Melbourne 2

In New England we have the saying, "If you don't like the weather, wait 5 minutes." Melbourne is similar, saying that you can experience 4 seasons within a day. That turned out to be pretty true today. Very windy, alternating sun and rain, warm and cold, a rainbow. Crazy! I spent the day with my colleague and her friend who's on assignment in Alice Springs for 6 months, and two of the grad students from Monash. We took a tram out to the beach/harbor and saw one little penguin hiding in the rocks, and had lunch at a cafe out on the harbor. Then we experienced an Australian pub and then a bar, a quick, casual afternoon bar hop. Australian hard cider, and wine ... not as trashy as it could have been :P

Being in the cities - Sydney, Melbourne, even Wollongong - has given me a good sense of Australia, but I know quite clearly that I'm missing in a lot of way the real thing. The outback, the northern jungles, the Great Barrier Reef, the opal fields. This is why I wanted to take the train to Melbourne rather than the quick flight, and I am really glad I got to see some of the interior, the countryside. As quick and isolated as this trip feels, I think it's been enough, and given the option right now I wouldn't stay and spend the extra time it would take to get up to those other parts of the country.

While I was talking with one of the grad students today, she asked me about my fiancee, and as I explained a little how it was being far away, she commented how distance makes the heart grow fonder. I've felt this, but I don't like it! We were engaged exactly a month on the day I left for this trip, putting me roughly 8000 miles away from where Jeannie was then in BC; flying out of Phoenix there was a flight leaving 2 gates down for Vancouver - sometimes God has an ironic sense of humor. I also wrote an email to a friend who just got engaged last week himself, and I told him that at least for the first few months, do not travel for any length of time! In past travels, last summer especially, I'll kind of build walls within myself to allow me to be independent and alone in a foreign place and not let that get to me; these have had to be a good deal higher and thicker on this trip. In some ways I've been ready for this trip to be over from before I left, but the walls have allowed that not to interfere with the trip itself, which is good. And though I feel this distance quite strongly, I wouldn't change a thing about the situation ;) This is my own small odyssey - 10 days, rather than years - and I've been on my way home since that first takeoff in Phoenix; but I'm almost there.