now cut the size of the park down to that of a couple of football fields.

And we're going to have to keep non-paying guests out aren't we? So how shall we do that? That's right, with a twenty foot high corrugated iron fence. Paint it white so people can tell it's a fun-times theme park and not an abbatoir inside.

Now, the entrance. Ideally, this will look like the entranceway to Satan's underworld, as wrung through the tortured imagination of Tim Burton after a night on the absinthe.

Don't believe me? Take a look at this...



Right. That's the outside sorted. Now you're going to need some rides.

Actually, you're not. Because Luna Park opened to much excitement in 1912 and you get the distinct impression that they haven't changed the rides since then.

Certainly the roller coaster seemed to be held together mostly by rust and human adrenaline. And as for the Spider Ride. Holy Shit, it was a truly terrifying thing to look at.

In fact, overall, if you took your original image of Disneyland, shot the mouse, replaced him with a sinister and murderous-looking clown with a rapacious lust for money and a habit of corner-cutting that would make the average builder proud, you're about there.

On the plus side, it didn't cost anything to get in. Which was about the right price, as far as I was concerned.

So, after the park, I wandered around St Kilda before going to see Dana International and her kids, in order to spend much of the afternoon constructing a Harry Potter lego castle.

Jeez, Lego has changed a lot since I was a kid. In my day, it was just a load of bricks which, with my engineering skill, I could do little more than make bigger,less regular bricks.

Nowadays you get all sorts of specialist parts and blueprints to built your mansion. At one point I think one of the kids was actually preparing a Gantt chart to map the critical path for the construction project.

Anyway, after that (and a lot of wine, come to think of it) I decided to go out and about in the Melbourne nightlife.

Which is how I learned that Aussie bouncers are a nicer, more helpful and more honest breed than ours.

The first good experience was in the casino complex, which has a couple of clubs. I asked the bouncer of the first 'what's the difference between these two places?'

His answer: 'Absolutely nothing mate. I'd just flip a coin if I were you.'

Secondly (and fast forwarding here) at 5.30am I had a half-hour to wait until the first train started running. So I went to a bar.

"We're closed," said the bouncer.
"Oh really," I replied, "but I just want to kill half an hour until my train comes."
At this point, I ready myself for either a short-tempered repeat of 'we're closed' or a sarcastic response.
"Oh alright mate, come on in then."
I was so not ready for that answer I nearly walked off anyway.

Oh, hang on, just remembered something else from the day. I nipped into the casino as I was walking back into the city because I wanted to use the toilets.

In there they have a 'win a million dollars' slot machine or other game. The point is, the million dollars is there on display - in dollar coins. So they've got a column about nine feet high and five feet across of coins.

How cool would it be if, when someone won the money, they just said 'there you go' and pointed to all the coins. 'Oh, and anything you take away tonight, we're going to keep'.

Also, whilst I was in there, I thought it really wasn't right to have this big casino and not spend a cent. So I had a dollar coin that I put into a one cent fruit machine.

At least I think it was a fruit machine. What actually happened when you pushed 'go' was a baffling sequence of pictures came up. Sometimes these pictures were good and I won some money. Sometimes I guess they weren't and I didn't. To this day I have no clue which was which and what I was supposed to be aiming for.

Which is why it was all the more surprising when I won 30 dollars out of the thing.

Ha!

Anyway, going back to the night out, as I was preparing for the casino nightclub experience, I got talking to a bunch of Vietnamese Australians ('We're Vietnamese mostly' was their answer when I asked about their heritage, but they immediately added, 'But we're Australians really.' Try getting that answer out of an American.)

It ended up with them trying to take me to an Asian bar, which turned out to be quiet as a grave, so I went back with a few of them to the casino anyway.

Things got a bit hazy after this. But eventually, I decided to leave the club, but just as I was leaving, I noticed a woman in a wheelchair and her friend trying to get in up the escalator.

Now as they were both attractive women, I decided to offer to help (did I mention I was drunk by this time? Do I even have to?).

So I ended up back in the club with these two girls. I tried to get Wheelie Woman to dance with me, but she wasn't having any of it. Then, disturbingly, there were loads of blokes around moving in on the girls, so I gave up and left, eventually getting the first train home.

So, really my first big night out in Melbourne and it was fun and eventful in equal measures. So that's another tick for this fine city.

Hope you are all well.

Messages:
Happy birthday Nathalie Hollander.

Debbie, get well soon.

Brother Mark, what's going on?

Wig, have I got a job yet?

posted by Peter The Great @ 7:34 AM