Warning: This post talks vaguely about the musical Wicked, so now that you’ve been warned you can’t blame me if you haven’t seen it and I ruin it for you!

Do me a quick favour - think about everything you have ever done in your lifetime. While you’re thinking about all that ask yourself a question, have you ever defied gravity? Of course, I don’t mean it as though you have literally pulled off an amazing feat of human levitation. I mean it in more of a metaphorical sense. Have you ever done the unthinkable? The amazing? Have you ever truly smashed the limits that have been set in place around you, whether they be put there by yourself of others? Something so monumental that is could be equated to a person literally defying gravity?

I personally don’t think I ever have.

Now something has set me off on this train of thought and it is not letting me go! Recently while I was travelling with a friend in London we visited the West End theatres and took in a show of the Broadway hit, Wicked. For those of you who don’t know, possibly you’ve been living under a rock or you’re just not interested in that sort of thing, Wicked is an adaption from a novel written as a prequel to the film, The Wizard of Oz, and it follows the story of Elphaba, also known as the Wicked Witch of the West, and what happened before she was given that title. Bear with me here, I’m not completely crazy. In the show is one of the most impressive songs that I have ever seen/heard, Defying Gravity. In this song the audience sees Elphaba really becoming the Wicked Witch of the West, however, it is not because she is indeed wicked. Instead, the Wizard labels her as this to rally the people of Oz against her because she would not got along with his evil plans. In the song Elphaba is trying to break free from this persecution (furthered by the fact that she has faced persecution all her life due to the fact that she was born with green skin), and also fighting back for a cause she sees as just. In the end, she literally flies away to escape this persecution - hence defying gravity. You can watch this song below, if you like.

What has got me thinking about this is not the simple story in which a character flies away off stage, but the simple idea of someone defying gravity. The idea that someone could undertake an act so monumental that it could be considered equalled to someone overcoming one of the most basic forces in our world. It has got me thinking about whether I have ever done anything this monumental. If not, why not? It has got me thinking about whether or not I could ever really do anything this monumental. Again, if not, why not? None the less, my thoughts keep coming back to one simple idea - just because I never have and possibly never will truly defy gravity in this sense, doesn’t mean I shouldn’t try… And I think this is true for everyone. I am not only referring to this in terms of fighting the just cause, or trying to break free from persecution either. I am referring to anything and everything. People doing something, anything that they consider to be monumental, something they would never normally do in their daily lives. The more I write about this, the more I think it’s starting to sound like one of those “live every day to the fullest” special-for-TV-only movies, but that’s not even what I’m talking about. I’m not saying you have to necessarily live every day to the fullest. In fact, I am one of the biggest advocates for occasionally sitting around and just doing nothing…

What I’m trying to say is - no matter what you do in your daily life, wheter you try to live every day to the fullest or if you’re just cruising along day-by-day… every now and then stop and think to yourself, “Have I done anything huge lately? Anything monumental? Have I defied gravity?” You don’t neccessaily need to go out into the world and do something right away either, just keep it in the back of your mind and if the opportunity should happen to come up to do one thing that you would never normally do, something different, something completely outside the boundaries of your life… then give it a go! Try it! If you have a cause you strongly believe in, go out one afternoon and do something about it. If there’s something you’ve always wanted to do but it just doesn’t fit into what you see as being you, or doesn’t fit into what other people see as being you… just do it. Get out there and do some gravity defying, people! It’s only basic physics… I mean, who couldn’t beat that!? I think I’m gonna give it a try.

And all of a sudden I feel way to preachy… Sorry about that.

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At this point in my life I am travelling across the world - I am living away from my home country, Australia, with my Aunt and Uncle in the sunny ol’ Canada, and I have been travelling across Europe in the past month. To keep a record of the events that shape my travelling life I am keeping a diary. Not a diary of my thoughts and feelings, but merely a diary of what I had for breakfast that morning in Venice, and similar such things. The bottom line is: I keep a diary. Over the past 7-months I have actually accumulated a nice little pile of books filled with my scribbled handwriting, and they are the best souvenirs of my trip by far.

