Trivia, Zoo, Indian Food

Ok, last week/weekend were eventful in KAngie terms. This means we did things outside the house, often with other people. Last Wednesday we went to a trivia night hosted by Democrats Abroad with a few friends. It was just a trivia night so anyone was welcome (even Republicans and Aussies/Kiwis). We went to an excellent Indian restaurant before the trivia gathering which was reminiscent of the Ethiopian place but a bit more tasteful and extremely tasty! We got a vegetarian combo where they pick the three dishes (always risky) and it was freaking great. And how do they cook the rice like that? It's just plain rice but it's so much better after it came from an Indian person's kitchen. And don't even get me started on naan...mmmmmm...

After delicious and inexpensive (ah, no wonder I liked it so much) dinner, we proceeded to trivia night. Trivia, like basketball and fashion, is something I like but am horrible at. I don't have a memory, so how can I answer random questions about inane crap? Plus, to make an argument that doesn't make me sound like such a doofus, I'm an engineer: trained to know how to find information, not just to know it. In fact, I think my entire generation has learned that you don't need to know things, you just need to sit near a google prompt. There is no need for me to remember random things, which is good because I apparently can't.

With this in mind, I'm always amazed at how much crap other people know that I don't. I generally walk around feeling that I am of at least mildly superior intelligence to most folks (but maybe that's just a complex) and yet, it seems like every idiot knows more trivia than I do. I try to make excuses, but, in the trivia contest, I still look like an oaf. I should take up drinking because then I'd at least have an excuse. "Angie was so useless at trivia, she was totally trashed". But no, I just get to be useless and extremely aware of it.

It didn't help that this was political trivia. Granted, I can't think of a trivia subject that I could confidently answer questions about (except "math", but that's not trivia, it's just knowledge; and I probably wouldn't even be all that good at that, sadly), but politics is surely one of the worst. You may as well quiz me on 19th century ship making or something. It's really pathetic. I don't know names. I can't remember dates. And for god's sake, I don't know historic court cases. These were just a few of the categories at this trivia night where I failed miserably, unable to help my team at all. And no, I don't actually know the names of past and present Supreme Court Justices. Not even if it's in the form of true or false questions. My team wouldn't even let me be the person who writes the answers down because I kept spelling everything wrong. "You said Nancy Ferguson?" "No, Betty Anderson - give me the paper". Damn.

Needless to say, we won last place. But, due to a random joke telling contest in the middle of the trivia marathon, Kane managed to win a free pitcher of beer for our table. And you thought racially insensitive jokes couldn't get you anywhere...

So that was trivia night. We followed that up this weekend by renting a car and hitting up the Werribee Open Range Zoo. Since they are partnered with the Healsville Sanctuary, I thought we could give it a try. It was a nice place; I did not feel like the animals were oppressed in any way. It was a nice day and the animals were neat - though I did like the Healsville place more because there were mostly Australian-oriented residents, rather than hippos and rhinos shipped from lord knows where. Still good though. Picture collage to come, don't have time at the moment.

After the zoo I actually had a night of patented Angie sickness - where my insides suddenly decide they need to be on my outside. And with that, we missed a bbq at our friends' house and instead got to relax in the living room/bathroom Saturday night. Oh well. Even though I didn't feel great on Sunday, I refused to waste a $77 car rental so we drove down to Geelong to see what that place was about. It's about an hour away and is one of the larger towns surrounding Melbourne; many people commute from there. And just fyi; it's kind of a hole - I see no reason to return. But it was a nice day anyway. At least until I had to be escorted quickly back home to reacquaint myself with the toilet. Go me.

Still a good week and weekend. And I've fully recovered from strange stomach ailment, for which I still have no viable origin to suspect. Now it's halfway through the week and is only just over a two week countdown until our triumphant return to the States.

Secret Handshake

A lot of little things happened last week, none of which were worth their own post. The event that made me the happiest, while not the most exciting, was learning the secret handshake at the gym. While not an actually physical manifestation of camaraderie, we still feel privileged to know this new information, which is this: you don't have to pay $108 a month to belong to the gym. They make you think you do because that's what they tell you when you sign up. But, after an undisclosed amount of time being a member and paying a billion dollars a month, you can downgrade your membership to any number of veiled secretive options.

