long time followers of the blog (hi mom!) may remember that right before i was set to leave south korea i was graced with a visit from my family. that turned out to be a fun 10 day streak down the korean peninsula full of soju, squabbles, sacred sites and, who can forget, stairs. abroad again and although i am not yet scheduled to leave australia family has come to visit once more. yes, my dad and jill took the 14 hour flight from summery ohio to visit australia just in time for winter. and as if to make it clear that they were not specifically here to see me it took them over 2 weeks in the country before they even stepped foot in melbourne. yeah well i have things to do, too, so…whatever.
as the two were farting around a typhoon-battered queensland complaining about the heat (what??) i was finishing up my tenure at the melbourne star. goodbye melbourne star! goodbye tourists! goodbye green screen! and just in time - the very next day actually - hello dad and hello jill. they arrived late by taxi, just down the street at a cute little b&b. jill was tired but dad and i went to have pizza and drinks at d.o.c., a little italian joint i had been meaning to try forever but with no one to join me.
this was unlike when mom, larry and starr came to visit. in korea the very familiarity of their faces was bizarre in a place so different. a worlds colliding sort of thing. and while there is something to be said about seeing a familiar face show up on the complete opposite end of the globe, when that end is australia it doesn’t feel all that disturbing to the order of things. like that evening out with dad at the pizzeria was a long overdue visit from up in dayton. i didn’t have to order in a completely different language and ask them politely to not stuff the crust with sweet potato paste.
if anything i felt nervous about the normalcy of it all. its a long way to go after all and am i really worth it? i’m not sure but again its not all about me. but is australia really worth it? that was the real kicker because after all these two had just, what 6 months ago or something, been on an excursion through india, nepal, tibet, and bhutan. have you seen tiger’s nest? have you?! well australia is no tiger’s nest. but australia, you know, it’s a grown ass country and it has to speak for itself.
anyway, melbourne was the part where i could kind of direct the course of things. help australia out a bit if need be. although really i had no idea what to do. melbourne isn’t really a tourism city, it’s a lifestyle city. its beautiful and diverse and theres plenty of things to do but they’re things to do in the course of staying there, not exactly things to do while visiting. there’s no sydney harbor with its historic bridge and opera house. there is a wheel inexplicably placed outside of the city overlooking a costco. but then that was exactly the answer. no - not the wheel. the every day quality of the place. the very normalcy i was worried about. we treated their visit as i would treat my day. wandered around the city. cooked out on the beach. rode bikes to st. kilda.
through the idealized everydayness of events they, i think, got a good idea of what melbourne is all about and, i think, grasped an appreciation of what makes it a lovely place to live. drinks by the waterfront, multi-ethnic cuisine, public green spaces, diverse neighborhoods, etc and whatnot and so forth and so on. and, good news, we’re not really done with melbourne yet. we’re going to be back. “back?” why yes, back, because we’re currently in tasmania, which will be featured in an entirely separate photo-heavy post following this one (to make up for there not being any here) because its a mini-trip in itself and a brand new experience for me, which is the most important bit after all, right? wait no, we covered this. it isn’t.
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