Ah, that’s right.

I didn’t hear reports of anyone being severely injured in the storm, and by all accounts everyone with home and contents insurance thought it was all good fun in the way everyone does when something unexpected happens to break up the mononotony of a Saturday afternoon. I thought it was pretty cool myself, even when the hailstones disappeared in favour of a flood of water gushing down the steps of Degraves St subway while my boss ran to the door and barricaded us in before the worst of the water could seep under the edge of the door and flood Sticky Institute, where I work.

View from the Inside

So, yes, while I was technically present during the storm, I was also underground in a slowly flooding shop. But thanks to the fact that Sticky Institute seems to get flooded more than once every blue moon (and it’s already happened twice this year), our fearless leader Elle got all the stock off the floor and created a kind of barrier around our sacred photocopier just as the water started pooling around our feet. We took off our shoes (apparently the smell of subway water does not come out), turned up sodagreen on the stereo, and kicked back with our MacBooks while the water level rose outside the shop until people were all but wading through it.

After a few hours it became clear that no emergency services were going to rescue us, and it was only a matter of time before we’d have to switch off mains power and lose our internet. Elle toyed with the idea of calling Today Tonight to do some hilarious tabloid piece about poor subway shop owners and their frequently flooded holdings, but then even that idea lost its appeal in favour of going home. Only one problem: the water lever was a few centimetres in the shop, but shin deep right outside our door. The solution? Bin liner boots, of course!

And people think I'm weird, honestly.

And other than some slightly damp soles and one zine that randomly fell off a shelf into the water (and that stack of business cards I knocked with my elbow into same and later suggested could be used as Official Sticky Flood Headquarters® souvenirs), there was no permanent harm done. It would be days before the subway’s 1950s drainholes managed to suck anything up, and until then we could only hope someone with a giant pump would come down and de-saturate all the shops. After talking with some city officials looking after a boy who’d apparently thought a flooded subway was a great place to go exploring — receiving a broken ankle for his trouble — we climbed back up to the city where it was still raining, but only lightly, and I made my way home on a tram whose roof was leaking steadily onto the seat next to mine. Which pretty much guranteed my umbrella its own seat the rest of the way home.

All in a day’s work, really.

V: *feels self-satisfied*

Head of Media and Communications: “…of course, this just means you’ll all be competing fiercely against each other for good marks in your subjects.”

V: “shit.”

***

So I’m finally back home after five extremely excellent months living and travelling through Asia, which also means I’m currently in the throes of mild but everpresent reverse culture shock. Nothing’s upset or pissed me off too much so far, but I haven’t exactly re-integrated into society yet either. But seeing as it’s just a day after Australia Day** (which I only remembered after queueing behind some lobster-complexioned lasses in Australian flag dresses at the airport), I thought I’d share with you all my thoughts on being back in Melbourne.

1.  Where did all these pale, hairy, large-limbed and extremely loud people come from, and why are they speaking English?

2. Giving the trams a new exterior paint job does not make them any less infrequent and slow.

3. Ravioli! Ravioli! And the pizza…OMG, it actually tastes like food! *slobbers some*

4. $2.50 water? That’s so cheap! *mentally multiplies this by six* …or maybe not so cheap. But there’s something about overpriced Mount Franklin water that soothes the soul (and then you remember it’s owned by Coca-Cola).

5. People here read books in the wrong direction.

6. Melbourne’s skyscrapers are numerous enough to fit inside a petri dish.

7. I haz balcony. Hawr hawr hawr.

8. What do you mean I can’t have a 20 minute shower!?

9. People actually care when you accidentally bump into them.

10. Cats! I have cats again! *squeezes them both and consequently discovers a large deposit of fur on t-shirt* Cats…I have cats again…

Ah, Melbourne.***

*Paraphrased. It’s too early in the year to be taking notes.

**Referred to by me and mine more commonly as Invasion Day.

***I swear that’s not patriotism. It’s irony, or cynicism, or nostalgia. Or something.

Tomorrow I will be back in Melbourne for the first time in five months, and in between all the uni-enrolling, reminding-old-friends-of-my-existence-ing, ravioli-eating, sunburning, zine-making and speaking English to everyone again I just hope I still have enough presence of mind not to crawl under my doona and sleep through February.

