Most excellent weekend

[trixtah]

I was about to go insane from the steady pressure of the last few weeks at work, and took Friday off and went to Melbourne for a couple of days. The initial plan was to rendezvous with an ex-colleague of mine who was going to be over for a training course, but we somehow managed to miss each other in our preparatory email interchange. I decided to go anyway due to the preceding work insanity.

Melbourne is one of those places, like Wellington, San Francisco, Brussels and Hawaii, where I immediately felt that it was my kind of place on first going there. You can walk across the CBD in a bit more than 1/2 an hour. There is a CBD. There are cool and funky inner-city suburbs. There is decent public transport. There are tall buildings (which I can take or leave, but they also give a certain density of people in the area), the river (nice for lunching by), the dinky little alleyways, swanky shops and grungy shops, people from zillions of cultures, fantastic food, and great coffee. Other than the ethnic mix, there are recognisable queers and goths and students and arty types and the lot wandering around and mixing and matching. There are even shops selling clothing I'd like to wear (suits! pretty pretty shirts!). There are lots of very attractive women in their suits roaming the streets in the lunch hours. Getting back to the coffee, it amuses me that I found no less than 3 cafes serving Coffee Supreme, which is based in Wellington. I think it's the best commercially-roasted coffee in NZ at present. It appears that they've started another roasting operation in Mebourne, and the stuff here tasted just as good as the coffee brewed in its city of origin. So I overdosed a bit, oh well.

I realise that I'm experiencing the place as a tourist, but some places are more "homelike". As I mentioned, I had that feeling about Wellington the first time I visited, and when I finally got to live there, I loved it. So, yay for spending time in a place that just fits.

I got to spend some excellent time with damned_colonial and her SCA buddies. It was probably a little bit bad of me to take over the stoking and feeding of the experimental pizza oven that a couple of them had built, but it was a cool contraption, and well, I can't help myself around fire. And being controlling about properly-cooked food. :-) Also, it was nice to have an appreciative audience, and anything that gives me scope for my butchly liking of fixing things is good. Heh. damned_colonial and I also hit the Victoria Markets the next morning, which is the best indoor food market I've encountered here in Oz so far. I admit to being biased towards places which have a good deli section. Sydney seems to have a much better seafood selection, interestingly enough. So, yay, hanging out with groovy people who like doing fun things is always a bonus. I will be doing it more often.

I also got to meet the charming goatsfoot yesterday, which was fab. It's nice to put faces to names (and L/Js), and it's even nicer when they're people you hit it off with. I did my usual shy-and-talking-too -much thing, but oh well, that's better than the opposite problem. I'm looking forward to catching up again in a month and hopefully in a more leisurely fashion. Also, Plans were Being Hatched.

After getting home again (I made the airport with 5 minutes to spare, due to being engrossed in conversation with goatsfoot, bad me) and having some decent sleep, I got to spend some nice quality time with the CDL today, which involved some good and affirmatory "checking-in" conversation, healing massages, inspection of a few purchases I made in Melbourne, and other excellent stuff. Fucking yay. You know, this weekend, I pwned the world, and it was good.

Comments

[micheinnz.livejournal.com]

SO with you about Melbourne and Wellington. They're both places I'd be happy living in. They feel... _alive_, somehow, in the way that a lot of cities don't.

And hooray for pwning the world! Most excellent.

[trixtah.livejournal.com]

Yes, that feeling of "liveliness" and variety is what it's all about. Canberra certainly doesn't have it. Auckland is ok until you get to about Onehunga to the South, Parnell to the East and Pt Chevalier to the West. Sydney strikes me similarly, in that only the inner-city and not "old money" burbs appeal to me.

I like Dunedin too, but I've only been there the once, alas. Of course, it was freezing cold, being the middle of winter, so my "I could live here" vibe didn't quite kick in. It did in the "sufficiently aesthetic" and "sufficiently funky" senses though. I should try visiting again sometime when it's actually summer. :-)

[saluqi.livejournal.com]

Yay for world pwnage! Yay for Melbourne too; god knows I love my home town, but my biofamily is showing no signs of heading for the Gold Coast so here I stay.

[trixtah.livejournal.com]

Lucky you for coming from such a cool place. Lucky me for more native guides to add to the pool! :-D

Bowie

[(Anonymous)]

It's Jay from Matisse's blog. If you give me an email address, I will be glad to send you a tune from Bowie's latest.

You are right about Bowie and the 80's. Even Let's Dance was weal. He later admitted he was artistically bankrupt during this period.

[cheshire-bitten.livejournal.com]

I love my city, I might have to move north for post grad, and the thing which bothers me the most about that is leaving this city.

[filkferengi]

Yay! Thanks for sharing the general excellence.