Inner City Faces

So this past week I worked for the Adventure Travel Expo, which happened on the weekend. For the first 5 days we were handing out flyers at train stations and busy streets during lunch and the rush hours (which involved 7am starts, bleh). I don’t know how many people I saw walk past me, but it was quite an experience in people-watching. For the record, if you ever want time to slow down, go stand somewhere handing out flyers, it is like a time warp and you think you’ve been there for an hour, but it’s only been like 5 minutes! To keep it interesting I made a list of some of the more interesting people that walked by, split into categories.

The demographic:

• So many Asians (which isn’t too surprising, especially given the close proximity of Chinatown)
• Businessmen (who didn’t take flyers)
• Backpackers lugging all their worldly belongings
• Hordes of schoolchildren in various dorky uniforms
• University students walking with notebooks held up to their noses (it’s exam season)
• Older people who took flyers out of actual interest (we were targeting the younger crowd but most ignored us)
• The usual city assemblage of weirdos hanging around train stations
• Other people who were flyering or doing face to face fundraising – the competition always messed us up

What they carried:

• a cat in a bag with leg holes
• a giant sprig of rosemary
• a big painting board
• a little kid with a bag of mangoes bigger than him
• iphones held right up to their noses, making me worried that they were going to crash into me at any moment
• multiple bags, cups of coffee, ipods, and various things that could deter them from taking a flyer due to the sheer lack of hands

What they were wearing:

• a “Vote for Pedro” shirt
• a guy in a Taylor Swift shirt
• a guy in pink skinny jeans
• a girl with a multicoloured clown wig on and crazy-coloured skirt/tights
• on Tuesday, the women wore lots of little side hats and feather head clips and everyone was super dressed up for the Melbourne Cup (which I watched on a screen in the street, but the official race only lasted for about 3 minutes, and one of the lower-ranked horses won, in an upset)
• a guy dressed as a magician (at least I think so) with a fancy top hat and makeup
• a range of sadistic-looking high heels, wedges, and other torturous foot devices, usually on women
• on Friday we started to see people with poppies pinned to their shirts for Armistice Day (11/11)

The bizarre:

• A guy in a mechanized wheelchair that was blasting “Ghostriders” to the world
• Many pregnant women, particularly small Asian women that didn’t look real
• A chubby bulldog rambling down the street, not a leash or a pet owner in sight, and he was wearing sunglasses

When you’re standing near buses, bus stops, and train stations, you are also overwhelmed by advertisements. Some of these were so well disguised that I couldn’t figure out what the ad was supposed to be. One featured a pile of apples in front of a girl’s face and had a brand listed, but I didn’t know if it was advertising the apples, the girl, or something off-screen (Emma, the other girl flyering with me, said it was for perfume). Then there was an ad that had a boy and a girl facing each other with romantic swirling dots around them, which you would think was for perfume, but was actually for a phone company (weird). The best ad was just writing across the side of a bus: “Baby pink polo shirt says, ‘yes, ladies, you can trust me.’” What was that all about?

Saturday and Sunday we worked at the actual Expo event, which was inside the Town Hall and had exhibits of lots of travel groups and companies from different locations in Australia and around the world. It looked pretty fun, and I made a quick dash around at the very beginning, but mostly we were stuck at the entrance, handing out the list of travel talk topics and telling people to register for a prize giveaway (return tickets to Europe, but sadly we weren’t allowed to enter). 

The best thing in the Expo, though, were the snake people! One guy was from a Reptile Centre in Alice Springs, and he had a huge python draped around him like a feather boa, and you could hold the snake yourself and get photos. There were also a few smaller pythons, a bearded lizard, and on the second day another reptile guy arrived with some more snakes, a tiny crocodile (it was so cute), and supposedly a goanna, but I didn’t see that one during my brief forays into the expo itself. I chatted with them during the after party (there were parties Saturday and Sunday, which was fun) and got contact info to maybe work with them, so that was an unexpected benefit of spending the whole week standing in the inner city!