Wednesday, August 10, 2011

Turkey-slapping interstate visitors: A guide to Canberra

Other Australians have a strange relationship with Canberrans – sure, we are better looking than the rest of our convict brethren, but the city and the people who inhabit it often invoke an instinctive reaction from the 21,000,000 Aussies who aren’t lucky enough to live within the glorious borders of the ACT.

“Where are you from?” they ask.
“Canberra,” is your response.
Now watch their face contort, as if you’d just stirred their drink with your dick and asked if you could turkey-slap their first-born.
“Do you like it?” they ask.
“Yes, it’s a great place to live.”
…and then BANG - the This Guy Likes Living In Canberra look, as if you’d just dug up his childhood pet and started dry-humping it.


“But there’s nothing to do there,” they say.
Actually, you’re wrong. There are multitudes of things to do, and I daresay 95% of them are the same activities that you’d find in any other city in the world. You can play sport, watch sport, eat out, drink coffee, go shopping, visit a museum or gallery, go to university, get on the piss, see a movie, go to the gym, buy a dog, kill a hooker and hide her in a lake. You could do all of this in one day if you really wanted to. Twice, if you’re quick at killing hookers.


“There’s no nightlife.”
That’s not entirely true. If you’re looking for a nightclub that you have to line up for 3 hours to get into, pay $30 cover charge and then $50 for three drinks that you waited for another hour to buy, then you’re probably shit out of luck. Canberra nightclubs have a gold coin donation to get in the door, and the bar staff water the drinks down so much that it would be criminal to charge more than $3 for anything. Let's be straight here; nightclubs are actually fairly shit the world over, but feel free to head out to a Canberra club if that’s your thing. If you’re not having a good time, it probably means that either you’re a dickhead, or your friends are. That’s not Canberra’s fault.


“There are so many public servants!”
True. Canberra is where parliament sits, so it makes a bit of sense to have the people who work for the government live in Canberra as well. It’s called a workforce. Strangely though, there are also other jobs available in Canberra that might also appeal to those folk who live interstate. And then there’s the option of not using your career as a substitute for your personality.


“Your roads have roundabouts everywhere!”

“So many roundabouts!”
I’m sorry, I don’t follow your train of thought. Are you really struggling that much to hack on Canberra that you’ve had to resort to our road design? A roundabout is a quick and easy way to - you know - turn, which might confuse some people, especially if they’re from Sydney; a city in which it is not only illegal, but downright impossible to make a right hand turn. Did you know that if you buy a car in Sydney, it has its right-hand indicators removed to avoid confusion? Melbourne has fucking hook turns, which are basically the same as roundabouts, but without a dirty great circle in the middle of the road. And Brisbane has Queenslanders in charge of motor vehicles, so don’t even get me started on that.

I’m not saying that other cities aren’t also tops, because they are. There’s always that special something something about them that differentiates them from other cities, whether it’s the skyline or a monument or a big old ugly building. But don’t come to my fair city and wander around looking for the Opera House. You left that behind, dickhead. Have a gander at Parliament House instead - they're both giant buildings that you'll never go into unless held at gunpoint.

Now help me over here; this dead hooker isn’t going to put herself in a sack.






"Jesus Christ, that roundabout is coming right for us! If only there was a way to turn around! Oh wait..."

2 comments:

King Crack said...

And don't forget the pretty women. In all my years of visiting, which has been a few times a year for twenty years (I really should have moved down there) the quality of women easily surpasses Sydney.

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