Hawaii: Day Trip to Brain Hemorrhage Beach

'Hey girls, welcome to Sandy Beach. Just wanted you guys to know, we're advising against swimming today. Current's pretty strong. Not sure we'd be able to pull you out if you got in trouble. And this beach is known to cause the most spinal injuries in the world'.

Bloody hell. We - Martina, Karin (my roomies) Filippa, Heini (additional Swedes) and I - had woken up extra early to get the rental car and head out to one of the many beaches that line Oahu's shores. After a scenic diversion twice round Diamond Head, Karin had managed to point the car east and we'd parked up at Sandy Beach, east of the mountain where some terrifying waves were round-housing into the sand.

I hadn't been in the ocean yet and was looking forward to splashing about and maybe digging a hole or making some kind of fort. I'm not one of those lie-on-a-beach-all-dayers. I don't need a tan, I need activities. Now the lifeguard was telling me that was out of the question.
What. A. Jobsworth.
Luckily, I had some TIP TOP companions to chat to and a boiled egg (bought from the petrol station for thirty cents. Excellent seaside snack) to eat. However, Sandy Beach also turned out to be Bloody Windy Beach and after a while, the decision was made to try another spot and look for lunch.

It just wasn't the day for beaching. We sat on another slice of sand further up the coast, with our hoodies up and knees to our chattering lips. 'I'M HAVING SUCH A RELAXING TIME!!' Martina screamed over the wind.

You wouldn't think Hawaii to be cold, but it gets pretty darn gusty from time to time. It rains a lot too, but only drizzle and there's always a rainbow to make up for it, so its allowed. This breeze just wasn't easing up though. We threw in the towels and trooped back to the car, heading to a Mexican shack on the roadside for tea.

the Hawaiian hello demonstrated by Baz

Perhaps driving in Sweden is easier than driving in the States, but Karin was having a tough time on the Hawaiian roads.
We overshot the diner and ended up in a driveway leading to a Marine army base. Waiting at the stop sign to rejoin the main road, another car (presumably driven by a real-life Marine) pulled in and signed the friendly Hawaiian wave to Karin, who lost all control of her hand and the limb it was attached to trying to figure out how to do it back, all the while yelping hysterically in Swedish. The other car had passed by now, wondering who this cabal of screeching women emerging from the base actually were, but Karin had pushed the pedal to the metal and propelled us approximately fifty metres to the tiny car park of the Mexican cafe up the road. 

I hoped it wasn't local local food, which consists of rice and mincemeat and is completely devoid of any greens or vegetables whatsoever. Loco Moco looks WELL rank. This place had 'organic' and 'fresh' plastered all over its exterior so it couldn't be that bad. Unless tofu was involved. I scanned the blackboard menu above the till, picking out the fish tacos and went to sit outside on the benches and let the girls try and teach me more Swedish. A lady behind the grill yelled out my name when my order was up. I came back with a plate of this:

Yes, it was necessary to make the picture that large. Because anything less would be an injustice. And because I'm showing off. Because this meal of fish tacos was BOMB.COM, snazzmatazzmic and Offish Delish off the hook.

The fish - pleasantly meaty - had been marinated for a long time and then grilled for optimum flavour. Each portion came squashed inside two soft corn tortillas and topped with chunky chilli and pineapple salsa. It's companion was homemade coleslaw, dressed in some lemony peppery goodness that is making me salivate just by looking at this picture. Garlic also featured, but I can't pinpoint where - it was definitely flitting about.
The others had ordered pretty tasty looking dishes too (there was a portobello mushroom burger in attendance) but I reckon mine was the best. Definitely worth searching out, definitely worth driving to the east shore for.

karin, martina, filippa, heini

Satisfied, we ambled back to the car and began the trek home, stopping briefly at cliff overlooking Sandy Beach and upon which a lighthouse perched for a quick photo-op and look at the view. There are some places that are never boring to look at, some vistas that you never tire of, and this was certainly one of them.

Boston: A Little Bit Magic

I'd wanted to visit Boston ever since I finished watching the fantastic and captivating Martin Scorsese directed film, The Departed, years ago. We arrived in the Massachusetts capital after an epic ten hour Megabus ride across the border from Canada and across New York state.

