Aus Episode 3: It still isn't over yet!
1 Comments Published by Oh Wayward One on 19 April 2010 at 4/19/2010 01:20:00 pm.
Before I really begin Episode 3, I should add a suffix to Episode 2, which was OH YES, The Kid turned 1 while we were in Darwin and as I'm told by a fellow "early april" birthdayer, this means that since it fell on Easter weekend this year, that now every few years she'll get an easter weekend bday, which will be great for her. Lucky kid!
For her birthday we just entertained ourselves and focussed on the adults as I had fully intended to do. Remember, I'm still Mommy-No-Fun until further notice (likely when she is at least old enough to comprehend the word "birthday"). Everyone thinks I'm cruel (nothing new there, says I) but frankly there's no reason to get her a bunch of crap and have to drag it around for the rest of holidays etc etc, particularly when she doesn't even know what's going on. SO, I let T. buy her a cute little tie-dye tank top at the market, and A. insisted we give her vanilla slice for her "special thing" with 1 candle on it, so that's what we had after dinner. And she got a boat ride in the deal too. Which, as I mentioned before, she pretty much slept through.
Also, what I wanted to say about D-town and didnt (BTW if my last recap read like a very annoying stream-of-consciousness Hunter S. Thompson novel or some such, it's because I was giving my dictation app a workout on my iPhone, to avoid having to type everything. It works great, except for punctuation) was that I could seriously consider living there, believe it or not. OK it wouldn't be my first choice, but what it did was rectify a lot of the grievences that I left Aus with when we moved away. What I learned this trip was that most of those bones that I had to pick with the country involved the city and snobby pretentious city folk that I had to deal with while living in Melbourne. Seeing that a society could exist back there which is still operating outside the boundaries of society (so to speak - they call it "Territorial Freedoms" - even though a lot of those are starting to disappear/be taken away by Big Brother) and still be in Aus was really uplifting for my spirits. Also, because of the freakish weather and climate conditions there, people just act different in general. A little bit more Libertarian I guess. I appreciated it.
I dont REALLY think I would try and live there though - because it's so damn far from everything, even for international travel it's a ridiculously far way away... but I just thought about it for awhile while we were there because apparently they're DESPERATE for every technical profession up there because none of the snobs from Melb & Syd will lower themselves to moving up there with all the crocs & weirdos. So T. was begging me to try and think about it because they've got jobs going up there in our field all the time. Funny. Who'da thought I'd ever make peace with the idea of living down under again? Well not that I HAVE or WILL, but my point is that I think I COULD, if it was there.
Anyhoo - on to Melbytown.
So we had to take the redeye (every flight to & from D-town is a redeye) leaving at 2am, landing in M. at 7am. Fay came to pick us up at the airport and it was sooooo good to see her again!! She's her same ol' same ol' generous and sweet and helpful and over-the-top mommy mode which I dearly love because, well let's face it, where else am I gonna get a fix of THAT! We spent the morning drinking coffee at her place, going grocery shopping, and making a plan for the week and playing catch-up. That day was a public holiday so lots of places were closed but we eventually made a plan with Bron and Magda to meet them at a pub along Bridge Rd. (where we used to hang out a lot). When we arrived at said pub, all the typical Melbourne CRAP came back to me.... not that I dont love Melbytown.... I do.... but it is really up itself in a lot of ways. Which have only increased and intensified in the 8 years I've been gone apparently!! We had this horrible cow of a waitress who absolutely scowled down her nose at us because no one wanted to order any of the $40 lunch specials (!!! ITS A PUB!!) and was generally rude and unhelpful, her in her freakin trendy retro buddy holly glasses and meticulously coiffed trendy hairstyle. When we ordered a bowl of fries to go with our horribly overpriced bottle of chardonnay it was all eye-rolls and heaving sighs, and we all just got annoyed and decided to bail after we'd had our drinks. Of course she never came back to our table to ask if we needed anything (like the bill) so we just estimated the price of the bill and left it on the table which drove her BATTY!! Especially when the tip was a big fat $0.00. Cow. This was only just the beginning of the many disappointments related to snobbery and pretentiousness that I experienced during the week.
