Blue-ish

Today, I went about the routine that I seem to have developed during my time here in Melbourne, the one in which I seem to spend at least six hours of the day doing self-imposed work which I will very likely never be paid for and as a consequence spending very little money otherwise.
The routine goes something like this: I get up later than the guy in the bunk beside me, who gets up early because he has work on a construction site, and earlier than the guy on the bed across the room from me because he does not work at all. I amble down to the kitchen and make myself a bowl of porridge (large sack of porridge oats approximately 65 cents) and a cup of tea (priceless) and sit down and manage to be surprised once more by the sort of thing that happens to be on Australian television at this time of the morning. Yesterday it was an episode of Deadwood, which I had seen once before followed by the film Closer and all before ten o’clock in the morning. Colourful language and porridge is clearly the way to start the day and certainly beats BBC Breakfast News or Supermarket Sweep.
The kitchen at Toad Hall is large and usually fairly busy at most times of the day as the other residents of the hostel go about their own routines and by some sort of miracle, no-one ends up getting in each others way. I generally run into the same people each morning and although I have been putting on my big act of being friendly and approachable, I probably come across as a deranged loon of some description, but you should be pleased to know that I have reached nodding acquaintance with some of the guests here, although it’s a sorry state of affairs when I seem to be the most sociable one in the building.
I then pack my bag with the usual equipment: the electronic-typewriter-thing, the ipod, the usual, and I trek down to Flinders Lane where the city library is located. A modern, funkily designed building with a good sized quiet reading room, which at this time in the morning is not yet swarming with students and home to a good sized Chinese book section, which from my completely ignorant and probably offensive perspective of the language must be a bitch to alphabetize. I stay here for around two hours or two-thousand words depending on what comes first, then amble back to the hostel by which-ever means looks interesting. I do not buy anything on the way, and the shops do not take long to become tediously familiar over the days, but Melbourne is full of little nooks and crannies which are a pleasure discover. Narrow alleyways stuffed with cafes and bustle are a favourite, but there are a handful of good second hand bookshops to get lost in as well – and given that I remain a little too sentimental about some of the paperbacks that I have accumulated so far, these are shops in which I am reasonably well-off in their currency of choice.
Lunchtime is spent back in the hostel. Again, more people humming around each other rather than talking to each other, and more peculiar programmes on the television. I occupy myself until four o’clock, which includes time to go over what I have done during the morning, and then I head off to the State Library of Victoria which does not allow the full backpack to accompany me (or, alas, the ipod), so I take what I need wrapped in a department store carrier bag which makes me look either like a student or at least highly suspicious, and wander deep into the depths of the building, favouring a seat on the balcony if possible, affording views over the peaceful book-lined chamber, the hushed sound of murmured conversation and the quiet clattering of keyboards, the faint smell of dust and disinfectant. Once more, I stay here for two-thousand words which usually takes me until six o’clock or so and then I head back to the hostel for dinner and once I have finished with the washing up, I take all my stuff and take a walk up to Lygon Street, which is home to three bookshops, a pleasant art house cinema and an awful lot of pizzerias. I do not buy anything again, which must irritate the book shops immensely, but the atmosphere is lovely around this part of town and it proves to be a relaxing place in which to walk aimlessly. I head back to the hostel and stop on the way at the internet café across the road where I hole up for an hour or two to upload the days work and scan over it a couple of times before saving it online.
So, there’s a synopsis of a general day, the sort of thing I’ve been doing for the last few weeks and which I have become – strangely – rather attached to even though it seems rather miserable and antisocial when I read it back to myself.
It isn’t.
Really, I’m fine.
And I am. Honestly, it’s been a very pleasant time spent here and this is the problem. Today is my last day in Melbourne and I realise that I am going to miss the place. I have not really done as many things as I feel I could have done here. I did not get a job like I hoped I would, and I did not meet so many people (a certain streak of misanthropy probably did not help there, I confess) so perhaps part of the sadness of leaving is a regret that I did not make more of the place.
I walked down to the railway station this evening before dinner to gauge how long the walk would take me (twenty minutes unburdened, double it with the rucksack, just in case…) before heading down for the train early tomorrow morning and I realised once again, as I took a long route back, that I would not be walking these streets again in the near future, and that this might be the last time I would see these views of the city – a similar revelation to the one I had this evening as I left the State Library for ostensibly the final time.
Perhaps it’s simply a case of disliking leaving in general, a sentiment balanced by an enjoyment of arriving somewhere new. Tomorrow I’ll be on a train again and will be heading back to Adelaide once more which is not strictly somewhere new, but is at least the first stop in a continuous chain of pre-booked journeys which will take me first to Sydney and then by plane to Auckland.
Yes, that’s right. I’m going to be catching up with both Gary and Julia.
Now who’s depressed?

