Tuesday 24 June 2014

Complicated

“Why do you have to go and make things so complicated?
I see the way you're acting like you're somebody else
Gets me frustrated
Life's like this
You, you fall and you crawl and you break
And you take what you get and you turn it into honesty
You promised me I'm never gonna find you fake it”

Complicated – Avril Lavigne

This week is an insight into my teenage music tastes. I’ll start by admitting that I’m a bit of a hoarder of anything involving emotion. I have a spike key hanging around my room because it reminds me of my athletics days and somewhere in my childhood room is a box of cards from nearly every birthday and Christmas I have lived through because they still mean a little something to me. If it’s sentimental then I have a hard time throwing things in the trash.

I also have difficulty deleting music that played a big part when I was growing up. For example, I still have every Good Charlotte album on my iPod because they were my favourite band growing up and I could never let them go. I also have a few (twenty) Avril Lavigne songs on my iPod because that girl was the shizz when I was a teenager. She understood me and she understood teenage angst. I was never a big fan of female artists because I wanted to rock out with the boy bands (like Simple Plan and Elemeno P) but I had a special place for Avril Lavigne. Maybe it was because her first hit Complicated and second hit Sk8er Boi talked about hating on fake girls and during my teenage years I could not stand those types of people. I loved her and I wanted to be her.

Over the years I became less attached to Avril Lavigne as I grew up and, well, her music became rather shit. Her tracks Girlfriend and Here’s to Never Growing Up became guilty pleasures for me because I was still hanging on to her that little bit. That is, until I heard her newest song Hello Kitty. I was going to make it the title song of this blog and analyse it a bit but I couldn’t lower the standards of my blog for that song, and this blog doesn’t have very high standards. I can’t even bring myself to post a link to the song because it is probably the worst song I’ve heard, ever. It’s worse than Call Me Maybe. It’s even worse than Friday. It’s an insult to Hello Kitty. And I can’t believe I’m about to write this but Chad Kroeger wrote the song and it’s an insult to Nickelback.


So instead I give a last tribute to the artist Avril Lavigne was when I was growing up with. I’ll keep her early songs on my iPod partly as a reminder of my life ten years ago and partly because the teenager in me still loves the tracks. But as for Avril Lavigne I’ll no longer care for her as an artist nor will I follow any of her new music. I suppose most artists reach a time when their music takes a turn for the worse and their fan base slowly falls away and I expect it will happen to many more of the bands and singers I loved when growing up. But for now I’m giving Avril Lavigne one last bit of attention.


Saturday 14 June 2014

Swing

“Oh shit, shake that ass ma, move it like a gypsy,
Stop, whoa, back it up
now let me see your hips swing
Oh shit, shake that ass ma, move it like a gypsy.
Stop, whoa, back it up
now let me see your hips swing”

Swing – Savage

I was in a San Diego nightclub on my first evening on Contiki when Swing came on. I’d so far spent most of the night dancing in the club, obviously showing off my impressive dance moves to my fifty new best friends. When Savage starting playing I went a bit mental, and myself and another guy from New Zealand sung (okay, screamed) the entire song and did all the dance moves, and at the end made sure all the Aussies and British people around us knew Savage was from New Zealand.

If you’re a New Zealander you probably know Savage isn’t our musical claim to fame – Swing is literally his one hit. And yet at that moment in that nightclub I was so excited a New Zealand song was playing. It boiled down to pride. Not pride in Savage particularly, but pride in that something from my country was being played across the world. While few others in that room that night would understand it, I knew how important it was to me because I love being from New Zealand. And in a strange way this song began my journey of self-discovery.

I went travelling across to America and joined a Contiki because I needed to go exploring on my own. Other people on the tour talked about how they could never travel alone and join up with fifty strangers, but I had never considered going with someone else. I needed to make sure every step I took was for myself and every decision was one I was comfortable with. Most of the time this was easy enough because you wouldn’t think twice about missing out on opportunities. Sometimes I had to push myself and know I would regret not taking part – like when I drove the speedboat despite how nervous I was and at the end of it I felt really accomplished.

Fast-forwarding two nights after Savage played in San Diego and I was in another club in Scottsdale, Arizona, and I was not dancing alone if you catch my drift. Contiki has a bit of an underground reputation for being a shag fest and I didn’t manage to escape it. Before I went the whole hog though I wanted to make sure I wasn’t doing two things. A) I wasn’t hooking up just because I was on a Contiki and B) I didn’t want to become known as the girl that did that guy from that place. These thoughts created a bit of doubt in my mind so I snuck away for a moment and wrote myself a note on my phone to clear my thoughts. One of the sentences I wrote that night said “anyone can walk into your life for a minute, an hour or a week, but only you will be there for the long haul”. It has taken me nearly 23 years to figure out that in your entire life you are the only person who will be with you forever.


I left with that guy that night because I actually, definitely wanted to. And I didn’t care if I became known so and so’s Friday night hookup, because if you listen to what people who you’ve known for four days say about you, then you need to reevaluate your perspective. Everything I did in those two weeks in USA I did for myself. It took me two decades, a trip halfway around the world and a guy from Australia to figure out that no matter what I do or where I go, I do it for myself. And, most important of all, I spend the rest of my life loving myself and looking after myself.

Thursday 12 June 2014

On Top of the World

“‘Cause I’m on top of the world, ‘ay
I’m on top of the world, ‘ay
Waiting on this for a while now
Paying my dues to the dirt
I’ve been waiting to smile, ‘ay
Been holding it in for a while, ‘ay
Take you with me if I can
Been dreaming of this since a child
I’m on top of the world.”

