So, on Australia's day of day's, here I am talking about five things that Australia needs to put in place that America does better. They're in no particular order. Afterwards, I'll throw up five things that America could learn from Australia, just to be fair.
Dogs Dogs Everywhere.
In Perth, you used to be able to go to the cappuccino strip in Fremantle and sit and enjoy a cup of coffee with your canine pal next to you. Nowadays you'll get a $100 on the spot fine before you've even bitten into your cannoli.
In America, the land of the free, the home of the brave, the something of the somethings, you can take your dog wherever you please. There are restrictions of course, like when you want to fly from LA to New York and you have your dog with you, you have to ensure that your furry pal will sit on your lap all through the flight, or maybe stick him in a bag if you can. But, basically put, for no extra charge whatsoever you can have Henry Peirce sitting on your lap for a five hour flight from one fantastic city to another.
Dude has a pretty fucked up face, but a very nice looking dog.
If I wanted to fly with Henry from Perth to Sydney I'd have to arrive at the airport a couple of hours early, stick him in a crate and let him get taken to the bottom on the plane where your bags are and then wait for him on the other side. No lap journey of luxury - although I'm pretty sure my lap is not that comfy for five hours straight. I wouldn't know.
I have a feeling this dog has died. Woman has pretty stinky feet. Should have bought Dolce and Gabbana.
If I felt like shopping for a Gucci handbag or a Dolce and Gabbana pair of shoes (that's right, right?) at Macy's - the biggest department store in the world (up until 2009 that is) - and I wanted to get Henry's opinion of whether the pair of Dolce and Gabbana shoes would suit me or not (they wouldn't, they don't do size eleven shoes. I think), I could take him up their escalator's, all eight floors of them, and peruse their shoes and gowns and stuff, and nobody would care. Nobody would say, you can't bring that hound in here. They would keep walking on by talking about what Shenae did last night and how that bitch better learn some respect and stop stealing my men. They wouldn't care about the one eared Schnauzer giving advice to his owner about what shoes to wear.
I Would Like All Your Dr Pepper's. Right Now.
Online ordering is brilliant. It's divine. It is a thing from the heaven's. At eleven o'clock at night, when you feel like having a Dr Pepper and there is no Dr Pepper in the house at all, and the shop is just so far away yet the internet is so near, you just pop onto delivery.com and order yourself ALL THE DR PEPPER THEY HAVE. And then half an hour later, a little exhausted Mexican man who rode all the way over to your apartment on his bicycle in the Polar Vortex gives you ALL THE DR PEPPER THEY HAD and then leaves.
In Australia, if I want a Dr Pepper at eleven o'clock at night, I can't do this. I can't order ALL THE DR PEPPER SOMEBODY HAS because nobody has Dr Pepper, and nobody delivers at eleven o'clock at night. A delivery service like this - where they will deliver within the half hour - needs to come into effect in Australia. Now.
Specifically, a delivery service for all of the fast food or restaurants who do takeaway. Don't feel like getting a pizza? Pretty much the only food that is available in Australia to get delivered to your front door. Then tough, because the only hot instant food that will come to your front door in Australia is pizza. And whatever attempt at not-pizza Dominoe's is doing this month. Feel like chinese or pasta? Tough, you have to get into your car and go and pick it up. Nobody will bring it to you.
Am I lazy? Yes. But I would like nothing more than to live in a world where all I need to wear is my boxer shorts all day long and only have to quickly pull on my pants and tshirt when someone comes and delivers ALL THE DR PEPPER THEY HAD to my front door.
What Do You Mean You're Out of Dr Pepper?
Which brings me to my next point.
The lack of Dr Pepper available in Australia. If there is one carbonated beverage which I admire the most in the world, it is Dr Pepper. It's not Pepsi for it's can-do attitude to sticking it to the man (Coke) and trying to do their own thing. It's not Mountain Dew for being a blatant lie. It's not Red Bull for, well, I don't know why anybody would put Red Bull as their favourite beverage unless they're named Felix.
Dr Pepper is Texas nectar. No, not Texas tea. But, Texas nectar. It defies medicine for Mr Pepper is not a proper Dr and it is not going to cure anything.
Except thirst.
This is not the right use of this gif.
Dr Pepper is heavenly. If I woke up at 2am in America and felt like a Dr Pepper, I could walk down to the local Duane Reade (how come this asshole gets his own store?) and buy ALL THE DR PEPPER THEY HAVE. I could also buy alcohol and get a flu jab, but that's besides the point. If I wake up at 2am in Australia, I'm screwed because the only thing that is open is McDonald's where I can get sweet fuck all Dr Pepper.
Taxi Please.
Public transport in Australia is a bitch. If you miss your train, or your bus drives past you five minutes prior to it was due to arrive (I'm still bitter you bus driving ass, you think you're better than me because you can drive a bus and because I'm at your mercy with when I get to where I want to go on time), you're fucked. You have to wait an hour for the next bus or train to come and even then it'll suck.
In New York, you can mostly catch a taxi to wherever you want straight away. Stick a hand out and some man driving a yellow car will pull over and take you to where you want to go. Or maybe you could go to the subway and wait five minutes for a train to arrive. That one was too full? Oh well, wait another five minutes and another one will be around that'll be emptier. The bus system is a little questionable in New York, but in LA it works well enough.
The subway system in New York will take you almost anywhere. Or, in fact if you don't want to go anywhere in Manhatten, Queens, the Bronx or Brooklyn, then fine, you can catch a train to pretty much anywhere in America. In Perth, I can go to Mandurah or Joondalup. And even then, the place you want to go to is going to be at least a half hour walk away from the train station or bus stop.
