Touchdown in Australia

After 17 hours on airplanes I arrive in Melbourne on May 31, 2007. Two hours later I make it to my hostel, the Home Travellers Motel. I recommend it. Very clean, very chilled out, cheap.

The first night i sleep 14 hours and get up at 8 am (5 pm central time) and walk around the entire district I’m in called St. Kilda, an area that reminds me a lot of Austin except it’s on the beach. It was kind of slummy in the 80s but in the 90s backpackers started coming in and brought in some extra money. There are bohemian paved sidewalks down the main strips, dive bars right next to hyper expensive restaurants right next to seedy sex shops, pastry shops that make you think you’re somewhere in France, and loud footy bars (rugby is kind of a big deal here) all smashed together one after the other.

The first day I find the St. Kilda Botanical Gardens and walk around them in the morning, then down to the beach. I get back and go the lobby where some people are starting the horror movie Hostel.

Later in the evening I go down to the main part of St. Kilda and find a street busker playing blues on a steel guitar. I almost walk past, he’s good and I have to stay. I stand there while bankers and punks walk by, mostly ignoring the two of us, and I whoop and holler after each song. The busker grins. After he plays we go to a bar filled with Mexicans ( what they call people who live in Melbourne city proper). He explains to me that half is a gay bar and half is just a regular bar, and he assures me we won’t sit on the gay side. I thought he was making this up, but you can obviously tell which half have guys hitting on one another. We sit down and order beers and within two minutes a guy sits down next to us and starts talking to us. I make sure he doesn’t have the wrong side of the bar and then start talking to him. He’s about 40 years old, a 15th generation Australian (you can kind of tell who the long time australians are–they look incredibly hard but are the nicest people you meet around here), tattoos all up and down his arm and hands and, as I see later, on top of his bald head. (I’ve seen a lot of tattoos on the faces and heads of these kinds of Aussies. The first one I saw helped me to figure out where I was on my map.) He has a 5-6 inch goatee dripping off his chin. He is mostly talking to the busker, Garry, and not me as they apparently somewhat know each other. The guy works in a soup kitchen serving to Aboriginees, the natives of Australia. A local grocer donates food and the state of Victoria pays him to run the kitchen.

We talk about politics and such in Australia. Voting is mandatory and he is proud to tell me he hasn’t voted in the 40 years he’s lived there. The government tried to fine him the first time, but when he supposedly strong-armed them into never fining him again, and he says he hasn’t had a problem since. I leave the bar early as I’m still jet lagged, and crawl into my top bunk and try to sleep with one of my 3 roommates snoring louder than my father.

The next day I make my way to the city (I’m pretty much in the farthest south part of Melbourne). By the end of the day, and $15 dollars later, I have the tram figured out and haven’t spent more than $5 on it since then. I make my way up to the Queen Victoria Market, a huge crazy place which I was promised has everything I could possibly want. I don’t know about that promise, but they have a lot of cheap crap. I get a backpack, a wallet, some pants, and some bad Indian food for about $30. Their website looks all slick and organized, but the place was extremely chaotic with fruit hawkers screaming their specials for that hour and stalls with anything from Nokia phone covers to denim clothing for kids with cartoon characters on them (that was my favorite stall: the guy working there is this tall, extremely built Middle Eastern man who looked really embarrassed to be working there). I noticed most of the stall owners are either Asian or Middle Eastern. The 50 year old Middle Eastern man I buy pants from, with a bulbous stomach and a face that looks extremely tired or angry but who is very nice and talkative, assures me I could take these pants fishing as many times as I want without any machine washing problems.

It takes me one day to realize I like the laid back, chilled out St. Kilda much more than downtown Melbourne. When you find a bar or music venue downtown it can be much more rewarding but the good ones aren’t easy to find. They’re down alleyways, usually unmarked or at least have signs that don’t attract any attention. But once you get inside they are usually packed with good music and friendly people. I was pointed to a jazz club that looked like a place you’d go for high stakes poker with 9-fingered men. Melbourne is considered the music capital of Australia.

Yesterday is my day off. It’s supposed to be my laundry day too, but that’s going to be another as of yet undetermined day. Today I go downtown to check out art galleries but find out they’re closed on Mondays. So I go the Australian Centre for the Moving Image (ACMI) located in the extremely busy Federation Square, kind of the hub for the whole city. It’s got the major bus station and is the gateway into the city center. The ACMI and other buildings all have the same odd, geometric design. The ACMI has little booths where you can watch unreleased short films and I’m there for about 2 hours until a swarm of school children surrounds me. I walk down along the Yarra River to the Royal Botanical Gardens, a giant area of which I only cover about a quarter, where I find secluded benches and knolls to sit and read. Most important of all it’s free.