Spring Break!

Posted on March 10, 2014 by borysSNORC

Here we are in Cocoa Beach in the middle of what American’s affetionately refer to as, Spring Break. Yup, didn’t realize that when I was booking a hotel down by the beach for us and the in-laws to catch up at, for a couple of days… mind you Mr K and his Dad are totally not complaining about all the scantily clad girls in bikinis that are walking around the streets. Feels much like to Gold Coast with one noticeable difference – it’s Spring, but the weather is barely 17-22C degrees. So you need a jumper on the beach, and a windcheater in the breeze… and the water temperatures is somewhere between ‘fucking hell it’s cold’ and ‘there’s no fucking way I am getting in that!’ But the kids are all out sunbaking next to naked, and actually SWIMMING in the goddamn Atlantic!

I have no idea what is wrong with these people, other than to surmise that they are lacking that little something in your brain that tells you ‘this shit just ain’t a good idea’. So yeah, not exactly beach weather for Queenslanders. Went for a lovely walk along the boardwalk though and couldn’t believe the numbers of people with their rented chairs and rented shades hanging out down at the beach in this cold… crazy buggers.

After that we were looking for somewhere to go hang out for some lunch and I was pied pipered into heading towards a bar and grill with a big deck, playing some funky Bob Marley tunes. We found ourselves a great table over looking the beach (and coincidentally the outdoor showers where bathers were washing off the salt water), and ordered up some cold ones. Lunch swiftly followed and consisted of oysters, buffalo wings, salad and gator tail! Yup gator for lunch at the funky little reggae bar on Cocoa Beach. Life is good. We spent a few hours there shooting in the breeze (I had dug out a wrap by this point though – still too cold for me), before heading back to the hotel for a few hours.

We went out again in the afternoon, ostensibly for a booze run, but ended up at the local Walmart looking for snacks and booze, and went for a drive down the southern end of the peninsula to Melbourne Beach! Yep, come all the way to Florida only to find a place called Melbourne Beach, who’d’ve thunk. It was less populated than Cocoa Beach, and very pretty, but still too cold for this little black duck.

Several beers later and we headed to a place called the Shark Pit Grill for dinner, where we tried some of the local highly recommended burgers and pizzas and stuff – really good thin base pizza with the first cheese I have seen since we got here that wasn’t bright orange! I have a sneaking suspicion that it was actually mozzarella, but don’t tell anyone, we can’t disabuse people of the notion that the average American’s propensity for dumping horrid melted orange cheese on nearly everything, is universal!

Oh, and I HAD to share the cover of this tabloid rag I picked up at Walmart today while waiting at the checkout… OBAMA has declared WAR on Hollywood! W00t! Like he doesn’t have enough to worry about, what with Sarah Palin back in the media at the moment, sprouting her erudite thoughts on Russia: ‘The only thing that is going to stop a bad guy with a nuclear weapon is a good guy with a nuclear weapon!!’

La Nouba – Cirque du Soleil at Downtown Disney

Posted on March 9, 2014 by borysSNORC

Absolute clusterfuck trying to get to La Nouba tonight. Between a time change in Central Florida that we weren’t expecting, and a misreading of the ticket times (I thought it was a civilised 7:30pm time like every other show, but it was at 6pm!), and the damn GPS taking us to the wrong end of Buena Vista Drive, we literally rocked up to collect our tickets at 5:57pm and I was panicking that we were going to get locked out! Well, we made it in by the skin of our teeth and discovered that our tickets were front row, which is weird because I don’t want to be pulled up onto the stage during the show and I usually book a few rows back, but oh well, front and centre it was – I must have booked ‘best available’ rather than chosen my own seats.

The building itself is quite beautiful, and as expected the place sets an entirely different atmosphere to what we experienced a few nights earlier at the Ford Arena when we saw Varekai. Gorgeous building, liveried staff, fancy decor in the lobby and a fantastical space created for the performance which leads to an air of excitement in the air for patrons so completely different to that of wandering into the Arena in sombre lines.

Most of the acts at La Nouba are obviously designed to cater for their younger patrons. Given the theatre is in Downtown Disney, there is a strong family atmosphere and far more children present than you normally see at a Cirque du Soleil show. As such, there were many apparatus incorporated into the show that would be very accessible to the younger audience. They had an act comprising of some very fancy people jumping rope in a wonderful display of coordination and skill, there was another with some guys doing tricks on bicycles, and another that was tightrope walking and a very accomplished juggler – all acts that children can appreciate how difficult they are to execute as they may have tried similar challenges themselves. Ditto for the guys on the trampoline, kids all familiar with trampolines would know how hard it is to do what these acrobats can do having played on trampolines themselves.