However, I do not see them as finished. Despite the fact that some of these diaries were written in the early stages of April and May, they are still being written. They are changing, evolving with my thoughts on my travels today. Occasionally, when I get time, I flick through the diaries of yester-month (it’s not a word, but it should be) and read what I wrote - what I found interesting, what I found new - and I can’t help but have a completely different perspective on what I experienced back then. One day I thought to myself that it would be a shame to lose that new perspective, in contrast with the old one… and so I started to make notes. If you look through my old diaries they are littered with post-it notes with tiny scribble trying to get my new perspective across, marks in the margins to remind me of things I forgot when I was writing the diary all that time ago, new thoughts and ideas overflowing the pages…….. As I said, my diary is still changing, evolving into something new every time I read it.

Most people, from my limited knowledge of the subject of what other people do in the privacy of their own homes (for all I know they could do the cha-cha until 6am), do not see their diaries this way. They spend maybe an hour pouring their hearts out onto a little piece of paper, or in more modern times, a tiny piece of a computer screen, and then it is put away and forgotten for years to come. Sure, the author may come back in years to come to read what their thirteen-year-old self reacted to their parents divorce, or the maths test next Friday, but it ends there. How do they feel about their parents divorce now? What about that maths test? Even the tiniest fragment of the past can be seen in a completely new perspective only a short time later. A diary should not be treated as a completed record of the past, but instead a growing record of developing perspectives on past events.

Besides, it makes it a lot more interesting to read the next time!

So if you keep a diary, or have diaries from past years, go back and flick through… Read a couple of pages here and there, and while you’re at it grab that post-it pad sitting on your desk and make some notes, anything, and leave a new record, keep your diary alive. If you don’t write a diary and never have, try it sometime! They’re good fun to read, even a month later, and I’ve been told that your grand kids will thank you for it!

Recently I got a job working at an office building in Downtown Toronto. Now I wont say where, purely so you can’t stalk me, but I did. Naturally before I started I had to complete the necessary paperwork, but this job, just like my job at Canadian Tire, simply went to prove the Canadians insane need for piles of paperwork.

Back in Australia when I got my first job at Big W (a department store for those of you who don’t know it - no, it’s not Big Walmart) I also had to go through the steps with the required paperwork. However, that paperwork consisted of signing a contract, filling out an availability sheet and giving my banking information so I could get paid. That was it. Afterwards I had training modules that needed to be done before I started, but for the simple welcome process it was close to nothing at all, 5-minutes work. (I am also not including the interview processes and such) So the Australian method was rather easy.

With THIS job, however, I was sitting there for the better part of an hour filling out all this paperwork. There was an offer letter, a contract, a privacy agreement, my personal details (filled out once on about 3 different forms), a criminal check form, my personal working and schooling history, where I’ve lived in the past 10 years… The list went on and on… It was insane!

Now wait a minute, my job in Australia was a simple department store and this is an office… There’s a bit of a difference there! Well yes, that’s true, but when I worked at Canadian Tire (a Canadian department store, for those out of the loop) there was STILL a mountain of paperwork. We all sat down in a group and it took at least half an hour to fill out all the paperwork. Hundreds of agreements and policies that needed to be signed… I guess Canadian Tire didn’t want to get sued!

And I personally think that’s what it all comes down to - getting sued. From what I know frivolous law suits are just as common here in Canada as they are in the US, hence everyone and everything is trying to cover their butts as much as physically possible. In Australia, while people DO get sued, it is far less prevalent, and hence these businesses don’t NEED this much over-the-top paperwork…

I guess the moral of the story is: Canadians, stop suing each other so it doesn’t take me an hour to fill out some paperwork… please!

