The occupants of households past

I was talking to an Irish girl in a hostel once, about room mates. I told her about the rag tag punch of misfits I've lived with in the past few years.
She thought it was great.
So here it goes again.



Morgan - Was a drug user, now a lesbian roller derby player

 I had just finished high school and was desperate to get out of my mothers house. Not being of legal age yet was proving to be a problem in procuring a home. I had worked with this girl named Morgan for about a month, she said she had a spare room. It was great at first, we got along well, we threw awesome themed parties, she let me use her ID. Then she started smoking a lot of pot, she lost her job, didn't get a new one and spent our rent money on weed.
Time in the house - 7 months

Adelle- The crazy Christian

I was desperate when I took the room in this house. I didn't know her, she was advertising online. I had just got back from an overseas trip and couldn't stand living with my mother any more. Adelle was (I presume still is) a strict Christian. She was engaged but didn't live with her fiancé. I have no problem with religion  to each his own, but she used to have her super judgmental bible study group come over every week. But the thing that really earned her place in the lunatic house mate hall of fame was the fact she kept a very large jar of chicken bones on the kitchen table. Something about good luck, wedding, I never really listened. It was gross. 

Time in the house - 8 months

Siobhan, Mark and someone else so forgettable I can't even remember his name.

This house was doomed from the start. I moved in with my friend, her boyfriend and his cousin. Can you pick the odd one out in that situation? It was ok a first, but I moved out after the boys put a dead crab in my bed. Probably  just a joke, but it was the icing on the cake.
Time in the house - 1.5 months

Marty and Ash. 
This house was really fun. I moved in here after having a pretty shitty break up. Ash is one of my best friends and he knew Marty through someone else. Marty was a social worker during the day and a drag queen who went by the name Martini Ice at night. This house was a debaucherous mess and great when you needed a costume for a party.
Time in the house - 7 months

The bat cave - dangerous to your mental health
All good thing must come to an end. With the previous house, Marty reached an age where he wanted to try living by himself so Ash and I moved on. Being poor students we took the first house we were offered with our poor credit history and limited income. We called it the bat cave, it was where dreams went to die. There was staples in the wall like they'd been filming porn in there, a hole in one of the bedrooms, an outside bathroom and no laundry. Oh, and the landlord was an insane devil woman who once woke me up by knocking on my bedroom window.
Time in the house - 9 months

Ash and myself find a friend; Bec the British bitch.
When we got jobs, we got out of the bat cave. We found a nice respectable house near the university. A girl I worked with moved in. It didn't end well. We signed a year long lease, she left after two weeks, she didn't give any notice and removed all her belonging while we were out getting hung over food one day. We got our pay back though.......
Then came Paul
A bipolar nutcase. He was a really nice guy, but he was six years older than us but acted six years younger. He made for some really great nights out, when he would blow his salary shouting us drinks.
Time in the house -12 months


Pip, Ashley Stacy , Jodie, Ray.
(My last home in Australia)

Ash and I went our separate ways. I moved into an all girl share house. There was Pip; the feisty flight attendant. Ashley; the lesbian professional dancer. And Stacey; the pathological liar with a dalmatian named Dexter.

Ashley got a cruise ship job and left, in moved Jodie. Jodie lost a lot of weight on the duramine diet and was paranoid about putting it back on. She didn't work, went to uni like two days a week, went to the gym twice a day and would try to force us into house weigh ins.

Stacey was convinced everyone was out to get her and moved out/got kicked out for not paying her rent.

In came Ray a girl who claimed to be a devout Christian but was super slutty as well. What ever makes you happy I guess.
Time in the house - 12 months

A Collection of short stories

This bus must be pretty old. At least 20 years old in fact. 

•  I saw a child pick up a cassette tape, put it in the CD player and shut the lid. He looked so confused when it wouldn't work. 
• Roller blading is kind of big where I live, I saw some chump trying to roller blade on pebblecrete. 
• There was a fire drill at the school I work at. They had pre-warned me that there going to be one and that I was responsible for getting my children outside to the safe point. Piece of cake. When the class started I did a quick head count so I knew how many kids to get outside. The alarm went off, I told the kids to leave everything where it was and head outside, there was no time to put their “outdoor” shoes on. Outside at the safety point did a head count, everyone there, nailed it! Or so I thought. I looked around at the other kids who were in perfect lines, my class swarming around like a heard of cattle. I saw one of my older kids on the other side of the car park, he waved to me, I waved back. As I was waving back a bee flew directly into my eye, I shrieked and tried to bat it away. I looked up hoping that the student hadn't seen it. He had and was rolling around on the floor laughing.  
  
