Melbourne, Australia - Part IV | FreeWillTravel.com

The meteor shower itself was a total fiasco as the thick grey clouds rolled in from the Southern Ocean at exactly the wrong time. Well, it’s not like the couchsurfer Tina and I would have seen much anyway from our little hill near the high-rises of the CBD and the river, next to the illuminated ferris wheel... the light pollution made the night-sky a kind of purple. In the end we didn’t see a single shooting star. Even so, it was an illuminating night on another level with my new eager-to-share friend.

Last week I went over to the park to play football but no one showed up. So I went around looking for another team but all I could find was a relaxed ultimate frisbee team, open for anyone. A ball or a frisbee, oh well, it doesn’t matter which object I get some kind of kick out of chasing after, it’s mostly an excuse to move my lazy butt. Most of them have played for years. I’m not particularly good at throwing or catching but I am good, if there’s any juice in my legs, at interpreting the game more or less like football and going on runs that sneak in behind or split a defence wide open.

My cousin Sigmund and his wife Elin Edda were waiting for me outside my Smith Street room when I returned, absolutely shattered from all the running. My flatmates Leo and Marcello were just getting started with a big BBQ party in the back yard, Sigmund and Elin went down to Woolworth’s to get some meat, and voila, we were in the middle of some South American shenanigans. They eat meat. Not just a chicken wing or a pork chop but enormous, thick, massive slabs of cows. Dunk it in some sauce, eat it with your fingers, that’s all. So for the first time in a year I had a dinner not only consisting of a lot of meat, but only big chunks of red meat! I went to bed that night feeling faint, not just from all the running, not just from the red wine, but from my stomach attempting to digest a brick.

That feeling lasted all day today as well, with the added discomfort of having slept very badly in my room which is already stiflingly hot when one person is sleeping in it, let alone three. Don’t get me wrong – absolutely no complaints about the heat!! We walked around the area, crossed Brunswick Street, went over to Carlton Gardens and to Melbourne Museum. I enjoyed chilling in the air-conditioned foyer, Sigmund and Elin went inside. It got too cold inside so I went outside to sleep. After a little picnic in the park we took the free tourist tram around the CBD and checked out the river and Federation Square.

Outside the cathedral opposite the square something odd happened. A group of young people from a church were handing out free pancakes! It really made my day, not just because they were amazingly tasty pancakes but also because it was a free dinner. And there was no catch, no preaching etc. I asked if I could contribute and they said I could try to promote the free pancakes to passers-by, which I did for ten minutes. It’s amazing how difficult it is to give away free pancakes! Few people actually believed me and just kept rushing past. “Free pancakes!” – “Why?” was the most common reply. Well, that’s the world we live in, unfortunately. I spoke for a while with one of the guys running the pancake stand and my attempt at expressing my appreciation of the free pancakes (I had three, in the end) was perhaps a bit clumsy and maybe I came out of it sounding like I was homeless and destitute. When I shook his hand to say goodbye he squeezed a 50-dollar note into my palm. I of course couldn’t accept it, he was giving it to me for the wrong reasons. I explained that my situation is self-inflicted and, as I explained above, I will never truly be desperate, and gave it back to him, asking him to give it to someone who really needs it.

So it was a bit ironic that, next, we went to Brunswick Street so that I could do some busking. I showed Sigmund and Elin two of my favourites, Bar Open and The Evelyn, and then sat down to busk. In just over an hour I made 3.30 dollars. It’s not like Darwin, that’s for sure... and when I got up to leave with Sigmund and Elin (after I made them sing a Norwegian traditional song, but failing to make any more money) we stepped right over the 15 dollars that someone had dropped on the pavement not far from where I’d been busking, the guy behind us picked it up. It felt like that money was rightfully mine, if anybody’s...

