In a blink, we were flying out of Bali and processing our last few days there. We were rolling into Australia where we paid $10 per coffee in the Perth Airport before landing in Melbourne. Melbourne was meant to be a further slowing of pace, a place to work to rectify what had been done to our savings account and take some much needed time to figure out where the hell we were going next. We were emotionally and mentally spent. In the ensuing time, we got into a rental and had to get out of that same rental. We then found a place all to ourselves with a kitchen for Moozh to play in and a right on the tram line for me to get to work. We got into a routine complete with grocery shopping, laundry and weekend markets for produce. We got into pay checks and watching the nightly news. I got my words back. Any loss of perspective and commentary got re-enlivened somehow. A sense of settling in made us think of settling down. Cozy feelings of winters past and the comfort of home, a place of your own, warmed us up before a sense of panic came with the realization that on the other side of January 1, 2013, we had no idea what was next. There was no 'next'. Feelings of excitement at thinking, 'We'll see all this and then we'll head home," were followed by blank stares. Where was home? Where is home? The only tangible pieces of 'home' that still existed for us fit in two large boxes in storage in Canada. There was not locale, no postal code that was 'home'.
But Moozh and I are romantics at heart, and thus no decision is as easy as 'I want to go there'. There is an eternal perspective, a desire for our 'place' in life and in the world to mean something, not only to us but to the community we choose. To be a part of the grief, celebration and wonder of the world. To be the hands of Christ in the world, the salt and light, to be more than a faceless neighbour. Five years from now, not to mention fifty, I want to look back on our years and know we make sacrifices daily to make our life, and the blessings we did nothing to deserve, count. A piece of tension we've received from our travels has been a global perspective. I will never consider the importance of social services without thinking of the man without hands or feet waiting on the goodness of strangers in Kathmandu or the eight year old girls dressed up on a street corner in the red light district in Phnom Penh. I will consider the importance of reaching out in faith without thinking about our host in Russia who had just lost her job in the recession and was staring down a winter in Moscow on the money she was making through renting out her spare room.
We are on the trip of a lifetime. But we are also on a trip that creates a life with what it gives you in experience but also what it takes from you in ignorance. Our minds are going a mile a minute, which means Moozh isn't sleeping at all and I'm sleeping more than usual. We're like the Jack Sprat and his wife of emotional coping. Though the month has been overwhelming, it's been a really special month abroad. Moozh and I celebrated our fifth Christmas and New Year's together and our first on our own. We drank eggnog and ate Christmas Bread and then went for walk in our flip flops. We witnessed "The End of the World", with its eerie similarities to Y2K. We smoked cigars as we watched the New Year's fireworks. Even in five years it's amazing the things you forget, how the time gets lost, the details blurred. If anything, I think I may have written this as a point of posterity, that I wouldn't forget this moment and how it felt. We are Indiana Jones standing at the edge of a cliff knowing he has to just step out in faith if he's going to find sure footing. *I just referenced Indiana Jones as if I knew what I was talking about.
Things I've learned our first month in Australia:
I am ruined for nightly news forever more. Check out The Project.
Wine is cheaper than beer in Oz, which makes for a great change of pace.
People actually say, "G'day Mate", in all seriousness.
Quote from Australia:
Moozh: Beer is so expensive here! Even Budweiser -BUDWEISER- is $10! That's robbery.
Melbourne
There is nothing quick about life in Melbourne. Coffee is lazed over while reading the paper. Breakfast is taken sitting down, very rarely out of a paper bag. Trams move about as fast as shopping carts. It goes beyond the Australian, “No Worries” mentality. Or maybe it doesn’t. But daily life takes on a pace different from anywhere else we've been.
Melbourne has a bit of an inferiority complex. So much time and breath are spent extolling the virtues of the pretty sister further north, Sydney. Melbournians are reticent to concede any finer points to Sydney, instead choosing to highlight the ‘livability’ of Melbourne. A vibrant coffee scene and a foodie paradise with a unique beauty all its own, in all fairness, Melbourne has plenty to offer.We were pointed towards Melbourne often during our travels. We were told to choose the grittiness and creativity over the occasionally ‘vapid’ glitter and showmanship of Sydney. It would be like choosing San Francisco over LA, we were told. And wouldn’t you rather choose San Fran?Well of course we would, we thought. We couldn’t have been prepared for the proliferation and diversity of eateries and coffee joints nestled within a half hour drive. Neighborhoods such as Brunswick East, Fitzroy and South Yarra are all boast an abnormally high number of truly amazing restaurants.
