Location: Northbridge (Perth suburb), West Australia
I woke up this morning and walked to an ATM in my pajamas. $150 dollars, back to the hostel, payed for another night. Showered, ate Nutella and bread, and started my glorious day.
Northbridge is, ironically and mysteriously, North of the downtown Perth area. It contains more restaurants than people, it seems, half of those being Asian, Indian, Indonesian. My plan was to skip past these places of food and go to the most obvious travel destination around: the Library. Free, Air-Conditioned, Centrally Located, With Books, the Library is a nice place.
Along the way, however, the Nutella-bread began to wore off. Wandering into a very nice, small grocery store, I bought a quarter of watermelon for $1.37. In a shady, breezy spot next to the Western Australia Museum, I sat on grass and spit the seeds at pigeons and schoolchildren. The schoolchildren were 50 meters away, so the pigeons took more interest in me.
Eating a watermelon without a knife, napkin, or spitoon is delicate, to put it delicately. I had never before realized how the seeds made up veins in the flesh of the fruit, how you really can suck from left to right, harmonica-style, and machine-gun 20 seeds out of your mouth. After a certain point the curvature of the watermelons “event horizon”, so to speak, becomes too close to your cheeks, and you must either cut, or smash. I smashed. Ate. Smashed. Snapped. Nibbled. Done.
Now, it was time to appease the gulls. There were 5 in my vicinity, but being frequently routed by a supremely evil gull I dubbed “Gul Dukat.” The poor fellow was confident enough to stake out his territory, but his power-crazed disposition and his ruffled and dirty feathers made me question his sanity. I tossed him a hunk of rind. Gul Dukat was very interested at first, but soon became angry at the watermelon rind. His beak couldn’t do anything with it. I had picked off the soft flesh, and his beak would get stuck in the rind anytime he tried to grab a bite. So, he went insane, in keeping with his assigned Star Trek name. First trying to attack my other bits of watermelon husk, the other seagulls, then my foot, which kicked him.
To sum up, some guys from the Australian Wilderness Society also observed that the bird was insane, I went to the Library, read about other countries, tried to eat potato chips discreetly, and left. End of story. End of day.
