Countries are like arseholes; everyone's got one. Wait, that's opinions, not countries. Well nevermind, we've definitely all got two out of the three, at least.
I've hit the new country, literally, in one sense of that phrase, and it is so very very nice indeed, oh yes. New Country No. 8, new Continent No. 2, and Australia is pleasing every sense of mine except the financial one, and that was a case of arrested development anyway. The air is clean, the streets are wide and gloriously spacious, the people are instinctively and universally friendly, and taxi drivers stay inside their cars until asked otherwise. You could say I like it here and not ever be sued for slander.
I do rather like Melbourne, in case you had not caught on yet. As mentioned above the cleanliness of streets and air, alongside the downright filthiness of everyday language are perfectly to my liking. And not only that but the manner and politeness and, well, just damned Englishness of the good manners is such a breath of fresh air after Asia, although I've found myself barging in and not saying `thank you` to strangers this week and attribute it to my unackowledged acclimatisation to the Asian way of life.
I hope to brush up on my Ps and Qs forthwith before some endearingly frank and perfectly justifed Aussie calls me out as a "rude fuckin' c***t" on the tram.
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Yes, trams. And trains that run regularly, ticket booths capable of handling more than one destination, and staff who are genuinely considerate towards my needs. I almost hugged the first person I spoke to post-customs (a lady at the moneychanger booth at Melbourne airport) for having the basic humanity and warmth to engage with me in my jet-lagged banter, and the taxi guy who accosted me outside the airport, a New Zealander of obvious maori descent, who offered me a price I thought was a bit suspect but that actually checked out as the absolutely proper going rate.
Nevermind the fact he wasn't a real taxi driver and his car was far too nice - I suspected him a mid-level city worker playing at airport taxi-driver on the weekends for a little extra ready cash - because I still paid the same as the regular metered fare, and got a far nicer car and conversation into the bargain. He has a nephew who spends money like a c%#@, and within ten minutes we establish that my old Boss, T_-_-_, is also a c%#@. They do rather like that word; and why not? 
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But to begin briefly from where I left off: I came in from Bali, and that island in itself is worth another visit if only because it is like Goa in India but much more so, in every way that is good.
Bali is a resort for Australians who can pretend they have visited another country but really have just extensively scaled down one of their cities in size and economy and infrastructure, while scaling up the value and density of entertainment to near-fatal levels.
Within 3 hours in one small beach-town on that little party island I had avoided the attentions of an ecstacy-crazed transexual, walked a gigantic flat beach by moonlight, had a fantastic seafood dinner in a world-famous restaurant for about £7.50, passed equally legendary nightclubs famed by everyone who's anyone anywhere, and noted in passing and halting Bahasa Indonesia that the local youth gangsters could indeed drink a vast amount of booze, before sidling off myself to a stunningly good hotel to drink about twice the amount they had consumed all on my own, and all for - including the hotel for one night - about £22.
After the relative extortion that was the village near Mt. Bromo this was luxury beyond expectations.
Seminyak beach in Bali is very similar to beachside Goa, but with mostly paved roads, lumpy pavements rather than scuffs in the grass, more and better shops selling the same old tired souveniricana, much faster internet access, more and better restaurants and hotels, far fewer beggars, fewer taximen and ojek riders, and an absolute shitload more Westerners, almost all of the Australian.
Now I have to say here that this isn't all there is to it, because Goa retains a lot of its charm because it is so undeveloped (in places) and has genuine indigenous life and habits and customs still dominant in the streets and restaurants and on the beaches. But Bali is like a version of Goa where you really don't have to be conscientous or on your guard, or even, perhaps, conscious, in order to go out have some fun and get home safe afterwards.
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And so I left Indonesia on something of a high, waiting to try my meagre language skills out for the last time at the airport yet annoyingly confronted with English-speaking staff (damn you, Malaysia Air!) at every turn. Still, `saya tinggal di ingris, Indonesia tidak. Saya Jalan-jalan ke Australia, ke mana saya bisa bahasa ingris!* which is by far the most complicated sentence I've had to constuct in that loveable language, and almost certainly one of the most disastrously hashed-together.
The best thing about Indonesian is that it doesn't matter too much how you order or phrase things, although many conventions do apply you can get by remembering just one or two, and kindly understanding people will take the time to work out what you're trying to say. Best of all, one word sometimes does the job of 3 or 4 in English, like `saya` which means variously `I`, `me`, mine`, or `my` depending on context, so you can just throw it in there whenever you like. This may be the only reason I have made some progress with it 
Still I did leave the island of Bali, flew to Kuala Lumpur (yes that is about a thousand miles in the wrong direction, such is life) then onto Melbourne Tullamarine airport. I have one brief gripe about KL airport before I discard this though, as beautiful and modern and high-tech a space as it is - rated as the best airport in the world, funnily enough - and that is the obscure way that you pay for your drinks.