Calling Melbourne ‘artistic’ would be like calling Salvador Dali ‘unique’. It’s the word you look up in the thesaurus looking for a word that seem to do a more robust job of describing all the angles that will add up to an accurate picture. Art installations abound, both modern and indigenous in form. They pepper the riverfront, occupy downtown streets, frame freeways and bridge approaches. The busking community, especially within the CBD, is on every street corner and sometimes on the same block. It even produces really good music, which is surprising given the reputation busking has made for itself. Handicrafts, caricatures, illusion and magic shows line the curbside. Protests and fundraisers of equal opportunity are just as visible. Walk with a hand out for a block downtown and you’d come away with a tree’s worth of paper pamphlets, tracts and business cards. You might even come away with a few coupons.
After an initial hiccup with accommodations due to misunderstanding, miscommunications and heaps of other misses, we found ourselves sitting in the lobby of a hotel we couldn’t really afford, trying to figure out what to do next. After the hospital roadbump that felt like a body slam in Bali, paired with the high cost of living in Australia, we were feeling a little punch drunk. AirBnB swooped in and patted us on the head, a house all to ourselves showing up within our newly revised budget. It was in a quiet neighborhood, lots of families and retirees, mostly known for being quiet and close to an RMIT campus. But it had a big, nicely equipped kitchen for Moozh to play in and was a few steps from the tram line that would take me to work. Now I just had to get a job.
I had shopped my resume around while we were in Bali, toting my new skills and eagerness to work. Leading up to the holiday season, I was naïve to think that any bakery or patisserie would have left any kind of vacancy open for what can be the busiest time of year. I was also told, “Melbournians don’t eat bread in the summer,” which I knew was probably true in a micro sense but was also their way of letting me down easy. The minimum wage in Australia is around $16 an hour, depending on where you are, which is mind boggling for a Canadian, where most industries are a ways away from paying a living wage. I’d been working café jobs since I was a teenager and thusly knew that one glance at my resume and I could likely have a job in a café in a day. And I did.
Nestled in one of Melbourne’s cute and funky laneways in the CBD, I found a café that I would have wanted to go to. Cool exposed lightbulbs, stylized scaffolding, higtop benches of grommeted two by fours, I liked not only the look of it but the steady clip it came all day. Always being busy it what separates café work that is fun from the café work that is insufferable. I lost weight working there initially before I put it all back on after Christmas. A herd of drowsy Melbournian businessmen and women huddle around the La Marzocco, where what is likely the best espresso in the CBD was cranked out from 630am to 4pm, Monday through Friday.
We settled into a nice routine. I did the rush hour tram home where Moozh had dinner waiting for me and we would eat while watching The Project and commenting how Canada could take a note on how a relevant, interesting news program should be done. George Stroumboulopoulos can't do it all on his own. We quickly learned Moozh did the househusband thing badly. Too type-A for any Jell-O molds and needlepoint to keep him satisfied. He was driven, he was ambitious, he just couldn't legally work in Oz. We would swing down into Fitzroy and Brunswick on our weekends, or take in the Preston Farmer’s Market for fresh veggies. Though I sheepishly admit, we also discovered ALDI and their discount wine selection. That got away from us in no short order. Not since Europe had we been able to get great wine so cheap.
Then I began to find my feet were really itchy. I was getting small, red bumps all over my feet and ankles that were EXTREMELY itchy. They weren’t like mosquito bites but were small and rounded. Besides I hadn’t seen any mosquitos in our house really. And the bites were just on my feet. Now my childhood was bereft of housepets, save the occasional fishtank that never seemed to last long. I do not mourn this fact. I have found in my adulthood I have a low tolerance for excessive hair floating in my personal space and for germs in any considerable denomination. Due to this ignorance, I had no framework for fleas, which is in fact what it turned out to be. The house we were renting used to have a cat, the indoor/outdoor sort. Seeing a black speck on my foot one evening, I grabbed at it to inspect it. (I trust you are visualizing this in your mind. It felt as weird as it looked.)