Yeah, right.

And what do you know: my dream came true! Twice in the past week, in fact.

Unfortunately this also means that Shanghai now officially has everything that Australia does, and also better access to bootleg Asian soap operas.

Good luck dragging me back to Melbourne.

[With thanks to Vgag for posting this on my behalf, because Wordpress is banned in China today].

Melbourne Airport

Looking much as it always has (i.e. not particularly bothering to impress anyone), except for splitting up the foodcourt so the stingy domestic flight people don’t have to walk as far (bitter, me?), we arrived at Tullamarine and – after getting squeezed to death by my relatives – I went through into quarantine and was pretty much stopped immediately. He was short and seemed to be taking too much stock in his superior’s superior instructions.

“We have to weigh your carry on,” he said. Crap. The whole point in having carry on is to circumvent the weight restrictions put on checked-in luggage! And believe me when I say I milked that loophole for all it was worth and even managed to squeeze my heavy-ass purple doc martens into my bag at the last minute.

With a heavy heart, I loaded up my bag and the weight read 10.89 kilos. “That’s over the limit,” the man said.

“Actually, the limit is 11 kilos,” his superior reminded him. “But it’s your call.”

Great – the fate of my wallet was now in the hands of a quarantine intern, who didn’t look very keen on throwing me a bone. But he ended up waving me through anyway, if grudgingly. Personally, I put it down to the psychic powers of my giant flower headband, that was later to render many an X-ray operator at Kuala Lumpur airport agape. Amateurs.

Waiting in the lounge for my flight to start boarding, I bought an overpriced bottle of Mount Franklin water from a vending machine and by some strange twist of fate, was given exactly the right amount of change to buy a Pokemon keychain. It was fate, OK?

Flight MH 138 to Kuala Lumpur International Airport

What I don’t understand about aeroplane protocol is that despite the fact that it was now about 2am and we were barely into a 7 hour flight, they fed us food. For God’s sake, people, go the f**** to sleep, don’t stuff your gullet and watch My Life in Ruins and cackle infuriatingly when the poor, sleep-deprived teenaged writer behind you is desperately trying to get some shut eye, you stupid geriatric, moronic, self-absorbed [redacted].

But I liked the flight attendant serving my aisle. His name was Rudy and he had sticky-out ears and spoke in perfect Malaysian-accented English and said idiomatic things like “no wonder”. I’ve come to the conclusion that when you’re overseas you truly begin to appreciate idiomatic English.

KL International Airport…

…was much as I remembered it from 2006, just more under construction. But KLIA is a pleasant enough airport to stop over in, though the constant and never particularly subtle Malaysian tourism propaganda posted everywhere and anywhere became wearing quickly. I whiled away the three hour stop over playing my DS and duty free window shopping, and met a girl headed to Taipei on exchange over the drinking fountain. I assured her that Taipei was a wonderful city, and that I was heading over myself in January. She asked where else I was going, and when I told her, proclaimed I must be going on some kind of Asian travel adventure. I’d never thought about it in those terms, but I guess she’s right.

Flight MH388 to Shanghai Pudong International Airport

Considering this was a day flight, I was rather surprised at how sedate everyone on the plane was, and in between reading the new Stephanie Plum novel that my aunt had bought me in Melbourne, managed to doze away most of the flight.

OMFG – I’m back at Pudong Airport!

If it wasn’t the constant signage that told me this was so, it was the humidity. I forgot about the humidity. I had also kind of forgotten it was Summer in this part of the world, having just left rain-soddenMelbourne. And I was wearing my giant Elmo hoodie, which is comfy but stifling in a badly air-conditioned airport. That and I’d just signed a quarantine form pretending I didn’t have the flu, and pretending I hadn’t been in contact with about a billion other people who had the flu in the past week. But I’d just seen the aeroplane video explaining the new quarantine/customs procedure care of H1N1, and in no uncertain terms did it say that if I admitted to feeling just a shade off-colour, I would be whisked away and put into real quarantine. I also knew they were going to take my temperature, and judging from several bad experiences at Hong Kong airport, I knew it didn’t matter if I was fit as a fiddle, my temperature would be over and they would discover my runny nose, sore throat, fatigue and cough and not believe me when I said that anyone who’s been in transit for 14 hours would exhibit the same symptoms. But miraculously, and for reasons I put down to having taken my psychic flower headband off (didn’t want to be conspicuous) and standing in front of an air con vent for ten minutes before going through the infra red camera, they let me through.

