Category: Musings

Crikey!

Well, everything’s in boxes now and just have to do a quick run down the Post Office to send off my ‘valuable’ crap back home. Amazing how much random stuff I’d accumulated in such a short time. Been good practice paring it all down as I get ready to head off – but have to give credit to the Chrises for a much more impressive shedding of everything they own, as the house is now bare save for a few suitcases. Amazing.

Still half excited about going and half sad – had a great night out last night, visiting a lot of the regular Brunswick Street haunts. Plus Emma at Bimbos gave me a free pizza – huzah (as if my gut wasn’t already big enough from their pizzas). Feel a bit rough now, but that’s traditional for getting on a long haul flight these days. Anyway, for those of you interested in my route as I travel it’s all going to be on Tripsta, so sign up for that and then invite me along as a friend using ultrahi@yahoo.com as the email address. Simple. Going to be fun trying that site out for real as I travel again….

So, to my Melbourne friends, hope to see you all again somewhen and somewhere soon – enjoy the city for me while I’m away {:)

PFT

Not that long now till I get in a plane for Bangkok, and, as usual, the news is suddenly full of plane crashes, terrorist threats and everything else guaranteed to make me more nervous while I’m flying! Grrr… Ah well, everything will be fine as always but that never seems to stop me getting worked up before I fly.

Meanwhile the packing continues.. It’s amazing how much crap I’ve managed to accumulate in such a short time here. One of the dangers of stopping for a bit while travelling I guess. Now which camera(s) should I take with me….

Monty python’s autobiography. A huge tome of a book written directly from comments by all the Python team. Lots of interesting background, into both what happened and how people felt about it.

I should be so lucky, lucky, lucky, lucky

Interesting article on the BBC that talks about how to be lucky [courtesy of MetaFilter]. Will try to apply some of the guidelines for being lucky as I head round Thailand.

Pretty much recovered from New Year’s Eve now – although still seem to be crazily sleepy all the time. Little bit stressed out as I try and get everything packed up and sorted out before leaving on Thursday. I’m quite sad to be leaving Melbourne (although excited about seeing Asia and, eventually, getting home to see my family) – I’ve had a lot of fun here and met some really lovely people. Hard to believe it’s been a year already since I first entered Australia! Although not so hard to believe when I look at my bank balance… ouch.

Happy 2004!

Another year starts to unfold… Just got back from the Falls Festival after a few days of gorgeous sunshine (and consequently sun kissed skin type effect). Been the best weather of any of my trips to the Great Ocean Road so far – totally faultless.

Falls festival was fun – although managed to disgrace myself by popping off for a quick half hour nap pre-midnight and then managing to sleep through the appointed hour! Oops. Felt a lot better for my four hours ‘nap’ though, which somehow saw me sleeping through the banging bass of the dance tent right next to where I was snuggled up in our hire car.

Hope everyone has a splendid year ahead (and beyond).

Dude, where’s my country? – michael moore. A christmas present from Nig and Stevie that was rapidly devoured on Boxing Day! Another US government bashing epic from Mr Moore. No question is left un-asked – from ‘how come the Bush family is best mates with the bin Laden family?’ to ‘how come you gave tax cuts only to the wealthy 5% of the country?’. It’s scary to read, and although you now approach it with a bit of healthy skepticism, Moore backs it up with attributable sources. Just have to hope that enough people read it and vote a more sane US government back next year.

‘Twas the day after the day after Christmas

And all round the house, not a creature was stirring except for the lesser spotted ‘loudus stompious chrisus’. Ah well, good to get up early sometimes {;)

Belated Merry Christmas to everyone wherever you are!

So that was my first Christmas ever away from home… Had a lot of fun, although did miss everyone something back home muchly. Also managed to eat less than usual, mainly because it’s hard to eat too much filling, carb laden food when it’s almost 30 degrees!

It was also strange because it was probably the first Christmas ever when no TV at all passed my eyes. Huzah! Not having a TV here has been quite a strange adjustment – you don’t realise quite how much of your life is spent sitting in front of it just ‘passing time’. I always planned to do that when I first moved to New York but somehow a TV materialised quite rapidly in my apartment.

And on a related note it’s only five hours till I see Return of the King! Perhaps the true meaning of Christmas… well, this year at least since it comes out later here than everywhere else in the world. Aussies have a big spate of summer blockbusters released on Boxing Day which seems quite strange. In Victoria this is combined with the fact that there is no public holiday on Boxing Day, unlike the rest of Australia – much to many people’s dismay.