“Is that a…what the F***!”
Typing ‘flea bites’ into Google curled my toes. Pictures of people with bites that looked just like mine, red, inflamed, slightly shiny. Reading further, I found out that the flea bites can spread if the flea infestation is not contained. Patches of bumps along someone’s ribs or their upper thigh. This is where I turned into Animal from the Muppets. You know those people who are banned from WebMD and other tools for self-diagnosis? That is me. My mother threatened to Parental-Block on me when I was in high school because I made every headache into carbon monoxide poisoning, every cramp into appendicitis. (Was Nepal any shock to me? I should have seen it coming.)What aggravated this situation all the more was the fact that Moozh had NO bites. None. No insatiable itching. If I ever thought I was going crazy in my marriage, it was in Melbourne. It is every hypochondriacs nightmare, what they believe is going to happen but never will. IT HAPPENED TO ME. I will accept your sympathy now. I eventually went into a doctor because my method of obsessive floor-scrubbing and linen-washing was clearly not clearing up the bumps. Armed with some cortisol cream and some non-drowsy allergy cream, I was prepared the remaining week and a half that we would spend there before our lease ran out and we were moving downtown. This is also when I got Achilles Tendonitis. I felt like a cripple. And I had a terrible attitude. Certifiable. When they say, “Hell hath no fury like a woman scorned”, just add flea bites and general discomfort and you have a cyclone.
Melbourne was really fun, I swear to God. We had our first hot Christmas. Going for a walk Christmas Day in flip flops and shorts is something I could get used to. We had our first Christmas alone, which felt both awesome and very strange. I did by best daughter-in-law duty of trying my hand at my mother-in-law’s Christmas Bread. While Moozh was very supportive, the verdict very much was that it ‘just wasn’t the same’. To ring in 2013, we migrated downtown to watch the fireworks set off from the rooftops. New Years definitely made us aware of how much Aussies like to party. By 1130pm, kids were already being dragged into drunk tanks for being totally KO’d. At 1130! Any Australian we had ever met before had liked to party but it wasn’t until we actually got to Australia that we realized it’s on a macro scale. The best part was a public notice on TV before Australia Day saying that the Police Force had a Zero Tolerance policy for partiers punching cops. I should hope so.
January was filled with Australia Day, Chinese New Year and the Australian Open. We knocked off every restaurant within Melbourne (and within our price range) from Bourdain’s Melbourne episode. We had the quail at Rumi’s, the spicy bratwurst at the Queen Vic market and the zaatar flatbread at A1. For my birthday, Moozh took me on a Melbournian pastry kid geek tour, the highlight of which was easily Burch & Purchese; confectionary on a grand scale. We gawked at the spreads at Phillipa’s, the bread at Laurent and the valentine’s chocolates at Koko Black.We drank wine. So much wine. And so much great wine, wine we had only ever heard about in Canada.
The Federation Square wine expo highlighted wines from the Yarra Valley and the Mornington Peninsula, each about an hour from Melbourne. I was won over to the side of cool climate shiraz and Moozh was in Pinot Noir heaven. Soumah, Cannibal Creek, Alpha Box & Dice, Red Hill Wineries. I was somewhat consoled in my flea plague when Moozh started to have bug issues of his own. Apparently what can happen during the summer months in Melbourne is the Yarra River will bring in an increased amount of fly eggs which hatch once they reach the city. The flies in Melbourne are unlike anywhere we have ever been. They are persistent and impervious to being ‘brushed aside’ in any way. So what begins as an absent swatting, quickly degenerates into you swatting your own face while a fly crawls all over your forehead and cheeks, an experience I can only describe as ‘yucky’. And Moozh has a "compromised patience module" which just means that the flies made him lose his shit. Every time.
We learned what prams and snags are, ate at Macca’s and did our best to avoid the mozzies. We learned that Australia not only produces great wine but also has a burgeoning craft beer and cider industry, of which we had a healthy sample. Australia was at once familiar and an entirely new world. Australian’s are brash and loud in a way no other culture has been. They have been more conversational and opinionated than I expected. One could stand to adopt the ‘no worries’ mentality, even if only for a day. Outside of Australia, we really do take the world too seriously.