But then I had to wait in a long queue full of Australians and Canadians and get interrogated over the discrepancy between me and my 3-year-old passport photo (the main difference being my newfound lack of hair). They did a computer face match, which was only slightly more disconcerting than the fact that everyone was wearing face masks, then they let me through.

Christine, My Penpal

I was supposed be getting picked up by someone from the homestay agency who had placed me with a family, but coming into the arrivals hall, I couldn’t see my name on any of the held out signs. I did a few extra rounds of the hall without luck, somehow not surprised that there was a hitch, and wondering if I could contact the agency with a public telephone. Then, suddenly, I saw a harried-looking woman gabbling into her mobile, a scrunched up print out with Aviva Kidd on it in her hand. I shouted to her in Mandarin, waved my arms around, and attracted a lot of attention – but not hers. When she did finally see me though, she looked ridiculously relieved and joined me, helping me with my bags. It turned out that this was the fabled Christine from the homestay agency who I’d been emailing for the last month or so.

She talked to me in lovely and completely understandable Mandarin that I answered surprisingly coherently. Actually, I think it was just that my brain had snapped along with my inhibitions, and in the next half hour it took us to get out of Pudong and into Puxi, I don’t think I’ve ever held such a complete conversation in Chinese. I was tired, but happy, and I felt that if this was how it was going to be for the next four months, I could deal with that.

The Dutchman

We stopped on a busy street in one of Shanghai’s CBDs (they have five or more, depending on who you ask), and Christine bade me farewell as she was replaced by Martin, a colleague of hers from the agency, originally from Holland. He told me he’d never had a Chinese lesson, but had picked up all his Chinese by ear. We talked in English, and I listened with particularly rapt attention when he was going through ways I could extend my visa long enough to stay in China for four months. That’s all still up in the air, but at least now I know what I can do. We also got talking about how much hair cuts cost in Shanghai, and the cab fortuitously stopped beneath an underpass allowing us an unparalleled view of a what you could call a barber shop, minus walls and a roof. We were also able to calculate how much one man had paid for his underpass cut by watching how much change he was given (the cut cost about AUD$1).

The Arrival

We arrived at my homestay’s apartment building complex, complete with guard post out front and torch-toting security patrolling the forecourt at night. Thank God there was a lift, because the apartment was on the seventh floor (though having carried bags of textbooks up and down five flights of stairs every day when I was studying in Guangzhou, I felt I was mentally prepared for the task). Yun, my “homestay girl”, and her mother, welcomed me and Martin into the flat, I got the tour (which was initiated when I translated Martin’s much more polite “Can we take a look at the facilities?” with “Bedroom (卧室)”), and we signed the contract. I paid up (to be honest it was a relief to get that much money off me), and after some awkward goodbyes, Martin left, and I decided to unpack (anal, I know, but I’m a neat freak when it comes to rooms I’ll be inhabiting for any extended period of time).

My new lair

Yun’s mother had prepared some lovely food, I presented the requisite stuffed koala and kangaroo souvenirs to Yun, and we talked a lot over dinner. Yun’s uncle and his family had been to Melbourne on a ten day tourist trip and had loved it so much they’ve since bought a house there and emigrated. Yun is 22, has finished Chinese university, and plans to study at RMIT in Melbourne next year. She and her mother pored over the book of Melbourne pictures I’d brought with me, and I had fun describing landscape and locations I know and love as if I were an awe-struck tourist myself. Later, she showed me photos of the first tourist her family had housed, an English girl who’d stayed for two months. As I said, my brain had snapped and Mandarin was flowing out of me like nobody’s business, but at this point I was tired and my ability to comprehend what was being said was waning. Thankfully Yun’s English is excellent, and I promised to help her with revision for her upcoming IELTS (English exam), which she needs to do well in to get entrance into RMIT.

