Victoria trip Wednesday 16/1/08
Saturday, 26 January, 2008
This was our first Melbourne day.
We wake, eat yoghurt and muesli for breakfast and drive to Melbourne, Liwen reading to us from The Complete Polysyllabic Spree in the back (because I can't read in the car; I get motion sickness). In the city, we realise that the Australian Open is on and that the city has become overrun with tennis freaks. Naturally, we are not really sport-people (though Anita likes the cricket).
We park just opposite the National Gallery of Victoria, and pop in there to use the bathroom. (For some reason on this trip, I have to keep visiting the amenities; it must be all the cups of tea they made for me. Also, I temporarily became one of those People Who Carry Around Water Bottles. I think it did wonders for my skin.)
Then we walked past the Arts Centre and over the bridge over the Yarra—
—through Federation Square where people were watching the Australian Open on the big screen—
—and then entered ACMI (the Australian Centre for the Moving Image. I had always wanted to go there. Entry was free.
Downstairs, there was an exhibition called Replay Marclay which was about Christian Marclay, a performance artists whose art involved music (he would compose his on and he did that postmodern thing where you draw attention to the bits that people ignore—e.g. skips in the record, scratches, bits that are out of tune—and tried to make you aware of the whole action of listening). I found it interesting, though difficult to watch. In one of his videos, he put pieces of different LPs together like slices of a pizza and played them on a record player. In another, he turned on an electric guitar, and filmed and recorded the noises it made as he dragged it behind a truck. In another, because he can't play a musical instrument, he turned a turntable into a guitar-like instrument and played it, DJ-style, like Hendrix. In another, the viewer was surrounded by 16 television screens on which hands in white latex gloves made “music” from found objects. I liked that he made you aware of the music of everyday life.
Then we went upstairs and checked out some of the short films in the memory grid. Some of them were quirky and interesting; some weren't that good.
Next door there was the Games Lab where we tried out various computer games (and I remembered again how much I suck at them).
I'd soon had enough, so we decided to continue through the city. We walked up Swanston Street, passing this rather interesting lamppost:
and a trapeze. (“Is this what Melbournians do in the summer?” I asked.)
Our destination was the State Library of Victoria.
We checked in our bags at the lockers (the system fascinates me; I don't know why. You put your money in the machine, select the size of locker you require, then one lights up and unlocks itself, and the machine prints out a PIN and locker number for you. You put all your stuff inside the locker and then press the button to lock it. When you want to retrieve your stuff, you go back to the machine and punch in the PIN and locker number into the machine, and it unlocks it for you.)
Despite having lived in Victoria for several years now, Anita had never visited the dome, and she and Liwen drooled over the interior and the beautiful places to read.
The exhibition that Ben and I saw in 2006 ( Mirror of the World: Books & Ideas) was still running. I remember mentioning it to Anita and telling her she must see it, and her telling me, “I wish I could see it with you!” Well, now she could.
After looking through the exhibition, we headed out. I wanted to do a quick check of my email but there was a queue (more people seem to be using the computers there). We were thinking of catching the free circle tram down to the bottom of the city to get the car but soon realised we wouldn't have time.
We thought Liwen should see the city on the Circle Tram, so I accompanied her and Anita went back to move the car. The tram was very full and it took a while to get a seat, plus you couldn't see much out the window, so I don't think Liwen was very impressed. We passed this building in the Docklands which has an optical illusion on the side of it.
Anita met us on the corner where we had gotten on the tram, and we headed into Melbourne Central, the shopping centre built around the shot tower:
She said that the parking station she was in had this thing where, if you park during the day before 4 pm, they charge you $X/hour, whereas, if you came after 4 pm, it was a flat rate of $Y (where X > Y). She wanted us to get settled for lunch (because it was about 3:30 by this stage) and then she would go and move the car. We went past the box office for Hoyts and checked the times for thehalfpipe (as that was one of the things I wanted to do). The only choices were Alien vs. Predator or Enchanted, so we decided on Enchanted.
Then Liwen and I got lunch (Oporto's for me) and Anita went to move the car. There were little finches roaming around the food court in their cute hopping way. In the corner, a number of people were surfing the internet wirelessly with their laptops. I talked to Liwen about music-making, and why it's an art form that's harder than certain types of craft (e.g. knitting) because the skills you need are more complex; they aren't easily or readily grasped. The bar you have to jump over initially is higher, and perhaps it's harder to make mistakes. You can teach yourself to knit online (and there are plenty of videos and diagrams which will show you how), but can you learn to play the piano online?
Anita joined us soon after with her own lunch. When she had finished, we went off to buy tickets for Enchanted (and found, to our surprise, that seating was still allocated; the beanbags—sorry, lovesacs—have numbers stitched on them. But the girl gave us possibly the worst beanbag in the cinema. What is the point of allocated seating if buying your tickets early doesn't guarantee you a good reserved seat???)
