Day 1267 - Smith Street life and future plans.

It’s very hot and stuffy even in the middle of the night. Spring lasted a week or two and now it seems like summer is here already. We’ve had amazing weather down here for the last couple of weeks, up to about 32 degrees. It’s either too cold or too hot, not much of the in-between stuff.

 

Dr. Play left yesterday. The mysterious Melbourne airport continues to baffle. Still refusing to pay 16 dollars for a ticket, we took a train (to Broadmeadows, that’s your best bet), then a couple of local buses, we then walked a couple of kilometres before an airport shuttle bus took pity on us and drove us the last two kms. Despite the general friendliness of the Australian people, it was no surprise that the driver, potentially risking his job to help out, was Lebanese. A guy from the Gold Coast, just flown in to do a job in Melbourne as a pest controller, made a big detour to drop me back in Smith Street after Dr. Play had left.

 

Our last week in Melbourne together, after our return from the Great Ocean Road, was a simple and beautiful one. I went job-hunting and even did a bit of busking, she went to markets and did some “much-needed” shopping. Together we spent lazy days in parks picnicking and reading books, lazy days in bed watching DVDs, and we even went for a trip to the Melbourne Zoo! Having seen many of the Australian species before, the highlights for me were an energetic duck-billed, beaver-like platypus swimming around in its tank (I actually thought the platypus was extinct before coming to Australia!), several snow leopards, a couple of rare red pandas, an electric blue frog just screaming “stay away, I’m toxic!”, a tree-kangaroo (no kidding), and a face-to-face meeting with a massive gorilla, eye-balling me from inches away, only separated from me by a piece of glass. Terrific and terrifying. Dr. Play was impressed by the lions.

 

Finally, there was the giant tortoise (native only to Mauritius and the Seychelles)... and allow me to interject a piece of trivia here – did you know that a turtle is an aquatic reptile with webbed feet or flippers, while the tortoise is terrestrial with elephant-like feet? That’s the difference. I always wondered. Anyway, in Melbourne Zoo the fence around the giant tortoises is simply made up of a horizontal log at around knee-height, which keeps the tortoises in but offers plenty of opportunity for human-tortoise interaction. One of the tortoises was lying squashed up to the log with his head poking out underneath; he is obviously fond of humans. A kid of about ten was touching the tortoise all over, even on its head, while his parents were watching. Remembering being told how a turtle or tortoise bite can easily free you from one of your digits I immediately reacted to the carelessness of the kid and his parents. But then I thought... hang on, if this wasn’t safe the kid wouldn’t be able to do what he was doing. The fence would have been built differently. This is surely a tortoise that just doesn’t bite. Even I fell into that way of thinking and started petting the tortoise as soon as the kid had left, touching the amazing reptile’s soft neck. You see, Australia is half-way to America. Everything is safe. If something isn’t safe, somebody will pay. If there’s a hole in a pavement and you hurt yourself, you can sue the council. Which means that we don’t need to take responsibility for our lives anymore, someone else is doing it for us. We expect everything around us to be adapted to our needs.

 

Suddenly a zoo keeper turned up and ordered me to “get away, he can take your finger off!” before jumping inside the fence and hauling the tortoise away from people. Reality hit me in the face and my stupidity dawned on me. Never let anyone else take responsibility for your life...

 

But more than anything, we did nothing. And there are few people in this world I can enjoy “nothing” with as much as Dr. Play. Nothing, as long as the food is good, is quite blissful.

The anticipated flurry of activity to sort my life out as soon as Dr. Play had left failed to materialise and instead became a full-on collapse. The next 36 hours somehow disappeared. It’s not until tonight that I emerged from hibernation, cleaned and rearranged my room, poured boiling water into my shoes and started applying a new cream to my feet to sort them out once and for all, emptied our recycling in somebody’s bin in a back yard (we don’t have rubbish collection for this flat so we have to distribute it in other people’s bins).

 

The electric piano is resting on piles of books at the far end of the room. I’m sitting on my mattress, sweating and typing away on my laptop which rests on an improvised bedside table next to me. A pile of books I’m never going to get through is to one side. I’m doing well with Enemy at the Gates, though, one of the fullest accounts of the battle of Stalingrad. The DVD Gallipoli with a very young Mel Gibson tells the story of the greatest wartime calamity in the modern history of Australia and must be watched tonight and returned to the DVD rental shop tomorrow... and then it’s another “one-dollar Tuesday” so I’ll be sure to bring more DVDs home. Whale Rider, about Maori traditions on New Zealand, has been recommended to me. My few possessions are no longer scattered around the room, they have been shoved up against the walls, rather. My inflatable mattress is rolled up, ready to be unrolled in the morning and used for sit-ups, push-ups and several rounds of sun salutations (yoga). I’ve eaten like a pig since arriving in Melbourne and my stomach has suddenly expanded dramatically. I don’t really care about such things but for the first time in my life I have to say that my stomach is right on the border of what’s acceptable. I used to be able to eat and eat and eat, mountains of food, and I would still be skinny as a stick. Those days are obviously over. Can’t wait to play football in the park again, on Wednesday.

