Just for now, goodbye

When one must set one's alarm clock for 10:30pm, to be at the bus stop by 11:00pm, to be at work by 11:45pm for 10 hours, one must consider the amount of time willing to be spent taking the global-trot in search of food, adventure and the likes.

Consideration taken.

I am on a little work adventure in the great southern land of Australia for three months and am sad and sorry to say that I will temporarily be away from here for the majority of that time. This is the longest I've actively not involved myself on here, whether it be writing, researching or sorting through photo's.

I've barely had time to sit down and have a conversation with my husband since starting work a week ago, so in honor of time spent well, I'm going to have a fiesta from writing and come back for a radical new year, next year.

Please come back, it will make you smile.

Never under estimate the power of hunger

Our last night on the California coast consisted of me having the biggest, blood boiling, emotional episode to date. I kind of forgot about it until I was looking back at photos of our fish taco's, realizing the possibility of me having a brain aneurysm was actually quiet great.

Yes it was a combination of things, but I'd like to hold California responsible for the most part. There truly are too many people. I'm thinking a bucket of half dead mullet, all jammed in there, splashing about, water slowly leaving that plastic, blue vessel and not really caring if they're in each others faces, since they're all about to die anyway.

Harsh.

So the fish, this is the fish we bought from a little market in Hellsville, California. Some snapper, waiting to be gobbled up. Hoping to be floured, cooked and eaten that very night, it was not, due to the high-end emotional experience.

So here we are, a glorious night in Joshua Tree, some canned goods, such as beans and salsa, fresh fish and broken corn taco's.

This last photograph is one of my favorites. We tried four more times to take a variety of shots similar, but failed.

This was a one off.

It was also our first and last night at Joshua Tree. The next morning we went for a hike, where the rattle snakes and tarantulas hide out, imagining that these highly frightening creatures would be the one's to have me screaming naked out of the park. No, this did not happen. The next morning after our walk, we arrived back at camp to a colony of bee's.

Whatever species they were, they either wanted us gone or were clinging frantically to our cloths and bodies begging for us to stay. I was unsure.

These are the creatures that had me screaming almost naked out of Joshua Tree. I screamed and I screamed and I screamed.

You know what I screamed?

"THEY'RE FUCKING   EVERYWHERE ... AAHHHHH... FUUUUUUUUUUUUUCK..
AAAHHHH...GLEEEEEENN..DO SOMETHING.

This was being screamed over and over while Glenn threw camping items toward me to put in the car, while spraying himself with mosquito repellent and waving a single dinner fork around, presumably at the bee's.

Eventually we got out of there, taking four days for us to put our car back together, after having to throw everything in there in the middle of the bee storm.

Somehow, I'm gathering before it got to the point of screams and sobbing pleas, I managed to make a mushroom omelette for breakfast.

Three words to remember while shopping in a Mexican grocery.

If you took a sticky, (where I come from, that's derived from 'sticky beak', meaning, 'to take a look') at my last post, at a grocery outside of L.A., you would have hopefully drooled over the taco's and more than likely been able to smell them through the photo's.

If you did not have a sticky, you should have one.

After we were able to drag ourselves away from the man with all the good food, we rolled into the market.

JAX.

JAX MARKET.

This is what I found.

If I wasn't so bashful and knew more Spanish, I may have had some scary and amusing photo's of the meat section.

So here you go.

I wonder, if I searched really hard, would I be able to find one of these in Australia?

Possibility. Imagination. Celebration.

Global Street Food Day

Before you drool all over the photo's I'm about to show you, you need to know a little of where this place is and of course how we came about it.

The story, ever so briefly, goes like this.

Needing to get the hell out of California, well, the coast at least, we decided to spend the most part of a 111 degree day driving toward Palm Springs, where we would spend one night camping than hit Joshua Tree the following day. To do this, we needed to drive along a five lane highway in what you would still call the L.A. area. Hoping that we could get away with not driving too far into the world of mad, we were happy that it was a Sunday and that hopefully most people would still be at church and not adding to my irregular heart rhythm that I had developed since entering Southern California. The only thing I could compare it to was skydiving, only way worse.

We're now heading East and hunger is adding fast and furious to our already naughty attitudes. Of course we see an endless amount of evil and destructive signs for food not worth mentioning, somehow holding back the tears and turning to our instinct of where to eat. We are too far to wait until Palm Springs, where we could set up camp and cook something and we're still on a five lane highway with billboards towering above posting wanted adds for rapists and murderers. The only thing left to do was dive right into one of these highway neighbourhoods and hope for the best. We were approaching a place called Ontario. There was a 4th street exit coming up so we took that for no other reason than desperation.

We turned a few corners and made it to a main road where we saw JAX MARKET, with a mass construction site out the front, obviously making room for more parking spaces since people seem to feel the need to drive cars twice as wide as your every day Subaru.

At this point we thought JAX was nothing more than your just-off-the-highway-super store. Here we thought we could grab a roast chicken or something and ravage it with salt and pepper while adding to our heat stroke in the car park. We were very wrong. JAX was a Mexican grocery filled with enough glorious fascinations to keep us in there for about an hour.

This hour that we spent inside, this did not include the half an hour we sat out the front ordering and re-ordering the tastiest morsels of tacos I've put in my mouth. You must know that although I've never been to Mexico, Glenn has many, many times and he vouches on behalf of my hopes that the real deal tacos in Me-he-co are going to be just as spasmodically awesome.

They were tiny and perfect. I also do not speak a lick of Spanish, so delirious smiles and food smudged all over my burning cheeks while giving him the thumbs up was the only way I knew how to thank the man of the hour. To be honest, it's not that he didn't care, but his nervous glances toward me out the corner of his eye and his unruffled thick, black moe said nothing more than "Get stuffed lady gringo".

Of course it wasn't just about the food. Look where we were; in a car park, 112 degrees by now and a shopping trolley with a plastic tub filled with chicken and steak sitting i the under rack. (Separately) A bulk amount of napkins and salt on the table and crowds of people waiting to pay a mere $1 for a handful of corn taco, meat, lettuce, onion, and three kinds of hot, hot sauces.

Home cooking on whatever street you turn down. Why is this not yet a global holiday?