  

• 

  The best example to give children, I think so. 

  This story was told to me and I think it's too hilarious not to share. A girl I was working with told me how when they were in high school she had to go on a really boring school camp, as soon as lights went out her and her friends sneaked out to go get drunk. She was pretty happy with herself so she was walking along smiling when she walked directly into a low slung clothes line. The clothes line went into her open smiling mouth and cut her in the corners of her mouth. 
  
  
• I thought I saw a man kidnapping a child, he was running towards me with what looked like a child under his arm. I was all ready to make a citizens arrest, but when he got closer I realised he was just running with a pink gym towel and a pair of running shoes in his hand.

• 

  Kangaroo print shirt

  I was out having drinks with some friends of my flat mates and one of their companions tried to tell me we had a different moon in Australia. I wasn't the only one who knew what he was saying was wrong, several people tried to explain it to him, it took about ten minutes before he realised.
  
  
  
  
  
  

 My working visa has been denied because my degree has not been apostilled. What the fuck is apostilled! It's just a way to scam more money out of people. This has set back the visa process back at least another two weeks. As of Monday I will be an illegal alien.

 

Sharing the same irrational fear

One of the last weekends I spent in Georgia, I got very drunk in a bar in Zugdidi with some friends, there was four of us at this bar, we were the only people there. All night.

As 3AM rolled around we decided it was probably time to head to bed and let the poor bar owner shut up. Engela and Brent wanted to spend some alone time together, went to a hotel. Priyanka and I being stingy decided to go to the hostel which was a 15 minute walk outside of town.

We were drunk and hungry so we stopped and got some food and sat on the curb and ate it. Priyanka decided chips sandwiches would be good feast. That girl is a genius, they were amazing. One loaf of bed and a bag of chips was more than enough drunk food AND we had left overs for breakfast.

After we ate we walked to the hostel, it looked pretty quiet, but it was the end of the semester we just figured there wasn't too many people around because they had already started sending people home for the holidays. There was no one at the hostel. No staff. No patrons. They had shut up for the winter. There was a number to call if there was no one around, but at what was closer to 4 AM they didn't answer.

What were two drunk, traveller to do?

We built a cubby house out of the furniture they had left outside, took all the towels off the clothes line and tried to use them as blankets. It was winter, so it was freezing. We had been trying to sleep for about half an hour when Pri asked,

"Do you think it's cold enough to get frost bite?"

The thing was I couldn't sleep because I was being plagued with the same question. It was a completely irrational fear, it wasn't that cold and we weren't really exposed to the elements. I think in the end we got about half an hour sleep. 7 AM  rolled around, we got up and bailed, we didn't want the staff to turn up and try and charge us for using their furniture (the staff at this place were not very fond of TLG, I would not put it past them to charge us). As we were walking out of the hostel it started to snow for the first time that winter. Priyanka, being from India, had never seen snow before and previous to this day was so excited about snow that I thought she might cry. We were so tired, she didn't even crack a smile and sulked that it wasn't real snow, it was slush.

 We walked to the main road and hitched to Batumi where some friends of ours were, we made it there in two hours - a  record time. It took us four cars and about 20 minutes of walking down some creepy village road. The best ride we got that day was a man in a big, black four wheel drive who pulled over and picked us up. Drove us into into the city and didn't say a word the whole time. It allowed us to nap and refresh ourselves for another night of drinking. Pretty sure he only picked us up because he felt bad we were stuck in the rain.

The story of how I got the blood clot

Three days after the fall

I was really drunk in Tbilisi with some friends, we got back to the hostel quite late at night. Thinking I had a bit too much to drink I decided to go down stairs and vomit, thus reducing my hangover for the morning. I had forgotten though, that the bathroom floor was really wet and slippery. I fell over and smashed my arm against the edge of the sink.

At first I thought it just to be bruised, but it hadn't gone down in two weeks. So I had to go to the hospital which was an hour away. The hospital was a chaotic old soviet building, the x-ray technician I had was missing an ear. None of these things were building my confidence in the medical care I was about to receive.

After having my arm x-rayed I was taken to another room to wait. The technician came back and said that my arm wasn't broken it was just a very large blood clot and if I was married this would never have happened. I was given some cream and sent on my way.

UPDATE: The clot is still there.

Crazies on the bus. Part 2

It has happened. Not once, not twice, but thrice times I have been vomited next to on public transport. The first two were small children and the third was a middle aged man.