Sit. Have a coffee.
Things I learned in Melbourne:
Australia feels like a cross between Britain and the US. Not that I would ever say that to their faces.
Trams do not belong in traffic.
Cricket makes no sense at all.
Quote for Melbourne: Moozh: Babe you don’t see carnie tents and not bring money
Runner up: Me: I am checking myself out of Australia and into rehab.
But Moozh and I are romantics at heart, and thus no decision is as easy as 'I want to go there'. There is an eternal perspective, a desire for our 'place' in life and in the world to mean something, not only to us but to the community we choose. To be a part of the grief, celebration and wonder of the world. To be the hands of Christ in the world, the salt and light, to be more than a faceless neighbour. Five years from now, not to mention fifty, I want to look back on our years and know we make sacrifices daily to make our life, and the blessings we did nothing to deserve, count. A piece of tension we've received from our travels has been a global perspective. I will never consider the importance of social services without thinking of the man without hands or feet waiting on the goodness of strangers in Kathmandu or the eight year old girls dressed up on a street corner in the red light district in Phnom Penh. I will consider the importance of reaching out in faith without thinking about our host in Russia who had just lost her job in the recession and was staring down a winter in Moscow on the money she was making through renting out her spare room.
We are on the trip of a lifetime. But we are also on a trip that creates a life with what it gives you in experience but also what it takes from you in ignorance. Our minds are going a mile a minute, which means Moozh isn't sleeping at all and I'm sleeping more than usual. We're like the Jack Sprat and his wife of emotional coping. Though the month has been overwhelming, it's been a really special month abroad. Moozh and I celebrated our fifth Christmas and New Year's together and our first on our own. We drank eggnog and ate Christmas Bread and then went for walk in our flip flops. We witnessed "The End of the World", with its eerie similarities to Y2K. We smoked cigars as we watched the New Year's fireworks. Even in five years it's amazing the things you forget, how the time gets lost, the details blurred. If anything, I think I may have written this as a point of posterity, that I wouldn't forget this moment and how it felt. We are Indiana Jones standing at the edge of a cliff knowing he has to just step out in faith if he's going to find sure footing. *I just referenced Indiana Jones as if I knew what I was talking about.
Things I've learned our first month in Australia:
I am ruined for nightly news forever more. Check out The Project.
Wine is cheaper than beer in Oz, which makes for a great change of pace.
People actually say, "G'day Mate", in all seriousness.
Quote from Australia:
Moozh: Beer is so expensive here! Even Budweiser -BUDWEISER- is $10! That's robbery.
Melbourne
There is nothing quick about life in Melbourne. Coffee is lazed over while reading the paper. Breakfast is taken sitting down, very rarely out of a paper bag. Trams move about as fast as shopping carts. It goes beyond the Australian, “No Worries” mentality. Or maybe it doesn’t. But daily life takes on a pace different from anywhere else we've been.
Melbourne has a bit of an inferiority complex. So much time and breath are spent extolling the virtues of the pretty sister further north, Sydney. Melbournians are reticent to concede any finer points to Sydney, instead choosing to highlight the ‘livability’ of Melbourne. A vibrant coffee scene and a foodie paradise with a unique beauty all its own, in all fairness, Melbourne has plenty to offer.We were pointed towards Melbourne often during our travels. We were told to choose the grittiness and creativity over the occasionally ‘vapid’ glitter and showmanship of Sydney. It would be like choosing San Francisco over LA, we were told. And wouldn’t you rather choose San Fran?Well of course we would, we thought. We couldn’t have been prepared for the proliferation and diversity of eateries and coffee joints nestled within a half hour drive. Neighborhoods such as Brunswick East, Fitzroy and South Yarra are all boast an abnormally high number of truly amazing restaurants.
