…is a behemoth of a mall called Westfield Doncaster. The only time I’d been there before was during a 45-minute and ultimately fruitless car park seach on my way to Kevin Andrews’ office, located in an unmarked building next door. From the resulting interview I learnt that Mr Andrews is an Evil, Evil man — but a nice enough chap to talk to, really, and obviously someone with way too much time to kill these days (why else would he spend an hour and a half answering questions from undercover Greens and ALP members posing as National Politics students?). None of which has anything to do with my waking up yesterday with an irrepressible urge to return to Westfield Doncaster, beyond having way too much time to kill now myself and probably a few screws loose after reading Vampire Hunter D ’til 1 am again. Story of my life.

But even half-crazed from sleep deprivation and following a faded list of public transport possibilities, Hel and I managed to only get on the wrong bus twice before travelling through many strange and previously unknown suburbs with names like “Kew” and “Greensbrough” (we were scared there for a while), before finally arriving at Westfield (aka Many Blocks of Glass). Once inside we immediately set out in search of a foodcourt but got waylaid by a Borders appearing seemingly out of nowhere. I learnt a lot of things in this Borders. I learnt that the Young Adult section is actually the Twilight section now, and why read when you can drool over glossy photobooks of Robert Pattinson stalking underage high school girls?*

And just in case you’re feeling a tad overwhelmed by the merit of other sections like Foreign Language, you need only look up to experience that familiar feeling of being followed:

*Shivers*. It wasn’t a total loss though, because I finally found the last two volumes of -Fake- (the last of which was plastic wrapped for “explicit content”. Should I be surprised that the content raters are warning Concerned Parents about sex between consenting adults but not between an 100-something-year-old virginal vampire and a teenage girl?).

During our pilgrimage to Doncaster I also learnt that toilets are really called “restrooms”, and that the foodcourt is too big and has exactly the same food as Melbourne Central, and in fact all the stores there are exactly the same as Melbourne Central and nearby City environs, just packed closer together. My subconscious probably knew this already, but who could pass up the opportunity to accidentally board a bus headed to some place called Bulleen? Actually, it’s possibly a miracle we managed to arrive home on the same date we left, but we did it anyway, and tomorrow we’re going back to the well-tramped and well-loved stretch of Brunswick Street. They have bagels there, you see.

*And before anyone accuses me of hypocrisy after my not-so-implied Twilight bashing considering what I admitted to reading into the wee hours last night, I say this: a) Vampire Hunter D is 80s Japanese horror, not 2000s American fodder; b) D doesn’t stalk people because he wants to get in their pants, he stalks them because they have a price on their heads; c) in VHD you don’t have to put up with whiny heroines because they usually die before the end of the book, care of D or some kind of supernatural tentacle machine monster created by Dracula during his hyrbid breeding phase. Yay!