montage monday: melbourne

Today's Monday Montage is a little slice of nostalgia... a year ago this coming Friday, Ma and I took off for our five day trip to Melbourne... and these are a selection of the photos I took while we were there.

Some of my photos from Melbourne have shown up on here before... I made my first template out of one of them... and the "street art" shot on the second to last row, second shot from the end showed up as a Photo Friday post back in December.

It was actually a pretty good trip... even if it had less than auspicious beginnings after our flight to Melbourne on the Thursday morning was delayed by over five hours due to a mechanical problem with the airconditioning in the plane, then an inability to fix said mechanical problem, then having to wait for them to fly a different plane out from Melbourne for us and finally arriving in Melbourne some time around in the late afternoon. But, everything happens for a reason... as we touched down in Melbourne the weather was just clearing after a torrential rainstorm that had lasted most of the day... on the Friday, Ma grabbed a copy of one of the Melbourne papers showing someone trudging down Spencer Street in the city and being soaked by the splash from a car driving past... Spencer Street being the very street we had to trudge down to get to our hotel... so that could have been us.

After that though, the weather was pretty good to us... it didn't rain at all as far as I remember, and even if we did have fairly grey and cloudy mornings most of the five days, the afternoons were pretty nice (as the mix of grey and blue skies in the photos will attest to).

And for anyone visiting Melbourne, I highly recommend the Tropicana Juice/Food Bar on Elizabeth Street for breakfast... you can't miss it, there's a photo of it right in the middle of the montage... it's the one with oranges and bananas hanging all over the facade (although now, with the price of bananas being so high, it's possibly mostly oranges).

I have to say that I'm very fond of Melbourne... not only the city and the way it feels (and the fact that I feel like I kind of know my way around it after two trips)... but particularly all of it's intelligent and artistic street art/graffiti... I made a point of dragging Ma down various and sundry back alleys when we were wandering around, just to see what we could find.

So here's to you Melbourne... Victoria and South Australia may have this whole state based rivalry thing going on... but me, I loves ya baby!

And now... in local news...

I woke up really early this morning, around 5am or so I think, after having had the WEIRDEST dream... I know, I have a lot of those... but I think possibly this morning's dream took some kind of prize, even within the rather odd category of my dreams... In the dream, I was visiting someone in some hospital, and it turned out that he or she (I don't remember now) had to have their arm amputated and for the internal logic of the dream, it had to be done with a blowtorch (I don't know either)... as the arm was starting to be severed, the person turned into a MASH-era Alan Alda, screamed, and passed out from the pain... and then I looked down at my right arm and realised that whatever had been wrong with them was now wrong with me, and I was missing a band of flesh, muscle, whatever, around half of my arm, and that it would need to be cut off with the blowtorch too... in the dream, I fully expected to scream and pass out too... but I remember feeling the pain of the blowtorch, and then I was really awake and very aware of the feeling in my right arm, and that I could actually feel it there. I think the dream pain woke me up, which is probably a good thing...

Up until now, I've been going for my walk in a pair of jeans (which now have a big rip along the knee after I fell at the beginning of March)... but I got a new pair of sweatpants/tracksuit pants (I don't know why, but I really do prefer the American term sweatpants over our Australian term tracksuit pants... or trackies... urgh) and I wore them today for the first time. The only problem is that they're sweatpants, so the pockets aren't arranged like pockets in jeans, so I didn't take my full set of keys, and my mobile sat differently in my pocket which was odd... Also, because you don't wear a belt with sweatpants (unless you're some kind of crazy person) I didn't end up taking my camera with me... so I'm going to have to work out some way of doing that (whether it ends up being crazy-person-belt-with-sweatpants styling or not, I'm not sure)... and they were pretty comfortable, even if I thought they were going to be a little too thin when I started off on the walk and the wind seemed to whip right through them.

My weird mood from Saturday continues... although I think it might have actually reached it's peak last night... I ended up resorting to my "Black Mood" journal... something I haven't written in for a year... actually exactly a year today... but I was kind of tired of blogging the same thing and the same feelings over and over again, so I decided to just dump it all down in my journal... it's also useful because I don't actually need to give any backstory, I can just do a braindump. By the end of it, I'd written five pages, and was actually feeling a little better...

One thing that I shared with the Black Mood journal that I should probably share with the rest of you... it turns out that Marc isn't actually the complete and total stranger that I thought he was. Adelaide being the "Two Degrees of Kevin Bacon" town (as opposed to the usual six) that it is, he's actually someone that I'd spoken to a long time ago on Gaydar and had expressed an interest in then too (but never hooked up with for reasons of the rules he and his boyfriend at the time played by). It also means that I know now his story about having broken up with his boyfriend was true, since the last time I saw his profile he was down as "gay male couple" with a link to his then-partner and now he's down as "single gay male". It also makes it really hard to be as completely and totally Zen about him not calling as I want to be, since it would be really easy to just drop him a message online and say hey. But if he hasn't/doesn't/won't call, then there's no point in chasing him... so I'm just going to have to behave.

Current Mood: