Melbourne!

As I’ve said before, the initial excitement and novelty of being in New Zealand has mostly died down now that I’ve been here a couple of months. I get up and go to work just as I did in Seattle, go to the store and go to the movies and go for coffee just as I would in probably any city in the world. And just as I did in Seattle and everywhere else I’ve ever lived, I’ve gotten enough used to my routine (and to being rained on constantly and blown around by incessant wind all day and all night) that the idea of a weekend away started to sound really appealing.

I biffed Labour Day Weekend, it’s true, but fortunately for me I’d had enough wherewithal to put some plans to fly across the ditch to visit my friend Georgina, whom I met at the Octopus Resort and who’s become a great email correspondent in the intervening months. It’s been a quiet couple of weeks here in Wellington and although I am by no means a raging party person it was getting a little too quiet for me, you know? So I was even more excited to be taking off than I ordinarily would about flying to Australia for the weekend.

It was, for some reason, the Melbourne Cup when I got into town, which is such a big deal over there that the entire city got the day off on Tuesday. I wouldn’t have known about it at all…horse racing being one of those things, like the awesome new features your Blackberry has or trends in plastic surgery…firmly and permanently under my radar, except that Thursday evening when I got in to town there were all these people wearing walking around wearing very elaborate hats. Temporary as such hat-wearing activity is (surely), I immediately knew that Melbourne was my kind of town.

I met George at her office and we went to her very cute house in Parkville and then out to dinner…the first of many lovely eating experiences I had in Melbourne…with Frances, who also at the Octopus Resort. We went for some fantastic pizza…Melbourne has a lot of Italians, it seems, and so there is much good pizza and gelato, thank heaven…and I promptly began to feel a little sick. Frances remembered that the last time she’d seen me, on the way back to Lautoka from the resort, I was feeling pretty seasick too, and wondered if there might be something about herself and George that leant one to queasiness, but it was just the beginning of this snurfly mucus-heavy bug I seemed to have picked up, I’m sure. I sadly pushed away the rest of my handmade arugula-goat cheese-cappacola pizza and we called it a night.

Friday morning Georgina had to go to work early so I had a whole beautiful sunny day (oh, the thrill one feels when one bares one’s pasty upper arms to the antipodean sun for the first time in months) to myself in a fabulous new city. My dear friend Katie spent a semester abroad in Melbourne and had told me long ago that it was sort of the Seattle of Australia: lots of cafes and good places to eat, lots of live music, stuff to do but not super touristy. This impression turned out to be correct, as the first place I went, after regretfully deciding against the zoo, was the Victoria Market, which reminded me greatly of…well, Seattleites, you know.

Something everyone here in Wellington had told me, whenever I mentioned (roughly once an hour this last week) that I was visiting Melbourne, was that there was brilliant shopping to be had there. I was very glad to hear this. Very very very very very glad, because I am sick of all my clothes, my friends. I’ve bought a couple of things since I arrived here, of course, and a couple of the things my mom sent me in her multiple packages did actually fit, but for the most part I’m still wearing the stuff I packed up in August to come out here. I am tired of them. It feels like I chose only the frumpiest and ill-fitting items to take with me to the southern hemisphere, and such has been my hatred for my shell jacket that I was actively flinching every time I put it on, a reaction not dissimilar, I’m sure, to that of random passersby who had to see me wear it. So even though I am possibly the worst shopper you’ll ever encounter, as a) nothing ever fits me, b) I seem to always just want it in black, thanks and c) I lose energy quickly when faced with salespeople and d) I am subject to intense self-loathing after about thirty minutes and have been known to sit sadly on a street corner, head in my hands and a single tear trickling down my face, bemoaning the injustices of low-rise jeans and vowing to look into acquiring a large amount of burlap. This promised to be an especially touchy subject this weekend because not only am I feeling decidedly puffy and un-cute lately, but my non-Pill skin decided to make itself known, loud and proud, serving up some new indignity pretty much every hour or so.

