Mislaid stash

The Queen Victoria Market is a place full of shouting and people.  Even, and especially, on a Saturday afternoon.  We arrived as the market was arriving closing time, and so there were many bargains to be had.  If bargains are what you want to have.  I could have bought an entire box of pears for only $1, or eight avocados for the same price.  But what is one to do with an entire box of pears, or eight very ripe avocados, despite them costing only $1?  Sometimes, no matter how good the bargain, you must forego.

The old man at one stall would not let my friend buy only a few tomatoes.  And when she tried to take tomatoes herself and put them into a bag for him to weigh, he kept taking them out of her hands, putting them back into the pile and declaring his stall was not a supermarket.  She thanked him sarcastically, and left without purchasing, but then realised they really were the only stall with small, ripe tomatoes.  In a further part of the same stall we found another tray of tomatoes, and so she bought some, while the old man was well away down the other end.

We caught the train back to my house, and I put my purchases into the fridge, wondering why I had really bought cherry tomatoes.  It's unlikely I'll actually eat them before they turn soft and grow mould, but for 50c a punnet how could I refuse?  I put my purchases in the fridge, and she kept hers in her small trolley in the back of my house.  It's so cold there it might as well be a fridge.  There was no chance of her cheese or ham going bad sitting in the back of my house.

After we ate leftover soup, an invitation was issued to see a show called Voodoo Vaudeville in Northcote.  The show started at 8pm, and so we left the house to park near the Northcote Town Hall.  Unfortunately, Voodoo Vaudeville proved unexpectedly popular.  It was sold out by the time we arrived, and we had to be content with the elaborately dressed and masked people on stilts echoing our sadness by pointing to the imaginary tear drops falling from their eyes.  We left, disappointed, to drink in a small bar.

On the way back to the car, we passed a restaurant named Pizza Meine Liebe.  When Ben returns to Melbourne I will most certainly suggest we eat there, if only for the name.

I arrived home, by myself, to my empty house, and felt so much like smoking a joint.  I almost never do things like smoking joints.  I'm really such a square.  When I moved into this house I had a small stash hidden in my canvas shoes I never wear.  I remember telling myself "I don't need to hide this from Mum now!", and putting it somewhere that was not a shoe based hiding place.  Unfortunately, this non-hiding-place is a much better hiding place than any other I have ever conceived.  The small stash seems lost forever.

I had some beer instead.

Which is where I am now, slightly intoxicated, and slightly hungry.  I have the imaginary munchies.  It leaves me no choice but to retreat to my very cold kitchen at the cold back part of my house, find something to eat, and hope that Ben might find a phone to use his scam-bought phone card to call me.  Because I miss him.

Tuborg at the Sidewalk Express

I was just writing an e-mail to Cassie when, all of a sudden, a frazzled, blonde kid approached me with a slab of Tuborg and started rambling to me in Danish. Confused, I told him quite categorically that I spoke only English. (This is a lie, but I doubt I wanted to have this conversation with him in French.) He then told me that for DKKR10 - around AUD2.40 - I could have a can of Tuborg, my favourite of all New Year's Eve beers, in an Internet café in the middle of the central København H train station. Surprisingly, I declined.

I got in at 7am, and it is now 2.52pm. At first I was simply amazed, stunned that I was finally walking the streets of Europe. Now - well, now I'm not entirely sure why I'm here. Hell, I've got plenty of photos. I've also been scammed twice - once when I found out that this Internet place is nowhere near as good as the one five minutes away, which will let me upload all of my photos tomorrow, and once when I realised that the phone card I bought to call home was, despite the protestations of the 7/11 employee who served me, nowhere near as good as the card I found in the Afghan Market and would have bought had they accepted my Visa card.

Tomorrow, I will be far less naive.

Tomorrow, I might have enough money to drink Tuborg at the train station.

Tomorrow, you will see my photos. Because I will go to the better Internet café.

Tomorrow, I will be able to talk to Australia for more than 31 minutes having spent DKKR100, because I will return to the Afghan Market with paper money.