Quicker than any taxi in Perth. Guaranteed.
Don't get me started on the taxi situation in Perth. You'll be waiting at least an hour to two hours for a taxi in Perth. Standing on the side of the road with your arm out will get a beer can thrown at your head.
Food Glorious Food. Oh How I Want to Bathe in You.
Ok, maybe not bathe in it. (Yes, I want to bathe in you hotdogs.)
Here's a hypothetical situation. It's 2am (it's always 2am in these situations), and I feel like a hotdog. Because there are no places in Perth that do takeaway hotdogs because hotdogs are foreign food and we don't like foreigners here. Turn back the boats and all that. I can't walk down the street and find a lonely food vendor selling his tubed meat on the side of the road as the snow comes down around him.
For starters, it doesn't snow in Perth because that's another thing we fail at. Secondly, any man down the road selling tubed meat is not a man you want to purchase tubed meat from because he's not selling the type of tubed meat you want to eat at 2am. If he is the sort of man who is selling tubed meat you want to eat at 2am, then please stop reading my blog.
Not entirely the tubed meat picture I was looking for. But none the less, this is quite a stylish dog.
In New York, there is always somebody somewhere selling some kind of tubed meat. And I mean the sort that you do want to eat at 2am. It'll cost you about two dollars - plus a tip - and it will make your belly very very happy.
This dog is substantially less interesting than the one above.
In fact, the only kind of meat I can get at 2am is McDonald's meat and I can't even get that delivered to me so it's pointless because it's there and I'm here and it's 2am and in all of these scenario's I'm sitting there asking myself, why am I asking myself these questions at 2am and what am I going to do about it?
Nothing.
I'm going to do nothing about it.
One to Wolf of Wall Street at 1am Please.
I know, I know, I can't count. I said five things, and now there's a sixth thing and really who cares because you only scrolled down to see what the captions would be for the things and nobody has read this far. I promise.
America has cinemas everywhere. Well, almost everywhere. Due to this, they have films showing pretty much all the time. Sure, there's no four am screenings of Frozen, but it's near enough. Plus, nobody wants to see Frozen at four am. Not even if there's tubed meat involved.
The sort of people you are likely to see at a 1am screening of The Wolf of Wall Street.
The last screening in Australia is usually at 9pm. If you're lucky, it'll be 910pm. There's nothing later unless you're going to a marathon on a long weekend, but the time you were sixteen and would go to marathon's is a lot further away than when you'll be forty.
The other thing which is great about American cinema is the fact that they show the ad's prior to the advertised session time. Say you're going to see the 1am session of The Wolf of Wall Street and you get there at 1am, then you have just missed the fifteen minutes of ads that played prior to 1am. You'll arrive, find your seat, and the trailers for other films you may want to watch at 1am will play. Ten minutes later and the film has started. None of this arriving at 9pm and then waiting forty five minutes for the film to play only to have the very last ad be an ad for the Candy Bar where they remind you that the Candy Bar is open right now even though you walked right past it or even purchased your tickets from there you go, oh, ok, I already knew that, and the film should be starting now, but sure. Then you decide that fuck it, you will get that overpriced Coke you've been contemplating for the past forty five minutes because you really wanted a Dr Pepper but they don't have Dr Pepper so fuck it. You get up, go to the Candy Bar and then find that the Candy Bar has in fact closed because you decided to see the 9pm screening of The Wolf of Wall Street and they don't serve popcorn after 915pm. You curse a little and then you go back to the cinema only to find that you've missed the first hour of the film and Leo's already snorting coke out of a woman's buttcrack.
So, Australia, please put later screenings on.
And now five quick things that America needs to do that Australia does better.
1) Pay your employee's correctly. If there's one thing Australian's (and Scottish) don't like to do, is paying people for shit that other people should be paying them for. I don't like sitting there, having enjoyed my meal and then having to figure out how much to tip the person who brought me a menu and just existed for an evening. It's not my fault they aren't paid properly and I shouldn't have to make up their pay by tipping. Especially when the service isn't that great. It especially annoyed me greatly when the service was terrible, and then when the bill came the 18% gratuity would be added already. I have no choice but to pay that. And then complain about it later on the internet.
2) Move quicker. When buying stuff at stores, the average time was fifty years for them to process the payment for the item. This is not an exaggeration. I am still waiting in line at Best Buy to buy a DVD. I don't really need the DVD because I can probably stream it later on, but I'm in the queue and there's no way in getting out of the queue right now. In Australia, we don't like to deal with customers so we want to get them out of our face as quickly as possible. We have paywave almost everywhere so by the time the item is in the bag we've already paid and are out the door.
3) Fix your McDonald's. Or fast food in general. You'd think the country that helped make fast food what it is today would have better standards of fast food, but it's quite the opposite. Fast food in America is shit. Literally. The one time I bought a 'burger' from McDonald's - in a stinky smelly McDonald's in a Macy's store - it tasted like a thong. The service was shocking and the food was worse. At least I didn't have to tip. The food in Australia's McDonald's is three Michelin star food compared to McDonald's in America.
4) ATM's. What the fuck is with the ATM's in America? The majority of them look like you're trying to return some terribly dodgy porn that you ended up with to someone in a hole in the wall. Let alone looking like a hunk of metal that looks like it'll steal your money in an instant rather than give you money.
5) Coffee. Seriously America. You have Starbuck's everywhere. Fix your fucking coffee. Iced Coffee in America is literally ice and coffee. I'm certain it used to be coffee beans on ice until someone said, wait, why don't we add some liquid to this thing? It's just awful. I had to end on a downer, but seriously. What. The. Fuck.