The most substantial one being that NONE of our dodgey old pubs were alive and kicking anymore. It is a horrible state of affairs, I tell you!!! Everything is all gentrified and white-table-clothed and snobby. OK Melbourne has always been snobby, but not OUR Melbourne! Not Regular-Old-Joe Melbourne! Here was the score by the end of the week, in terms of our old stomping grounds:
1. The White Horse (neighbourhood pub): Torn down, replaced by chic newagey apartments
2. The Beehive (neighbourhood pub): Refurbished into a restaurant with posh polished floorboards, tablecloths, and a chef wearing a big puffy hat and designer chef uniform. With wine store attached.
3. The Skinny Dog (neighbourhood pub): In the midst of a similar upgrade while we were there, so closed to the public but a sneaky peek inside yeilded distressing images of dining rooms and fancy-pants artwork hanging on the crisp, whitewashed walls. Trendy stainless steel lighting fixtures being installed.
4. The 1000 cheap vietnamese restaurants of Vic. Road. Used to be tiny and spartan and communal... now, every other one has opened up into some giant Wagamama-style eatery with huge glass windows and expensive furniture and so on. booo hoooo!
5. McNick's late night souvlaki experience: Gone! Replaced by fancy eco-friendly hippie food bar. ugh.
I could go on and on, don't even get me started on the St. Kilda area in general. I still love it, but a lot of it was just unrecognizable, unaffordable, and unfriendly. And the house prices!! OMG!! no wonder all the normal people live 45 minutes away. And that's not even the bogans!
We ended up that first day getting a bunch of way-more-delicious food than that stupid pretentious hell-hole pub could've offered us, at the grocery store (all my old favourite typical Aussie foodstuffs: turkish bread, tzaziki, olives, cheeses, lebanese cucumbers, chardonnay, etc) and going back to F.'s place to continue our long overdue catch-up with the girls for the duration of the afternoon. It was a nice late summer day so we sat outside and it was just what the Dr. ordered. Then late late that night we all went (with B's new boyfriend who is a lovely artist) down to Vic Rd. and gorged ourselves on vietnamese food & behaved silly & enjoyed every moment. The LJJ was home with Fay's daughter which was again another perk! I believe she slept about 15 hours that night, what with having had the whole redeye flight from Darwin in her system and all. She was feeling a little under the weather by this time too, so even better reason to just let her sleep it off.
Next day we hung out some more, did a lot of driving around the old 'hood, taking photos, doing some memory lane nonsense, and again eating delicious food. That night we again left LJJ with Jamie and went out in St. Kilda with Bron & Paul and Fay to The Doulton, which is like, the LAST STANDING institution from my whole life there which still stood up to my satisfaction of being non-annoying in terms of pretentious snobbiness. Hooray! My faith is restored!! We also ate souvlaki (one for the list that we still had yet to check off since being back in Aus) at Stalactites in the Greek Precinct (which is pretty laughable nowadays because of course there's only like 3 greek restaurants there anymore!!!).
Then the next day we started the day with coffee at our old coffee house (which of course has ALSO been incredibly snobified and sterilized with the obligatory trendy wine bar style overhaul which appears to be the THING now)... this place used to be dark & cozy and creaky and mismatched with a real bohemian feel to it. Where you could go and sip coffee and read the paper and listen to Dylan on the stereo. Now you get hustled by slick waiters for $10 coffees and $32 breakfasts that involve hollandaise sauce and herb-encrusted new potatoes, etc etc. And of course the interior design is trés 1000-threadcount tablecloth style behind ceiling-to-floor windows and stainless fittings. Ahhhh another one bites the dust.
Also during the time we were there (I'm losing track of days now) we went down to Pt. Melb where 9 years ago to the EXACT DATE, we announced our engagement to all these same people, at The London (pub). It was cool to be there on the exact same day, and see the same ship in the bay that then took us off to Tasmania for our engagement trip away. ahhhh memories! At least The London still looked relatively the same. Crazy expensive menu now though. What is a bummer about that place is that it also is the site of B.'s wedding to M.... which just broke up last year so she wasn't exactly over the moon about joining us, which is understandable, so we just went with F. and LJJ. It was April 7....
After 2 nights with F. & Jamie, we were due to move on to Sandra and Aeron & their 2 kids' place in the suburbs. It was amazing the logistics that had to go into shifting us just a few miles down the road, because of The Kid. We are just grateful that one person had a camping cot, and another one had a car seat, and someone else had a chair and blah blah blah. Couldn't have done it without relying on people to borrow from! But everyone was so generous and understanding and we made it all work. So F. dropped us at their place, and that's where I'll start Episode 4.