On Top of the World – Imagine Dragons

The idea of jumping aboard a Contiki appealed to me as I wanted more than just sightseeing when I went solo travelling. I wanted adventure and I wanted to meet new people, and the LA to the Bay tour of West Coast America seemed perfect for me. Contiki has a great set up where you can chat online before your tour starts and I spent the weeks leading up to the trip interacting with people I was soon to meet. In saying this, I think the first person you meet from your tour is always special. I met Clarissa in the shuttle van when we left the airport for our first hotel and we chatted about where we were from and what we were excited for, and we headed out for dinner that night with another girl on our tour. Two days later we were with the rest of the group and off to San Diego.  

It’s said your Contiki group becomes your family. It’s a bit of a dysfunctional family because you get drunk together pretty much every night and different members of the group get busy shagging each other, but you’re a family nonetheless. It comes from the shared feeling that everyone is there to have a good time, and being put into situations with new people brings you closer together. You have one conversation with someone then you are paired together in a speedboat and trust each other to drive it safely (for the record, I DID NOT nearly crash). You sit next to another new friend from the other side of the world in the front of a helicopter and take in the stunning views of the Grand Canyon together. You dance together at clubs, you comment on new foods as you eat dinner next to someone different each night, you play beer pong together, you see stunning new sights and create memories for life, and despite how much you say you hate it you all sing the day song together when you travel to the next city – ours was On Top of the World.

Yes, you become one big loving family out having the craziest and best time of your life, until you have to deal with family tragedy. We had to leave Clarissa in Las Vegas. I wish I could write that she decided to end her tour early and run off into the Nevada sunset after her shotgun wedding, but that’s not what happened. I remember sitting in the room with the others when we were told she never made it out of the hospital the night before. I heard someone behind me break down first, then other faces slowly crumbled and I felt myself going the same way. There was a lot of comforting and helping each other out that day, and the days following, because that’s what families do.

We went to a pub in Bass Lake two nights later and we sung On Top of the World together for Clarissa. Then I went outside and I cried and I cried and when people tried to tell me it was okay to be upset I cried some more because I was so overcome with emotion. I’ve been writing this blog for two and a half years and on this night my tour group that I’d known for such a short time cemented every belief I have about music. It doesn’t matter who you are or where you come from or the fact that you’ve only known a group of people for seven days, you can still have moments where music brings you together and without saying words you can say everything. Together, as a Contiki family, we sung our final farewells to our girl who had come to USA for an adventure, to feel on top of the world.

Over the course of the tour there were thousands of photos taken, capturing the moments of craziness and moments of wonder as we travelled around the West Coast of USA. I want to share with you my favourite photo. This was taken at the Grand Canyon and I love the contradiction in it. When you stand at the edge of the Grand Canyon and look at the thousands of miles of beautiful rock formation you feel so small and insignificant. But then you look next to you and you realize what a big influence one person can have on your life.


To my Contiki family, with love.







Wednesday 11 June 2014

America

“I light a cigarette
'Cause I can't get no sleep
Theres nothing on the TV nothing on the radio
That means that much to me
Theres nothing on the TV nothing on the radio
That I can believe in

All my life
Watching America
All my life
There's panic in America
Oh Oh Oh, Oh”

America – Razorlight

It was around this time last year when I got an itch to go on a solo travel adventure. There were many places I considered going, like Southeast Asia and Europe, but ultimately I knew I had to go somewhere English speaking because I was too scared to travel alone to a foreign language country on what would be my second big overseas trip going farther than Australia. I needed a place easy enough to go to for a couple of weeks, and with Europe being a far off dream in which I hoped to travel around for months, I turned to America. I booked it at the beginning of this year after deliberating where to visit, and today I got back from my whirlwind two weeks tour of the United States of America.

Booking onto a Contiki was a no brainer for me – I knew I couldn’t travel completely on my own, so instead I jumped on board a bus with fifty strangers and we set off (but more about these crazy people in my next blog post). I’d had some preconceived opinions about what the landscape and the culture of America would be like, because I had spent a lot of my life watching the country. America influences our media greatly, and every television fictional or real life show or movie I watched or book I read or even songs I listened to seemed to give away some part of their culture. It was time for me to stop watching and experience it through my own eyes.  

In a strange way what I expected to be great was a let down and what I expected to pass by me were the best bits. I saw a few bits of Los Angeles, including downtown LA and Hollywood, and it seemed a bit rundown to me as I’d always imagined this place to be very glamorous. But in contrast, San Diego seemed fresh and full of life, and was my favourite city we visited. We went through a few really cool in places in Arizona then onto the stunning Grand Canyon. Las Vegas was intense and full of a weird energy I’m not sure I liked. Yosemite National Park was a beautiful little place perfect for relaxing. And San Francisco was the upbeat, contemporary city it promised to be.  


I could sit here and write down everything I saw in these places and describe the details and tell the quirky little stories about the towns and post photos, but I doubt you'd take much way from that. It’s only by going to USA I’ve learned how another culture works. They drive on the other side of the road and it is terrifying. They have Walmart which secretly I loved very much. Their soda sizes are huge. Their currency works very differently. They have different customs and traditions and it puts you out of place when you first have to acquaint yourself with them. I spent my whole life watching America but when I got there I understood you can’t learn much by just watching. You have to jump head first in and experience the good and the bad and the different for yourself, and realize how much more there is in the world beyond your own little country.