Melbourne, Australia

Marvelous Melbourne.

It was clear from the bus ride into the city that we were on an older, drier continent now. The bush was dried up on either side of the road. Tall eucalyptus trees stood out as solitary providers of shade, the horizon was now a far-off, distant concept. Australia is immense. New Zealand is like a necklace. Australia is a rug.

The tall modern skyline of Melbourne appeared through the bug carcass-mottled windows and a balloon of excitement inflated in my heart as I fingered the guidebooks for things to do; but the words were meaningless, squirming around on the page like ants on meth, because before me the city grew in size and reality and I couldn’t concentrate on anything but looking out the window and pinching myself.

I was here.

We took the connecting bus to the hotel and before we knew it we were hunting through the suite’s bathroom for freebies.

The bathroom was small and decidedly fancy, for there was no shower door, only a single plane of glass to protect the water from heading everywhere. You had to place a towel on the floor to prevent a stream from gushing out towards the drain in the middle of the room, and, unless I’m some freak barbarian in the shower, water splashed everywhere, over the toilet and towel racks and toilet paper. If someone had to go poop real bad, then they would best to wear their bathing trunks.

However smart the design looked on paper or in photographs, in the real world it was really quite stupid.

Thumbs down.

Flooded bathrooms would appear to be the norm for us in Australia. (more on that later)

Our time in Melbourne was action packed, alcohol-soaked, a whirlwind, I don’t much remember what happened, when and where, I just remember slices, portions, juxtaposed snapshots.

So here goes…

The streets were calling so we took the camera out to explore them.

Melbourne is laid out real simply in a grid, every major street, it seemed, had a cute trolley running down them, kinda like the ‘B’ line in Boston. A free tram also encircles the entire CBD, stopping at most tourist spots, and the river front has a bunch of shopping/restaurant venues to gather and eat. It’s a town you can easily conquer on foot. Our hotel was located right next to the river and across from the train station. Most of the CBD lay just uphill. The weather was moody, cool and crisp and always seemingly on the edge of raining. Of course, with the temperature always in Celcius, just hearing that it was going to be 19 degrees sent a shiver down my spine, whatever 19C means.

Federation Square is a modern meeting place for the city, surrounded by right-angled architecture, museums, a giant projection screen, and St. Paul’s Church, it’s a stylish public area for multi-purposes functions, something I wish Los Angeles had. (Come on, Antonio) That night they kicked off an arts festival with a folk/kid singer. Some dude with wild hair and a bright yellow suit and wacky reverence for song, or something like that…

Within the first hour of walking around Melbourne I noticed something striking: everyone was immaculately dressed and gorgeous. Serious, Melbourne is like one very large soap opera set. Every individual I saw looked like they must have their own stylist. Even the dude jackhammering in the middle of the street looked like someone quickly tussled his hair and powdered his cheeks before he began work. It truly is a stylish city.

Walking around the prim and good looking denizens of Melbourne in my Colorado thrift store tweed coat, I felt like the new kid, wearing last year’s hand-me-downs. It’s like the entire city could be the fifth member of The Strokes. (Or would that be sixth? How many Strokes are there?)

This seems like the time to mention that The National’s new album is a perfect fit for Melbourne.

Small Apartment Song, especially, for some reason, comes to mind.

Also, Mistaken For Strangers.

Melbourne has a ton of great street art. I recommend cutting down some trash-strewn alley and getting yourself a peep. It’s the stencil capital of the art world. If you know where to look, you shouldn’t have to pay to see art.

The restaurants… damn, there’s just not enough adjectives at my disposal. We ate like heathens, I’ll tell you that. Lip-smacking, belly-rubbing feasts.

Italian. Vegetarian. Seafood.

Every meal seemed to best the other. Sushi on a conveyor belt. Pasta with prawns overlooking the water. A tomato soup in a sidewalk cafe. A perfect steak in a candlelit Italian bistro.

Queen Victoria Market is a bustling hive of activity. A must-see. Even on a slightly rainy day, the smells and sounds were rollicking. They had all sorts of fruits, nuts, souvenirs, clothes, meats and other things for sale… pets, for instance.

We sampled the olives, the olive oil, cheese, bread, anything with a toothpick sticking into it.

All the food on display made us hungry even though it was barely noon, so we ordered pizza and a polish sausage with sauerkraut and, maybe it was all the freebies, they both were damn good.

We sat and ate them and put our feet up to take in the scene.

Australia in recent years has made strides on the world culinary stage. It has a long history of mediocrity at best and local cuisine used to have the texture and flavor of a cooked boot, they say. But that’s the past. The future is here.

Walking down the Chinatown streets with duck carcasses hanging in the window, I saw myself giving a tour of the area to some out-of-town guest who was visiting. I saw myself at home, showing off.

A quick note to explain why I love Melbourne: We wandered into a free art gallery that was part of MIT, Melbourne Institute of Technology. It was an Elvis exhibition with all sorts of trippy homages to the king.

Elvis dressed up as Napoleon. Blueprints of Graceland. A spooky video with his image morphing in and out while a monotone note played for 45 minutes. (we didn’t watch the entire cycle). His rings and jewelry in a glass box (talk about bling!). Elvis and Richard Nixon in front of a Hindu Temple.