I expected the city to be chockful of gruff men talking out of the corners of their mouths with wise guy accents, I wanted to see Mark Wahlberg lunging briskly around street corners and Jack Nicholson's superfantastic crazy eyes glinting out from a gap in the window of a blacked out armoured car. I got plenty of the accent but Mark and Jack sadly remained elusive. Luckily Boston and her surrounding areas had plenty to keep us entertained during our visit.

Salem was our first stop, home of the infamous witch trials of 1692. A couple of girls, hungry for attention, started a rumour that a few women in the village had put a curse on them. I'll call the main girl Lindsay Lohan, because this lot were the original Mean Girls. So, Lindsay Lohan experiences a fit one day but tells her dad that their Carribean slave cast a spell on her. The rest of the girls grow jealous of the attention Lindsay's getting and spin their own yarn to compete: 'Yeah, like, we totally had some black magic cast on us too'.
I don't know, maybe they were starting to get their period and got spooked, thinking their innards were about to fall out. Maybe they wanted to be talked about, discussed, achieve a mini-level of fame. Who knows? Teenage girls are nuts. So they point the finger at two women, both named Sarah in Salem Town; one a beggar called Good and another by the name of Osborne, who was an elderly, impoverished spinster. The Carribean slave is also accused. Instead of rationally questioning Lohan and her cronies and cross-examining their stories, the villagers whole heartedly accept their accusations as truth and set about collecting firewood to build the execution pyre. At this point in time, witchcraft hysteria is rife in the Europe and is infecting the New World with the speed of a student pub crawl in Newcastle during Freshers Week. Everyone is scared shitless of the supposed work of the Devil, so without a shred of evidence, they burn the Sarahs (Tituba, the Caribbean slave is spared this fate).

In the space of about five months, the townsfolk and judges condemn nineteen people to crimes relating to witchcraft and issue death sentences. Many more accused die in prison and a 71-year-old man is pressed to death with stones. It was madness. All this pain and persecution borne from a lie weaved by a group of hormonally charged, naive teenage girls. The killings only ended when the wife of a judge was accused of witchcraftery and the judge thought: 'Actually, this is a load of bollocks'.

We visited Salem close to Halloween to find its cobbled streets crammed with middle-aged Goths wearing unsuitably tight velvet and cheap lace corsets, squealing kindergarten school groups and teenagers mugging passersby in the name of Trick or Treat. It was fun, totally Disney. Not scary in the slightest but full of pantomime characters and cartoonishly creepy houses.

Alongside the witch trial stuff, there was a store selling Harry Potter merchandise (wands, Bertie Botts Every Flavour Beans, Butterbeer, brass Snitches. I seriously toyed with the idea of buying a $15 Deathly Hallows ring before giving myself a sharp and orderly slap) while a psychic convention and fair was taking place in the local shopping centre.

All things magick, weird, Wicca, offbeat, gory, Gothic and witchy lived here, in Salem Massachusetts. For some, all this stuff is just a bunch of Hocus Pocus (an excellent movie which also filmed some of its scenes in the town. Probably SJP's finest role) but the 14-year-old in me, who had tried stubbornly to perform the same spells as in The Craft (starring Robin Tunney and Neve Campbell, 1996), relished being submerged in this ludicrous and fantastic world.


Harvard was next on our list. We took the metro to this globally renowned centre of learning and emerged from the station to find ourselves on High Street Kensington. Harvard is a little way out of Boston city centre, a few stops away from MIT, in a town called Cambridge and it looks discerningly like home.

The plan was to tour the grounds with one of the student-run tour groups but we made the mistake of joining one with over-keen expressions and voices that placed heavy emphasis on random words. Their uniform consisted of straw boaters and maroon t-shirts that attempted to mimic the Boston accent by replacing 'r' with 'h'. Hahvahd. Pahk yah cah in Hahvahd yahd. See? Awesome. What was definitely NOT awesome however, was our tour guide Pritti's ridiculously high-pitched voice, crap jokes and game-show host mannerisms.

'HELLO EVERYONE and WELCOME to HAAAAAAARVARD UNIVERSITY!', she bellowed at us, punching the air with glee. How could she be so loud on a Saturday morning? Was it nervousness, or had she in fact she been popping Ritalin all night? Ritalin is a form of the class A narcotic, speed. I'd read somewhere that it was popular among college students, especially the freshman class. This could explain her yelling like an olden dayz town crier.