For her birthday we just entertained ourselves and focussed on the adults as I had fully intended to do. Remember, I'm still Mommy-No-Fun until further notice (likely when she is at least old enough to comprehend the word "birthday"). Everyone thinks I'm cruel (nothing new there, says I) but frankly there's no reason to get her a bunch of crap and have to drag it around for the rest of holidays etc etc, particularly when she doesn't even know what's going on. SO, I let T. buy her a cute little tie-dye tank top at the market, and A. insisted we give her vanilla slice for her "special thing" with 1 candle on it, so that's what we had after dinner. And she got a boat ride in the deal too. Which, as I mentioned before, she pretty much slept through.
Also, what I wanted to say about D-town and didnt (BTW if my last recap read like a very annoying stream-of-consciousness Hunter S. Thompson novel or some such, it's because I was giving my dictation app a workout on my iPhone, to avoid having to type everything. It works great, except for punctuation) was that I could seriously consider living there, believe it or not. OK it wouldn't be my first choice, but what it did was rectify a lot of the grievences that I left Aus with when we moved away. What I learned this trip was that most of those bones that I had to pick with the country involved the city and snobby pretentious city folk that I had to deal with while living in Melbourne. Seeing that a society could exist back there which is still operating outside the boundaries of society (so to speak - they call it "Territorial Freedoms" - even though a lot of those are starting to disappear/be taken away by Big Brother) and still be in Aus was really uplifting for my spirits. Also, because of the freakish weather and climate conditions there, people just act different in general. A little bit more Libertarian I guess. I appreciated it.
I dont REALLY think I would try and live there though - because it's so damn far from everything, even for international travel it's a ridiculously far way away... but I just thought about it for awhile while we were there because apparently they're DESPERATE for every technical profession up there because none of the snobs from Melb & Syd will lower themselves to moving up there with all the crocs & weirdos. So T. was begging me to try and think about it because they've got jobs going up there in our field all the time. Funny. Who'da thought I'd ever make peace with the idea of living down under again? Well not that I HAVE or WILL, but my point is that I think I COULD, if it was there.
Anyhoo - on to Melbytown.
So we had to take the redeye (every flight to & from D-town is a redeye) leaving at 2am, landing in M. at 7am. Fay came to pick us up at the airport and it was sooooo good to see her again!! She's her same ol' same ol' generous and sweet and helpful and over-the-top mommy mode which I dearly love because, well let's face it, where else am I gonna get a fix of THAT! We spent the morning drinking coffee at her place, going grocery shopping, and making a plan for the week and playing catch-up. That day was a public holiday so lots of places were closed but we eventually made a plan with Bron and Magda to meet them at a pub along Bridge Rd. (where we used to hang out a lot). When we arrived at said pub, all the typical Melbourne CRAP came back to me.... not that I dont love Melbytown.... I do.... but it is really up itself in a lot of ways. Which have only increased and intensified in the 8 years I've been gone apparently!! We had this horrible cow of a waitress who absolutely scowled down her nose at us because no one wanted to order any of the $40 lunch specials (!!! ITS A PUB!!) and was generally rude and unhelpful, her in her freakin trendy retro buddy holly glasses and meticulously coiffed trendy hairstyle. When we ordered a bowl of fries to go with our horribly overpriced bottle of chardonnay it was all eye-rolls and heaving sighs, and we all just got annoyed and decided to bail after we'd had our drinks. Of course she never came back to our table to ask if we needed anything (like the bill) so we just estimated the price of the bill and left it on the table which drove her BATTY!! Especially when the tip was a big fat $0.00. Cow. This was only just the beginning of the many disappointments related to snobbery and pretentiousness that I experienced during the week.
The most substantial one being that NONE of our dodgey old pubs were alive and kicking anymore. It is a horrible state of affairs, I tell you!!! Everything is all gentrified and white-table-clothed and snobby. OK Melbourne has always been snobby, but not OUR Melbourne! Not Regular-Old-Joe Melbourne! Here was the score by the end of the week, in terms of our old stomping grounds:
1. The White Horse (neighbourhood pub): Torn down, replaced by chic newagey apartments
2. The Beehive (neighbourhood pub): Refurbished into a restaurant with posh polished floorboards, tablecloths, and a chef wearing a big puffy hat and designer chef uniform. With wine store attached.