200 Hostels

I wait out my term in the Nunnery (now there’s a sentence I never thought I would write) and the interminable seven further nights drag on, made bearable my numerous trips to the nearby cinema.
During the week, Nicole moves into the room as well, and tries out a number of the spare beds before settling on the remaining bottom bunk. Sam and she try to emulate the one in the bed beneath me (whose name never sunk in) and so, by the end of the week, it looked as though there were three four poster beds in the room with myself sleeping on top of one of them like the intruder they clearly took me for.
Sam turns out to be disappointingly less mysterious than Nameless seems to believe. A gangly English guy with one of those faces which is all cheekbones and collagen, he’s a good looking lad certainly, but his propensity for farting and belching and the evident pride in which he performs such stunts publicly do not strike me as qualifying for an air of mystery. But then what do I know?
As I pack to leave – a task I attempt to perform with such stealth that they might not even appreciate I am doing so – Nicole catches me red handed and asks me if I am leaving (which over the past week is about the only thing she has actually said to me. But she has said it several times.) and I say that I am.
“Well,” she says looking delighted, “It was lovely meeting you.”
She helps me out the door by standing out of the way and watching. As I close the door behind me, she stands tensed in the middle of the room, and as the latch clicks into place, it is accompanied by a little whoop.

Having wanted to move anywhere with little regard to where I actually ended up, I booked myself into a place called The Greenhouse situated in the middle of the city centre, one street over from Flinders Street Station.
The Greenhouse – although boasting a good write up in the Lonely Planet – is a hostel converted not from a Nunnery, but from the top three floors of an office building. The rooms are clean and spare. Four bunks and four lockers per room, the rooms accessed by long white anonymous corridors, the doors opened with swipe cards which hum and click in the locks.
Oddly, the dividing walls of the rooms are simple partition arrangements and are not properly fixed to either the ceilings or the walls on either side. They are very thin and anything said in one room can be heard throughout the entire floor and should you lean upon them, they will sag and threaten to topple. I have slapstick images of the one leant on wall provoking a domino reaction throughout the entire floor.
Most fun of all, if you turn the light off in the room you are in, the walls on either side become lit with square haloes from the rooms one either side.
The Greenhouse is a machine for storing backpackers in.
I am sharing the hostel with a Japanese guy who does not speak any English. We exchange the usual sign language greetings and I do not see much of him until I come back in the evening to find him sitting cross legged on the top bunk wearing a vest and boxer shorts with a large packet of crisps in his lap.
He spends the next two hours eating the crisps. One at time, crunching and chewing each one the recommended daily amount. I lie beneath him with my book waiting for him to finish the packet, but I swear it is bottomless. When he turns his light out and passes out, he then snores so loudly that we get complaints from down the corridor.

My next choice of hostel is called Toad Hall. I pick it because the prices of the single rooms are reasonable and I feel that I deserve – no, I demand – a room to myself for a few nights. The room is rather cupboard like, but has a sink and a fridge, with a kettle and ceramic mug sitting upon it.
The building itself breaks several laws of special physics by existing. Corridors sweep round where by logic rooms should be. The building is made up of two separate buildings with the gap that was once between them having been replaced by carpeted corridors. The result makes no sense, and resembles a cross between a 1950s seaside B&B and Gormenghast. Think gothic labyrinth with wall-to-wall carpet and paisley wallpaper and you’re really not far off. There are hundreds of doors off the long winding corridors which must lead to bedrooms of some sort, but I never seem to see anyone else about. On the walk from my room to the bathroom along the creaking floorboards of the hallway, I occasionally see a doorway hastily close at my approach, but other than that, life seems very quiet at Toad Hall. This, I decide, checking that the lock on my room is secure, and setting a chair beneath the door handle, may well be a very good thing indeed.