In addition to these seemingly commonplace items of skipping ropes, pushbikes and balance and juggling acts were a wonderful trapeze act and an amazing group of four girls using Diablos. Now if you’ve ever used a Diablo, you know they can be a little tricky to get hang of using them, they can be fun, but they get knotted up and it’s hard to get the rotation going well, but these girls were experts, they danced and ran about and used their Diablos expertly, tossing and throwing them to themselves and each other in an amazing display of coordination, gymnastics, dance and most of all dedication to practice! They were great, and definitely my favourite act of this show.

After La Nouba, we went for a stroll around Downtown Disney and took in the sights and did a little shopping. DisneyWorld is HUGE… and I am so glad we are not going to be visiting DisneyWorld this trip – I think I’m a bit Disney’d out after last years three days in Disneyland and California Park with The Small Child. 🙂

Big Day O’ Southern Fun

Posted on March 9, 2014 by borysSNORC

We put New Orleans, and the fabulous Ron and Steve, in the rear view mirror this morning and head out for our Big Day O’Southern Fun. With several planned stops in our day, we headed straight out to Slidell for the Honey Island Swamp Tour – a boat trip down the West Pearle River and surrounding swamp lands. First up, full disclosure – there were no gators seen on our tour. Awww…. it’s just not a Southern Day out without gators! Figure we will make up for it with Gator Ona Stick for lunch or something! 😉

Honey Creek is wildlife reserve managed by the Louisiana State government. We were both very impressed to hear that that licensing fees that hunters (there are feral pigs, alligators, as well as ducks and other game birds) and fishermen pay (they’re catching blue crab, crawfish, catfish and a pile of other fresh water foods), are used to conserve the existing territory and to purchase and extend the wildlife reserve further into the future.

We set off in a covered boat with about fifteen other becamera’d tourists, all rugged up for the 14C and cloudy, that the weather service was forecasting… and I tell you what, once that boat started moving out on the water, I was sooo glad I had gone back to the car to grab and extra coat. Chilly is not quite the word for it. We started out sedately enough, pottering through the bayou until we got to the river proper, and our guide put the hammer down. Sitting in the nose of the boat meant we were getting the best unspoiled views of the reflections in the swap, but it also meant we go the full wind chill factor.

One of the first things we saw on the river was some ‘houseboats’, and I use the term with no exactitude whatsoever! Because these are quaint little two storey houseboats with a kitchenette downstairs and a party deck upstairs like you might see pottering around the Gold Coast Broadwater, these look like something my grandfather knocked together in his back yard in Toowoomba and then decided he should float them on some kegs or something. No, scratch that, my Poppa was a pretty handy carpenter. These little houseboats belong to some industrious local who will come out and use them for fishing and hunting and well, some people apparently live in them. They have dodgy, dodgy looking electricity hooked up to their little houseboats and they look like they’re all in need of some TLC. What they really remind me of is the Southern equivalent of some Minnesota ice fishing hut… a floating man cave.

As we move further down the river we saw many more permanent (shit, I am reluctant to call them that) structures that people have built along the river’s edge that the locals refer to as ‘camps’. It sounds like anyone with a boat can access the waters edge and build themselves a camp. In the summer time, the camps are heavily used for recreational activities from hunting and fishing, canoeing, swimming and even waterskiing. There are well kept, large camps with decks and power and satellite dishes, and others look like they belong on a rubbish tip or a warzone. To be honest, they don’t look all that appealing to me as holiday destinations, though I imagine the river is far more appealing and holds many more charms when the weather is warmer.

As mentioned earlier, we missed out on the gators this tour, it’s just too cold for them to be out sunning themselves on logs or anything, but we did see two gorgeous little river otters! Very unexpected. They’re such inquisitive little guys, one of them came quite close to our boat and swam along side for a while. Mind you, they move so fast it was hard to catch a photo, but it was very cool to see them in the wild. Awesome sauce. We also saw some tortoises, grey squirrels, some common egrets, a great blue heron, some cormorants and a peacock (don’t ask).

All up the tour was really interesting and takes you through some very unusual terrain that is quite unaccessible except by boat. I’d recommend to anyone to go along for a couple of hours through the swamp. I took many of photographs that probably give the area a moody and bleak feel, given the weather was less than optimal.