Berat, Albania

1. I will start with the middle aged man because that occurred last night and is still fresh in my mind. The thing I don't understand is, he was a local adult, he could speak the same language as the driver. Why didn't he alert the driver to the fact he was feeling unwell? He could have pulled over calmly and this man could eject the contents of his stomach into some shrubbery instead into a plastic bag less than a metre from me. But alas, it wasn't until after he had spewed, that the bus stopped. 
2. The second time. I had probably one of the worse hangover I have ever had in my life. I was supposed to hitch hike with my friend back home, but I just wasn't feeling up to it so I decided to catch a bus. (This was the day after I got the blood clot, a story for another day.) The driver made me take the seat right at the front, in between a boy in his late teens and a woman with a two year old daughter. Before we left the mother gave her child a bottle of coke and this cake thing that is the equivalent of a twinkie. About two hours into a five hour bus ride, this little girl was sick. All over her mother, the floor and the chair. The smell was vile, I probably would have retched even if I wasn't hungover. This time the bus did not stop, we waited until the designated rest period. I entirely blame the mother in this instance. That was way too much sugar for a child.
3. Which brings me to the first time someone vomited next to me on a bus. It was a 12 hour bus ride from Ho Chi Minh City to Nha Trang, during the day, this was not some cushy sleeper bus. I was with my sister who has the ability to sleep through anything so she was not phased by anything that was going on around us. Three hours into the journey a young family hoped on to the bus, two children under seven and a baby. The baby screamed - non-stop for five hours. The parents passed it around the bus and tried to make it hush but nothing seemed to work. Then it (I say it because it was wearing gender neutral colours) vomited. Everywhere. I don't know how it was possible for such a little person to create so much mess. But it was hideous, I started retching. Elisha told me to move away from it if it was going to make me sick. I would have had to step in it to get away. So I closed my eyes and dreamed of the beach. It will never be known if the child vomited because it screamed for five hours, or if it screamed for five hours because it was already sick. 

Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam

Blog title explained

Choosing a blog title is one of the hardest decisions  one has to make. The title speaks to the tone of the blog, you want it to give the audience a little taste of what is going on inside. In my case I wanted it to be light hearted maybe a little funny, but not the kind of funny where it was humorous at the time but when you look back at it you cringe - like when you think of the Hotmail address you created when you were twelve and first discovered MSN chat.

My friend was helping me brain storm ideas for it and we came up with "One Bag Full." This is a blog relating to my exploits whilst travelling, so it makes sense. I have my one bag full. But it is also an inside joke between my friend Ash and I. It started on a faithful trip to Sydney.

Sydney Harbour Bridge

I had recently been accepted in the teach and Learn Georgia program so I was making the voyage to Sydney to see my father and some other family before I left. I convinced my friend ash to come with my promising him after the family formalities were done we would share in a few debaucherous nights.

Ash testing out our incredibly small hotel room 

We woke up on our second day there with the hangover of champions, but we weren't going to let that stop us. Luna park was waiting for us. On the way to Luna Park we walked under the Sydney harbour bridge, there was a little old woman sitting outside of a corner store talking to her friend, also a little old woman. As we walked past we managed to catch a snippet of her conversation.

'...and so I said to Mabel, there was not one measly bag full, there wasn't even two bags full, there was a remarkable three bags full."

Ash and I stopped and looked at each other, was this woman telling her friend a nursery rhyme and passing it off as her own story? Did her friend have Alzheimer's and believed what this woman was saying?

In all honesty this woman could have owned a sheep farm and was talking about the yield she had off her animals this season. But what fun is that she was definitely stealing nursery rhymes and claiming them as her own material.

That night a challenge was born, talk to a stranger using claiming a fairytale or nursery rhyme to be your own story.  I don't remember if we were successful in our endeavour.

The next time I was at work I sent Ash this text message.

Did I tell you what my god daughter Cindy got up to? Well that girl has got some nerve. She was complaining and complaining about how her step mother was being mean to her and how she favoured her own daughters. So I called up her step mother and talked to her, convinced her to let Cindy go to the upcoming ball, she reluctantly agreed, saying she really needed a break and it would be good for her. So I went over there and brought Cindy the beautiful dress, it was one of my own, passed down through the family -  I thought it would look beautiful on her. I organised everything, a suitable mode of transport, a male escort, she was going to have the night of her life. I only had one request, not an unreasonable one, be home before midnight. It is not proper for a girl of her age to be out galavanting around half the night doing god knows what. AND do you know what! She disobeyed me, she turned up at some awful hour in the morning torn clothes, her hair a mess missing a shoe! I don't know what that little slut was up to. She was babbling nonsense about a prince and her car being a pumpkin. I think she's on drugs. I don't know what to do with her. 

Needless to say, I wasn't very busy at work that day.