'To start us OFF, why don't we ALL say our names and TELL US AS LOUDLY AS YOU CAN where you're JOINING US FROM THE WORLD TODAY?!' She looked at me, smile stretched across her face. If she'd had a tail, it would be creating its own gale force wind from waggling. What an eager pup. Jeeze. 'London, in the UK'.

She seemed miffed I hadn't screamed my answer at the 20-strong group, but did her best to mask her disappointment behind yet more undiluted enthusiam. 'OKAAAAAAAAAAAY! I actually have a cousin that lives in Leicester! GREAT!' Once everybody had identified themselves, she herded us across the road into the grounds of the Ivy League university, yelping out facts, stories and dates about the institution. This wouldn't do. I felt harangued and we hadn't even begun the tour properly. I wiggled my eyebrows at Leah, silently indicating that I planned to escape as soon as possible and she should remain alert and ready.

The opportunity to do a runner presented itself when I spotted another tour group close to ours, facing a different direction. They were being led by a tall student in a checked shirt and beige shorts who looked remarkably like Prince William.  
Hello, sailor. Time to jump ship. We slid behind a forest of camera lenses owned by a flock of Japanese tourists and joined the new tour. In the next sixty minutes, I learned loads about Harvard because:

1. his voice didn't make me want to saw off my ears.
2. he had interesting, funny anecdotes and his explanations sounded unscripted.
3. he looked like Prince William, who I used to have a massive crush on but who shattered my dreams by marrying Kate instead of coming to North Wembley to ask for my hand.

By the end of the tour Leah and I were crushing hard and laughing our heads off like two completely deranged teenagers.
This was wholly unacceptable because we are in fact, worldly-wise women in our mid-twenties who have a proven track record in looking at and conversing with men. Yet here we were, blushing and giggling and shoving each other towards Prince William as though we were 12-years-old and had been asked to be bridesmaids at K-Stew and R-Patz' Twilight-themed wedding. We didn't even know his name. I had to be restrained from following him down the street at the tour end. We had to retrieve our sanity. What would bring us back down to earth?

The answer was a good old-fashioned burger at another Boston institution, Mr Bartley's. The queue was about 20 deep when we joined it, still laughing like a pair of idiots. Mr Bartley himself was perched on a stool outside, notebook in hand, briskly taking orders which we had to shout due to his deafness and age. It was rammo inside, groups squashed right up against their neighbours and elbows tucked in while attempting to devour the juicy, meaty burgers. They came teetering on a plate overloaded with either fries or Kate-Moss-skinny onion rings. It was a damn fine meal. If you ever find yourself in that neck of the woods...

The last memory I have of Boston, which was about a fortnight ago now, is our night out on the razz the last evening we were there. A TexMex teacher called Marcella in our dorm joined us on our crawl of the diviest pubs and bars the city centre had to offer. Outside the streets were teeming with people in costume stalking about trying their darnedest to pin down fun.

We traipsed about ten metres from the Hostel door to the nearest Irish pub and sat at the bar, listening to stories about gangland Mexico while sipping cheep beer from plastic glasses.

At some point in the night, I must have decided to see how far our British accent, so popular with the Americans, could take us. Would it buy us a couple of drinks? Earn us a proposal or two? Diamonds, pearls or a suitcase full of cashmoney? WOULD MARK WAHLBERG FINALLY STEP OUT OF THE SHADOWS AND INTO MY ARMS, SEDUCED BY MY LAIRY LONDON TONES?

I scored a drink, while Leah earned herself an indecent proposal from an extremely incomprehensible and red-faced man. Marcella picked up George Washington, complete with blunderbuss, silly hat and stoner eyes.

Of all the east coast cities we've visited, and there's been a fair few, Boston has been my favourite. The accent, the people, the familiarity and the chowder. Chaaadah. It was all completely fabulous. Thank you Massachusetts.

 

Getting HurriCaned with Sandy

Apologies for the blogging blackout but a hurricane called Sandy elbowed her way into my life earlier this week and sharted all over my holiday. However, she demands appropriate coverage, therefore the Boston blog will be published at a later date.

So anyway.

OMG THERE'S A FRANKEN-FRICKIN'-STORM CALLED SANDY GUNNING STRAIGHT FOR MY BACKPACKING ARSE IN NYC.



who knew NYC had a favela?