I have no objection to exchanging money for products and services nomatter what the going rate is, I believe I can extend the phrase `when in Rome` to this idea, after all, but to receive these goods upon payment of the bill is something I do rather expect. Now it is a damn good money-spinning plan they have there but I still don't approve, as when I bought a bottle of rum from the old duty-free shop I was not allowed to take it with me, but was told to present my receipt on reaching the boarding gate. Hmmph. I'd been wanting to get me a Burger King meal and dose the coke liberally with bargain-priced Havana Club 12-Year Reserve in order to pass the time, bugger it.
Had it been down to the now-familiar religious sensibilites (ie. muslim cultural oppression, again) which are prevalent in Malaysia I would have sighed only inwardly. But there are bars in the airport - I should know, I had to make use of them during my 6-hour layover - so the consumption of alcohol is far from prohibited, and while I can excuse that for obvious financial gain (beers in those bars were about £4.80 a pop) I cannot excuse the shoddy and underhanded way you are meant to get what you have paid for: or not.
You don't claim your duty-free back at the boarding gate at all, but rather from a lone scraggly attendant guarding a trolley of everyone's loot, who first stands adjacent to the centre of the vast line making it just about impossible for everyone in the first half to have a chance to even notice where their goods are, let alone desire to claim them as that forces you to leave the queue and go to wait behind 359 other people. If you're in a family or group, fine, but lone travellers are pretty screwed. And you have to notice it first anyway.
Secondly, this person make no attempt to let anyone aboard know that they have everyone's duty-free items; she just stands there looking into the middle distance. Only when someone went and had a look and asked about his stuff while the queue was being boarded onto the plane, did he - and everyone else back from the gormless attendant's position - realise that they had either to relinquish their places in line or relinquish the goods they had already paid for, and as the flight was slightly delayed and it is against the nature of people to inconvenience themselves while queueing, I would suspect that a proportion of paid-for goods are left unclaimed from every flight leaving Kuala Lumpur, to go back on the shelves in the stores and into the increasingly swollen wallets of the scheming bastards behind such a scheme.
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All of which is thankfully secondary for me because I not only claimed my rum and trudged to the back of the line to board only just in time (there were, for the record, still two half-full boxes left with the attendant and I was one of the very last to be allowed onto the plane) but I also stayed on the flight, didn't cause trouble beyond harassing the steward mercilessly for free beer and wine, and made it to a new country and a new continent: here comes Australia! Woo-hooooo!!
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Customs and immigration officials in Downunderland are notoriously strict but even armed with this knowledge I was a little taken aback by the anally-retentive nature of their playbook. The idea is obviously that they establish a dominance over whoever they take aside and interrogate (I was one of the lucky few from our flight) and ask them personal and seemingly irrelvant questions amid the obvious few about bags being packed, contents of bags and destinations/departures, then make fun of whatever your answers were to further establish their dominance/lack of functioning gonads.
They also get to play silly buggers with your passport, try to demean you in very low-grade ways, and display their ignorant personal prejudices and biases while going about said demeaning, as well as highlighting their lack of imagination and intelligence.
It wasn't exactly novel - I did go to school, after all - but it was irritating because it was so unneccesary. I did try and joke with the first few lines he gave me, but my guy had the sense of humour of an epileptic, paraplegic plague victim, and so that was that.
Well it's okay; customs officers aren't real people anyway, let alone Australians.
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In the real world again and post-taxi to the lovely district of Prahran (pron. `Paran`) I found myself in the freakin' cold again - we all know it's Winter in Oz right now, but not quite how much Winter, if you'll forgive the syntax abuse. It's about 8 degrees Celsius here in the afternoon and evening-time, and no, I still haven't worked out the fucking shortcut keys for all my special characters yet so no Degrees or Fractions or ambitious multilingual Accents just yet.
This Melburnian way of life, though, is unaffected by such trivialities as mere temperature, and life bustles along at a cozy pace regardless of outer concerns, although; and this is so worth mentioning it makes me happy just thinking about it once again; it continues in so much more space than it can ever do in England that I hardly notice the sensation withdrawing from my feet anyway. I really do love these wide streets.
The district I'm in is only a few kilometres from the Central Business District, centered around a main street full of boutique shops, bars and restaurants, and is an easy train ride or two to get to any of the four convenient stations that corner the CBD itself. The city centre is a pleasant mix of skyscrapers and those hugely wide streets with pavements to match, most of which are in a block to the North of the Yarra river, which itself in most other places is flanked by gardens, state buildings and their grounds or sports stadiums, of which there are rather a lot.
In bewteen many of the modern, gleaming office buildings are gothic revival cathedrals and art deco-era concert halls, hotels and more commercial edifices sculpted in elaborate layouts of cirlces, elipipses and imaginative angles - all of which looks very attractive from both the ground, and from above the general skyline.
The people of Melbourne go nuts for sport, in particular Australian-rules football - AFL - which is centred around this city with something like 8 teams out of a total of just 19 nationally being native to Melbourne, so anyone familiar with lamenting the myriad teams that stem from London can happily exchange their bitching wholesale to this city as well. Isn't that nice?
Aside from that they also garland such sports as rugby, football, tennis and drinking with that remarkable gusto and flourish that marks the Australian hobbyist and sportsman as someone to be taken very seriously indeed: even if he's just around for a game of cribbage, you can bet he's gonna kick your arse.
