There and back

This post is dedicated somewhat cheesily to Heath Ledger, but I'm really upset he died last week. It so happens he was born the day before me in 1979. He also reminded me of at least two guys I know, and he really was a great actor. I still can’t believe he’s dead; I read so much celebrity gossip that when someone like him dies it can almost feel like a friend has gone. And he wasn’t even in the news that much.

Pai Sai Mar? Where have you been and come back from?
So we’re back in Laos, and people keep asking how the Island went over in Aus, and what blew him away the most. My answer is always: the birds. And not only the variety and beauty of the birds (Canberra has a lot of lorikeets and rosellas and suchlike) but also the fact that we were happy to look at them without eating them. “Why don’t you eat them?” he kept asking.

He was especially flummoxed by the pelicans when we went to the coast on Boxing Day. And again, not just by the sheer bizarreness of the birds, with their weird beaks, and not even by the sight of one swallowing a fish, which lodged sideways in its gullet, still moving. “Such a big bird with so much meat – why don’t you eat it?” Gah.

Also, prices. I thought he’d be more shocked by how expensive everything was, but in fact, I had warned him sufficiently beforehand, so that it was really only me who spluttered with rage at having to pay $5 for a small glass of orange juice at breakfast in Fitzroy. He just shrugged. “You said it would be expensive here,” he said.

Also, sizes. Of everything – the sky, the buildings, meals, and of course the people. I myself was shocked to see so many young people – people my own age in fact – who were grossly overweight. But then I think there must be a direct correlation to the size of the meals people eat.

And why does the sky seem so big in Australia? People at home scoff at this notion, but spend some time in Asia first and you’ll see what I mean. We took the ferry around Sydney harbour on a perfect blue-and-white summer’s day, and the sky seemed to be this massive, never-ending canopy.

Beautiful city, Sydney. The Island liked it the best. I always associate it with weekends away, when I would save up to shop on Oxford St, and Brooke would always tire well before me. That was when Brooke and Cristy lived in Surrey Hills. We had breakfast there, for old times’ sake, with three partners and a baby in tow. Times change, but things still seem comfortingly familiar. We spent NYE watching bands at the Sydney Uni Bar.

Melbourne had not changed. Everything in the Fitzroy-Carlton-Collingwood-Brunswick area fairly pulsed with memories, and I heard songs in my head, songs I haven’t listened to for so long. We had lunch at Tiamo with Zia Nelly, and dinner at Trotters’ with Libby and Billy and Emily and Adam. Hung out at the Standard, met Patrick at the Napier, and Sky and Merryn in Edinburgh Gardens, just like last time. We stayed on Westgarth Street and hung out with a Lao-related crowd, all home for Christmas, on Meyers Place, had breakfast on Gertrude St, walked through the CBD and shopped on Brunswick St. Can you imagine I don’t even live there anymore?

Canberra, ironically, is the place that has changed the most. All the places that formed my little personal landscape during the uni years are there, but there’s also triple the number of shops and lots of new people, nephews all grown up, new baby niece Annabel, as well as Paul and Cristy’s Lily. I took the Island into town for a drink one night, and as we sat by the bar’s open window watching people go by, I didn’t recognise a single face. This was never the case when I was growing up, right up until when I left.

Almost everyone we met up with in Aus seemed to be in a couple, and talking about real estate. I joined in, given that I’m soon to join the dreaded Canberra rental market. Everything has just kept moving on.

Taking it all in
Anyway, we’ve come home and I’m looking at everything through a lens of melancholy now that I know I’m leaving so soon.
I went home for a holiday and came back with a job. I start as a journalist with the Canberra Times on February 25th. My dream. My dream of buckling down and getting some experience under my belt at a good city newspaper for a couple of years. You know, the way I was supposed to when I finished law school five years ago, before I was thwarted by all sorts of distractions.

The Island is coming to join me later in the year, and together we will pursue our respective dreams. He dreams of becoming an architect, me a writer. We’re now in the arduous (and expensive) process of securing a visa for him before I leave. Boring - documents, photos, testaments, photocopied certifications, etc. The type of process I’ve only heard about from other people having to prove their (usually completely legitimate relationship) to a suspicious Immigration Department. Did you know that “A spouse relationship is a relationship between a couple who have a mutual commitment to a shared life to the exclusion of any other spouse relationships”? I guess I did know that, but it sounds so odd and forbidding when written on these forms.

What it means
Back in Vientiane, riding to breakfast on my first morning home, the day was warm and clear. I got a thrill being reminded of how dirty Vientiane is. The horizon over the river is smudged, the kind of marks a slightly dirty finger would make on a white page. The buildings are mottled with peeling paint and soot. Motorbikes are strewn over the footpaths, streetside food stalls smoke and steam all day long. Tuk tuks screech with always reliable breaks, and oversized SUVs hoot as they threaten to flatten the nearest motorbike rider.

Perhaps this blog will have to go; if someone’s finally paying me to write, the answer is clear, the joke’s on me. I’ll start a new one, perhaps. I’ll do my old trick of making Canberra seem glamorous simply by saying it is.

It’s so hard to imagine just how abruptly my life is about to change. I’ll have to adjust to a new job, where I’ll be writing my own copy rather than editing someone else’s. I’ll be riding a pushbike, not a scooter, until I can afford a car. I’ll have real newspapers, instead of reading them off the screen. I’ll be eating muesli, hummus and risotto, and breakfast out, a rare occurrence, will cost me $20 or more. No khao piak khao for breakfast, or noodles for lunch. No massages, or pedicures. I never had them in Australia anyway. I’ll be able to go to the cinema. Which is great, except that the appeal of buying the latest movies on DVD for $1.50 each is very high. I’ll be able to browse in bookshops, but I won’t be able to get clothes made to order. I won’t be able to call whoever and meet up at an hour’s notice (life doesn’t work like that in Aus), or spend hours at the Sunset Bar on Friday nights. I’ll be going to the same places I went to when I was a student. That’s how long it’s been since I was there. I’ll also be on a low income. Canberra is not a cool place to be poor, at least if you’re not a student. In Melbourne, it was different – you could just blend in with the general scruffiness. Canberra is not scruffy.

My life will be different. So will the Island’s. But that will be the subject of another post. Or another blog, even.

Hey, I’m still here though! Three more weeks. I’ll write again.