We were staying in a 'hotel' on Bleecker Street called the Bowery Whitehouse. Lies. It looked nothing like the Whitehouse. Or carry any resemblance to Barry White's house either for that matter. In fact, it looked like something out of a SAW movie sequel, full of creaky doors, poorly-lit corridors and homeless addicts mumbling in cobwebby corners. It was beyond the boundaries of abysmal and into the realm of the absolutely horrific.

I fully expected a knife-wielding maniac to come hurtling down the hall, screeching like the front row of a One Direction concert whenever I battled with the locks to our room.

It was the kind of place where you wished they'd install a euthanasia button just in case you were looking for an exit and couldn't face the fire escape.

Our room, another joke constructed by the cosmos to wreak havoc on our lives, consisted of two rickety single beds with approximately ten centimetres of floorspace. No, okay, I'm being harsh - they'd fulfilled the legal requirement of having at least TWO METRES distance between each plastic wrapped mattress. A round of applause, please. The Whitehouse has really gone above and beyond.



the black board is where my head would go

 

There was no ceiling. Forty bucks a night in downtown Manhattan doesn't quite cover such a frivolity. There were just wooden slats and exposed piping to look at once you'd arranged yourself on the cot-style bed for the night. Bedbugs cheerfully scuttled around my ankles feasting on my cold - but clearly tasty - blood with the level of ferocity you'd see in a Slough kebab shop on a Saturday night. Almost every morning I was awoken by the melodic tones of a thorough and comprehensive phlegm-rattle performed by one of our talented and congested neighbours. Scoundrel.



The Gassonatron and I had already been warned we'd get little sleep on Monday night by Nelson, the weary and sweaty check-in guy, on our arrival from Boston on Sunday evening.



serious business



'You guys are going to have the worst time. Like, ever,' he sighed, wheezing phlegmatically. He looked like the Comic Book Guy from the Simpsons, but with more hair on his head and more misery in his eyes. The family of whiteheads camped around his nose glinted folornly.


'I'm prob'ly gonna be stuck out here for the whole storm. And this is a really old building so like, who knows if we'll even be here in the morning? I hate my life,' he lamented, handing us the keys to 223.

I think the joke's on us, Nelson mate. We're actually paying to stay here, in this infected dump filled with a rabble of shifty tramps and vagabonds, as a cyclone howls outside. At least you're making money.

Nelson told us later that night that he'd gotten a text from his phone company advising us that we were in 'Zone One' and should have been evacuated hours ago. Sandy was expected to suckerpunch the lower east side with tremendous force and cause billions of dollars worth of damage. Terrific. It was now 1am. Would the National Guard, Navy Seals or Jake Gyllenhall ever come to rescue us? 

The only thing to do was hunker down for the evening and find a gung-ho shopkeeper that was open in the morning. We managed to gather essential supplies from a supermarket in Chinatown on Monday including: a packet of Flamin' Hot Cheetos, several Japanese pears, a huge bottle of Budweiser. Not exactly the same garb you'd find in Army issued ration packs, but enough to see us through the storm. This was no time to be healthy. There was a major natural disaster looming. This was the time to eat (or in my case, drink) your feelings.

After dumping our nutritionally wholesome goodies in our room, we arranged with a couple of other British girls, Helly and Debbie, to sit out the afternoon in a local Irish pub sipping  Hurricane specials. The TV above the bar flashed images of blockbuster movies featuring extreme weather to us, masquereding as news. It was hysteria, breeding panic, leading to complete and utter chaos.

CNN showed Jack Sparrow and the Black Pearl careering into Ellis Island. Fox News covered Arnie in the whirrly sky, yelling at everyone to get to the chopper like a modern day Noah. Another channel broadcast Helen Hunt strapped to Lady Liberty's flame while Morgan Freeman narrated the biggest storm to hit the eastern seaboard in however long through a megaphone.

Leah and I sat there astounded. Where we maybe, really, truly about to die? Was I spending my final few hours calmly downing cocktails and cracking jokes with my fellow, fast-becoming-shit-faced chum? Would our bodies be found in the remains of Battery Park in the morning, floating in a sea of flood water, sewage and hotdog wrappers with hungry seagulls tearing at our eyeballs for sustenence? Bolstered by the alcohol, and weirded out by the strength of our own imaginations, we decided to make one more visit to the off-licence for an emergency bottle of vodka. Just in case.

