Melbourne, Melbourne

I am writing this post from my office while on call on a rainy Saturday afternoon and the first day of a long weekend. Cheers for the weekend, but certainly not for the call. In all my years of working, I have yet to meet a fellow colleague who doesn’t hate calls. Corona used to look forward to them (why, I’ll never know), but has now gained wisdom. Although, yes, it is not too bad being here amid the bubbling and dribbling fishtanks, I can still think of a thousand better ways to spend a Saturday than confronting a six-foot knife-wielding chappie with friendship bands woven in his cloud of hair, six anklets and a bracelet of dreadlocks (possibly his own, but who can say for sure?).

In moments like these, I tell myself, “Melbourne, Melbourne”, like a wonky mantra. This works because I AM GOING THERE NEXT WEEK <a thousand exclamation marks>. I cannot wait to get out of the Fruit Farm for a while. The airfare and accommodation have all been settled and confirmed, and I am planning the itinerary to include the Great Ocean Road (Mr. Manx: yay!), horse-riding (Mr. Manx: eh), hot-air ballooning (Mr. Manx: buh), and most definitely shopping (Mr. Manx: meh). Sites like Total Travel and Tripadvisor have been an enormous help, as have the three guidebooks that I plowed through. And I am writing it all down in a self-created timetable, in different-coloured inks. Yes, my friends have called me obsessional.

The one thing I have not done is pack. Heh. I had a dream, some nights ago, that I woke up two hours away from my flight and STILL had not packed. Result: pure pandemonium.

Speaking of packing, last night I chanced upon this brilliant site, One Bag, about learning how to pack lightly. ‘Packing lightly’ is just two words, but there’s apparently a whole science to it that I’d never even thought about. For example, the author recommends never folding clothes, but ‘bundle wrapping’ (laying them flat and wrapping them sequentially around some pillowy object) them instead, as a better way to eliminate creases and wrinkles. Who would’ve even thought of that in the first place?

And speaking of bags, I so want to check out a couple of secondhand (dubbed ‘preloved’ by connoiseurs) bag shops in Melbourne as well. There are two reputable ones – Mio Tesoro and Secondo, that I hope to find some good stuff at. I am eyeing:

All that’s going to cost a pretty penny, so I suppose that’s a good reason to be thankful – as far I’m capable of being – for calls.

One and a half more calls to Melbourne… Melbourne…

Dream Of Aloneness

After having been exposed to about a dozen sniffly people over the past couple of weeks, I have succumbed and become sniffly myself. Possibly thanks to the cold medicine I took last night, I woke up to an odd dream.

I dreamt that I was  the only person left in a snazzy hotel suite after a party with my friends. Everyone else had left while I was sleeping. Their stuff was still there, handphones and bags and everything, but somehow I knew that they wouldn’t be coming back.

I looked out the balcony window and saw a dozen Caucasian children playing downstairs, blowing soap bubbles and tossing those paper balls that used to sell at five cents each when I was small. The bubbles floated up to my level and burst. I grabbed a handphone and tried to call Mr. Manx. I knew his number perfectly well, but the numbers on the phone were all scrambled – nines and sevens, eights and sixes had switched places and turned upside down – and I simply could not make it dial his number. The same thing happened with another phone and another.

Finally, using a big orange landline telephone, I managed to get through to Reception, but all I heard was two hotel employees talking about the woman who’d been left alone in the suite, and how it was already 1:36 p.m. and she’d have to leave soon. I checked my watch, which indeed read 1:36 p.m., and thought, “Where am I going?”

Then the dream ended. There’s a story in there somewhere.