Letters to Oscar: Boring Travel Post, Woo!

I have a riddle for you: what has two thumbs and was recently chilling more than a thousand kilometres from his house.

This guy

Having never in my life travelled further away than the coast before, it proved to be a strange, exciting and utterly exhausting week -- impressions hardly helped by the necessity of dragging an infant from one end of Melbourne to the other. And though my experiences are anything but unique, I am at heart a blogger, and that means I'm still going to tell you all about it whether you like it or not. I mean, what are you going to do: stop reading?
...
Actually, please don't do that.
...Hello?
Guys...?

Well, nuts to you jerks, I'm going ahead anyway.

The Flight.

Flying is a surreal experience, even in cattle-class. You haul your luggage through train stations and into elevators, protecting it like it's your life and death-glaring anyone even remotely shifty. Then, once the Promised Land is reached, you hand it right over to the first official-looking stranger who tells you to. Her name will be Bridgette, or possibly Esther: she will have scary eyebrows and just very slightly too much makeup; and you will gladly surrender hundreds of dollars worth of you personal property into her acrylic-clawed hands simply because she's in an outrageously-terrible waistcoat and you had to wait to do so.

Thus relieved of your stuff, you're forced to languish for what must be eons in a Purgatory-like building that can surely only be so terrible on purpose -- presumably so that the conditions aboard the plane seem better by comparison.

All of this is rewarded, however, by the marvel that is takeoff. The engines rouse their dull snore into a fierce howling; inertia presses you back into your seat as speed builds and builds to levels you never could have imagined possible from the ponderous bulk you walked into just moments ago. Pressure rises, invisible but omnipotent, pushing, pulling, dragging but still building, ever building, higher and higher and higher as jets scream into hateful apotheosis. Seconds pass but slowly, too slowly, and you know something has to be wrong, something's gone bad, there's too much noise, too much pressure, nothing but pressure on all sides surrounding you, pushing you, crushing you.

And there, at the crux, just when you become certain of your own fiery demise, it happens. Wheels leave tarmac. The howling metal gods return to their slumber. The terribe pressure eases. The world falls away and all of a sudden you notice that you've realised man's greatest dream: to slip loose our earthly bonds and pierce the heavens, laughing.

In one perfect moment, you take a hundred tons of metal and punch gravity in the dick.

The Destination

Douglas Adams once wrote that every person, deep inside themselves, carries a perfect and absolute knowledge of where they were born, and exactly how many kilometres away from that place they are at any time. Now, I didn't travel especially far: any trip than can comfortably be completed in a car isn't exactly an odyssey. Nevertheless, I have never felt as far away from home as I did when I stepped out of that airport, stared at a line of cabs just similar enough to my own to recognisable, and realised that even though I was in the same country, for all I knew about it, it might as well have been Mars.

Luckily, I was spending the week with friends who lived there, and who proved indispensable in getting around. With their help we managed to hit up both the fossil depository and the elephant house.

Every animal other than this is essentially redundant.

Still, even with all their help, the sense of disorientation never quite faded. Stepping out of the house was a feeling similar to that moment a few minutes after you sit down in what you're increasingly-certain is the wrong lecture hall, but before you have enough information to be sure: a creeping suspicion that things just aren't right. Every building feels slightly off, all the trains are the wrong colour (and just...just awful. Melbourne's public transport system is unapologetically terrible), and the atmosphere is just different to what you're used too.

This wasn't exactly helped by the time difference. A combination of latitude and the joke that is Daylight Savings Time meant that the sun had barely set before it was time for us to go to bed. This photo, for example, was taken at ten to eight Melbourne time...

More like ten to bullshit. You're not fooling anyone, Melbourne.

...which meant it was perfectly possible to be out until eight-thirty and not even notice, an effect as disorientating as it is totally awesome. Despite all this, the feeling of adventure and discovery you get just from setting foot outdoors is something I've never experienced before in my life. Insulated by the knowledge that you're only visiting, all the little differences only serve to energise and excite you -- a hitherto unfamiliar spice dropped into the dish of life.

Still, nothing can last forever. After seven fun-filled days, we said goodbye to our incredible hosts and headed off home.

The Return

Originally I'd meant to include a picture of myself looking sad to accompany this section (yes, I plan my pictures in advance: shut up) but yesterday, when I opened the door into my house, dumped my suitcase, and sank gratefully into my favourite chair, all I could think was thank god. Travelling is a wonderful, incredible adventure, but like all the best adventures it's also exhausting beyond measure. I climbed into bed that night and very nearly woke the baby up sighing in relief once my head found its way to my beautiful, wonderful, and above all familiar pillows. Even the once-boring routines of grocery shopping, organising bottles, and checking up on websites have had their thick layer of banality stripped away to reveal the warm, comforting layer of familiarity hiding underneath. Which, much like the unrelenting awfulness that is an airport, is what I suspect is the point: the ultimate benefit of travelling is not just to have a nice time while you're gone. It's to make the normal times, back home, seem so much nicer in comparison.

After all, going abroad is all well and good. But by far the best bit is getting back home.

Other Stuff

First of all: holy crap do Asian women love my baby. I have no idea why, but every trip out in Melbourne was punctuated by a parade of lovely Asian women coming forward to stickybeak at Oscar. Admittedly, a few of them crossed the boundary into creepy-town -- notably a group of roughly half a dozen middle-aged Chinese women who cornered Tiff in a parent room and started grabbing at Oscar's legs while talking to each other in their native language -- but they were the exception to the otherwise-extremely-charming rule. There's not really a point to this bit, to be honest: I just thought it was weird.

Secondly, I honestly tried as hard as I could to work this into the main text, but I didn't quite manage it, and I was damned if I was going to leave it out.

Above the Melbourne Central train station is a reasonably large shopping centre consisting mostly of mid-range clothing stores. The site also apparently used to house a factory for making leaden pipes and shot, and rather than knock it down the developers opted to leave it standing.

"So what?" I here you think. "They built around it."
Except they didn't.

They built over it.

The end result