Two days ago, on Sunday night, I had a sudden and overpowering urge to build a website. It’s something I have done plenty of times before, but not since I’ve been in Canada - so that’s at least 7-months! I decided that I should probably stop neglecting the blog that I set up before I came on this trip in order to share all of my international adventures with the people back home (which got a grand total of around 6 posts)… and so Spedman975.net was revived!

With that and a downloaded template (I cant be bothered making my own layout for this site, WordPress is too hard), within a couple of days this website was born, and with any luck it’ll live for a fairly long time! So take a look around, read a few of the articles and see what’s what… And hopefully you’ll find something you like and will come back now and then! If not, let me know what I’ve done wrong and then GET OUT! Hahaha…

And that’s all for now!

Last year I finished my last year of high school. I graduated and now I have been thrown into the world to make my own way, I think I’m going to get lost! I may not have realised it at the time, but my entire life up until recently when I walked out of Westminster School for the last time has been laid out in front of me like a road map. It was a given that I would progress from Preschool to Kindergarten, to Primary School, to High School. There was absolutely no doubt in that, there wasn’t really any other path that I could take, just like everyone else. Yes, people can decide to leave school in their later years, thus leaving this set out road map, but in my family that simply wasn’t an option. But now I’ve finished high school. Here I am, standing at the edge of the map. I’m standing at a cross-roads, countless signs pointing in all different directions on the side of the road ahead of me. I don’t know what’s what, or where’s where… I’m lost without my map!

Did you get the symbolism there? I threw in just a little bit.

But anyway, now I am out of school and, in a way, on my own. I am free to make my own decisions about what I do with my life from here on out, but that also means that I am the one who has to make them; and they’re not all straight, simple ones, either! I’ll start with an easy one - the one I have already made. The year after high school I could have gone straight into full time work, I could have gone straight into university, or I could have travelled. I chose the latter option. In a way, I’m already off the road map, I’ve found a pretty decent path and I’m sticking to it. But, this year is quickly coming to a close - it’s Halloween already! Where to next year? It’s an even simpler decision, one of my options is gone. I can either work full time or go to university. I have, already, chosen university. Then I opened a whole new can of worms, because then I have decide what to DO at university. To make this long, and overly dramatic story short, I have chosen to go into law at university. I got the marks and got accepted, and I deferred to travel. Law is my path, my new road. But do I really want it to be?

Over the last 7-months travelling the world I have changed my mind about what I want to be a million times - I wanted to be an Olympic gold medalist (who didn’t in August?), I wanted to join the army, I wanted to start a charity, I wanted to be the Prime Minister of Australia, I wanted to work at the UN. All varied and pretty damn difficult goals if you ask me, (High up in the army that was, an officer… Thus the hard) and they all come with their own path. Although these goals are mostly unrealistic, there are a few that I could concievably achieve (the Olympian isn’t one of them)… When I left school I had a solid idea of who I wanted to be and what path I wanted to follow - I had been shown one road on the next map and I was sticking to it! But as I’ve come along this new, uncharted path of international travel… I’ve noticed a whole lot of new roads to be explored… What do I choose?

To summarise - I want the rest of my road map with one, straight road that will take me exactly where I want to go! Unfortunately, I somehow think that’s impossible otherwise everyone would have it…

I recently found myself smack-bang in the centre of the ancient world, Rome. While globe-trotting with a friend of mine, we stopped over in the city for a grand total of three days to explore the sights, sounds and smells that thousands of years of history had left behind. During our time in the city we came across many honest and hard-working citizens of Rome catering to the needs of the tourists passing through, just trying to make a living. However, not all citizens of the city are as honest and hard-working. In those short three days my friend and I were the victims of various scams around half a dozen times, more than we had been our entire trip through Central Europe. Twice, they succeeded. When our train arrived in the Roma Termini train station, no one had warned us of the tricks of the trade of some of the city’s inhabitants.

As I said, half a dozen scam attempts were made against us, two of them succeeded. These were not all individual scams, we ran into the same ones a couple of times. Let’s see if you can guess which ones we were foolish enough to fall for.