Anthony's Ark

The tiger walks back and forth, pacing the length of his cage, over and over again.
The kids with their noses pressed against the glass get bored and wonder off, screaming into the depths of the zoo.
“Man, he looks pissed off.” Says Anthony.
He does indeed. A sign beside the exhibit explains that a new female tiger has been acquired and the male is impatiently waiting to be introduced to her.
We move on to the lion enclosure, where a group of large males sit luxuriating in the comparative warmth of the Melbourne day.
“This is,” Anthony says, “When you see these guys in the wild, it’s hard to go back to zoos and see them in the same light.”
Anthony has traveled extensively, taking in Africa, Europe and South America, where Gary and I met him on the Tucan bus.
He is in Melbourne for the weekend, meeting up with people and with a couple of parties to attend.
The trip to the zoo is the result of us happening to be in the area after a rather bizarre and far-ranging search of Melbourne’s charity shops looking for something red for Anthony to wear to one of his parties.
“It’s fur, feathers or something red.” He explains of the party’s theme. One of the shops we find ourselves in, has at least one red feather boa, which ticks off two of the criteria immediately, but Anthony settles instead for a red shirt and a trip to the zoo.
While the tiger paces back and forth, the pygmy hippopotamus has found other outlets for his frustrations.
“What’s it doing to the barrel?” a kid in thick spectacles asks.
His father coughs.
“Playing footy with it, I think.” He tries.
The kid seems satisfied and gets bored.
“Never seen footy played like that before.” One of the other parents offers mildly.
“Might explain why your team are at bottom of the league,” says another.
Melbourne Zoo is an expansive place and a lot of care has clearly been put into the animals’ varying habitats – the new Elephant enclosures in particular seem rather extensive even though when we saw the elephants themselves they looked rather bored with the whole place.
There is still the uncomfortable sense of animals being locked up in cages while people gawp at them, however, and for all of Anthony’s concerns about their welfare, he is not above practicing his animal-impersonations skills quite vocally in heir presence.
In general, the animals themselves do not seem too impressed with his efforts, but the children – who swarm around the exhibits like crows around carrion – appear to be slightly awed by the huge guy doing monkey impersonations at the top of his lungs.
The monkeys’ don’t even seem to notice. Too busy as they are trying to make lots of little monkeys.
“Good god.” Says one parent steering their children away from a pair of copulating baboons, “Clearly something in the water here.”
As we leave the primate enclosure, a small familiar voice can be heard behind us. It’s the little kid with the glasses from before.
“So what footy team do they play for?” he asks.

Get Thee To A Nunnery

The train arrives in Melbourne just after six, and having retrieved my luggage from the platform where it has been left in a pile, I decide to walk to the hostel on the other side of the central business district.
I was last here some six years ago, and then I was only here for around two weeks, but the city is immediately familiar to me. Another grid system, but with wider boulevards to make way for the trams, and its long sprawling streets with their competing pavement cafes, the city has a more continental feel than Sydney did.
I find Nicholson Street easily, and upon it I find The Nunnery hostel where I am booked for a couple of nights. On the registration card, there is the usual question asking ‘Where did you hear of this hostel’. I skip the usual options (Lonely Planet, Rough Guide, Premonition…) and write "I walked past it six years ago and liked the look of it.". The card is processed without comment and a key is handed to me.
"Just behind you." Says the woman behind the desk.

The building is – as its name suggests – a converted nunnery. A newer, bigger, convent exists just up the road, which might suggest that in Melbourne, the ecclesiastical life is a popular one if they need to move to bigger premises. There are six beds in room five, in three pairs of metal bunks, but only one seems to be occupied and no-one seems to be about.
Thanks to my experiences in Darwin, I pick one of the spare top bunks, and dump the rest of my belongings in a neat-ish stack on the bedside table unit situated against the wall near the beds.
As usual when I move into a new dormitory, I try to imagine whom I might be sharing with from a glance at the detritus they leave lying about. The disordered bed provides no clues at all, but the evidence lain strewn around it seems ambiguous regarding the gender of my fellow tenant. Clothes seem to consist mainly of jeans and t-shirts, both looking skinny enough to belong to either a male or a female. A copy of I Capture The Castle by Dodie Smith perhaps indicates a woman, but the Gillette Mach 3 razor in the bathroom suggests otherwise.
A set of communal shelves across the far end of the room are crammed with left over toiletries and paperbacks abandoned (presumably) by previous tenants. These too provide no clue.
I shower and change (only twelve hours on the train from Adelaide. Only twelve.) And then I set off to explore the surrounding area.

