Friday, October 7
I'm here! Melbourne fucking rocks, but the wireless in the hotel is stoopid expensive, so it's taken until now to get a free connection. Most good hotels give it up for free, give you free water and stuff, but this one nickel and dimes you. Or five and ten dollars you, more accurately.
The trip was fine, smoothest flight ever, felt like being in a room with a loud AC or something. I didn't get DVT, as far as I can tell, but apparently it can drop you without warning at any time in the future so who knows. The time change wasn't half as bad as I expected, slept that off the first night and feel great. The hotel gym is absolutely palatial, a real gym, not just a hotel fitness room at all. Good thing I converted my whole weights program to kilograms before I left home. They even have a set of punching bags, one of which is responsible for both the missing skin on my knuckles and the goofy grin I wore for most of the morning. Nothing better than beating the crap out of something semianimate at 9AM.
Sound check was today and went fine, since the venue is wonderful and the sound system has some serious cojones. The Talent was happy with it, and had a nice flip-out on the tour manager early, so it should be a good show. We're on dinner break now, in the little coffeeshop that's been set up for us festival artiste types. I finally feel comfortable with the material and don't do the pre-show panic anymore. Course I'm drinking a lot of coffee here, so we'll see. The festival she's a part of kicked off in style last night. The wine flowed like water on East 6th St. You took one sip and somebody refilled your glass. They had a gypsy/klezmer band that we liked more than most. I'm pretty sure we were the only ones singing along with "Kalashnikov", anyway. They kept trying to get people to dance, but that wasn't happening that early in the evening. A sea of lesbians as far as the eye could reach (did I mention Melbourne is about the gayest city ever) and I got hit on by a man. Phooey. We were leaving the party, B a few steps behind me, and he held his glass to clink with mine and said, "We've been searching for each other." I cold dissed him, though, and apparently once I was out of earshot he said "Lesbian." so I guess I still got it a little bit.
So this town is great. It's got all the good parts of places like Vancouver and Portland, a bit of Amsterdam (though no weed culture that I've seen so far) and all the conveniences of home. I was easily able to get all the obscure stuff I like to have for my weird dietary requirements, and have had to disrupt my schedule very little. Other than the adding of kangaroo to my food repertoire, that is. It was good, pretty much like tender beef with a gamier edge. Sunday we're going to try to get to the restaurant I've dubbed Eat the Zoo, where I will have wallaby or emu or crocodile or something. Bush tukka. Can't wait.
We've been all over the town, putting in 10+ miles a day easily. There are all these little alleys and arcades full of restaurant and places to get coffee which is uniformly excellent, though they put cocoa powder on top of the cappuccinos around here and I keep forgetting to tell them not to. Oh well. They also have Splenda tablets, tiny little microdots of sweetness which I'm going to fill a suitcase with before I come home because I adore them.
Oh, and as to the toilet thing, I still don't know. Every toilet I've seen so far has been the European type with the square hole and the big crazy chaotic flush that goes pretty much straight down. I'm going to take a bath one of these days and check that; the sink drains straight down so it's impossible to tell. I'm working on it, though, I promise.
Gosh. So much cool shit here. I wish I could post every day. We saw magistrates on their lunch breaks, little outfits and perruques and everything. Yesterday they had an Aboriginal burning ceremony to open the festival, which was kind of nice. They had a tribal representative give a little spiel about the meaning of the ceremony and stuff. Then the white people started their logrolling and backscratching speeches, and a blonde girl picked up the smoking pile of gum leaves, moved it off to one side and put it out. I don't know if the Aborigines have the same thing as every other culture with a burning ritual, and maybe it wasn't hugely offensive to put the thing out, but it sure seemed that way to me.
Haven't been to the "gaol" yet, or any of the museums or any of that stuff, just wandered the town. We've been to a couple of the outskirt neighborhoods and covered pretty much all of the main rectangular area. Love it. A little suit-heavy where we are, but it's the business district and that's to be expected. It's not much of a walk to somewhere else, ever, and that's good.
Enough for now. I'll try to get back here before we leave Melbourne, and I think at least one of the hotels in the other cities should have free wifi so I'll post more.
2:33 AM
