A Goddamn Squirrel

So I realised I haven't really put anything up here about my trip to Ultra Music Festival in Miami in March 2013. I don't really have much confidence in my own ability to retain any form of physical journal but I'm pretty sure google will use its overkill approach to ensure my useless data is recorded, stored and indexed for all eternity, so I'll post up a couple of things I thought about my trip. There is also another trip coming up so I am thinking about travel more and more recently.

I kept an ad-hoc diary of my exploits, and here I'll try to piece together the emails, notes, photos and facebook conversations (it's all first person current tense).

Community Creationism - or "Can I be a knight of Mars? With... you guys? Maybe get me one of them... bats?"

I'm going to coin a term here and I have no idea how accurate it will be. Community creationism. After being exposed to lots of different types of media and communities in the last few years, I have discovered what I think may be a human trait. It goes something like this:

As you are exposed more regularly to a media form, situation, thought process, community or other concept involving social interaction, no matter your initial thoughts on the concept, you will form an affinity for it. This affinity grows into a desire to contribute, and thus you become a community creationist. I'll explain with examples from my own life.

Australian food culture, or lack thereof

Australia is a young country

A part of that is that we never really had much time to set in a deep rooted culture like the more ancient civilisations have. As a people, we emigrated from European miscellany and tried our best to live in Australia as we had in Europe. This involved things like killing the native animals, people and trees, importing our own food stocks and generally doing our best to destroy the natural harmonious paradise that we had set our enterprising foot on. This approach not only irreparably destroyed much of our newfound utopia, but ensured that all the adventure of moving to a new country, a hitherto unknown landmass, was decidedly negated. So how has this affected our food, the most recognisable tangent of any culture? Do we actually have a food culture, and if so, where did it come from?

Local Dining in Vanuatu

I hadn't been overseas before. At the age of 22 I had not stepped foot outside my home country. That was a big deal for me. I had the travel bug long before I travelled, and I had to stop putting it off and just pop the cherry. The trip was with my girlfriend and we discovered we both have different travelling styles. We met some fellow Australians, some Ni-Vanuatu (that's what you call people from Vanuatu) and not many other people. Believe it or not, the majority of tourists in Vanuatu are Australian.