But! I was determined! I picked up a cute, cheap, black-and-white skirt and a purple shirt with little cherries on it pretty quickly at the market, which left me ample time to wander around the fantastic food stalls at my leisure. Wellington has a couple of fruit markets and of course there’s Moore Wilson but it feels like a long time since I was near a cheese stall that made my eyes roll back in my head, or a place selling homemade sausages, or fresh walnut-fennel bread. I treated that part of the market like a museum, walking around happily gazing at gorgonzola dolces as if they were Rembrandts, cooing dreamily over fresh dolmas, letting the sight of columns of rosy proscuittos wash over me and enter my soul. I was more pleased than I care to admit to find a place that sold fresh Greek yogurt sweetened only with honey, which I haven’t had much luck finding in Wellington, and you best believe I snarfed that up with a quickness. Georgina had a carton of it in her fridge, too, and I took to sneaking big spoonfuls while she was in the shower.

After the success of the market I was feeling very chipper indeed as I walked down towards the Flinders Street Station. There were tons of adorable and yummy cafes around so I stopped at one for lunch, reveling in a feta-omelette sandwich…which is really a brilliant idea, I think: an omelette in a sandwich, can you feature it?..and the beginning chapters of In Cold Blood. I didn’t end up reading much though: mostly I just looked at everyone sitting in their big sunglasses, as happy as I was to be out and enjoying the city in the bright afternoon.

That evening’s plans were to go to a show put on by Underbelly, this dance group that was also sponsoring the Rachel Brice workshop for which I was signed up. A cool dancer named Sarah, who’s been reading this journal since around here and who had been the one to tell me that the workshops were happening the very same weekend I was planning to be in her city, managed to sneak out of work for iced mocha (which in Australia arrives, fantastically, with a large lump of ice cream floating in it) and gossip for a couple of minutes. Her troupe performed in the Underbelly pre-show and were my favorite of all the tribal groups. They wore hats with veils (which sounds weird for bellydancers but which totally worked) and lots of pearls and were excellent in every way, as is Sarah herself. Our time together was sadly cut short by her day job, and so I had a couple of hours to make a stop on my Aquarium World Tour before meeting up with Heather for drinks and nibbles. It was a lovely aquarium, I have to say, with a couple of fantastic octopuses, including a difficult-to-see poinsonous blue-ringed one. I spent an excellent hour by the ray tank but was crushed to discover that there had been a giant squid (encased, awesomely, in a giant ice cube, making a sort of squidcicle) there but I’d missed it by only a couple of weeks.

Heather, who’s a friend of my friend Judy in Seattle and who told a very exciting story the last time I saw here, was lots of fun to hang out with before I had to go meet George for the show. It was pretty cool to think that I was in Australia for the weekend…for the weekend!..and that I was staying with someone I’d met in Fiji, having iced mocha (not only does it come with ice cream in Australia, it’s also pronounced “mocka,” how great is that) with a girl I met through my journal, and having dinner with a person I shared a cheese plate with on the other side of the world in 2003. It felt sort of funny and sort of awesome at the same time. Hard to explain: like the world is full of wonderful people, I guess, and that the weekend was one of those times where everything just sort of comes together and even though you don’t know anyone very well it feels perfectly natural to sleep on their floor and to do a dance choreography with them and to text them to ask where exactly you’re supposed to meet, just as though you’d all known each other for years.

The Underbelly show reminded me that I really don’t know much about bellydance, for all that I really like it and that I’ve been doing it, in one form or another and sort of half-assedly, for the past seven years. It was a mostly cabaret-style show, I think, although there were really only a couple of dancers who looked really and truly cabaret to me. Georgina had never seen any osrt of bellydance before and I made a nuisance of myself by whispering to her about the differences between tribal and cabaret (“In tribal they wear stuff on their heads, and in cabaret they let their hair down! Except when they don’t!”) and talking to her about swords and balancing and Turkish drops and so on and so forth. Rachel Brice…whom I’d never seen perform although of course I’d heard of her…defied description, as I expected. Her dance was very acrobatic, to me, with a lot of heart-stopping isolations and just so much sheer physical beauty and presence that I began to feel a little scared of taking a three-hour workshop with her the next day.