Tomorrow, I will not get locked in to the public library. Because I won't blindly walk in while someone official-looking walks out, then realise that he was only allowed in because he was official, and now the doors won't open behind me. The public library is in fact a Parliamentary Library on Kierkegaardsstraede, in a Ministerial building. It - the building, including the library - is closed on weekends. Today is Saturday. When I found myself locked in, I pressed the intercom button, and heard the phone ringing in what I assume to be the secretary's office beside me, which was hauntingly unoccupied.

Figure 1: The Danish Public Library

If I had known enough Danish, I would have been able to read the sign which told me to unscrew the plastic cap and push the red button to exit.

Instead, my arm was shaking as I blindly unscrewed the plastic cap and, not knowing whether it would sound a fire alarm or cause a group of killer ninjas to spring forth from the empty binder collections, pushed the red button.

The doors opened, and I was free.

At Changi Airport

And I now have 10 minutes with which to write another airport post, after having spent the first five of these free minutes wishing Erica goodnight.

I have many photos, which will eventually appear in this space.

For the moment, I will list the following things of interest:

1. I am tired.

2. I bought Erica a cookbook called 'Irene's Peranakan Recipes'. The salesman at the newsagency told me that Peranakan cooking is an authentic melange of Indonesian and Malaysian. We'll see.

3. After a conversation between Erica and I over what the official languages of Singapore would be, I asked an airport guide which language he spoke, other than English. Upon hearing he actually spoke Tamil, I then asked him whether his family came from Sri Lanka. This was, clearly, not a good question to ask.

4. I ate at the Sundanese Food restaurant. I recommend it - for SIN$6.60, I ate quite a hearty meal of mixed vegetable with coconut milk sauce, and all I could eat rice. I also met a nice Hong Kong-born engineer called Calvin, with whom I ended up sharing my meal. He lives in Singapore, but apparently he prefers to eat in airports.



5. Having gotten out of bed at 6am, it is now 1.30am Adelaide time, and I now have another plane to catch, which will take me until around about 2pm Adelaide time. This is also sometimes known as 7.20am Copenhagen time.

6. I am tired.

Next post: Denmark.

Empty Friday

It is Friday night.

I had originally made tentative plans to accompany a friend to a sex/bondage bar in St Kilda (for everything other than sex and bondage, it was a business meeting), but his partner in this particular item of business could make it instead.  So I finished work, and after a discussion in the car on the way to the train station with two young boys about Doctor Who and parallel universes and where you may go when you die, I came home to enjoy my currently empty house.

In my kitchen I stacked the coffee cups and the bowls holding chocolate crumbs and uneaten black jelly beans from last night's gathering of friends, and then made a large pot of spicy red lentil soup while enjoying a glass of wine.

In my bedroom, with a second glass, I ate the soup and perused the television guide.  The television is hardly ever turned on, but, with an empty house and an empty Friday, a movie and hot chocolate enjoyed under a blanket sounds perfect.  And I have an overdue fine at the video store, so it has to be a movie on the television.

My television choices include Clueless, which I have miraculously gone twenty three years of my life without ever seeing, and Boomerang which doesn't start until very late at night.  My plan is to watch both, while waiting for randomly sent emails from Ben to arrive in my inbox as he alternates his time in Changi airport between wandering and lining up for the free internet terminals.

Which actually brings me to Ben, and the reason I too am writing here.  

It's a strange concept to be writing a travel blog, without actually travelling anywhere, but that is my side of this story.  While Ben is jumping from hostel to hostel, and train to train, in strange and unexplored lands, I will be jumping from tram to tram, and train to train, in a not so strange, but still mostly unexplored city.  For that is the thing about Melbourne.  It's very big, but it's also very fluid.  It changes so often that it's impossible to really keep up.  The city itself is like its weather.  Like the blue, mild sky that turns to a flat, grey sheet between putting your washing in the machine and taking it out to dry.

So, this will be a travel blog, of my travels through my normal everyday life, until Ben retuns in four months' time when I will be travelling for the third time this year to Adelaide to greet him at the airport.

At Adelaide Airport

I just bought a power adaptor for Great Britain, and with my 50c change I can write these words.

I am frightened, and I am panicking. And I am excited. By Saturday I will be marching through a crowd to see a royal Christening.

How Did I Get Here? Part One: Melbourne.