We were prompted to ask because our boss said he only pays $70 a month on the condition that he can only go to the one gym rather than all the gyms in the chain. So we thought we'd ask for that. When we did, Mr. Gym Membership man said we could do an even cheaper "off peak" option, allowing us only to go to the gym between 10-4pm on weekdays. We go every day at lunch, so that was perfect. And it only costs $52 a month - 50% savings, booya! So, sadly, that was the highlight of my week. I love saving money too much.

Other than that, we got to help Marc and Alana move (yes, I wrote "got to" because they read this blog sometimes). Just kidding, it was easy since they only moved down the street. And Kane and Marc did all the heavy lifting, so it was especially easy for me. Yeay. Pictured are the three of us in the front of the moving van, Kane is behind the metal grate in the back (sorry that you're blurry Marc). We also got most of Kane's Halloween costume; he is going to be Shaun of the Dead. I will be a zombie and intend to acquire the necessary makeup this weekend. And, while acquiring this costume, we encountered Mr. White Trash Australian, which was new and exciting to me. I've only ever experienced Mr./Mrs. White Trash America before, so it was nice to see an exact parallel between these two countries.

Mr. White Trash Australian, let's call him Steve, had an Australian flag hat on, sleeveless shirt, and tattoed arms. He was also hopelessly (and appeared happily) overweight and eager to discuss menial topics with us, such as the merits of the clip-on tie that Kane was trying on for his costume. Steve was very excited to see another fellow human wearing this tie, since he himself had purchased this same tie but a week ago. Apparently, "you can't go wrong with a tie like that, mate", which is good because Kane certainly wants his costume to be excellent. And by excellent, I mean as cheap as possible. We salute you, Steve, wherever you may be, no doubt with beer in hand.

Also, the weather, while still hit or miss, is getting nicer. On Saturday it was hot in the day and warm all night - my favorite. I hear it's going to be a hot summer here, so we are relatively prepared to go from way too cold to way too hot weather. Figures.

Big accomplishments occured this weekend when we finally sent in our absentees and did our taxes. Those two have been weighing my to do list down quite a bit; now we are free!! They were both very trying activities and pretty much took all my energy for Sunday. Which works out since we don't usually do anything anyway. Next weekend I hope we can rent a car and go drive around somewhere. The weather better stay good!

Ethiopian Adventure

There's an excellent Ethiopian restaurant nearby that we frequent with Marc and Alana and it has so much character I thought I'd write about it this week. To start, the decor in general is something like what a blind autistic kid might orchestrate. The walls have been recently painted to mostly light blue (an improvement from finger-print-and-other-miscellaneous-dirt-stained off-white), with strips of white at the top and bottom where they didn't want to get too close to the ceiling/floor. Throw some accidental paint streaks on all window and lighting fixtures and *voila*, new paint job. The tables and chairs are of a nameless, rickety, sub-Ikea brand that might adorn an underprivileged elementary school's cafeteria or your backyard left over from the 1980's.

But, upon arrival, you are blinded to all this by the tablecloths. These monstrosities are solid plastic - to the point where I'm surprised that they bend over the edge of the table. But it's the pattern that is so distracting and, really, unnecessary: bright green, yellow and orange flowered print on a white background. It's a bit like the 1960's threw up all over these tablecloths. They are hideous and completely out of place and I have no idea where you could even purchase such an item. They give the place a cheap, awkward feel that lets you know that either the food is really good or really, really bad. Token plastic flowers in a tiny, sad vase adorn each table. And the funny thing is, there isn't a table for four people. There are six tables for three, all pushed up against the side walls and one big table for eight in the center and that's it. Fortunately, we've never come in when anyone else has actually been there (I'm starting to suspect that we're their only customers), so we just take the giant table.

Then they hand you the menus. The menus are a game of luck and chance. I believe they have about a half dozen menus in stock and possibly one of them has all the pages in it. The rest have only selected pages and I believe I've gotten one before that only had the drinks page. Fortunately we've been there enough to know when we are missing pages. It is rather ridiculous but fairly entertaining. We generally use the four menus that we are handed to mentally take stock of all the items on offer to make our decisions.