I wondered about the histories of these pieces. They were all done by different individuals in different parts of the world, they all probably premiered at some local institution where they saw some attention, but over time they gravitated together into this collection. In this sense art is like flotsam, like the giant swirl of debris that supposedly exists in the Pacific, the size of Texas. Like people too, I suppose. We seem to gravitate into groups of similar compositions; hang out with people we work with, head home for the holidays. Out there in the world right now is a collection of art pieces about trains, animals, buildings, all living out the rest of their days in a sort of art retirement home with other such pieces.

These art pieces seemed like they were conceived during one long heavy acid trip in the early 70’s, but to my surprise their dates ranged from the 60’s to the contemporary. We strolled through the white-walled rooms, loading up on culture, hands thoughtfully clasped behind my back the whole time, then squirted back out into the streets in a hunt for a pub.

I like my art in a nice quick shot on the go, like an espresso. I like it unexpectedly.

But about that bar…

It was bustling with Friday, after-work, merry-makers. Rich, warm red walls created a cozy vibe along with the old portraits of probably-dead people. We drank Coopers ale and eavesdropped on nearby conversations; twenty-somethings talking about work and dating and people they know that drive them crazy.

Melbourne was a real comfortable place, familiar and tidy, yet free to express itself. San Francisco with less stoners and trash, more boomerangs.

The next day we even felt daring enough to explore the old gaol. (jail – I learned after pronouncing it GAY-OLE for 24 hours.)

It’s where Ned Kelly met the noose, his last great act, and where many others had their unfortunate lives ended in such sudden fashion.

It was a touristy thing to do, but by this point we were unabashed tourists, and we were lucky to visit while a performance of the Ned Kelly saga was taking place, because of this we had a blast. The performers asked the crowd at one point who was British and a small amount of hands went up and the actor made a joke about the Brits, something about them being swines and screwing over the Irish; and then he did the same for the Irish and people raised their hands, the actor then complimented the Irish (Ned Kelly being, of course, Irish). Then he asked if there were any Yankees in the room and no one raised their hands. I looked around and didn’t see any of my fellow countrymen, or at least there was no one that copped to it. The actor then cracked that he had a special room for the Americans in the back. Everyone laughed.

I found it interesting that there were no Americans there, and doubted that to be the actual, factual case… in fact, I know there was, me.

I bet I wasn’t the only Yank who didn’t raise my hand.

Thanks Bush.

Every time I was asked where I was from on this trip, I answered, simply, “California.”

I guess I fashioned that response in order to admit to being American, but clarifying that I’m no hillbilly. Of course there’s plenty of hillbillies in California, gutter-snipes, rednecks, scurvies, automatons, and the like… but they don’t know that.

Walking around I tried to imagine the jail back in its day: the torment and anguish that had lived in the very walls and rooms I was now exploring in my Gap jeans and Urban Outfitters sweater. It’s spooky to think of the place as an actual jail, that the souls of those criminals might still be housed in the building, but not as spooky as the truth. You’d think you would be freaked out exploring such a place. But everything blending together these days, tragedy and entertainment, the mass media maze being that dizzying place that it is, it’s hard to be freaked out. One day they’ll make Abu Ghraib a museum and you’ll pay some amount of currency to walk around it, inspecting the stuffed dogs in the exhibits, on a Baghdad vacation. I hear the time to go is in the Spring. Maybe it’s the Disney Hall of Presidents effect, but it’s hard not to see everything these days as some sort of simulacrum, even the real thing.

We had laundry to do and found a backpackers up the street from the hotel with machines in their basement. I spent a surreal morning reading George Saunders’s Pastoralia, ignoring the Canadian Music Awards on the TV while a young Japanese girl eating a bowl of Muesli gave it indifferent glances, in a stone basement, on a ripped leather couch, with the width and weight of the world making itself heard in the tossing of the washing machines as they spun and up above Melbourne growled to life.

That’s how it felt anyways.

We were about halfway through our trip and all the way through our clean clothes.

We’d seen a lot, experienced a lot, ate a lot.

I’d found a second home in Melbourne, if only for three days.

Just before we left for our bus tour of the Great Ocean Road we met three guys at the bar who sent us out of town with a humorous story about the dangers of dance. The sun had finally decided to come out, and it was a glorious noon in Melbourne, a large city-wide scavenger hunt was underway, teams with numbers on their chest walking the streets. The scene lured us out onto the balcony. This sounds like a bad joke, but it’s true, it was an Aussie, a Canuck, an Irish dude, and later on a Scotsman. We struck up conversation easily as a bush fire and pretty soon the Aussie related to us that just this morning, a lo’ five hours ago, they were finishing up their shifts at the bar and were having a dance-off to liven things up. Apparently, the bartender, a lesbian, the one that just served us our stubbies 5 minutes prior, was pissed at our new friend because her sister had jumped into the Aussie’s arms during the dance-off and he had dropped her, causing a sour trip to the hospital and a few stitches in her forehead. “Not a true dance-off until a little blood is spilled,” I cracked in response. The Aussie looked at me blankly and sucked down some of his drink.

At least that’s what I think he had told us, but honestly, with his accent, I could have some of the crucial details wrong.

They were a cheery, sleepless, possibly drug-fueled bunch who proclaimed themselves, “the three most handsomest men in Melbourne,” and insisted we take their picture… so we did.

The Great Ocean Road coming up next…