Above all else, there is one thing I have noticed about Melbourne. That one thing is this thing: Melbourne is exactly like Adelaide, only bigger. But not really bigger in an exciting, adventurous way. Melbourne simply has everything Adelaide has, in bountiful quantities at inflated prices, and loads more shit. Melbourne is a town of live music. In Adelaide, folkster Grand Salvo and popster Guy Blackman would have played for free in a dark, crowded, smoky pub, on a small corner stage by the front window. In Melbourne, they play at a cocktail lounge selling $10 glasses of Bordeaux wine, in front of tables lit only by tiny candles. It also says something about my hometown that the only people we knew at the venue were a couple from Adelaide, who have moved for work and for music.

Melbourne has far better food than Adelaide, though, and at dirt cheap prices. Melbourne also has far better public transport, aside from those rather unfortunate moments when the trains get delayed due to murder. It has chains of supersized op shops; a traffic rule requiring drivers to turn right from the far left, just like Keith Windschuttle did in the 1980s; a library reading room with lime-green lamps; and, opposite this, a Japanese takeaway store where food is prepared before you have even finished ordering. (No, seriously: no sooner had I handed over my $20 note did we receive two containers of food, immaculately prepared, with separate rice and tofu sections, and cups of miso soup.) But most of all, Melbourne has Erica.

You'll read more about - hell, and from - Erica in the very near future. Suffice to say that Erica is how I got to Melbourne, and Erica is why I will be returning, early and often, in the near future.

My plane landed at Melbourne airport at 9.30pm, and after collecting my luggage I casually walked to the shuttle bus stop just outside the front door. A short, thin impatient man circled me three times, checking the timetables and attempting to peer over the top of my head. The bus wouldn't come for another fifteen minutes. Finally he approached, and in a slight accent asked if I had already purchased a ticket.

"No," I told him, attempting reassurance. "That machine will only take credit cards. I have cash, and we're able to buy tickets from the bus driver."

"It costs twenty dollars, right?"

"Yes, from the bus driver."

"Would you like to share a taxi? It can't be more expensive than the bus, with both of us."

So despite having never met, the two of us hailed a cab to Spencer Street station. This seemed like an excellent idea, until we started driving. Here's another thing about Melbourne: its taxi drivers are, really, quite something. Ours never indicated once to change lanes; turned right without checking any mirror; swore at all oncoming traffic, even that which appeared safely in other lanes; and answered his mobile phone to inform a friend of the Lebanese word for 'cockhead'. He then apologised if we were offended (by his language, not his driving), and took us to the train station. It was here that we realised that our trains were still fifteen minutes away, and thus this Taxi Adventure of Death had really been for naught.

I caught the Upfield train to Brunswick.


As I was taking this photo, a rather enthusiastic youngster asked whether he could pose for me. I declined his kind offer, and put my camera safely away. He and his friends then noticed the Virgin Blue ticket on my suitcase, and asked where I had come from. "Adelaide," I replied. They asked if Adelaide were bigger and more exciting than Melbourne. I felt as though I was depriving children of Santa Claus, but I did tell them the truth. Had I been to Broadmeadows?, they asked. I hadn't. Never been 'a the Meadows, hey? they replied. They told me I should visit. I'm not so sure, myself.

And then I alighted from the train, walked across the tracks, and stumbled into the bar to be greeted by the amazing Erica, in full costume. You might be interested to read that she plays music. On this night, she told her audience that she was waiting for a boy to catch a plane, then a bus (she was not told of my change of plans), then a train to meet her. For anyone listening, it would have been quite an interesting end to the tale to finally see her greet me by the door.

My week in Melbourne passed blissfully. It involved the following items:

Exhibit 1A: Interesting Business Ideas.


Exhibit 1B: Coffee Obsessions.

Exhibit 1C: Bizarre Solicitations on Toilet Cubicle Doors.

At the end of the week (or, since it was Monday, the start of a new one) I returned to Adelaide. Only a few days later Erica joined me, albeit briefly. That is her story to tell. But for now, I will leave you with a scene from Avalon Airport, and the knowledge that tomorrow I will again be travelling through the air. This time, Melbourne's not nearly far enough. By Saturday, I will be walking the streets of Copenhagen. Then the 'travel blog' part of this can truly begin.