The Nunnery is located in Fitzroy, a self-styled arts and cafe district just outside the main city drags. Brunswick Street in particular (where Cate used to live) is wall-to-wall cafes, interspersed with the occasional second hand bookshop of florist.
It being Friday night, the place is heaving when I arrive. I amble up and down the street, peering into cafes as I go. All are full: groups of people gathered around tables talking busily over the sounds of the stereos blaring out bland indie rock at a high enough volume to be mistaken for interesting
I venture back towards the hostel, then cut across Carlton Gardens to Lygon Street, the Italian Quarter (Melbourne has, as it might have been gathered, more Quarters than is mathematically acceptable) a long, broad and handsome street tightly squeezed with Italian restaurants. It is also home to a good bookshop and – praise the lord! – a nine-screen cinema complex showing world cinema and arthouse movies.
I promptly purchase a ticket for a film called Factotum and snuggle up in the comfortable cinema seats for it to start.
Once done (a very entertaining film with Matt Dillon playing a slightly-too-pretty version of Charles Bukowski) I return to the hostel to find the room is still empty. This is not the case for long, as I hear someone trying to open the door from the outside.
I open it from the inside and the woman standing there with a keycard in her outstretched hand looks startled.
"Oh," she says. "I didn’t think anyone was in there."
She speaks with one of those slightly constricted American accents which make every word sound like a half-hearted protest.
Her name is Nicole and she wanted to use the room to practice her guitar.
"Sam works late." She explains indicating the slept-in bunk. That she conspicuously avoids any pronouns while discussing Sam, means that I remain none the wiser as to his or her gender.
"Are you going to bed?" she asks, cracking open the guitar case and plumping herself down on the untouched bunk.
"I’m going to lie down." I say, "But that’s not quite the same thing. Had a long train journey. Twelve hours."
She’s not listening, she is tuning her guitar instead as thought I am not there any more.
At the end of the bunks, the bedhead of the lower bed forms a ladder to the top. I clamber up and pull myself under the covers.
Nicole strums and warbles a series of reasonably competent cover versions of tracks from the Pulp Fiction soundtrack album. The Dusty Springfield track appears to appeal to her particularly. She plays it through at least five times.
When she is done, she packs up noisily and leaves the light on. It is two o’clock.

The next day – having slept through Sam’s arrival in the room during the night and lain in while he or she exited again the following morning – I walk into town to have a look around.
There are those who maintain that Melbourne is not a city to visit, it is a city to live in. Lacking as it does the memorable attractions that Sydney boasts on every postcard. It is true, certainly, that there is nothing to compete with the grandeur of the Harbour Bridge here, or the eccentricity of the Opera House, but the broad, tree lined streets and the rattle and ring of the trams are very easy to fall in love with.
I spend a pleasant day trying to establish my barings. From the foot of Carlton Gardens to Flinders Street Station, the central business district is a regimented grid of streets. Beyond Flinders Street, the Yarra river snakes discretely between the glittering Crown Casino Complex and the vast imposing stadium of the Melbourne Cricket Ground. To the West lies the new docklands complex which I presume would look better without the layer of grey clouds which confirms at a glance every stereotype you might have heard about Melbourne’s weather.
I return to the hostel early in the evening, and once more find the room empty. The lounge too, seems oddly deserted and so again, I set off for a wander around the Northern Suburbs, looking for a cafe which is not too crowded and will not be too shocked by someone asking for a table for one – which seems almost unheard of in these parts.

I return to the hostel after eleven or so and switching off the lights, collapse into bed.
At one o’clock, the lights come back on, and I hear someone dragging something across the floor. Someone is moving in.
Someone is moving in to the bunk beneath mine.
There are four other beds free, two of which are in an unoccupied set of bunks, but this person is moving into the bunk beneath mine. I roll over to make clear my presence in case it has been missed. It is ignored.
Metal bunks – I should point out – are cheap bunks. They move and creak with very little impetus, and so, true to chaos theory, the act of adding bedsheets to a lower bunk cases major earthquakes and tremors on the top. It is not unlike trying to sleep in a hammock in a storm tossed sea.
The person moving in beneath me is not Nicole, but she sounds like her – the same wet note of complaint in her voice - and seems to be best friends with her. As she moves in, Nicole comes in too and helps without discretion or subtlety that it might be expected the late hour would demand. They talk instead using rather loud stage whispers. It turns out that the one moving in, has a crush on Sam.
"He’s so mysterious." She says.
He! Congratulations, it’s a boy!
"Yes," hisses Nicole, "But I worry he knows it. I have to keep telling him to keep his ego in check."
The other sighs. Lovelorn.
"He’s so mysterious." She says again.
I do not say anything of course. There are some conversations you simply do not want to be part of, particularly when they involve insomniac furniture movers with sexual fantasies about gender non-specific invisibles.
The move lasts another three or four hours and it is nearly five in the morning before the lights are finally extinguished. The entire process required a lot of heavy lifting and grunts and groans and had I been more of gentleman, I might have offered to help. However, I am only gentlemanly between the hours of nine in the morning and eleven at night, so she really should have booked in advance or - heaven forbid - moved in at a more sensible time.
Finally, the inhabitant of the bunk beneath mine finally stops tossing and turning, and the subsequent momentum has finally stilled my own bed and I manage to grab a few hours sleep before the morning sunlight bursts through the curtains and people start staggering around the room again.
I wait a bit longer before going for a shower, not trusting myself to be polite should I encounter any of them.