After our Louisiana swamp tour, we thought we’d continue out Big Southern adventure and try out The Big Easy Diner in Slidell for lunch/dinner (we have inadvertently slipped into a habit of skipping breakfast, and having lunch/dinner somewhere between 2pm-4pm… I know, bad habits but it’s only for a while). The Big Easy Diner looked like something off a movie set – red leather booths, black and white checked tiles everywhere, neon signs and a huge menu full of typical Southern fare. I decide to try the catfish and shrimp combo (with mash and salad) and Mr K opted for a bowl of chilli and some onion rings, after assurances from our waitress that ‘they is so good, I takes the leftover chilli ho’wum alls the time’. We probably need to keep reminding ourselves about the complete lack of portion control here, because this is what we got for dinner –

FUCK. All deep fried and huge. Onion rings almost the size of your head, a small side salad that did nothing to offset the heart attack in the rest of the meal. I ate my salad and most of the mash, but only managed about half the catfish and shrimp… there’s only so much deep fried goodness you can take. By all accounts, the chilli was as good as our waitress claimed.

After lunch, we hit the road!! After being in Beaumont yesterday, we were destined to hit five states in twenty four hours – Texas, Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama and Florida. Try doing that in Australia without a jet! The country side was really interesting, so much industry down here. We also kept looking up the the local demographics as we went through various towns. Mississippi is quite depressing – has the highest rates of poverty, highest infant mortality rates, lowest rate of health insurance and highest rates of obesity. 🙁 Mississippi needs a lot of help.

We stopped in Biloxi, Mobile and a couple of other places on our way to Pensacola… where we had tickets to check out a uniquely American attraction – MONSTER TRUCK JAM! Woo-hoo! We had no idea what to expect, but were there largely to check out the locals, see how ‘into’ monster trucks they are and figure out what we think of the whole monster truck thing. First thing we noticed when we arrived was that there were plenty of locals getting around with earmuffs on. Bugger, that meant we had to find some earplugs and quick. Luckily Mr K found some at the merchandise stand and when we got into the stadium, we found out why. Not only were there monster trucks, but there were modified quad bikes running races around the arena, and they were so loud!

There were heaps of people at monster trucks, many of them quite excited and appeared to know quite a lot about the monster truck circuit, and the current year’s leaderboard. And there were a few long suffering wives and even a few long suffering children there too, watching on while a very enthused Dad cheered.

We made our way to our seats and I just abhor the way my shoes were sticking to the floor… I didn’t want to think about what was causing the gross sticky underfoot thing, but it didn’t take long to figure it out. Every other person coming into the place was carrying beers, cardboard trays of something with liquid cheese all over it that was pretending to be ‘nachos’ and/or hotdogs… you can literally buy a cup of that cheesy shit to dip your cheese stuffed pretzel into. All of it made our lunch look positively gourmet healthy. :/

The monster truck people are a bit like circus people… who are in turn a bit like the Pigeon Fanciers Club of Prague or the Redlands Orchid Appreciation Sociaty. Seems it doesn’t matter what you’re into, there are always people who absolutely live and breathe it. The Monster Truck circuit is no exception. There were obviously people here who were so enamoured with Monster Trucks that tonight was definitely a highlight for them. Mr K and I, on the other hand, as he so succinctly pointed out were a bit like social anthropologists plonked down unceremoniously amongst a new species and desperately hoping no one would notice we didn’t belong there. I’d say it was fun, but seriously? I think it was mostly just funny… and yes I know, that assessment is a long term side effect of my established snobbery when it comes to cultural expressions.

Oak Alley Plantation Louisiana

Posted on March 7, 2014 by borysSNORC

We had two things on our 'must see' list while we were in Louisiana, other than Mardi Gras of course, and that was to visit a southern plantation and go check out some gator/swamp territory. So today it was off to a stately plantation home and we'll check the swamps tomorrow.

We decided to go to Oak Valley Plantation at Vacherie, which is about 45mins from New Orleans as they have regular tours, a very well preserved manor home and it was on the way to Baton Rouge.

Today was rather dreary, weather wise, felt like it was going to rain all day, but kept changing its mind. But the overcast slight drizzle seemed to suit the mood of the plantation with it's restoration fern covered oak trees, the house's 28 stately Greek Revival columns, and of course the solemnity of the reconstructed slave quarters.

Oak Alley was, and remains, a going sugar plantation. Built by slaves, the house is three stories high with massive verandahs around all floors, and insulating 16″ thick brick walls for both interior and exterior walls. It has been designed with windows and door directly opposite on each side of the house so as to maximise the cross ventilation – many of these heat management design elements remind me very much of the famous Old Queenslander style houses back home. Interestingly, Oak Alley consists of very few rooms, one sitting room or parlour, a lavish dining room, and plantation management office downstairs; a master bedroom, nursery, children's bedroom and a sitting room/viewing room (for use when someone had passed away as there are no funeral homes anywhere) upstairs and a large internal stairwell in the centre of the house. I wasn't aware that many of these old homes had a kitchen in an entirely separate building, and slaves would prepare food elsewhere and bring it to the big house at meal times,Oak Alley derives its name from the 28, three hundred year old, Virginia Oaks that line the path leading up to the front of the home. Oddly enough, the house is about two hundred years old and no one can document or could recall who planted these oaks. Out the back of the home, is another 28 Virginia Oaks in a path leading away from the house towards the slave quarters, though these gorgeous trees are a young one hundred and fifty years old and were planed by Jacque Roman, the owner of the plantation during the slaving era and the builder of the home.