Calling Melbourne ‘artistic’ would be like calling Salvador Dali ‘unique’. It’s the word you look up in the thesaurus looking for a word that seem to do a more robust job of describing all the angles that will add up to an accurate picture. Art installations abound, both modern and indigenous in form. They pepper the riverfront, occupy downtown streets, frame freeways and bridge approaches. The busking community, especially within the CBD, is on every street corner and sometimes on the same block. It even produces really good music, which is surprising given the reputation busking has made for itself. Handicrafts, caricatures, illusion and magic shows line the curbside. Protests and fundraisers of equal opportunity are just as visible. Walk with a hand out for a block downtown and you’d come away with a tree’s worth of paper pamphlets, tracts and business cards. You might even come away with a few coupons.
After an initial hiccup with accommodations due to misunderstanding, miscommunications and heaps of other misses, we found ourselves sitting in the lobby of a hotel we couldn’t really afford, trying to figure out what to do next. After the hospital roadbump that felt like a body slam in Bali, paired with the high cost of living in Australia, we were feeling a little punch drunk. AirBnB swooped in and patted us on the head, a house all to ourselves showing up within our newly revised budget. It was in a quiet neighborhood, lots of families and retirees, mostly known for being quiet and close to an RMIT campus. But it had a big, nicely equipped kitchen for Moozh to play in and was a few steps from the tram line that would take me to work. Now I just had to get a job.
I had shopped my resume around while we were in Bali, toting my new skills and eagerness to work. Leading up to the holiday season, I was naïve to think that any bakery or patisserie would have left any kind of vacancy open for what can be the busiest time of year. I was also told, “Melbournians don’t eat bread in the summer,” which I knew was probably true in a micro sense but was also their way of letting me down easy. The minimum wage in Australia is around $16 an hour, depending on where you are, which is mind boggling for a Canadian, where most industries are a ways away from paying a living wage. I’d been working café jobs since I was a teenager and thusly knew that one glance at my resume and I could likely have a job in a café in a day. And I did.
Nestled in one of Melbourne’s cute and funky laneways in the CBD, I found a café that I would have wanted to go to. Cool exposed lightbulbs, stylized scaffolding, higtop benches of grommeted two by fours, I liked not only the look of it but the steady clip it came all day. Always being busy it what separates café work that is fun from the café work that is insufferable. I lost weight working there initially before I put it all back on after Christmas. A herd of drowsy Melbournian businessmen and women huddle around the La Marzocco, where what is likely the best espresso in the CBD was cranked out from 630am to 4pm, Monday through Friday.
We settled into a nice routine. I did the rush hour tram home where Moozh had dinner waiting for me and we would eat while watching The Project and commenting how Canada could take a note on how a relevant, interesting news program should be done. George Stroumboulopoulos can't do it all on his own. We quickly learned Moozh did the househusband thing badly. Too type-A for any Jell-O molds and needlepoint to keep him satisfied. He was driven, he was ambitious, he just couldn't legally work in Oz. We would swing down into Fitzroy and Brunswick on our weekends, or take in the Preston Farmer’s Market for fresh veggies. Though I sheepishly admit, we also discovered ALDI and their discount wine selection. That got away from us in no short order. Not since Europe had we been able to get great wine so cheap.
Then I began to find my feet were really itchy. I was getting small, red bumps all over my feet and ankles that were EXTREMELY itchy. They weren’t like mosquito bites but were small and rounded. Besides I hadn’t seen any mosquitos in our house really. And the bites were just on my feet. Now my childhood was bereft of housepets, save the occasional fishtank that never seemed to last long. I do not mourn this fact. I have found in my adulthood I have a low tolerance for excessive hair floating in my personal space and for germs in any considerable denomination. Due to this ignorance, I had no framework for fleas, which is in fact what it turned out to be. The house we were renting used to have a cat, the indoor/outdoor sort. Seeing a black speck on my foot one evening, I grabbed at it to inspect it. (I trust you are visualizing this in your mind. It felt as weird as it looked.)
“Is that a…what the F***!”
