Melbourne.

The place feels like it got spawned when Dublin got drunk and fucked Paris, and then Paris took steroids and smoked throughout the pregnancy.
Its a fantastic muscular sprawl of a place, full to the brim of Australians, Asians, Asian-Australians, Aborigines, Greeks, and about three black people. Mullets are common place, as are lesbians, gays, emos and freaks and the underlying cold politeness stemming from the mistrust of other demographics. And nobody over 26 lives here.
Trams run like spiderlegs from the centre for miles and miles, making it simple to navigate, get lost, get found again and be really bored sitting in traffic. They are really friendly to tourists and backpackers, with free tourist trams and busses, and kind volunteers from Melbourne tourism wearing red jackets on the street, happy to answer questions, give out leaflets, and help people out with ways of spending their hard-earned whilst on holiday.

These first few days have been pretty rough on me.
I guess I haven't really settled into the newness. I am scared to open this package and am beginning to feel that this trip, and by extension my life, is lacking some forward push.

Or not that, how to expand and show you both sides... maybe that I'm crawling out of an old skin, an ill-fitting one, and into a new one that can't be removed. I'm wondering, more and more, what comes next in life. I have to leave the college life behind, the drugs and parties and freedom and fun, and embrace the reality of moving on, with words like "career", "mortgage" and "sober" repeating themselves like a woodpecker perched on the side of my head, and avoiding those words, well that's why I find myself typing this in an apartment in Melbourne. But beyond that, new words too, smiles, positivity and the Greater Gods of the Promised Lands guiding me though I don't want to be.


I remember lying in bed the first night here. My back arched against the cool hard mattress, just staring at the white walls around me trying to sleep off the travel-sickness in our sterile apartment.

And when I tried to sleep, the strangest feeling washing over me. The hotel felt like a steep dividing line, the walls became arrows, pointing home and away, obscured in the shade of the creeping evening.

And for that time, a brief lollygag of bleary-eyed semi-consciousness, I felt like nobody I have ever known. It seemed all in my past sat up, waving at my back no matter where I turned, a good natured push in this new direction, which is obscured to me like cloudy nights on foggy freeways.


And this is how Melbourne introduced itself to us. Subconsciously sending messages of underlying deep meaning through road-signs and random noises, that effected my mood which was as changeable as the weaether here.

I felt total elation, and that sometimes turning to immediate and swinging depression and negativity, anger, foolishness, dizzy with newness, and again like an old man, beat down by the world too much and aching for the terminal sleep.
Most times, walking around with my eyes to the sky trying to catch the whole vista, I feel like I am in a movie set. I don't feel like a real or full person, just a plot device in an old movie, and it's wonderful and sad and strange and crazy.
I have to remember that the voyage is only beginning. I have to remember Cian and Sarah beating a trail here. I have to remember Bob and Peter, and to hope to see them here with us soon too. I have to give myself a break and open my eyes to the newness of the world. I've discovered Australia, I've gotten here, and that is just the start, not the tipping point.

Our tactics for this part of the trip were agreed before landing. We started off slow and steady. I think it's important, considering we are here for so long, to dip your toe into the vast pool of unknown, rather than dive headlong in without knowing how deep the pool is, where the tide pulls, and where you get swept away.

I'm being cautious, because I am scared and this storm of bitter sudden depression that has begun to subside has knocked my self confidence a bit, turning my into a malleable mouldable chunk of raw energy ripe for adventure.
Don't get me wrong, I'm still a charming bastard, but under that skin I am still hammering against a brick wall of my own fear trying to escape and be happy with being here, away from everything. I mean I have escaped!
Why imprison myself except for the greater good of prolonging the trip?

This place is one huge unknown, I am an x in an equation with a million other variables and by moving to here, I have introduced maybe a million more.
Home in Limerick I knew the rules, the score, the layout, the limitations, and what to expect. But there is a stifling tedium in always knowing the score.
I'm still loving the travel. The road, the planes, the ships, trains and busses, all fill my heart with hope.
Its the arriving I am having trouble with.

I just have no idea, as yet, where to go, what to see, how to get there, or how to get back again. Which is kinda funny, when you think about it, in the nation that invented the boomerang.

I can feel the call of Asia and almost smell it when I close my eyes. I can see the lights of Hong Kong, and smell the canals of Amsterdam, hear the cold stone of London, tread the beauty of Prague. But it's here first, and here longest, and I want to open up the underbelly of this place and find some beauty in the guts of it all.


On our first day here, the day we actually landed after the odyssey of backpain, boredom and disney movies, we got breakfast in an Italian eatery on Lygone st. which is a street composed entirely of restaurants and bars.
Most of the city seems to be designed in this way. Every street seems to have it's own theme. There is a bookshop street, a sports store street, a porn shop street, a camera shop street, a car rental street, and on it goes.
I'm not sure if the town planning here is fantastic or retarded. Most likely it's a total accident, but everything here seems to run like clockwork to an up tempo beat of happy youth and integration.
My first look at the place, after that breakfast, when we were out of our minds with tiredness and jetlag, having escaped the airport some two hours earlier and with 4 hours still to kill before we could check in to our apartment and sleep, goddamnit sleep!
Despite being so destroyed we were actually drunk on exhaustion alone, we had to fill in the time conscious around Melbourne. Most of those 4 hours, other than breakfast and ambling, were spent lying red-eyed and prone on a table outside a sandwich bar, smoking fag after fag and trying to stay awake.

The only effort of note, and memory, even now a day later is fading due to exhaustion, was that we walked down Swanston st. right to Federation Square, the centre of the Business District, and stared, completely in awe at the scope of the architecture, and completely freaked out about what was ahead of us. That was the clash the centre of our earth for the first few days.