It’s very late on Friday night, I’m just back from busking duty, Sigmund and Elin are fast asleep. Seems like I finally cracked it – 19 dollars made in one hour of busking. However, I also “cracked” something else – my mouth harp. Broken, again... but this time I am little bit better prepared, I have a spare one. Thanks to my hand-written cardboard sign, people are mostly not giving me money out of sympathy. My sign says: “Help a Norwegian in his attempt at travelling around the world without flying, cheers.” So it’s blatantly saying “I’m just having the time of my life and there’s no reason why you should support that. I really don’t need your money like the homeless guy over there but, hey, feel free to chip in”. It’s straight-up and I think a lot of Australians like that. However, it’s curious that the pattern keeps repeating itself – it is virtually only men who give. Anyway, I’m happy I made the money needed to post the harp to Norway for repairs...

Saturday was a classic. We started off with some art, from antiquities to modern, at the National Gallery of Victoria, the entrance to which is a very cool wall of water. It’s no Tate Modern; take away the stuff that seems more suitable for a museum and all the decorative art and there’s perhaps not that much left. Still, their rooms of late 19^th and early 20^th century art included ponds by Monet and cobbled boulevards of Montmartre by Pissaro, sleeping nudes in chains awaiting death-by-lion, the naked and alluring “grasshopper” by Jules Lefebvre and sculptures by Rodin. It was also surprising to find the notorious cow-slicing modern madman Damien Hurst’s take on The Last Supper on display, in the form of archetypal printed medicine packaging giving the contents of your favourite hearty dishes such as “meatballs” in tablet form.

We got caught out in the rain on our way back; it wasn’t going to stop for 24 hours. When it rains, it rains. After a pit stop back in Smith Street we went to Tina’s amazing 22^nd floor flat behind the Arts Centre on the south bank of the Yarra River, with astounding views of the CBD and the river. The tallest building in Melbourne, pretty much next door, was literally scraping the clouds. A bunch of couchsurfers had been invited for a devilish Thai green curry and some funky Japanese plum wine. We braved it through the rain and a knee-deep puddle back on the tram in the direction of North Melbourne. An Indian couchsurfer about to head back to Delhi was having her leaving-do, I’ve been to enough CS gatherings by now to know almost half the people there. Sigmund and Elin were quite impressed at the amount of weird people assembled in one place and seemingly happily so; Aussies and Kiwis, Brits, Scots and Irishmen, Scandinavians of various denominations, Germans and French, an Estonian, a Mexican, a few Indians; a deaf and mute guy having a whale of a time communicating with pen and paper, a designer of cars for Toyota, the owner of a big Australian bank, the manager of one of the biggest Japanese pop stars, in town for the music awards. For me it was quite ordinary, I suppose. We got kicked out at around 2 or 3am and went instead to the squat around the corner, all lounging around on the mattresses covering the living room floor and eventually falling asleep where we’d dropped. Sigmund and Elin made it back home in a taxi.

As much fun as that sounds, I’m noticing a change in me. I’m perhaps beginning to get older. Or perhaps my priorities are changing. I’m enjoying it a little bit less. I feel the need to purge myself of bullshit and to seek pure truth again, to clean up my act a little bit and to spend time doing what I enjoy doing with the people that matter. Adventure can be simple, adventure might not even involve physical movement. Truth is an adventure in itself. Australian girls and in particular Melbourne girls can be off their trolleys and great to be around but everything in moderation... There is a time to branch out and take it all in and there is a time to take a step back and find the essence. No bullshit.

Sunday came and went all too quickly. Sigmund and Elin took me out for an amazing fried breakfast at one of the best (and best-value) Smith Street cafes, Gluttony. Then they took off in their rental car but didn’t make it too far and came back in the evening to spend a last night on my big mattress. Tomorrow they’re off again, this time in the direction of Adelaide, then a flight to Sydney and finally back to Norway in January. Elin is doing well and should make a medical doctor within a year and a half.