Myself, I have avoided all sports and physical activity beyond walking, as usual. I'm pretending to go climbing tomorrow or the day after (or the day after that ) with one or more of the guys from this hostel, but I won't know for certain until I'm dangling 20 metres up a fake cliff hoping I can trust a guy I've only known for a week. I also cooked my fingers in a lively fashion this morning on a dangerously antique sandwich toaster (it may actually have been a dismantled steam iron) and I'll throw that in as an excuse as and when necessary.
I have however been fairly active on the tourism front, and have seen one or two of the better sights in the city, even though they have all cost me an arm, a leg and small parts of my liver to acheive. Top of the list is Melbourne Museum, the largest such establishment in Australia and a superb acheivement, covering all that needs covering and then some. I is actually hard to think of a better museum in fact, even theoretically, although this is giving some grace and creedence to the fact that Meburnians alone will probably want to know all about Melbourne in intricate detail, thus forgiving one gallery that would be out of place anywhere else.
In fact despite the human body & mind gallery where the displays had nothing new to tell me, I'm pleased to say I learned a lot from every single space in that museum, with an amazing collection of insects numbering a staggering 2 million specimens and of that some 1.4 million beetles. These things are not just displayed in a tired fashion but are newly mounted in illuminated vertical cases, and their uses today are widely advertised so as not to make the viewer feel creepy about all those dead creatures.
Fact is, that there lot in the Melbourne museum is the largest single fully catalogued collection on Earth and is the one-stop-shop for most reserchers of medicine and students of extinction and species preservation.
In a similar vein the museum hosts an excellent collection of aboriginal artefacts and sensitive displays outlining just how and why Melbourne's museuem is a allowed to show them after agreements with elders of the relevant tribes and lands - some of them, at least. The aboriginal question is too large, complex and emotive to go into, and mot importantly I dont know enough about it to try yet. The museum has begun to sensitively track and display what it has agreed it can with the aboriginal cultures it has information and materials on, and all through the museum a similar sort of sensitivity seems to pervade.
If you ever come here, then go there. I can't recommend it enough.
The forest area is very good as well despite the low numbers of wildlife, because what is there is remarkable - I have a video of a male Bower Bird actually building its nest less than 6 feet away from my camera lens - and not once all day did I lose interest in anything, although my feet did fail me at one point prompting a rapid self-medication of coffee and pie, which leads me neatly onto:
THEY ONLY FRICKIN' HAVE FRICKIN' PIES IN OZ, OH YES, OH YES THEY DO!
And after fried rice and butter-fried everything for eight months, my god is that a bloody welcome taste. In fact they don't just have pies; they love pies here, and they love them almost to the point of a blissful crumbly-pastried choking-death, just like I do.
A soft crumbly pastry and tender steak and onion centre: keep your FA cups, Nobel prizes and olympic golds; this is what dreams are made of.
No, I don't forsee losing much weight here - but fuck it, they do make such good pies I could die in their shortcrust 'n' sirloin arms and not have a single regret. Mmmmm-mmm-mm-mmmmmmhhh....... *drolls uncontrollably*
The only slight worry is that they insist on putting ketchup on them, as well as floating them in vats of mushy peas (much reminiscent of East Yorkshire in regard to the peas ensemble, but fellow pie-afficianados like you already know that ) but I shall embrace these new methods in the likelihood they're on to something. All I can offer in return is my infamous extendable stomach trick and eat four regular pies, or one `super-family-size-serves-six` behemoth in one sitting.
Ahem. Such gluttonous indiscretions aside, I have other good news to bring from this most pleasing of cities, especially that there are more things to see, and one or two done already. The tallest residential building in the world is here in Melbourne and I went up to the 88th floor today to the Eureka flight deck 260 metres above the city; to the highest observation deck in the Southern hemisphere; the 2nd tallest building overall in the Southerly half of our fair planet; home to more somewhat arbitrary claims to fame as these that I have completely forgotton to list. Or I chose not too because, after all, the Southern hemisphere is a little under-qualified in world terms even today, what with China, Russia, India, the United States, most of Malaysia, All of Europe, Canada and the entire Middle east all being in the Northern bit. Kind of takes the fun out of claiming anything as `best *** in the Southern hemisphere` when you're the only fully developed nation with any sizeable landmass who's even trying.
Still, this is just one of those features of the Australian people: they do truly believe, with all their heart and none of their formidable piss-taking and cynicism, that Australia is the best bloody country on Earth mate.
And if you ask directions, times or distances across their great nation and inevitably offer some hopelessly optimistic suggestion of time or distance or difficulty, then you will sooner or later be reminded, in all pertinency and spirit of helpfulfulness, that Australia's not a country, it's a fuckin' continent, mate.
One certainly seems to, and both these statements may indeed be, absolutely true.
I hope I get a good chance to find out which is what 
* My little hashing of Bahasa Indonesia, in case you were wondering, translates as "I live in england, indonesia-not. I travel to australia to where I can [speak] english [language]!" where words in square brackets are necessarily implied by context.
Syntax is correct for Indonesian although the words are the most simplistic.
No I can't really speak it, but I like it, so I may yet one day