Through years of studying history, we learn so many things about the American civil war, slavery and emancipation histories, but it's the little details that you learn from visiting a place like this that stay with you…

– The slaves would supplement their rations by growing their own vegetables and raising their own chickens, we thought it quite odd that the plantation owners would buy any excess corn off the slaves (that they OWNED) to feed to their horses and other stock animals.

– Miss Celine (Jacque Roman's wife) would give her houseguests a pineapple upon their arrival, and each morning the guest got up and their pineapple was intact, they were fine. But if one morning a guest got up and found their pineapple served up for breakfast, they had outstayed their welcome.

– Many slaves died from very preventable conditions, a very obvious one being from parasite picked up while working the fields without shoes one – worms and the like. It defies logic why you would let your $300-$1200 slave die for want of a cheap of pair of shoes? Surely shoes would be a good investment in protecting your property and ensuring many years of work to come? Bad management.

– Many southerners were very superstitious, and I never knew this, but when a person died, and the mirrors were covered in black cloth the theory behind this was to stop the person's spirit from crossing into, and being trapped in, the mirror.

– When the boy of the house reach fifteen years of age, he was considered a man and it was no longer appropriate for them to live and sleep in the big house. They would move into a nearby house called the Garconiere but still take their meals etc in the house with the family.

– It seemed quite a standard practice for well to do socialite wives to take the children to live in New Orleans (a day away by steam boat and two or three days by horse) and leave their husband/Master to oversea the plantation.

– The mattresses on the beds in the house were made of horsehair, duck feathers and Spanish moss, which would flatten down and get lumpy overnight. Every morning the house slaves would spend up to an hour a mattress taking the bed head off the bed (which resembles a rolling pin) and beat and roll the mattress until it was soft and flat again… apparently it was quite a skill and had to be done every morning.

There were many other things too, but these were the little oddities that stuck in my head for now. I wish we had more time to check out more of the plantations in the area. Some are well looked after like this one which has been in a special trust for the last forty years or so, and others… not so much. It is a sad chapter of America's history, but a chapter that can not, and should not, be denied or neglected.

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Cirque de Soleil – Varekai

Posted on March 7, 2014 by borysSNORC

Saw Varekai in Beaumont Texas tonight at the Ford Park Arena. I was a bit confused when they arrived there was no signage, no merchandise stand and no concession stand. We were being led into what looked like an empty arena by side doors. We go through some black curtains and find ourselves in the stands and looking for our seats which were flat on the floor about five rows from the front. I’ve been to quite a few Cirque shows by now and every one of them has had an atmosphere of surreal excitement going on outside… I recall the sets and props outside the tent at Ovo and how amazed The Small Child was at being able to get in amongst the oversized grasses and lit up flowers – this place had none of that. Not even a sign to let you know you were at the right show. The result being we felt like we could be getting let in to see a lecture or something and people were responding to the flat atmosphere accordingly.

We took our seats and had a good look around, the usual stage lighting, small amount of smoke and crickets and dripping noises made up the ambience inside. I was feeling a bit uneasy about it and my expectations lowered dramatically as I felt like this was budget Cirque somehow. Being in an arena just doesn’t have the same feel as the BIg Top or one of the dedicated theatres in Las Vegas. Had me a bit worried as I have Mr K lined up for about five shows and this was the first.

Unfortunately that feeling of slight disappointment lasted well through up until intermission. There was a lot of panto and time with the clowns on stage as well as quite a few dance scenes, but only four moderately impressive acts – two aerialists (the main character who falls from the heavens with wings and a lady in gold with a trapeze bar) and two acrobatic acts. They looked fabulous as per usual and the music was wonderful too, but there was none of the ‘OMG how the hell did they do that?’, gives you goosebumps, display of human ingenuity and physical endeavour that I tend to associate with the Cirque.

The second half however totally redeemed itself, some amazing balance and strength artists, some very accomplished aerialists and one of my favourites, a dozen guys on the Russian swings. They were fantastic, and I was so glad we came all the way to Texas to see them in the end. Mr K said he enjoyed it immensely as well, so now I am less worried about having lined him up to see so many shows, knowing that the others will have a vastly improved atmosphere over the arena setting too.