One More Night

This is my last night abroad. Tomorrow morning I’ll be getting on a plane, and staying there for a ridiculously long time. I will eventually be spat out in my hometown (after more than 20 hours in the air, not including stops) and then I’ll sleep in my bed for the first time in close to six months.

Woah.

First, though, I have some errands to do today. Among other things, I have to close down my bank account, and pack a little (I’m mostly packed at the moment, really, but I need to do some major re-arranging.) And this evening I’ll be meeting up with my Script Frenzy buddies for what promises to be a fun send-off. It’s going to involve GIANT ICE CREAM. There will be pictures.

To backtrack a bit, however, I should probably catch y’all up on what I’ve done since Queenstown. The day after my last blog post I hopped on a bus to Christchurch. The windows were constantly foggy and, aside from that, dirty as hell, so I didn’t take pictures. But we travelled through a lot of territory in which the “Rohan” and general horse battles from LotR were filmed, which was obvious just from the look of the land. And I saw Mount Cook from a considerable distance, which was still pretty cool.

I feel bad for Christchurch, it really got the short shrift. I saw a tiny bit more of it this time, since we arrived during daylight hours, but by the time I’d dropped off my things and gotten settled into the hostel it was dark already. My flight was at 6AM, so I had to get up at *shudder* three thirty in the morning to catch the shuttle to the airport. That evening I basically did my laundry (which I’d MEANT to do in Queenstown, but forgot) and tried to put myself to sleep by reading Elizabethan plays and drinking beer. I hit the sack at about 10:30 and slept in a few long-ish chunks until 3AM, all the while dreaming that I was mighty Tamburlaine, conquering the world in iambic pentameter.

On the shuttle I ran into N, one of my neighbours from when I was living at Herring Road during university! What are the odds? She was going back to Sydney on a 6AM flight.

My flight into Melbourne was fine, though apparentely another international flight to Melbourne from the same parent company hadn’t fared quite so well.  This doesn’t particularly worry me, as I figure the chances of having it happen TWICE to the SAME AIRLINE on the SAME WEEKEND are significantly more astronomical than having it happen once.

It was nice to be in Melbourne again, though it was rainy the whole time so I didn’t bother to take many pictures. I got the airport shuttle to my hostel and then, since I couldn’t actually check in yet, stored my bags in a locker and visited the Victoria Markets for a couple of hours. This, it turns out, is something of a Kafka-esque experience. Hundreds and HUNDREDS of stalls, and yet there are maybe four stalls in all – the cheap leather/clothing stall, the cheap jewelery stall, the cheap souvenirs stall,  and the AMAZING HEALING PRODUCT stall – and they are repeated AD INFINITUM. I seriously started to wonder if I had backtracked at some point, but no, I was just in a nightmare of endless insanity. I only bought one thing there, something for my brother.

There was another kind of stall – the fruit/bulk food stall – and these were sequestered together in another endless repetition of the same fruit at the same prices being hawked in the same way. But this was much more amusing because I’d never been to a market where people literally accost you with grapes before.

In the afternoon I met up with CH and we went to see two shows. The first was a little overly literary and disconnected in its writing, and relied a little too much on the sure-fire ANGST of WAR AND DEATH, but the main character’s performance was great and the show was TECHNICALLY fascinating. Lots of use of film and light in interesting ways, and darkness – the theatre was PITCH black to start. Then in the evening we met up with CH’s friend R and saw a totally fun little soon-to-be-Fringe show called “The Adventures of ButtBoy and Tigger”. Then we got a bite to eat and chatted for a while, and R helped me find my way back to the hostel so I could collapse into bed. I’d effectively been awake for 22 hours at this point.

The next day was WICKED DAY! CH and R were going to see the matinee (yes, they were seeing the show twice in one day), so I spent some time wandering around the city. I went to the Old Melbourne Gaol (Jail) and had fun looking at the death masks of various people who were hanged over a hundred years ago, including Ned Kelly, the local folk hero (sort of in the same vein as Bonny and Clyde, but I think they actively LIKE Ned more here). And I got the best souvenir EVER, which I’ll talk about more once I’m home.

“Wicked” was great! An extremely well put-together show, lots of good songs and dancing, and Crazy Singing (mum will know what I mean. CRAZY.) It certainly wasn’t a very DEEP show, though to its credit it doesn’t try to suggest that it’s much more than a fun romp with a Slightly Moral Message and a True Friendship and other white-bread kinds of themes with Capital Letters. The person who played the lead role was sick today, she missed the matinee performance altogether and had to leave the main peformance halfway through and be replaced by her understudy (or stand-in, I can’t remember – either way, she was still pretty amazing in her own right, though she didn’t quite have the unbridled vitality and sharpness of the main player.) I didn’t have one inkling that she was sick, though, so she must be tough as boots to have stuck it out for that long.

After the show R went home early and me and CH went to an all-night diner to sit around and chat and pick at various extremely tasty Greek appetizers. The place was called “Stalactites” and I have pictures which I’ll upload once I’m home to show you why.

Now I’m back in Sydney, and I had a hilarious transportation disaster which I’ll replicate for you in its entirety later (once the tragedy has had more “time” added to it, thus making it a comedy). It’s hard to believe that I’m really going home. More than that, it’s hard to believe that THIS ISN’T home anymore. Ack. Okay, no more noodling along these lines for now. Time to go wrap up some loose ends and enjoy my last night in Sydney.

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