 

My media player is on random and is playing music that I don’t know I have. My music collection has grown to about 70 GB. The last tram rumbled by through Smith Street below on its way to the suburbs a little while ago. Loud voices talk of good times to be had at the bar across the road, not bad for a Monday. It’ll end very soon. It’s surprising that a city as lively as Melbourne goes to bed so early.

 

Ah, there’s one I know intimately – Redemption Song! “Emancipate yourself from mental slavery, none but ourselves can free our minds.”

 

 

 

The week has vanished in a mist of procrastination and laziness. I’ve just finished my Enemy at the Gates book, about the bloodiest battle in human history, at Stalingrad in WWII, and I’m going to see the film later on tonight. The Uruguayan boys and their mates are whooping and shouting from another room, Uruguay have just scored in the world cup qualifying play-off match against Costa Rica. I keep on enjoying their quite regular barbecues in the back yard and on Friday I used it again to invite my own friends around. Well, “friends”. Couchsurfing makes it seem like you have a lot of friends – in fact I’d only ever met one of them before, Cassie from the squat. I just invited people from the Melbourne CS group forum, posted my address publicly on the internet, and about ten random people showed up - Australians, a couple of Polish girls, people from Taiwan and Scotland. Melburnians are very clever in how they conduct their post-modern social lives, there’s always something happening, there’s always a costume or a theme or a special reason or a cause or some kind of well-planned bloody environmentally friendly event. Melburnians are simply very skilled at socialising! So in my post-post-modern way, I went the other way (or full circle) and invited people around “to get pissed on cheap wine”. I think it worked pretty well. Yes, there was plenty of cheap wine and yes, we got very pissed, ending up at Bar Open in Brunswick Street.

 

I’ve been to picnics, I’ve played football in the park and I’ve even found an ultimate Frisbee team I can play with on Wednesdays and sometimes Sundays. Then there’s the Sunday free dinner and meditation at Gokula House, the meditation centre around the corner. And tomorrow I’ve been invited to a concert and to watch a meteor shower in the middle of the night by a lovely couchsurfer, Tina, who came here on Friday.

 

So... some things are happening. But as I’m not working I should use the opportunity to take my writing more seriously, I guess. So here goes.

 

Big things have happened. In the last couple of weeks my future has been pretty much decided, both short-term and long-term. Well, if not decided, at least there’s been an opening up of options.

 

I’ve been trying to find work ever since coming back from the Great Ocean Road with Barb. I could certainly have tried harder, but I’ve tried. I’ve spent several days trotting around Smith, Gertrude and Brunswick Streets and surrounding areas popping into an innumerable amount of shops, cafes, pubs and bars asking if they need anyone whether or not they have put a sign up in the window asking for that. It’s bloody hard. I’ve been offered a day of or two of work per week if I stick around for Christmas. And, well, not only am I not going to be here for Christmas, I’m also stupidly honest enough to say so. Few people in the world would tell the truth about such a thing, few people would not lie on a CV. I’m certainly capable of doing the same but I don’t like it. But why do I feel that I owe them my honesty? That’s just not how the world works. And am I supposed to be grateful for being allowed to work a day or two per week? The capitalist world is a funny one – a society should surely be happy when it is running so smoothly that not everyone needs to work? Then everybody could take longer holidays etc. No, instead we are supposed to see the opportunity to work as a privilege. Ordinary people have to sell their ability to work on the labour market to the highest bidder, ordinary people have to fight each other to be chosen to do something they don’t care about in the slightest, something that is probably also uselessly unproductive in the greater scheme of things, in order to survive. We’ve got our priorities completely wrong. I'm not complaining about my situation - it's exactly how I've chosen it - just about the useless and undignified system.

 

So I’ve tried busking. But in Melbourne you need a license to busk. To get a license to busk you have to audition for the council and wait three months. So bollocks to that. I’ve tried busking anyway. Without much luck. Melbourne isn’t Darwin. I’ve repeatedly dodged the police in Smith Street and surrounds, but at Victoria Market, the biggest market in Melbourne, a private security firm told me to get lost because the pavement was apparently private property!? I will experiment with busking a bit more but I know I won’t be able to make anywhere near what I made in Darwin.

 

Then there’s the internet and sites such as www.seek.com.au. I've sent off a CV here and there but again, it’s difficult when I’m not going to be around for more than a month.

 

So instead I withdrew every last penny from every bank account I have in this world and somehow managed to pay my rent for this place for the entire two months and my return tickets to New Zealand, and I can probably scrape by on a two or three dollars per day for the next couple of months. It doesn’t cost a lot to buy enough flour, milk and eggs to make enough pancakes to last a week. Or noodles. It always makes me laugh when Norwegian students moan about being poverty-stricken (the government grants are pretty exceptional), and they seem to measure their poverty in terms of what they eat. “We have to get by on noodles” seems to be the standard call for sympathy, year after year. I don’t really see what’s wrong with noodles? Perhaps they should be thankful that they have noodles?