The workshop wasn’t until 2:00 on that Saturday so after sleeping in that morning, Georgina and I ingested a heroically large breakfast (at which I ordered both organic oatmeal and organic bacon, which the waitress seemed to find very odd) and set off to do a little more shopping. I have to say right now that Georgina is super arty and dresses really stylishly and knows a lot about music (she can’t keep her entire CD collection at her house because she’s on the ground floor and she doesn’t have bars on her windows to keep all thousand of them safe) and architecture and design and cool stuff like that. Her house is really pretty (she assures me it wasn’t when she moved in, citing in particular the orange-and-yellow kitchen she had to deal with) and she’s one of those people who sort of have brains in their eyes, if that makes sense, like she can see the possibilities and potential in a horrid orange-and-yellow kitchen instead of running screaming into the night at the prospect of fixing it up. So she was an excellent person to go shopping with, having already “had a bit of a think” about where I might like to go and what might look good on me…and this, you understand, was based on knowing me for a week in Fiji, when I was as often as not wearing not much more than my lost bikini and some gigantic swim flippers.

We went to a very cool neighborhood, Fitzroy, and her taste was unerring as we went from cute little boutique to edgy thrift store to darling indie shop. The conversation was flowing and she was picking out all these great things for me to try on and it would have been perfect, perfect, were I not the only woman in the history of the world, apparently to have my specific combination of small waist and big butt. No good, man. I tried on pants after pants, jeans after jeans, sucking in my gut and trying to rally my spirits and believe that if I kissed enough frogs I would be rewarded with a prince of an outfit. My romantic life and my shopping life mirror each other worrisomely sometimes, it would seem, and in the end it was not to be. We had just about given up (I was beginning to get a little frown mark between my brows) and were randomly admiring a sixty-five dollar handmade t-shirt when we noticed a couple of cute skirts, which miraculously fit and which I snapped up immediately in two colors. Pursuant to a long discussion about the low-GI diet thing we stopped off at a couple of bookstores…a much more enjoyable shopping experience in general, I find…and George, bless her heart, bought me a copy of one of her brother’s band’s CDs, which is really good and which makes me feel like a rockstar by association (I know the lead singer’s sister!) And then it was time to get into my hideously unflattering racing-striped yoga pants and subject myself to a couple of hours of torture, bellydance-style.

I chose the choreography class because it fit into the weekend’s schedule, not because I am particularly good at choreography. By the end of the three hours I was convinced that I am not good at anything having to do with any dance whatsoever. It was really an intense workshop: sixty people, most of whom had been at it for three hours already that morning, and many if not most were much better than I am. We didn’t really warm up, and I felt sort of shy to warm up on my own—which, by the way, is a mistake I will never make again—so I am really sore today. It was a fun choreography set to a spooky weird piece of music but it was just really hard for me to get and I kept feeling like an idiot. Rachel, as far as I can tell, very much has her own style and borrows from a lot of bellydance traditions, which is amazing to watch but quite difficult to learn. I felt like I didn’t even have the same dance vocabulary and that the way I’m used to moving (very isolated and structured) didn’t work with what she was teaching, which was pretty jazzy and kicky and even involved some Fosse-esque moves. I was very glad I knew Sarah and was dancing near her so I could watch her out of the corner of my eye, but it was pretty frustrating not to be able to remember the sequences very well and to feel like it was all going too fast and that I kept failing at everything: technique, isolation, attitude, and that indefinable thing that happens when you stop just executing steps and actually start dancing, if that makes sense. That said, I’m glad I did the workshop anyway. I haven’t been able to get into the existing scene in Wellington as much as I’d like so I have to take opportunities like this when I can. Frustrating as it is, it’s good to see lots of different ways of doing things and to learn your strengths and weaknesses. And of course all the Australian bellydancers (there were some people from NZ there too, woo!) were super nice and friendly so my not being able to do anything wasn’t as terrible as it might otherwise have been, I guess.

