On Thursday Linton and I were back to our wandering ways. After waving goodbye to the kids, we rather circuitously made our way down to one of the finer areas of town known as Chapel Street. Lint had already explored this area with our friend Alex, but I was eager to see the glitz and the glam of Melbourne's version of Yorkville. Of course on a backpacker's budget this was not a particularly strong call on my part. However, the other option we were weighing for today's festivities was bicycling around the entire circumference of the city so I was willing to spend my way out of that one. Surprisingly, I have only recently come to appreciate that if you can't afford something at home or a piece of trendy clothing looks ridiculous on you - chances are that travelling half way around the world isn't going to make it any more affordable or fetching! And yet, I think sometimes you need to see how the other half live in order to truly see what you're not missing. Besides, you never know what you might find if you look hard enough...
Many people continue to ask us, "Why Melbourne?" Meaning - why spend all this money, time, and energy at the cost of missing friends, family, and a year of mortgage payments, to travel to a place like Melbourne, Australia. To which we usually respond with a series of comments like - similar language, culture, great travel opportunities, good schools, etc. What I also think might be buried somewhere in our explanations is that more than anything else, this is an adventure of discovery for all of us. Partly to see if we can actually do it, partly to give us a chance to re-charge and renew for the next phase in career and life, and partly to see what else this tiny blue orb has to teach us about living and life. And though we seem to be leaping off some precarious perch out into a mysterious and foreign world...Melbourne and its people are very much like home.
And the more we explore Melbourne and poke our heads into the shops and the markets, buying Tim Tams instead of Timbits, the better we are able to understand and appreciate what makes life in Canada or Melbourne or anywhere - good, worse, or just different. In many ways, if we were off living in Namibia, or Zanzibar, or Belgrade then the comparisons about life and living would have been very much as we compare apples and oranges. But here in "familiar" Melbourne, where just yesterday on Chapel street we were eating really good and cheap Dim Sum, listening to Kid Rock's latest and trying on Converse running shoes, we are getting a very good, very clear reflection of who we are - minus the extra baggage of career and stress weighing us down. I feel that the "noise of normalcy" might make similar observations, when walking from Cumberland to Yorkville to Hazleton, impossible. Or at least, not as clear.
I continue to pursue (read) the White Whale (Moby Dick). Admittedly, there was a time there where I thought he (Melville) had got the better of me, and my earlier predictions of reading 20-30 novels would have to be adjusted to just 3. However, I think I turned the corner recently, safe in the knowledge that I now know more about whales and 19th century whaling than I know about space travel, the internet, and the Montreal Canadiens combined! I continue to find inspiring connections between Melville's descriptions of a life of the seas and our lives abroad. Thus, if I can end with a final - hopefully clear - connection to Ishamel and his ponderings, then I would offer this quote as a final rationalization or answer to the question - "Why Melbourne?" and what occured to me as I strolled down Yorkv...I mean Chapel street the other day:
"For d'ye see, rainbows do not visit the clear air; they only irradiate vapor...for all have doubts; many deny; but doubts or denials, few along with them have intuitions. Doubts of all things earthly, and intuitions of some things heavenly; this combination makes neither believer nor infidel, but makes a man who regards them both with equal eye."
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