We bought two of the cheapest bottles of rotgut we could find.
As soon as we checked in, the first bottle was passed around until it was empty, and by about 4 we were nicely drunk and things seemed much easier.
After battling such bad jetlag in San Fran, I was determined to stay awake, just keep my eyes open, until at least 8pm to try and survive the jet lag here. I made it because of alcohol, and the ability to be so tired that I could stop my mind from its freakout cycle through booze and my tobacco buzz. We watched tv on my laptop, and mono-syllabically supported each other with grunts of positivity and soft touches of re-assurance while our eyelids slowly got heavier and heavier until eventually the warming embrace of sleep took all my worries and let me rest for a good 12 hours of unmoving body warmth.







The next day we woke up at about 7:30am, or 10pm back home, and cooked breakfast.
Our first cooked meal in two weeks! You should have seen how happy I was to toss a pan and fry some meat, dirty up a kitchen and serve the food. It felt so good to eat home cooked food again, from even though the hangover feeling that we had woken up on the wrong continent persisted.
We walked on into town,strolling down Swanston st. towards the Central Business District. It's a sky-scraper-pocked landscape, with a hodge podge of neo-classical architectural styles, incredible buildings, huge wide ash-lined avenues and fantastic shopping and throbbing with people. We walked straight down to Fed Square and felt at the centre of everything for once.
sleep kept chasing us all day.
Because of all the time that stretched ahead of us to fill in Oz, it seemed like these baby steps of taking tiny tasks and digesting them day by day was the best way to slowly acclimatise ourselves to the ongoing reality of being firmly and definitely far out of the comfort zone.
I was still drained from putting myself through the ringer about actually getting here. Frequently I plunged into short-term depression and had to pull myself out or get pulled out by Sarah, still the ever-present rock.
Its totally man up time, and I have no energy to do it yet, but I feel that it is coming.

Most of the first two days were spent navel gazing, being in awe of a strange city, laughing at the awful tv and radio, and being misunderstood by the locals who seem to speak much slower than the rest of us. It gets annoying very quickly, that up-speak they sing at you. Why does everything have to sound like a question?
We couldn't decide what to do. the only thing we were certain of was that we werent having enough fun though I'm sure that is ahead of us.
The stress of the move sucker-punched us at regular intervals. We snuck into feeling ok after coaxing ourselves out the door to peak out at the surrounds, and then everything would temporarily fall apart as we unravelled in each other's arms, freaking out at what was ahead, what we were to do, and what was going to have to happen before we could relax here. Ahead of us was the option of travel through Australia, or settling and working in Melbourne while we waited for Cian and Sarah, or cutting and running to Thailand, where they were. I was thinking of just going straight home, and starting again, maybe in London, Amsterdam, Paris or Dublin. Anywhere that felt sane when compared to here. But that was just a coping mechanism I had developed and not a thought I wanted to follow through with, it was just a plot device I fooled myself with when It all seemed too much, and too far away for my liking.
I thought that when I landed in Melbourne, my future for the next year would just stretch out before me and the plan would unfold itself like a golden straight line road to Oz, like the fairytales my mom used to sing me to sleep with.

I realised that I hadnt planned at all for this trip. I had ended up in Melbourne with absolutely no idea as to how I should navigate it, what I should do next, where I should go to see anything cool, or where my life was going. It's a strange mix of liberation and imprisonment I can't explain, except to say that I feel like I couldn't be anywhere else a million times a day, and I wish myself anywhere else a million other times.
We only had a place to stay for one week, and were still tired and very prone to swings in emotion and depression.
The shadow of my failure in San Diego loomed large over me as I catapulted depression against the bedroom wall and took to drinking for any sense of normalcy when times started to get tough. I have smoked something like 3000 fags since landing.

But this cycle was destined to end. Emotional exhaustion alone returns the functioning brain to it's owner, and we really hit our stride on the third day.
My parents, whose every message to me since leaving has been positive and made me smile, got in touch again with more good luck. They told me that I was getting back 2900 euro in tax from my last year of work. I spent most of the hour after getting that text trying to contact them, pacing back and forth, smoking and refusing to believe it. I was hoping for 500 bucks. And they are going to front me out 3gs, for quitting my job and taking a long holiday from Ireland. I love it, sometimes, how the world works.
It seems that again, and how can you argue with me, that someone is pushing me hard in the back to complete this adventure. And I feel it pumping through me with the booze and blood and I have to defer to that. Im here now. And I cant go home, no matter how much I feel like I need to, and no matter how much my stomach or heart complains.
We spent the morning circling ads in newspapers, trying to find a place to stay while we are here.
Hope again lay in this necessity of existence and surprise, I jumped up to the task and finally was the one to find the place.
We called the most promising place and took a tram out to St. Kilda (a 20 minute trundle from the centre) to meet a guy who rents backpacker apartments. He was another crazy mad character and he sold us the place with his idiosyncrasy alone. I think he fancied himself an artist and found refuge in property rental, feeding out work to backpackers that came his way trying to find homes here. He was another lovely character, and put us both at ease, with his colourful shirts and light hearted banter. He led us to his beatdown old people carrier and whilst driving he tried to teach us about the area we were in, with his hands never on the wheel, pointing and girating while he talked on his mobile. He showed us a studio apartment a bit off the beaten in St. Kilda. When we pulled in, it looked like an abandoned motel, in need of some paint and love but solid and safe feeling. It has a bed, tv, oven, sink and fridge all in the same room. But the area seemed interesting, we dont have to sign a lease and we can leave as quickly or as slowly as we wanted so we grabbed it then and there.

We are moving in there on thursday. I think once we move there we will begin the job hunt. Surprisingly, I am feeling ok about it now. But the exciting thing is that between this sunday and next thursday, we have nothing planned, and nowhere to be, a car already rented and money to burn, and another adventure to plan, thank God.