Moving on - Melbourne

Funny thing, long distance air travel. Not just the jet lagged, can't get comfortable endless hours pretending to be asleep funny; it's also that strange disconnect between perception and reality in terms of distance travelled.

So we take the plane from  Hong Kong to Melbourne, via Auckland (don't ask, we don't know). The flight itself is notable for not much - we get seated amongst a group of mostly elderly Chinese tourists, and the gentleman seated in our aisle decides the best way to while away the long night hours is by singing, out loud. This does at least give Sian a last chance to use her mandarin, leaning across to politely ask him to shut the f**k up....anyway! eleven hours later there we are in Auckland, so far from home that if we went any further we'd start coming back. But it's hard to feel it when everything seems so disconcertingly familiar - wandering around an airside mall of tasteful coffee shops and outdoor-boundy kind of places as might be encountered at a retail outlet somewhere deep in the Cotswolds,with the small excepting fact that everyone employed seems to be a kiwi.

This disorientatingly comforting (or comfortingly disorientating) sensation continues after landing in Melbourne - a weird mash-up of mid-west USA and home-counties England, liberally sprinkled with influences from countless other parts of Europe (170 different languages spoken in this city, so we are told). One thing for sure, it isn't Hong Kong. For a start it's way quieter and slower paced, belying its 4.5 million population ( getting on for 20% of Australia's total). People are also incredibly friendly and helpful, bending over backwards to give help and assistance (contrasting with the terse yes or, more often, no, which is all you can often expect in HK). All in all it's a very easy place to be, somewhere you could very easily feel at home in - even when home, in all probability, is a very very long way away.

Sian lived here for a year too (absolutely the last port of call on our trip where this applies) so a fair bit of the stay is taken up revisiting old haunts and meeting up with old friends. Great to see Our Meens again (a mere 19 years since we last met and 33 years since we shared a house here in South Melbourne!). We also shared brunch with Pete and Luisa who I had a hand in bringing together (nowhere married 30 years). Pete and I met at the Melbourne Cup 33 years this week (big annual event here). As a fellow Pom, he quickly became part of our Pommie tut family and through that met Luisa, a friend of Our Sue's. He's been here ever since......