Sneak Blog Attack!
So... Perth.
I'll get the obvious out of the way. I went to Perth to see Pendulum play live and was not disappointed.
I got there about an hour and a half early, because I was told that Perth people like to line up. Turns out that I was about the 15th person there. Yay for me? Even better: I got a park before they started charging for car parks.
I heard Pendulum warming up/sound checking whilst we were all waiting outside. Not only could I hear everything fairly clearly, I am fairly sure that the roof was physically quaking under the loudness of the sound system. Not just vibrating, visually moving. Impressive, considering that I wasn't wearing my glasses.
Before Pendulum, they had a DJ (didn't catch the name...) playing Drum'n'Bass/Jungle and Dub Step. The bass line, particularly through the Dub Step section, was deep and loud enough that they probably could feel it in Jamaica. I'm sure we almost hit the brown note a few times too.
I'd prefer less Dub Step and more DnB... but the mixing was quite good.
Props go to the old man, who looked about 60 and probably there with a grand/child of some description, who was mixing it up with everyone in the middle of the mosh.
And then there was a break before Pendulum made it out.
The light show would have been enough, but there was also a giant screen behind them showing all sorts of CG/video goodness. I've got to be honest, I didn't even see what was happening on stage for the majority of the gig. There was only the screen.
The sound was not perfect... but after about ten seconds, your ear drums compensated for it by being blasted to hell.
One of the best moments was when the MC got the whole crowd to crouch to the floor in the middle of one of the songs (“Slam”? I can't remember which one it was...) before the second rise. A real crowd pleaser.
Roughly a 50-50 mix of the Pendulum classics and new stuff including, of course, the ABC remix (which actually isn't as good live as it is on the radio... but at least everyone was up for it).
They lose marks for not playing “Hold Your Colour”... so that gives them a score of 10 out of 10.
Curiously, I was asked on no less than 3 occasions if I was selling pills. Pretty sure that I don't look that dodgy... right?
Now... Perth itself.
I have decided that I am not a city person. Anything bigger than Newcastle may be a little much, but anything smaller than Kal is probably too small. Potential exception: Bega.
I may have bigged it up too much in my head, so I was initially disappointed.
I remember once having written in an assignment that Perth was a well designed city because it was actually designed as a city and not as something smaller that just grew up to be a city.
Well, the problem with that is that project was almost 15 years ago and all cities eventually grow up... and need to have repair and expansion work done. A solid section of the streets and buildings near where I was/wanted to be were construction zones. That made navigating and driving around hard when some streets were closed or only open in one direction.
To make matters worse, it's been a while since I have had a multitude of one way streets to deal with and it's not that good. Perth is reasonably well signposted but, with all of the road works going on, there were a few errors that potentially lead up to crashes. They also have a few streets that angle across at major intersections. One particular street has a one way street turn in to a two way street whilst crossing over a lane that has traffic lights situated between where you stop and where you actually turn. Sounds confusing? Yeah... try driving it for the first time during peak hour.
Here is an annotated map of the offending intersection:
Red Line is where you stop when heading North. Blue Line indicates the direction the street crossing you takes. The Real traffic lights are the middle circle. There are also two other sets of traffic lights (other circles).
Note the scale on the map? Yeah, this is all within 40 or so metres. Because that makes sense.
The directions from Google Maps don't lie (often... their distances and times appear to be somewhat off)... but the map itself tries its hardest.
"A" Is where I am staying. I am driving in from the North side of the Freeway. I know I must take a loop off at the spaghetti junction when driving south.
The street I want is Mount Street (conveniently located across the middle of the picture).
See how this street looks like it connects (as shown below)?
Well... it doesn't.
That freeway actually runs through the middle, and the street name running across it is a deception. You can not get to the west portion of this street without doing a huge loop around. I'm sure you could at some point in time... but not now.
And if you couldn't do it before, the person who named the streets needs a good slap on the head.
That connection? A bridge walkway... and not a Tunnel as I though it might be.
Needless to say that finding my temporary accommodation was difficult.
This was compounded by the fact that the turn off (Cliff Street) says No Through Road... something that shouldn't really happen when there are multiple exits from said street... and especially when it is a Street and not a Close or Lane or similar. Oh yeah, Cliff Street is also like Mount Rd in that it appears to connect but really doesn't. In fact, Cliff Street is true to its name because there is a drop of 15 to 20 metres from the top part of the street to the one that connects to the main road in the south. How these two pathways ever got the same name, I will never know.
Then there are the streets that are known by several different names... Such as St. Georges Tce, Malcolm Street and Kings Park Road... all splayed more or less horizontally across the middle of the map.
Here is the actual route you need to take to get there:
I won't show the route I took... but needless to say that it covers almost all of the streets visualised on the map. And then some. And 30 minutes.
Western Australia is a curious place in terms of retail hours. They only recently, as in the past two months, passed laws that allowed some types of stores to be open on Sundays... but the law is complex and certain types of stores are only allowed to be open in certain locations but not others, whilst other types of stores are allowed only limited times.
Midday is not an uncommon time for stores to open on a Sunday... if they open at all.
In apparent contradiction to what I will say later, Perth is a well dressed city... to the point where I felt under-dressed whilst walking around and intimidated when looking for restaurants and cafes.
I still recommend going to Perth. It feels significantly more open and friendly than Sydney. The people here are less uptight and self-important, and there are less of them. Even the sunlight and breeze feels better.
So... what else is there?
Well... whilst scouting out my route to get to the stadium, I found this sign.
Now... I am not sure what they were thinking here, but the whole idea of being Terminator whilst being a real estate agent does not really give me confidence. I mean... would you purchase anything from a robot whose purpose is to destroy human kind? Perhaps I can see their point though: If you demand a piece of real estate, they will erase all resistance to your will and you can claim vast tracts of open land.
So there.
Yeah, I know it's not a post full of laffs... but it is still a post. Enjoy :)
(In the future, there will be technology with personality and a guide to Hannan Street. Yes, I know that I have been promising Hannan Street for a while. It will happen as I finally have a complete weekend or three coming up)
