Friday, December 02, 2005

Falling Down

Tracie and I went to see Harry Potter last night. I really enjoyed it. I have read the book, but couldn't really remember a lot of the details except to know that they cut a lot of the book out of the movie.

After the movie, we started riding the tram home, and Tracie got a little motion sick so we had to hop off after only a few blocks. As we were walking home, we passed a group of people who had just left some sort of function and were waiting for taxis to show up. A few steps beyond them I heard the scraping sound of highheeled shoes on concrete quickly followed by a loud thud of a drunk middle aged woman hitting the ground hard. It wasn't like she was able to catch herself at all like sometimes when you slip on the ice and can save yourself by crouching or ducking or what ever so that you fall a shorter distance. This was the thud of a person who was perpendicular to the ground three feet in the air and went straight down. Like when cartoon character slips on a bananna peel. She didn't get up for a long time. I'm pretty sure that she even cracked her head pretty hard.

One thing that I've noticed about Australia (Perth and Melbourne) is that they really tolerate public drunkeness here a lot. People take their drinks out into the street and there are always lots of drunken people wandering the streets late at night. The main roads are always littered with empties. It's not just the homeless people that drink in public here either. Supposedly respectable people of all ages are stumbling in the streets.

-Gary Milner

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