 

My own situation will never be desperate, I have the luxury of being able to ask my parents for a loan pretty much whenever I want. So, unless I want it myself, I shouldn’t go hungry. But it’ll be the absolute last resort.

 

So why am I "wasting my time" going to New Zealand? Well, the rainbow world gathering over there is very high on my list of things I want to do. This year is for me very much about exploring ecology, sustainability, communities and alternative ways of living. NZ is also a way out – I can probably live more or less for free if I can pull my weight for the community in other ways.

 

Plane tickets to NZ turned out to be very expensive around Christmas. The gathering is from December 16^th to January 15^th but I could only find reasonable tickets (return AUD 420) when leaving Melbourne on December 10^th and returning on January 21^st. But that’s ok, it’ll give me more time to explore NZ! I’ll be living on bread and water, I’ll be hitchhiking, busking, couchsurfing and sleeping outside. Coming back to Melbourne on January 21^st I’ll be completely skint but I’ll be in a much better position to immediately find a job.

 

This means that I don’t need to find a job when I’m here in Smith Street, I may as well enjoy it and work on my website. Though I will half-heartedly keep on looking. Luckily for me I’m now very cheap to run, I don’t need much at all. I’ve pretty much stopped eating meat, I’ve given up all tobacco-based products, I’ve stopped supporting the Coca-Cola Company and fast food chains, I’ve virtually given up drinking fizzy drinks and I can easily get by only on water. And I have too many clothes. The only problem right now is that the LCD-screen cable in my camera is yet again busted, well within the warranty period from when it was last fixed in Singapore, but, well... I’m not in Singapore. I’ll have to have a serious word with the company from hell, Sony, but I doubt it’ll lead to anything. I just can’t afford to fix it. Luckily I can keep on working without it if I only use the viewfinder.

 

Then I received another amazing piece of news. My mother is turning 60 in March. Well, that wasn’t the piece of news, I was aware of the fact that my mother is going to turn 60 in March! When my dad turned 60 a few years back my parents splashed out on a big party for surely close to a hundred members of my extended family. My mum doesn’t want to make quite the same amount of fuss but she still wants to splash out on something special. I suggested Australia for my parents and my brother, “too expensive” they said. So I suggested Indonesia, specifically Flores, one of the most beautiful places on earth and still quite untouched, where we could live for virtually nothing, but it would still cost them less to bring me to Norway from wherever I am than to pay for three tickets from Norway to Indonesia. Suddenly they announced that they’d booked tickets for all of us on one of the most amazing cruises in the world, from Bergen to Kirkenes on Hurtigruten, the renowned boat trip in and out of all the Norwegian west-coast fjords and nearly all the way to the Russian border in the north.  Not only do I want to celebrate my mum’s 60^th birthday and spend time with my family, that cruise is a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity for me. Yes, even being Norwegian - I can't ever imagine having so much money that I would spend it on something like this.

 

The date, near the end of June 2010, is also perfect timing as that’s around the time when I will have to leave Australia to renew my visa, to come back as a tourist to keep working on a way to cross the Pacific. But then it struck me like a thunderbolt. Why would I go back to Australia? I’d be unlikely to have enough money to support myself for a long time and it would be more difficult to find work as I’d have to work illegally. Then there’s the East Timor to Darwin leg and the onward journey across the Pacific, both extremely uncertain routes. I would have no guarantees that I would make it when I return to Australia... and if I don’t, then what? Then I’d be stuck very far from anywhere else... What if I can’t find a way across in 2011? Am I going to try again in 2012? Where’s the limit? Is this journey going to take the rest of my life or should I draw a line in the sand somewhere? There is absolutely nothing wrong with being “stuck” in Australia or anywhere else, it doesn’t matter that much to me exactly where my life unfolds as long as it keep on making some kind of sense... but this journey binds me in another way because of my various projects associated with it. I’d love to see them completed before I turn fifty, you know.

 

So for the first time it struck me that if I wanted to be very kind to myself I could buy an onward plane ticket to South America from Europe instead of going back to Australia. Meaning; for the first time I’m toying with the idea of not “travelling around the world without flying” but flying across the Pacific Ocean (or via Europe, rather) and picking up the trail in Santiago or Buenos Aires.

 

Revolutionary! I then relaxed and thought I’d have months to think about this new plan but then it struck me that I should really buy plane tickets when I come back to Australia, while they are still cheap. So I need to look into this... perhaps it’s much more expensive than flying return to Australia, in which case I wouldn’t be able to afford it.

 

I don’t know. I’ll ask the meteor shower tomorrow, I’ll see what they think. Good night.

 

 

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