Yesterday I bought a car! My first car ever! It’s a 1985 Holden Commodore and I hope it will bring me safely from here to Sydney and then up the east-coast! I paid 1.900 AUD, which is really quite good. Not dirt-cheap but o.k. and the car seems to be in good shape.

I bought it from a car-dealer so I’m hoping that it actually is in a reasonable condition. A dealer does have a certain form of liability after all, even though that is very, very limited if the car costs less than 2.000. Makes you wonder why it cost 1.900, doesn’t it…
Anyhow: I’m gonna pick it up pretty soon (actually I had expected the car to be ready about an hour ago) and then we’ll head down to the registration-office and do the paperwork. And then I can be off to explore Australia!

Actually I’ll probably stay in Perth for a bit longer. Not because I found it very fascinating so far, but because two bank holidays are coming up meaning that all the hostels south of here will probably be pretty crowded and that all the shops are closed. So I might as well stay where I am and explore a bit of Perths surrounding with my new car. I just hope I’ll get used to driving on the wrong side of the road pretty soon. When I testdrove my car I thought I was gonna go insane! Everything is in the wrong place!

I’m not overly impressed with Australia so far: It’s cold, it’s raining almost all the time (today is the first sunny day since I got here), it’s quite expensive and … well … it’s simply very much like England – only with better looking people inside! The nightlife is quite good in Northbridge, the part of Perth I’m living in, but going out is simply so expensive that it takes the fun away. I have already accepted the fact that I’m gonna blow my budget of 1.000 Euro/month here – and it’s not really a problem since I have enough money in the bank – but it’s annoying!

Being a sissy at the doctors

Other news: I got my stitches out on Tuesday and removed the plasters yesterday. To my great distress my body seriously let me down when the stitches were taken out. It didn’t really hurt all that much but apparently my body didn’t like it at all. And so my blood pressure dropped, I started to sweat cold sweat, my stomach was feeling all queasy and I probably would have dropped on the floor if the doctor had not said: “Please lie down –you are about to faint.” Faint? Faint?!?!? I’ve never fainted in my whole life. Dammit. Falling down there would have been pretty bad though, especially since the doctor couldn’t have caught me; believe it or not, but he was wearing a cast!

The fictional gunfight

I also made up a wee lie (o.k., it’s a fucking big one) about how I got those stitches. I mean, everybody in the hostel was asking be about them and saying “Moles remove” would simply have been so boring. So I decided to spice the story up a wee bit and said that I flew from a gunfight between locals in a Cambodian nightclub by climbing through a shattered window. And that’s where I got cut. If you’ve ever been backpacking then you’ll know that this is the kind of story that appeals mightily to backpackers and so was swallowed eagerly. The funny thing is, that I could see the story change as other people retold it to other people in the hostel. My version was always the same (lie, if you want to, but be consistent for gods sake) but when I heard it retold the nightclub was, for example, in Vietnam, I jumped through a closed window and the gunmen were actually shooting at me. Quite amusing, really. I feel a bit guilty about increasing Cambodias reputation as a dangerous place (which I think it’s not), but it’s simply the far more interesting story.