Bappity bap bap thonk

Another fun African drumming session, continuing to learn a rhythm called ‘yagga’. Today was even more fun than last week as the weather was even more gorgeous, the flies were less plentiful, and we all managed to keep the rhythm going for ages without messing up. Sweet! It’s great just sitting there banging away at the drum – you go into this completely different zone, until you realise that you’ve missed the cue for the next section of the song and have to catch up. Oops!

Post drumming went to see ‘The Spanish Apartment’ (L’Auberge Espagnol) – a French film about a group of Erasmus students of varying nationalities living in Barcelona for a year. Very funny movie, and also quite intellectually challenging if you stop reading the sub-titles (sous-titres) for any length of time as the dialogue moves rapidly between French, English and Spanish – both Catalan and traditional Spanish at that! Been a bit of a film week already as also went to see Spellbound yesterday – a film about the final of the National American Spelling Bee competition. It’s amazing how interesting a documentary about a load of kids spelling words on stage can be… and also nice to see something about American culture that didn’t involve violence in any form.

Final bit for the day – bought a new toy for my camera antics: a Vivitar Zoom Thyristor 3500 flash unit. If you’ve been looking at my Fotolog over the past few weeks you’ll have noticed the photos using more random direct light sources. Mostly this has been anything I had to hand, especially other people’s cameras – or at least the flash from those. Anyway, decided it was time to stop wasting other people’s batteries so you can expect to see a lot more randomly lit shots coming up in the foreseeable future. Even better news is that this AU$70 flash does trigger off my EOS SLR contrary to what the bloke in the shop thought. Although being an old flash it doesn’t pick up all the exposure info it needs so it’s a full manual job. And, of course, having bought that second hand flash I found a ‘proper’ EOS flash second hand the next day – d’oh!

ps, If I don’t write anything more in this blog ever it’s because I’ve been eaten by the one (or all) of the hundreds of spiders that seem to have set up web in my bedroom suddenly. Lovely. Hope they’re not all expecting me to buy them Christmas presents…

Pingu!

What a great night out in St Kilda! No, not the usual drunken session with the boys and girls, although they were all there, but just very different and fun. It’s continuing to be ridiculously hot (37 C) – after a whole weekend of this and the forecast is offering more of the same. Phew! Very glad indeed at the moment that our house holds a welcome blast of coldness in the bedrooms as long as you keep the kitchen door closed. So with that backdrop – a trip over to the seaside of St Kilda makes a lot of sense, plus it was Kate and Amy’s last night in town before heading over to Sydney.

First up I randomly decided to go try some African drumming for a change of pace (and to get away from launching Tripsta which is almost there now just waiting for my fixes on a few niggling things – grrr). Simon who runs these sessions is holding them on the pavilion near St Kilda beach – so get to learn African rhythms as the sun starts to set and the fly swarms start to hand over to the evening shift of mosquitos. So much fun. As most people know I’m a compulsive tapper of tables in bars so it was a nice change to apply this to more ‘melodic’ pursuits. Hardest thing was keeping in time with everyone else, plus repeating the same bars over and over again without trying to improvise. Looking forward to next week already…

Met up with everyone at the Espy after that to watch the sun set before we wandered down to the beach and pier. On the edge of the breakwater heard this rough sqwauking noise – and a quick flash photo later revealed the source to be these cute little penguins! So now I only need to see a wombat in the wild and my collection of random Aussie animals is complete. Oh, and also saw a huge rat – but that was less cute.

So a good night – following a fun weekend. Oh, and quick weekend summary – Friday went to see Holly play at the Espy where she was supporting for a fellow Adelaide band whose name escapes me, from there went along to a warehouse/hip hop party with Gretta and Turtle which was great fun. Saturday met up with everyone at Emma and Emmet’s place for preliminary drinks before heading over to Revolver on Chapel Street. Then Sunday was pretty chilled – ending up with Holly playing an awesome set (her best and longest yet) at her regular Daguerres slot on Chapel St. Phew!

Picture palace – paul theroux. My first Paul Theroux book, again thanks to Chris for putting this my way and for cleverly sequencing it after the Graham Greene novel (Greene is a character in this book). The story in this book follows a fictional female photographer, Pratt, through her life, the people she’s photographed and her obsession with her brother. The writing is dense and interesting and you really believe that Pratt existed, such is Theroux’s observations on photography in general and the styles (and behaviours – however true they are) of famous photographers shortly after the war. Another great read that drags you from page to page and leaves you wanting more at the end.