We watched TV ’til 10.30, exchanging our opinions on various Chinese and Taiwanese celebrities and their careers, then hit the hay. Like all Chinese beds, my bed is as hard as a rock (I’m not making this up, I’m sitting on it right now – ouch), but it was so hot I slept on top of the coverlet, and I was so tired I fell asleep easily.

This Morning

I woke up much earlier than Yun had expected (both she and her mother were out), but I spent the time having a sinfully long shower (only Australians can understand how sinful long showers really are) and cleaned myself up. Dear, dear Yun had listened to my rampant babbling last night on the subject of food, and had bought me a whole carton of coconut milk and was extremely bemused when I almost cried with joy. I ate red bean and vegetable baozi and salty tofu for breakfast, and managed not to touch the jar of peanut butter only because my face was stuffed with everything else. My Mandarin was (is) a bit stiff this morning, but we still seem quite happy to shift in and out of both languages, and at least when I revert to English I don’t feel so guilty because I’m backhandedly helping her revise for her exam. This afternoon we’re going out in search of a Chinese SIM card for my phone, and at some point during the next three days Yun and I are supposed to register my presence at the nearest police station. Won’t that be fun?

Tomorrow I’m going to start writing the third novel, because I am determined to finish the first draft of it before I leave for Hong Kong at the end of December. But who knows what will happen between now and then, and with Shanghai in all its craziness just outside my window, I can’t wait to find out.

P.S. :D

Au revoir, Melbourne!

But the exhibition itself was great, though I definitely prefer Bracks’ work when he was painting scenes of “ordinary” Melbourne life in the 40s, 50s and 60s. And finally getting to see The Bar in person, I now understand why the National Gallery of Victoria was (and still is) so desperate to acquire it. What an incredible painting, even just aesthetically.

John Bracks' 'The Bar', 1954

Other favourite paintings in the exhibition were Brack’s self portrait shaving in the mirror, the back of one of his daughter’s heads with her loopy hairstyle, the old schoolbuilding caught in late afternoon sun, his nude in the bathroom, Collins Street 5pm (of course), and its figurative descendant, the mechanical pencils marching out of the tower made of scrabble tiles. What I found disappointing about the exhibition curatorship-wise though, was that most of the paintings did not have individual descriptions under their labels, and even major paintings like Collins Street, 5pm were marked by interesting, but only vaguely relevant quotes from the artist. Still, a relatively minor quibble about an otherwise fabulous exhibition of one of Melbourne’s great artists.

All of that art-ogling can be a tiring exercise though. Lucky for me I have a giant cup of coffee to zap my neurons back into functionality.

Image credit for The Bar.

Apparently it’s been Winter for a while when I thought it was still Autumn. Though I guess not having as many days of being able to see my breath in my own bedroom is a good thing.

Still, everyone enjoys the occasional holiday, and a good friend of mine was celebrating her 18th in Winchelsea and Geelong, so after an extra half hour delay involving the country-bound train managing to start our journey on the wrong track, I arrived in Geelong, at which point I was again surprised at how it wasn’t just a strip of sandy road with a pub and a post office dating back to when stonework and Brittania were the architectural manifestos of Australia. And again my geographical ignorance came into play when I realised you could see the sea from Geelong. Who knew?

Still, though, you’re unlikely to see advertising in the City with people called ‘Felila’ or ‘Abey’ on it, and my first foray into a country pub was cut short when I was unable to prove my graduation from minor-hood with an ID card that actually had my date of birth on it (“What about a driver’s license? What? You mean you don’t drive?”. “It’s all about the trams,” I wanted to say). I enjoyed myself a lot, though, but after about 20 hours abroad I felt a primal urge to return home, back to the Land of Trams, Brunswick St, the expanses of CBD bluestone and a Dangerfield on every corner.

Which does call into question my ability to move overseas with any great success, but I feel relatively confident that I can acclimatise to Shanghai’s smog, metro, Nanjing rd, expanses of pedestrian-unfriendly streetscape and bootleg DVD stores on every corner. Especially the bootleg DVDs.