3. The Skinny Dog (neighbourhood pub): In the midst of a similar upgrade while we were there, so closed to the public but a sneaky peek inside yeilded distressing images of dining rooms and fancy-pants artwork hanging on the crisp, whitewashed walls. Trendy stainless steel lighting fixtures being installed.
4. The 1000 cheap vietnamese restaurants of Vic. Road. Used to be tiny and spartan and communal... now, every other one has opened up into some giant Wagamama-style eatery with huge glass windows and expensive furniture and so on. booo hoooo!
5. McNick's late night souvlaki experience: Gone! Replaced by fancy eco-friendly hippie food bar. ugh.
I could go on and on, don't even get me started on the St. Kilda area in general. I still love it, but a lot of it was just unrecognizable, unaffordable, and unfriendly. And the house prices!! OMG!! no wonder all the normal people live 45 minutes away. And that's not even the bogans!
We ended up that first day getting a bunch of way-more-delicious food than that stupid pretentious hell-hole pub could've offered us, at the grocery store (all my old favourite typical Aussie foodstuffs: turkish bread, tzaziki, olives, cheeses, lebanese cucumbers, chardonnay, etc) and going back to F.'s place to continue our long overdue catch-up with the girls for the duration of the afternoon. It was a nice late summer day so we sat outside and it was just what the Dr. ordered. Then late late that night we all went (with B's new boyfriend who is a lovely artist) down to Vic Rd. and gorged ourselves on vietnamese food & behaved silly & enjoyed every moment. The LJJ was home with Fay's daughter which was again another perk! I believe she slept about 15 hours that night, what with having had the whole redeye flight from Darwin in her system and all. She was feeling a little under the weather by this time too, so even better reason to just let her sleep it off.
Next day we hung out some more, did a lot of driving around the old 'hood, taking photos, doing some memory lane nonsense, and again eating delicious food. That night we again left LJJ with Jamie and went out in St. Kilda with Bron & Paul and Fay to The Doulton, which is like, the LAST STANDING institution from my whole life there which still stood up to my satisfaction of being non-annoying in terms of pretentious snobbiness. Hooray! My faith is restored!! We also ate souvlaki (one for the list that we still had yet to check off since being back in Aus) at Stalactites in the Greek Precinct (which is pretty laughable nowadays because of course there's only like 3 greek restaurants there anymore!!!).
Then the next day we started the day with coffee at our old coffee house (which of course has ALSO been incredibly snobified and sterilized with the obligatory trendy wine bar style overhaul which appears to be the THING now)... this place used to be dark & cozy and creaky and mismatched with a real bohemian feel to it. Where you could go and sip coffee and read the paper and listen to Dylan on the stereo. Now you get hustled by slick waiters for $10 coffees and $32 breakfasts that involve hollandaise sauce and herb-encrusted new potatoes, etc etc. And of course the interior design is trés 1000-threadcount tablecloth style behind ceiling-to-floor windows and stainless fittings. Ahhhh another one bites the dust.
Also during the time we were there (I'm losing track of days now) we went down to Pt. Melb where 9 years ago to the EXACT DATE, we announced our engagement to all these same people, at The London (pub). It was cool to be there on the exact same day, and see the same ship in the bay that then took us off to Tasmania for our engagement trip away. ahhhh memories! At least The London still looked relatively the same. Crazy expensive menu now though. What is a bummer about that place is that it also is the site of B.'s wedding to M.... which just broke up last year so she wasn't exactly over the moon about joining us, which is understandable, so we just went with F. and LJJ. It was April 7....
After 2 nights with F. & Jamie, we were due to move on to Sandra and Aeron & their 2 kids' place in the suburbs. It was amazing the logistics that had to go into shifting us just a few miles down the road, because of The Kid. We are just grateful that one person had a camping cot, and another one had a car seat, and someone else had a chair and blah blah blah. Couldn't have done it without relying on people to borrow from! But everyone was so generous and understanding and we made it all work. So F. dropped us at their place, and that's where I'll start Episode 4.
I'm w/you on the bday thing and the NO GIFTS thing! However, I hope you got a pic of her and her vanilla slice/candle, b/c really the early days of babydom are for pic's and to show the kid when they're older.