Kiss the Frog
Surprisingly enough, Magnetic Island’s toad race is not a touristic attraction.
It is being held in a local pub here every Wednesday for quite a few years. When we arrived there all the audience - mainly local families, fathers with beers and their children with, well, also beer (only the babies received coke) - were sitting in a large circle around a yard. In the yard, a circle of some 6 meters radius was drawn on the floor. The toad race was just about to begin.
Before the race commenced, there was a public sale. The manager showed each toad, gave it a proper name (”meet George Waker Bush!”) and urged the public to gamble on it (”21 dollars going once! going twice! Do I here 25? 25 dollars going once!…”). After all the toads were exposed to the public, and each toad had someone who gambled on it (amounts were in the order of 20$-30$; the highest gamble was 50$ on one toad, which lost of course) - usually the children shouted the gambles and the fathers paid - the race begun. All toads - there were about ten of them - were put inside a bucket at the center of the circle, and when it was raised they all started to jump, following the applauses of the audience.
This process repeated for each round, with money prizes that changed according to the sum that was collected every round. The biggest prize that evening was 135$ - in that round the last toad to leave the circle gave its gambler a nice T-shirt, as a second prize. The nice thing was, however, after each round: in order to get the prize the winner had to give a kiss to the winning toad, which of course made all the audience even more happy. Would you kiss a toad to get your winning?
After the toad race finished we returned to our hostel. We found in our room two nice Irish girls and had a little chat. They were afraid of beasts so I took a long time to tell them about all the dangerous creatures of Israel - from snakes and scorpions to arabs and Judean-Desert tigers. It was really amusing to watch their reaction. Then we had a small talk about the army (”you HAVE to go there? It’s aweful!”) and some talk about the differences between Ireland and Israel (no dangerous animals in Ireland, “because Patrik banished them all. That’s how he became a saint - he gathered all the animals, asked any animal who wished to stay to rais its hand, and since snakes have no hands they were all banished”).
Before going to sleeep I went down to the reception area and found there a small Possum walking around - It is a strange half-kangaroo half-cat animal, which just came silently looking for food in the garbage. It was nice watching it, though. Then I went to sleep. Today I spent most of the day tramping in the mountains here, looking at various trees (large hoop pines, some eucaliptuses, and other vegetation); chilling out at some bays (absolutely clear water); and having some good ice-cream (try the winning Mango-Passion Fruit combination).
June 24th, 2005 at 15:00
You just came back to your room and found some Irish girls ? Why does it never happen to me ?!?