Luckily the night turned out to be rather uneventful. Lights pinged out at around nine on Monday evening, and still hadn't been reconnected when we left the city three days later. Internet connection had done a runner, while electricity, dodgier than a packet of Poundland condoms, was also out for the count. We entertained ourselves by speculating how many panicked notifications and Facebook messages we would each get once our phones found a wifi signal, singing wildly inappropriate songs and making comedy videos out in the storm to cheer ourselves up.

After an ice-cold shower on Tuesday morning, as neccessary as it was unpleasant, we headed out to gawk at the damage. A road block had been put installed a little up Bleecker Street to contain a fire that had broken out in an apartment block. There was news that a crane on a construction site had been pushed over and killed a passerby. Ambulances streaked past, their cargo life support patients whose batteries were running out of juice. Broken shopfronts were a common sight as we joined the streams of people heading uptown to where lights, electricity and coffee still lived.  
 

Our merry band of Hurricane Survivors stuck pretty close to Times Square for the remainder of our time in New York. Times Square looked like Neon decided to go to after-work drinks, mixed her beverages and violently threw up lurid and garish advertising all over the building blocks. The difference between up and downtown was eerie, unsettling and shocking. The Upper East and West along with Chelsea was carrying on with business as usual while the lower half of the island looked as though Mad Max was lord of the land. 

I've been to New York before, but I was really looking forward to getting my city stride back, side-stepping slow Joe tourists, shouting indignantly at yellow cabs cutting across my path by yelling: 'Hey, I'm walkin' here!', and seeing all the sights by whizzing around on an efficient subway system. But then Sandy huffed and puffed and blew my hopes down.

the Chrystler building shows the way to civilisation



We were lucky though. So lucky. People in New Jersey and Queens had their homes decimated. Some had to chase their property down the street. For many there is little chance to rebuild. A lot of them don't have home insurance and are stuck living in shelters until the government can sort out a longer-term solution. Cold weather is creeping in and up to 400,000 in the state are homeless. There's no way this hurricane, its handling and the pace of recovery isn't going to have a significant impact on the electorate come voting day, tomorrow, on the 6th of November.

And at least now I know that if I am ever eye-to-eye with a hurricane in the future, copious volumes of vodka and taking the piss for the duration will always, always see you through.



INSTANT!!! Day Out - Just Add Water

The Greyhound from Pittsburgh to Buffalo, the next stop on our route through the US, wasn't nearly as comfortable as the Megabus. It's the doddery great uncle of coaches, smelling faintly of wee, desperation and stacked with tall leather seats slick with the sweat of previous passengers. Megabus in comparison, is the bright-eyed and bushy-tailed gadget-savvy teen; vibrantly coloured and roomy with wide skylights and petulant wifi.

We've so far been travelling exclusively on Megabus, buying tickets back in July and August when we could get them for the fabled $1 a ride. But for some reason we had to catch the Grey to Buffalo and it was a piss-poor experience. The driver rarely took breaks leaving us no time for a roadside dinner. The connecting bus at Lake Erie failed to turn up so we were herded onto a bus, some of us baa-ing and moo-ing in indignation, with a different company. It was so full one poor bloke was forced to stand in the aisle for near on an hour until we reached the next stop. It rained the entire day, making each coach humid and uncomfortable. Whingewhingewhine. At one point, the driver braked at a set of red lights and instead of stopping, the bus skidded forwards for a few horrifying seconds on the slick tarmac.

wings from Anchor Bar on the second night

I was just excited to get to Buffalo. Ever since I was handed my first buffalo wing at a dive bar called Turtle Jack's, I fell into hot and spicy lust with this incredible sauce. I love it. So much so that I was given a gallon of it for Christmas last year. It looks pretty toxic - neon orange and the same thickness as Heinz tomato soup, with a lemony spiciness that isn't overpowering but gives food a flavourful kick. It is as fantastical and bold as Tom Selleck's moustache. And now I was going to Buffalo, New York state's second largest city, and the town that gave birth to this condiment dream.
The plan was to gorge on buffalo chicken for the duration of our stay.

It was pretty late when we got to Buffalo bus station. We threw our bags into the back of a cab, dumped our stuff at the hostel and headed right back out in the pouring rain and dodging screaming tramps to sate my hunger for buffalo chicken.