1. The Friendship Bracelet
This one I personally don’t imagine having much success, unless they found a string of really ignorant tourists. Walking along the second landing of the Spanish Steps and looking over onto the city, a man came walking up to me with three pieces of string wound together (red, white and green - very patriotic) and held in a loop. The man then told me to put my thumb in the loop, and that he had something he wanted to show me. In such instances if someone were to actually think that nothing bad could happen by putting your thumb in a loop made my a complete stranger, the man would then proceed to tie an intricate friendship bracelet. Upon completion, the man would then demand payment. Sure, you can refuse, but the trick is that the bracelet cannot be untied, it must be cut off. Do you carry a pair of scissors with you?

2. The Rose
A simple trick - a man at the bottom of the Spanish Steps came up to my friend and I and shoved a rose in her face. He insisted that I buy it for her, and even went to the lengths of trying to grab her wrist and force it into her hand. In the end it was even offered for free… Very likely, I thought.

3. The ”Other” Menu
This was the sneakiest scam we found while in Rome, and an interesting plan of attack as well. My friend and I, tired after a mornings exploring, stopped at a small cafe in the Piazza Venezia. As all good tourists do while in the country of Italy, we decided to indulge ourselves in a pizza - what else do you think of when you think Italian food? Careful with our dwindling travel funds we carefully checked the menu for the prices of the items. We decided on a pizza that was advertised as €6, a reasonably good price, and ordered. We got our meal and dug in, enjoying it to the last bite. Once we were done (and personally sick of waiting for the SAM (Short Angry Man) to come back to our table) my friend headed up to the cashier to pay. Lo and behold, our pizza turned out to be much more than €6. When my friend pointed to the menu right next to her and showed her the price, the cashier insisted that that is not what we ordered. We did not order the Margarita pizza, despite the fact that she had just said that two-seconds earlier when confirming our order with the SAM… Apparently, we did not order from the menu posted on the wall but their other lunch menu which, unfortunately, we failed to realise existed.

4. The Drinks
Similar to the “Other” Menu trick, this one involved the omission from a menu, not a new menu entirely. Basically you would walk in, check out the prices for food and order, along with a drink for yourself. When you get the bill at the end of the meal you look it over, the food you ordered is the exact price that was advertised, but then you think to yourself, “How much was a drink listed at!?” It’s not on the menu, and you just paid €6.50 for a 400mL cup of soft drink. What are you going to do, you can’t give the drink back…

5. The Fountain Coin-Grab
Okay, so this isn’t a DIRECT scam on people, but it is still someone getting money for nothing from you and your tourist friends. As all visitors to the city do, my friend and I visited the Trevi Fountain. As the old legend goes, if you throw a coin into the fountain over your shoulder you are ensuring your safe return to the city. If you’re generous enough to give the fountain another coin, you get a wish. My suggestion to you - throw it hard. While trying to get a photo in front of the fountain (it takes a while) we noticed a man walking around with a short metal stick. This man would look out for the police patrolling the fountain while spotting €1 and €2 coins in the fountain, thrown by someone with a weak arm. When no one was looking (or so he thought) he would extend his car-aerial-like rod with a magnet on one end and snatch up the coin. His coin would be dripping as he walked away, but who would honestly notice?

So these are a few of the scams we ran into while we explored Rome. This is, of course, other than the usual daylight robery in ridiculous prices for tours, food and other touristy things. And since you’ve waited patiently and read through this entire page (I’m assuming) I suppose I shall tell you the two scams we fell victim to: (highlight it to read it)

1. The “Other” Menu (€18 meal with drinks there)
2. The Drinks (€6.50 is a bit ridiculous!)

Don’t get me wrong, for every scammer there are hundreds of innocent and honest Italians working throughout the city - I have even heard stories of innocent bystanders helping helpless victimised tourists from thieves and scammers alike - but just make sure when you get to Rome, you bring a stick to beat back the scammers!