Typing ‘flea bites’ into Google curled my toes. Pictures of people with bites that looked just like mine, red, inflamed, slightly shiny. Reading further, I found out that the flea bites can spread if the flea infestation is not contained. Patches of bumps along someone’s ribs or their upper thigh. This is where I turned into Animal from the Muppets. You know those people who are banned from WebMD and other tools for self-diagnosis? That is me. My mother threatened to Parental-Block on me when I was in high school because I made every headache into carbon monoxide poisoning, every cramp into appendicitis. (Was Nepal any shock to me? I should have seen it coming.)What aggravated this situation all the more was the fact that Moozh had NO bites. None. No insatiable itching. If I ever thought I was going crazy in my marriage, it was in Melbourne. It is every hypochondriacs nightmare, what they believe is going to happen but never will. IT HAPPENED TO ME. I will accept your sympathy now. I eventually went into a doctor because my method of obsessive floor-scrubbing and linen-washing was clearly not clearing up the bumps. Armed with some cortisol cream and some non-drowsy allergy cream, I was prepared the remaining week and a half that we would spend there before our lease ran out and we were moving downtown. This is also when I got Achilles Tendonitis. I felt like a cripple. And I had a terrible attitude. Certifiable. When they say, “Hell hath no fury like a woman scorned”, just add flea bites and general discomfort and you have a cyclone.
Melbourne was really fun, I swear to God. We had our first hot Christmas. Going for a walk Christmas Day in flip flops and shorts is something I could get used to. We had our first Christmas alone, which felt both awesome and very strange. I did by best daughter-in-law duty of trying my hand at my mother-in-law’s Christmas Bread. While Moozh was very supportive, the verdict very much was that it ‘just wasn’t the same’. To ring in 2013, we migrated downtown to watch the fireworks set off from the rooftops. New Years definitely made us aware of how much Aussies like to party. By 1130pm, kids were already being dragged into drunk tanks for being totally KO’d. At 1130! Any Australian we had ever met before had liked to party but it wasn’t until we actually got to Australia that we realized it’s on a macro scale. The best part was a public notice on TV before Australia Day saying that the Police Force had a Zero Tolerance policy for partiers punching cops. I should hope so.
January was filled with Australia Day, Chinese New Year and the Australian Open. We knocked off every restaurant within Melbourne (and within our price range) from Bourdain’s Melbourne episode. We had the quail at Rumi’s, the spicy bratwurst at the Queen Vic market and the zaatar flatbread at A1. For my birthday, Moozh took me on a Melbournian pastry kid geek tour, the highlight of which was easily Burch & Purchese; confectionary on a grand scale. We gawked at the spreads at Phillipa’s, the bread at Laurent and the valentine’s chocolates at Koko Black.We drank wine. So much wine. And so much great wine, wine we had only ever heard about in Canada.
The Federation Square wine expo highlighted wines from the Yarra Valley and the Mornington Peninsula, each about an hour from Melbourne. I was won over to the side of cool climate shiraz and Moozh was in Pinot Noir heaven. Soumah, Cannibal Creek, Alpha Box & Dice, Red Hill Wineries. I was somewhat consoled in my flea plague when Moozh started to have bug issues of his own. Apparently what can happen during the summer months in Melbourne is the Yarra River will bring in an increased amount of fly eggs which hatch once they reach the city. The flies in Melbourne are unlike anywhere we have ever been. They are persistent and impervious to being ‘brushed aside’ in any way. So what begins as an absent swatting, quickly degenerates into you swatting your own face while a fly crawls all over your forehead and cheeks, an experience I can only describe as ‘yucky’. And Moozh has a "compromised patience module" which just means that the flies made him lose his shit. Every time.
We learned what prams and snags are, ate at Macca’s and did our best to avoid the mozzies. We learned that Australia not only produces great wine but also has a burgeoning craft beer and cider industry, of which we had a healthy sample. Australia was at once familiar and an entirely new world. Australian’s are brash and loud in a way no other culture has been. They have been more conversational and opinionated than I expected. One could stand to adopt the ‘no worries’ mentality, even if only for a day. Outside of Australia, we really do take the world too seriously.
Sit. Have a coffee.
Things I learned in Melbourne:
Australia feels like a cross between Britain and the US. Not that I would ever say that to their faces.
Trams do not belong in traffic.
Cricket makes no sense at all.
Quote for Melbourne: Moozh: Babe you don’t see carnie tents and not bring money
Runner up: Me: I am checking myself out of Australia and into rehab.