The strange place bucket list for quirky people (and their lawn ornaments)
After adding Zimbabwe to the list, Rodrigo and I have now been to 39 countries together. While we were hoping to make Spain number 40 before 2016 came to an end with our latest ship assignment, things didn't quite work out that way. When I first found out that I would be rejoining the same difficult ship instead, I started reevaluating my life choices and wondering if Rod and I could find other ways to experience the world.
I’ve been wanting to put together a bucket list for a while now, and I finally sat down and did it (while I was still on vacation). Here it is:
1. Instagram the Skeleton Coast
The Skeleton Coast is an inhospitable dessert coastline in Namibia that is littered with more than a thousand shipwrecks. Used as the location for the movie Mad Max, it is possibly the best place in the world to take post-apocalyptic-dystopia-grams, …as one does.https://www.instagram.com/_claudia_berger_ / www.passeport-en-poche.com |
2. Sip hot chocolate with hello kitty’s face on it while pointing your pinky finger (with it’s freshly painted hello kitty nail art on it) in the air
If you're thinking "I just haven't seen enough pink in my life", the San Rio Hello Kitty House in Thailand might help you reach your entire quota in one afternoon. If I thought that dragging my ex-boyfriend to cathedrals in Europe was torture for him, this place might get me dumped all over again! Maybe I should just take a girl friend to this place which has a cafe and a nail salon, among other things.http-//hello2day.com/hello-kitty-house-bangkok.html |
http-//hello2day.com/hello-kitty-house-bangkok.html |
3. Take in an exhibition at the Museum of Bad Art
Back in the late 90s when I did art at high school, all that anyone wanted to paint was aliens and foetuses. I hope they have some of those! Either way, there is a whole museum (or three?) in Massachusetts devoted to art “too bad to be ignored”.
HOT, HOT, HOT (VICTORIA'S REAL SECRET) by Unknown Photo by https://www.instagram.com/miriamcarothers |
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4. Go to a cat cafe
It seems cat cafes are multiplying faster than bunnies with businesses popping up in Japan, France, USA, Austria, England, Spain, Hungary, Germany, Singapore, Thailand and Russia. Just to clarify, these places don’t serve cats, they just have lots of them. You can now pay exorbitant amounts of money to have tea in the presence of some cats, and possibly get to stroke them or completely be ignored by them, because they’re cats and they’re like that sometimes.
5. Visit a giant pineapple
Table mountain, the Nelson Mandela bridge and the Bathhurst Pineapple: Those are the big three! You haven’t seen South Africa until you’ve seen its pineapple. Okay, maybe you have. New Zealand is a fraction of the size of South Africa and it has a giant apple, a giant carrot, a giant kiwi fruit, a giant kiwi bird, a giant trout, a giant bicycle, a giant prawn, a giant gumboot, a giant bull, a giant sheep, a giant sheepdog and a giant sheep sheerer. All South Africa has is a giant pineapple (okay, and an oversized Nelson Mandela with a less oversized out-of-proportion head - And that’s in an upmarket shopping mall) so go with the pineapple!
(P.S. If you’re a fan of a certain song, you might want to bring two pens and an apple)
http-//a-family-travel-adventure.blogspot.html |
6. Run around on the ceiling
There are upside-down houses in China, Russia, Malaysia, California, South Korea, Poland and the USA. - As in upside down both inside and out! I don’t mind which one I go to, but I would like to do my hair so that it stands up like a troll so that when I flip the pictures upside down (or the right way up), my ability to defy gravity looks convincing.
Note to self: Don’t wear a dress that day.
Jastrzębia Góra, Poland |
7. Add my cooties to the Market Theatre Gum Wall
What started off as a mild form of vandalism when theatre goers started adding chewing gum to the wall at the Market Theatre box office in Seattle, Washington, eventually became something of a national landmark. According to Wikipedia, it was named one of 2009’s germiest tourist attractions and is frequently used as a backdrop for wedding photographs. Romantic!
https://www.instagram.com/irishcricket1 |
8. Sleep in a plane and wake up in the same place
In Stockholm, you can pay lots of money to get to do what a lot of pilots do for free: sleep in a cockpit! Yes, they have turned a Jumbo jet into a hotel, and while the cockpit is the room most in demand, I quite fancy the idea of sleeping in one of the jet engines. I used to work at an airport and, as part of their ‘safety training’, they used to show us pictures of what people looked like who had taken a stroll on the runway and been sucked into an engine. Now you can spend time in one of those babies and not come out the other side looking like flesh confetti.https://www.instagram.com/stoffskichronicles |
9. Stay in a sandcastle
This isn’t actually something that seems possible right now, but I’m sure one day someone will build one big enough for people to sleep in. That will be fun.
10. Liberate a garden gnome
Okay, I travel with my own lawn ornament and that seems strange, but there are whole movements in France and Italy whose goals are to liberate gnomes from the gardens where they are 'enslaved' and free them back into the wild. According to a very iffy website, the Italian town of Barga has been declared a garden gnome sanctuary. I would like to 'liberate' (steal) a gnome from someone's garden and take it to Barga to test this theory. If it turns out to be false I will take him to the gnome reserve in Devon, England, and unite him with his kind. I'm not sure they even accept donations, but they let you wear cool gnome hats while you’re there, so that’s exciting! Rodrigo is not a gnome, only a flamingo, so he can visit but he can’t stay.http-//www.blackberrygarden.co.uk/2012/06/gnomish.html |
11. Donate something to the museum of broken relationships
If the gnome reserve doesn't want my gnome I will donate him to the Museum of Broken Relationships. I'll make sure I steal the gnome from someone I know so that the theft will cause a rift in our friendship and the gnome would be a valid donation to the museum, in Zagreb, Croatia, which is made up of items donated by people who have been through bad breakups.
https://www.instagram.com/denoay |
12. Sleep in a rectum!
I know it sounds a little gay, but who wouldn't want to experience the inside of a giant anus? This is a real guest house and you can spend lots of money to stay in this crap-hole. You may have thought the Belgian were only good for chocolate and waffles, but at the Verbeke Foundation, they have found ways to make other dreams come true too.
http-//thesquidstories.blogspot.com |
Other more normal things that I want to do:
- Be an extra in a Bollywood movie in India (even though they are shot everywhere else). (…Okay, I might settle for Cape Town.)
- Sing karaoke in Tokyo (and possibly find an excuse to dress Harajuku).
- Dance salsa in Cuba. (I had an Australian guest tell me I shouldn't bother going there because it’s "dirty and poor". Then I remembered that I’m from Africa, so I don't think I’ll let that stop me.)
If you can think of some quirky travel bucket list things I haven't heard of, please let me know in the comment box below.
In the meantime, Rodrigo and I are just a few weeks into a new ship contract. Be sure to follow the sharonicles to keep up to date with our adventures as we continue to tick 'Work on a cruise ship' off of that same more normal bucket list.
You can stay at The largest, deepest, darkest, oldest, quietest motel room in the world:
ReplyDeletehttp://gccaverns.com/rooms-packages/the-grand-canyon-caverns-cavern-motel-room/
Thanks, that sounds like large deep dark old quiet fun.
DeleteI might have to revise this post and include "hug a panda".
ReplyDelete