It was all I dreamed it would be. Five BONELESS wings saturated in delicious, spicy sauce accompanied by skin-on fries. Boneless wings. Effortless. They're not like chicken nuggets; these weren't shredded bits of poultry re-lumped together and fried, eyeballs, feet, gristle and all. No siree, pure meaty, white chicken. I'm not a huge fan of eating off the bone - it feels feral and I can never get to all the meat properly because I am hindered by tiny teeth and poor technique. Also I am worried about ingesting marrow even though it is reportedly delicious. What if another chicken needed a bone marrow transplant and I sucked away that chance? I don't really know what I'm talking about here, but my point is, boneless wings are thebomb.com.

Food decimated and after a restful night's sleep in an eeriely quiet hostel that had all the fittings and fixtures of a lunatic asylum, we made tracks towards the locality's greatest attraction; the magnificent, marvelous and mighty Niagara Falls. Forty minutes on a local bus dropped us off a couple of minutes away from Rainbow Bridge, just a couple of hundred feet away from the millions of gallons of freshwater that cascades over American cliffs and into Canadian turf.

I don't really know what to say about Niagara Falls. It's Niagara Falls. A lot of water making a hellotta fuss. It's the sheer power of nature that people go to marvel at. The sound of so much water surging off the cliff sounds like a freight train gunning right towards your pathetic, fragile human body. You can get right up to the spray if you're on the US side - there's an elevator in the trunk of the observation deck that you can descend for just one dollar and a set of concrete stairs skirting around the side of the Falls. Cheap day out.com. 

You should definitely go and see it for yourself, but if you can't afford the airfare right now, feel free to photoshop yourself into my pictures x

Brits Ladding it Up in the Pitts

 

It's always nice hearing a fellow British accent when you're away from home. We'd only been on the road for a week, but when I heard Tom and Pat's familiar chat at the rest stop after leaving hum-drum pig's bum Toledo, I very nearly fell upon them like they were from the embassy and I had been released from a traumatic hostage situation. But in the way probably only the British do, I shyly skitted past them and reported my discovery to Gassonatron. She looked mildly interested but was far too busy celebrating our escape from Yawnsville, USA by yelping out all the amazing things we could see, smell, do and eat now that we'd mercifully rejoined civilisation.

Anyway, it wasn't until we rolled up in Pittsburgh and eyeballed each other's backpacks that we actually converged and conversed. The lack of hostels in the vicinity meant that they were most likely staying at the same place as us; Not Another Hostel.

Tom, blond and tall, leapt in first with a toothy hello. We sang back cordial greetings and then got on with the business of exchanging names, ages, where in England we were from (London, Devon, Devon, London by coincidink), and how long we'd been travelling (us: seven-ish days, them: around the two-month mark) before debating the merits of getting a taxi together. It was a choice of either hunting down two buses at $2.50 a ride, or piling into a cab and splitting the fare amongst us for a three mile journey. The obvo choice was to find the nearest cab with a capacious back end for all our junk.

I can't pinpoint the exact moment I realised Tom and Pat were Lads of the Highest Order, but it was probably when I suggested we stop for happy hour at a bar offering $1 beers on our way to finding Mount Washington. The original plan was to get up the cable cars and look down on the city by sunset, but we all quickly consented to a swift pint because frankly, at that price, the bar was practically paying us to drink.
Pint drained, mountain conquered, dinner inhaled (we all went for half-price chicken wings with various marinades - ONE OF THEM RASPBERRY. Blew my mind. I usually abhor the idea of pairing fruit with meat (par example pineapple on pizza. Who in the hell invented that? A right frickin' wrong 'un, that's who) but raspberry barbecue marinade on wings was Offish Delish*) and cab caught, we returned to the hostel to find our host Jon whizzing around the dorms, chucking bed linen and towels on mattresses for us.

We spent the rest of the evening in Church Brew Works, a pub in a church that had barely been converted out of its religious moorings into a palace of ale. Apart from the fact that the altar now housed a full-on brewery with copper pipes and tanks and stuff, the place would be ready for Mass at any given second. I wondered if they performed beer baptisms.

Seeing as Tom and Pat were in town for the same length of time as Leah and I, and we all wanted to see the same things, we decided to knock about together the next day. During this time we:

Ate at Primanti Bros, a restaurant known for its ridiculously stuffed sandwiches (fries, coleslaw and cheese are the default basic fillers) and immortalised on Man vs Food. Adam Richman basically jizzes his pants when he has one, and while it was good, I don't think my arteries could take eating another in a hurry.
On the Lad Scale of Ladditity, I'd give this activity a 8/10. It would have gotten more if bacon was involved.