It’s Friday afternoon but it feels like a Sunday. Feels like the weekend has come and gone already. Steph had her leaving-do yesterday, that’s what happened. So now she’s off to Switzerland and Yemen and god knows where. I actually had two leaving-dos to go to yesterday, luckily both in Brunswick (the area). First I dropped by Hayley’s little gathering. She’s from Christchurch in New Zealand, where I will be flying to, and she has arranged for her parents to give me a space to camp in their garden if I need it... which is very sweet of her. Hayley, by the way, plays the contrabassoon. How many contrabassoon-players do you know, like? Hah! Steph’s party was fun, I met some new people, went out busking in between each beer to make money for the next one, an arrangement which worked pretty well. When only four people were left standing at around 4am we decided it was time to call it a night, we all said our goodbyes at the junction of Victoria and Brunswick Street and then we all walked off... in the same direction! Total confusion... This morning / afternoon, after a few hours of sleep, we had brunch in Clifton Hill, I went over to her place to pick up my mail and stuff I’d left behind; Steph, her mum and I then went underwear-shopping in Smith Street and then we said our goodbyes right here in Smith Street, not quite the same setting as the last time in Dar es Salaam.

Tina dropped by on Tuesday for a DVD night. She’d seen Bruno so I had to pick something else. Being a girl who tortures rats in a lab for a living, I obviously chose the hilarious-sounding Finnish horror “Sauna” with the even more hilarious tag line “Wash Your Sins”. With the more girly (but excellent!!) Vicky Cristina Barcelona as a backup I thought she’d have a bit of a range to choose from. She of course chose Sauna, who wouldn’t? It was interesting but largely incomprehensible. She missed the last tram so I walked her all the way back through the CBD and to her place on the south bank, and via Carlton Gardens to watch the possums at night and back home to Smith Street. The slow stroll took me a couple of hours. The city is at my feet.

Wednesday was ultimate frisbee-time and I have to say that I’m getting better. Not really at throwing but at running – last week I was so shattered I had to continuously mark the 50-year old guy on the other team for the last half an hour to have any chance of keeping up – this time my energy lasted right until the end! It’s a great group of people, there’s a few in the core group who arrange everything and then others, like me, just drop in and out. We’re at least 15 people every Wednesday. This time we went out for drinks afterwards, I stuck to water and stretching.

I’m getting along fine on my couple of dollars a day, I’m eating well. When Dr. Play left I had a pretty much fully stocked kitchen at my disposal and it’s incredible how long you can make it last. For example, there was 1.5 kg of flour left. With 3 litres of milk and some eggs, do you have any idea have many pancakes that makes? About 80 thick ones! I can live for a long time on 80 pancakes... Please don’t think that I am complaining about my situation. It is self-imposed and I am perfectly happy like this. What to other people would seem very mundane is to me a great gift – a room that is mine for two months.

Oh what an amazing night! I went over to Brunswick Street for a bit of busking just after midnight. I knew something special was going on when the first person who walked past, even before I’d started playing, gave me eight dollars! The money kept rolling in... and then a throat singer (or overtone singer) suddenly turned up and started jamming, soon followed by a clarinet player! As I’ve said before, the overtones of the mouth harp and throat singing (and didgeridoos for that matter) are much the same thing, they somehow resonate in a special way with each other. We jumped on this wave that came out of nowhere and resonated upwards and outwards, playing for our lives, getting all arty and weird and spontaneous, dancing and singing all over our little part of the pavement. People came along and dug what we were doing, everybody forgot about the money, I even moved the money-bag out of the way. The throat singer sang and simultaneously wrote spontaneous poetry on the back of my cardboard sign – “how infinite can a breath be?” - and we expanded and grew and resonated and suddenly the pavement was a canvas, the three of us actors in a great film called “life”, our music the soundtrack, our interaction with passers-by the stuff of godliness, a breath infinite. Suddenly I was one of the reasons why Melbourne is cool. And then we joined the bass player down the road and completely took off...