Then we turned out attention to exploring Melbourne and doing some more shopping. (Yes, we're girls and we like shopping.) We went to T2, kiki.K, Max Brenner, then walked through Myer (stopping at the perfume counter because Anita likes perfume which I find interesting because I have no interest in it. But that's what happens when you go shopping with friends: you get to find out what they're into, and you start to see it from their eyes. So now I know Anita likes perfume, Venetian masks and the colour green, whereas Liwen is into pink, ice blue, beautiful scarves and shoes. It's very helpful information for buying presents for them ...).
We crossed Bourke St and entered The Strand where there was a Koko Black shop. (There I bought chocolate for my work colleagues ... well, the girls, anyway.)
I loved the wallpaper in this shop; it was fuzzy.
Then it was onto Collins St, with another shoe shop and Tiffany & Co which was shut but we made Liwen pose in front of it because she had Audrey Hepburn Breakfast at Tiffany's sunglasses.
Shops were shutting so we made our way back to Melbourne Central (stopping at Cotton On, and JB Hifi which, you'd think, would have OK Computer for $10 but no ... I did, however, manage to pick up Heavy Soul Part 1 by Tyrone Noonan for $1 for Elsie, along with Vega4 and the soundtrack to Centre Stage [with its cover of Stevie Wonder's “Higher Ground” by The Red Hot Chili Peppers] which were also cheap.)
Anita and Liwen went ahead and said they'd meet me at the cinema, so I hurried to catch up with them and get there on time. It turned out that I was the first one in the cinema.
I was soon joined by some couples (girlfriends who had dragged their boyfriends along) and a group of about five or six teenage girls who grouped their Lovesacs together and flopped all over them. They weren't sticking to the allocated seating rule so, when Anita and Liwen showed up (Liwen bearing popcorn—such a bad influence!), neither did we, and we got a nice brown bean bag to ourselves closer to the front. (The orange ones seat two and the browns seat three.)
I have to say, I drastically lowered my expectations for Enchanted. Even so, I was surprised by how much I enjoyed it. The Romcom morality was a bit dodgey, and Patrick Dempsey always seems to wind up playing the same character, but Amy Adams's wide-eyed innocence, singing and uttering her lines with such pure sincerity, had me in stitches. Even James Marsden was perfect for his role in over-the-top-ness. My favourite scene (and George will hate this for me because her review of Enchanted is “The worst film I will see this year”) is in the park when they sang, “How do you know?” All the songs were very catchy (they were written by the same team who did The Little Mermaid and Beauty and the Beast), so, even though I had only seen the movie once, I found myself remembering the tunes the following day (and annoying Anita and Liwen with them).
At the end while the credits were rolling and we were admiring the beautiful ornamentation that unfurled around them, some of the teenage girls got up and stretched, and one realised that she could project her shadow onto the screen because the film projector was rather low. So she amused the rest of us by jumping up and down and waving her arms, and doing cartwheels down the front. Anita, who works with teenagers all day, found it particularly amusing, saying how much she liked that innocence about them.
We walked back to the car, only to find that Jasmine the car was locked in the parking station. It closed at 8 but the signage was not adequate enough to advertise this fact broadly. Anita called the number to get her car out, resigned to being charged a fee, but while she was on the phone (having difficulties with the person she was speaking to—a guy who wanted her to give her his credit card details without first giving her a guarantee that he was going to come and open the station for us), the doors opened for another guy who was leaving. So Anita went in to get Jasmine while Liwen and I stood in the path of the sensor to make sure the roller door didn't come down on us. After that, Anita tried to cancel the guy coming to let us in but soon hung up in frustration.
It was impressive that that didn't put her in a bad mood because she turned to us and said, “How are you guys feeling? Do you want to go on an adventure?” We said we did, so she drove several blocks and parked, and we got out and walked to the Sofitel Hotel, a very swanky establishment which, oddly enough, had a Dirt Cheap CD store in its shopping mall.
We went in the lift which took us up to the twenty-something-th floor where there was a bar with some lounges and a very nice view of the city, and then went in to use the ladies'. This was the view from the sinks:
Anita asked if we wanted to stay for a drink but we were tired so elected to drive home instead. (Perhaps the others wanted to stay but I was the only one who was vocal about leaving; I was concerned that it was 10 o'clock and it would take us around an hour and a half to get back to Warragul. Perhaps we should have stayed. Oh well.)
We drove home, Anita and Liwen talking about work stuff in the front and me falling asleep in the back.
Blinks:
A way of funding writing in the future: pitch and idea and get people to support it.
Place where you can hire play equipment for parties, etc.
How to recalibrate the home button on your iPhone.
Unsolicited manuscripts accepted by Pan Macmillan with certain conditions.
Thought Balloon is a group blog in which the writers tackle a new theme every week? month? with one-page scripts. This URL is for their Phonogram ones.
How to sew a zipper on a knitted garment.
Issues organised by tale.
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That’s lovely that you had a Melbournian show you around town. Thanks for posting on your trip in detail
I think I have a drawing of that Swanston Street sculpture from when we were in Melbourne for the convention!
Honestly, all that ridiculous singing made me cringe. Though I did have the “ah ah ah” in my head for days afterwards and annoyed my friends by singing it again (and again and again)!