I was super tired afterward, having not eaten much, and I was very happy to get home so I could eat the rest of Georgina’s Greek yogurt. We were slated to meet up with her awesome sister Rowena to see a band that night and I admit there was a part of me that was not feeling as hardcore about going out as I might like. I was starting to feel a little stuffy and part of me just wanted to stay on the couch, but I managed to wash the grime off me and put on a fresh shirt and ingest some Indian food and out we went.

We saw The Cops, who were a pretty good band, although I was so tired I wasn’t paying very good attention and actually, embarrasingly, fell halfway asleep a couple of times. It says something, I’m sure, about my country-mouse tendencies that I was shocked, shocked I say! to see people smoking indoors, although fortunately for me, they played in the smoke-free back room. Rowena and her friend were extraordinarily pretty and fun and nice, and it was very interesting to talk to them about the recent elections…Rowena’s friend told me that the Democrats’ win was the best news she’d heard all week. (“The best news you’ve heard all week…” I said). I think we were all pretty tired…what with us being fully thirteen years older than the youngest legitimate drinkers in the crowd and all…so after indulging ever so briefly in the rockstar lifestyle I was happy to go home again to blow my nose and complain about my aching legs.

Sunday was the occasion of another long luxurious brunch (I kept it simple with pesto and feta scrambled eggs) with George and her very excellent friend Michael, with whom I fell promptly in love when he misheard my mention of Bro Town as “Blow Town” with much raised eyebrows. After breakfast my lovely host and I spent a couple of delightful hours at the Melbourne Museum, wandering around some very good bug exhibits and talking about the city and its history and Australia in general. I hadn’t thought much about going there when I was making plans to come to New Zealand, although I thought that I might come over for a little while in between the end of my work visa and the beginning of my tourist visa, which is when I intend to do the backpacker thing again and see some more of the country. Now I think I will make sure to spend at least a month in Australia. It’s not enough to see the whole of a huge country, of course…I don’t think a month in Melbourne would be enough, really…but I think it will be cool anyway. I’m looking forward to doing some more research and learning more about all the cool things to do and see there. As fun of a time as I had this weekend, I know I didn’t even scratch the surface; George said I had sort of a strange introduction to Australia, in that I just stayed in the city and didn’t even make it to the beach or anything. I hope to rectify that situation when I return; it’s the kind of goal that seems very easy and satisfying to acheive.

Because I am not very smart, I had George drop me off four hours early at the airport instead of just two, but that was fine as it gave me plenty of time to write postcards and eat duty-free chocolate. The security process in Australia and New Zealand seems to me, as an American, laughably casual…no lines! No random searches! Liquids and gels? Totally okay!..but the quarantine stuff is very intense, with all these very menacing signs telling you that you will be fined and jailed and and your partner will leave you for someone much better looking and your dog will be given away to someone who will kick it every hour on the hour and you’ll never be able to get a library card for the rest of your life if you bring any animal or plant products into the country with you, no really man, they are so not kidding about this, put that jar of honey into the bin right this minute, and forget about it if you’ve been to an abattoir on your vacation (and who hasn’t?).

I made it through just fine, you’ll be happy to know…I didn’t have enough time to visit an abattoir on this trip, but maybe next time…and found myself very glad to hear Kiwi accents and vocabulary in the departure lounge and to see Maori words on the custom agents’ uniform badges. On the super shuttle ride I felt this great sense of calm when I saw all the familiar street signs and dairies (they call them “milk bars” in Victoria) and it was with a great sense of relief that I got back to my own flat and my own room and my own bed.

Melbourne exceeded all my expectations and all the people I met ther and spent time with treated me excellently well, and I have to say it’s one of the best cities I’ve ever been to. I can’t wait to go back. This is probably a huge cliche I’m about to indulge in here, but: as fun as my weekend away was, I have to say it was just as sweet to find that returning to Wellington felt like coming home.