Wednesday, March 07, 2007

Melbourne Part 1

Broadly speaking, everything you do in life can be brought back what you did, what was good about it, what was bad about it and what you would have done differently.

My work calls these ABCDs - Achievements, Benefits, Concerns, Do-Nexts. It's a joyless way of summarising your life into bullet points and categorising.

Anyways, seeing as it's my 3rd day here in Mexico (Melbourne ... south of the border, for those who've never heard Victoria referred to as Mexico) and I'm here for work, here goes for a Shtine Time corporate-style status update.

Achievements

Arrived in Melbourne office on time for a 9am start Monday morning. This meant making my 6:45 am flight. This meant a 5am wakeup. All of the above are firsts for me.

Went to my neighbour's house (aka - Crown Casino) on Monday night. It was packed full of people at 10:30 pm. Put $5 on 23 red and it came up.

Went for a 10km jog along the Yarra River. Like Bondi, except you die if you enter the water. Melbourne is a very healthy looking city - there are literally hundreds of people jogging and riding bikes home.

Have communicated with the Mumbai and Bangalore teams who I will be working with over the next 5 weeks. Communicated is possibly the wrong word. I definitely had phone connections with them. They talk faster than ... the fastest talking Indian person you've ever met.

All my mates here have kids. The one I went out with last night has a 2 year old and one a few weeks old. Both of them made stinky when I was there last night. This was more their achievement, then mine...

Benefits
Girls in Melbourne are so friendly ... Last night, one invited me home and before I knew it, she'd taken off her pants... Pics below.



Accomodation is a 4 minute walk to the Office and is cleaner and larger than my permanent residence in Bondi.

There are approximately 120 coffee shops between my Accomodation and the Office. The coffee in Melbourne is very good. My project team drinks a minimum of 2 large lattes every day. I've heard rumours that the project manager is hooked into a drip which feeds him caffeine intravenously 24 hours a day.

Client office is in Port Melbourne - the foyer looks like a car dealership and I've already been informed I'm not allowed to take photos, or for that matter, bring out my camera phone (or for that matter, even own one). We are in a room the size of my bedroom - 3 x 4. There are 6 of us in this room and I have a view of a wall painted off white. They have a cafeteria which looks like a prisoners eating area and the food tastes appropriately. (I realise this shouldn't really be in "Benefits", but my "Concerns" list was getting a little long and I don't really enjoy complaining...)

Concerns
5am wakeup? Are you kidding me? I didn't know there was a 5am in the morning... at night, sure, everyone knows there's a 5am at night, but in the morning?

Flight was pretty ordinary - Virgin was crowded and full of suits and carry on bags and tired looking people - it looked like the crowd at the end of a wedding - haggard looking, poorly tied ties hanging at awkward angles... and who designs the seats? Upright or non-upright (What is the opposite of upright? They never tell you that on the planes. They never say "Please ensure your seat is in a 'non-upright' position) - regardless, I couldn't sleep because my head kept sliding off the seat and waking me up.

There is a newspaper here called the "Herald Sun" which is published every day. This explains why everywhere I went, there was copies of the Sunday papers lying around. It took me until today (Wednesday) to figure this out because I'd never picked one up ... after all, why would I bother reading Sunday's paper? The giveaway was the contemporary headline on the front page, underneath the title - "HERALD SUN - Wednesday, March 7"

Driving in Melbourne CBD seems normal until people try to turn right. To turn right, you need to pull over to the left hand side, wait for all traffic to pass, then turn right across all the lanes. When traffic in both directions is attempting to do the same thing, there is a beautiful, synchronised effect that looks like cars going around a non-existent roundabout. At some point, I must set myself a task to camp out on the busier corners with a video camera and send film of the imminent crashes to Australia's Funniest Home Videos.

Have been in Melbourne for over 48 hours already and have not set foot into a bar or restaurant.

Do Nexts
Set foot into bars and restaurants. DG to take ownership. Estimated time until delivery: approximately 9 hours.

Organise to go to Formula 1 Grand Prix

Summary

There are subtle differences between Melbourne and Sydney. There are also massive differences between Melbourne and Sydney, but I'm only interested in the subtle ones.

At first observation, there appears to be a lot of places for gambling here - clubs and pokies open until 3 in the morning, even in the suburbs on a Tuesday night. And, there are seemingly 7-11's on every corner.

From this (and all of the above), I can deduce that the culture here is very much one of: Wake up, get coffee, get snacks, gamble, make babies, repeat.

3 Comments:

Anonymous Anonymous said...

Hey mate, good read - as always.
My brother lives in Melbourne, same age for you and frequents bars and restaurants. Shall set you up for drinking if you want(will send details separately). Check out Movida, Bar de tapas y vino, 1 hosier lane - melbourne, ph 03 9663 3038. www.movida.com.au
x

12:46 pm  
Blogger GladtobeGreg said...

Enjoy your "Sabatical du Mexicana"

6:37 pm  
Anonymous Anonymous said...

Raoul on Melbourne

Flatland, no skyline, sprawl. An endless stretching horizon not excused by a macchiato culture, bar culture, restaurant culture, a culture culture. Boys that all look the same in tank tops that all look the same and expensive haircuts that all look the same. Girls who don't drink and turn right from the left hand lane. The sporting capital because Canberra is the real capital and Sydney is the capital of everything else.

AFL is quite good but.

3:55 am  

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