Strolled down the strip, one long road round the corner from the hostel that led us into the heart of downtown Pittsburgh. We passed houses that had properly gone to town with Halloween decorations, scrap and junk yards, sections of dilapidated dockland warehousing and then grocery stores, bars and food markets. Here's where we picked up ingredients for dinner, because nothing marks out a bunch of Lads more than lamenting about the lack of houmous and selecting items to make falafel and salad for dinner.
Lad Scale of Ladditity rating: 6/10. Would have received a higher rating if we did it rat-arsed, goin ' fackin'  MENAAALLLL and with bits of kebab in our hair.

Went to the Andy Warhol museum. Located on the other side of the river, the museum houses six floors full of videos, magazines, art work, sculptures and installations created by the Daddy of Modern Pop culture. Warhol made his fortune by making the mundane and everyday into the iconic, so a lot of the stuff was a bit like, why am I trying to find artistic genius in this rubbish drawing of a Heinz ketchup bottle?
Then you turn the corner and WHAM! It's the iconic screen print of Elvis, or a giant replication of the front page of the New York Post using black glitter, or a space filled with rectangular silver helium-filled balloons floating dreamily around the room. Great place to while away the day, but the $20 admission fee seems a bit excessive.
Lad Scale of Ladditity rating: 5/10. A lot of it was awesome, but it made me think about social norms and how people behave and celebrity begfriending and yeah. Thinking is an unapproved activity in the Handbook of Laddism, Chapter Six, Coping with Culture so pôints had to be deducted for that.

 

 

Anyway, wicked time. Loved the Pitts more than Brad Pitt in Interview with a Vampire. Going to eat a burger now. Hugs and rainbows xx

 

Down in the Pitts

When I was researching Operation of US of Heeeyyy! a couple of months ago at work, there didn't seem to be many places to stay in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. Then I stumbled across Not Another Hostel, run by Jon and his then girlfriend, on a donation-only basis. If you couldn't afford the suggested $25 a night, you could pay whatever you could or they would let you stay for free. A highly philanthrophic idea that seems rather unusual in the United States of Corporate America.

However, as Jon told us the night we arrived (holed up in a church that had been converted into a pub), he didn't always have good experiences. He left home at 18 after falling out with his ultra-religious parents and opened the hostel after returning from travelling for four years. His first group of visitors were in town for a music festival and invited total strangers to sleep in the lounge so that Jon woke the next morning to find a bunch of decrepit tramps on his sofa. Another flushed tampons down the toilet, causing the plumbing to break down and flooding the basement with a metre of shitty tampon water which cost $1000 to fix.

ONE GUEST EVEN SHAGGED JON'S GIRLFRIEND, then had the absolute cheek to hang out with him the following day and ply him with drinks. Out of guilt I suppose, but what the eff!? Who would have the nerve to stick around? Pig dog.

 

You'd think after this catalogue of horrendous episodes, Jon would just give up and shut the place down. Most people wouldn't have the heart to carry on. But Jon has 'social experiment' stamped through him like a stick of rock and a generally optimistic attitude, so not persevering was never an option.

The $25 per person per night donation keeps Not Another Hostel in operation. It pays for laundry, rent (the landlord is an old hippy who doesn't mind the place being used as a hostel), food, toilet roll and beer. Say the hostel is full every night, and everybody who stays coughs up the money, Jon easily clears $2500 dollars A WEEK, just from hosting travellers in his house. It's not even his full-time job, he runs a paragliding school over the city during the day. And because the hostel is donation based, there's no requirement for fire escapes, extinguishers or the need to pay additional tax or insurance. Schweet. The address remains a secret until you arrive, to avoid an army of tramps and vagabonds pawing the front door. Staying there is sort of like going for a sleepover at a mate's house; it's comfy and a bit messy but you don't feel awkward helping yourself to a beer.

It's a brilliant concept, and a pretty brave one too. I don't know if I could have randomers in my house ALL THE TIME. You couldn't wander around in your pants. Or watch Emmerdale without judgement. Or pretend you were starring in a reality TV show. Whatever.

It relies heavily on people not being douchebags. And while most aren't, you never know which sly bastard about to trip into your living room could be about to poke your girlfriend in the vagine.