Up until this last time we went, it was always the same woman working there; I think she was the hostess, waitress, cook, and cashier. She did not speak English. We ordered by pointing. She would waive her hand and say "finish" when they were out of the item we wanted, which was just about every time. She seems like a kind soul, though the masses of scars and tattoos that adorn her arms and face make her mysterious. Her rear end may, in fact, be the size of Ethiopia, which makes her all the more endearing to us.

We order almost the same thing every time and get something completely different. It's like an Ethiopian grab bag. I point, she nods, something different comes out on the plate. But the thing is, it's always good. And I didn't know what I was ordering in the first place, so it doesn't really matter. I point to vegetarian yellow-ish and brown lintel paste with a side of mushy delicious-ness on the menu and get a different vegetarian bean-y paste with a side of lumpy mush. It doesn't really matter. It's all excellent. And the price is right; it's all sooo cheap.

So we go back again and again to the Ethiopian place, to watch Dancing with the Stars muted on the TV and listen to crazy tribal Ethiopian music on the three foot tall, completely disproportionately large speaker in the corner. We laugh, we consume our plate of mush, we try to avoid the sticky spots on the tablecloth. Ahh...I wish I were there now.

Hitlerhoff

This weekend we attended another Melbourne Fringe Festival event (see last week's entry). This time we went to a show called Hitlerhoff, which, just based on the name alone (and the picture), we figured must be entertaining. Hitler and David Hasslehoff both have checkered pasts and were both at one point beloved to the German people. I thought that a play that somehow combined the strengths and humor (I guess Hitler can be funny now, it's been long enough) of the two of them would be necessarily funny. On that note, I was wrong.

Hitlerhoff was stupid. Not only did it not clearly define who the character "Hitlerhoff" was supposed to be (Hitler with a bit of Hoff?, a Nazi-inclined Hasslehoff?, their love child?, someone else completely who had an equal affinity for fascism and lifeguarding?), but it took place in an undefined time in this century (ex: he fought in The Great War while a picture of a gun-toting Sarah Palin appeared in a photo montage) and it had a propensity toward being completely unintelligible. I figure at some point, though I consider myself a generally intelligent and open minded person, willing to accept someone's strange idea for a play, there are plays that are "works of art" that are understood and appreciated mostly by the community of artists that are prone to that sort of expression. Fine, I don't have to get everything. But I'm not actually sure there was anything to get with this play.

There was really no storyline to follow, no laughable jokes (though I could feel the breeze as a few of them undoubtedly flew over the audience's heads), and no climax or real ending to the story. I can say two good things about it: the actors weren't bad and it wasn't so terrible that I wanted to cut myself or anything. I just kind of wanted to take a nap. Actually, what I really wanted was to get what was going on, a desire that fueled my undivided attention to these ranting strangers for an hour on a Saturday night. But alas, I found nothing to get and we left empty handed with only our incessant complaining to comfort us. Which it did. Thank goodness we saw this with two other couples so that we could bitch about it for an hour afterward to help cancel out the time wasted.

The funniest part of the play was actually when some poor fool in the audience decided that he had to go to the bathroom or have a smoke or answer his phone or do something that required leaving the room. This play was in a relatively small room that seated about 50 people and the entrance/exit doors were toward the front of the room between the stage and the first row. In the very first lines of the play, Hitlerhoff says something comically noting how the doors will be locked for the duration of the show, assumingly as a joke. When this guy went to leave in the middle of the show, however, he couldn't get the 1950s-style double doors to open. He wrestled with the door for about 45 seconds much to the amusement of the crowd and most certainly stealing the show from the Hitlerhoff-grovelling-on-the-floor-in-a-red-speedo scene. That got the most laughs out of the whole show, and I certainly thought it was the best part.

So, that was the highlight of our weekend, which actually was a highlight since it provided grounds to bond with our friends and something for me to blog about. So maybe it wasn't so bad after all. ...But don't go see it anyway.