When I finally stir, I lean over the edge of my bunk to see what has become of the room I had not yet become too familiar with.
"What the…?"
The ladder at the end of the bed has been covered up. In fact the entire lower bunk has been transformed into some sort of make-shift four-poster bed. A muslin throw has been stuffed under my mattress (which explains part of the previous nights violations) to form a kind of curtain around the entire bed.
I stumble down the shrouded ladder as best I can – almost tripping up when I plant my foot into a dream-catcher which has been hung across the bed head.
I reach the floor and survey the construction job which kept me awake most of the previous night.
The bed behind the curtain, I can just about make out. It is covered with throw rugs and scatter cushions. Strings of beads have been hung up all around it, a small mobile glints in the morning sun and something tie-dyed winks at me through a gap in the muslin.
The bedside unit upon which I had stacked my belongings has also been transformed.
All my bags have been dumped unceremoniously in a pile in the middle of the room, and the small, square table has been covered instead with a sequined cloth, upon which now stands a pot plant, some scented candles and a cluster of assorted crystals. There is also a beside light, aimed upwards, directed - I could almost swear - at my eye-level.
As I stare at the destruction and construction around me, and check over my bags to make sure that nothing was damaged during the move, the curtain stirs and a pale face peers out at me.
She’s still there. All along, she has been sitting reading a magazine. She does not offer me a greeting, nor an apology for throwing my belongings out of her way.
Instead she says, rather primly:
"There’s another one of your bags under the bed."
She plucks its errant strap - shyly protruding from beneath the bed - with a finger, a distasteful look on her face.
"You might want to move that." She advises.

Six Dollar Pizza Debate (Abridged)

It should go without saying that my Czech is considerably worse than Miro’s English, but Miro has a trick when it comes to speaking my language which I cannot compete with. For every comment he finds hard to understand, he decides that there’s an eighty per-cent chance that it was probably a joke anyway, and so laughs uproariously.
This makes conversation with him a little unusual to say in the least.
“Six dollars is a pretty good deal for all you can eat pizza and a couple of movies.” I say. (This, of course, is the sort of conversation frequently overheard at hostels, involving basic economics, junk food and entertainment, but not necessarily in that order).
Miro shakes his head.
“One dollar.” He says.
This seems unreasonable. I say so. Miro laughs uproariously.
I met Miro on the train from Darwin. We ended up at the same hostel in Alice Springs and – having set off on separate trips around the same locations – ended up again on the same train to Adelaide. Right now, we are in the same hostel, and the offer of the day is six dollars for as much pizza as you can eat and a couple of DVDs in the television room.
“Six dollars isn’t bad.” I say again, “It’s about two-fifty in British money.”
I am not sure why is should make this particular comparison, as I’m suspecting Miro is not particularly familiar with the British exchange rate.
“In Darwin, it was one dollar for a meal.”
I blink. Did I miss that?
“For backpackers it should be cheaper!” he insists – he grins as he says all of this. He’s probably the happiest guy I’ve ever met. Even when discussing cheap eats and perpetuating the strange notion that being a backpacker is a privileged position at whom everyone should throw discount vouchers and bargains. Something I – while picking up and using all the discount vouchers and bargains that get thrown, I admit – am a little skeptical about, but there you go.
My look of confusion obviously speaks more than any dialogue.
“At the Vic.” He says, “The Vic Hotel? There were vouchers. One dollar for a meal.”
Oh, that’s right. I do remember now.
“Yes,” I say, “But the Vic was a cattle market. It was a stunt to draw a crowd.”
“Yes, but it was one dollar!”
“Yes…”
“One dollar, brilliant.”
“I see that, but…”
“Six dollars, crap.”
Brilliant and crap, it should be clarified, are the two infallible poles of universal criticism which Miro learnt from an Irishman in Perth.
The conversation continues along these lines for a while and gets pretty much no-where. When the push comes to the shove, I pay my six dollars and Miro heads off into town to find something cheaper.
The pizzas are good, and certainly worth the minimal expense. The films are pretty good too. I tell Miro this when he gets back.
He laughs and laughs and laughs.