Melbourne Day One : Cousins Vs Judd

Okay. I’m back.

Admittedly this trip is not going to be anywhere near as exciting as the Japan trip, but as I love Melbourne so much and have been here so often, it would be remiss of me to discount it as a place worth writing about.

I arrived this (Thursday) morning after coming over on the Qantas redeye. Thank God I now only fly Qantas for domestic. It’s so much better than Virgin or Jetstar, and the difference in price is negligible. Overall the flight was as good as could be expected from a redeye, and we arrived in Melbourne earlier than expected.

I didn’t think Jana would be too stoked by me waking her up at 5:30 in the a.m. when I arrived at Southern Cross station, so I put my suitcase in a locker ($10 for 24 hours, even though I only wanted it for 2 hours) and walked into the city to find a 24 hours McDonalds to use their free WiFi.

After finding a Maccas not too far along I got the internet hooked up and sat there drinking one of their shitty coffees and plodding around on ze interwebz. Neither my computer nor their WiFi connection were terribly happy with doing too much with face book, so it kept freezing up when I tried to do stuff on the ‘book. At the moment I will give my new computer the benefit of the doubt and assume that it was MacDonalds fault. At least I hope it was.

After retrieving my suiitcase and heading out to Port Melbourne I met Jana out the front of her apartment, dumped my stuff and we went out for breakfast. Unbeknownst to each other we had both been on a strict Atkins (or at least No Carbs, sugars and Alcohol) regime over the past month, but we both broke the carbs rule this morning. Mmmmmmmmmm Carbarific.

Jana’s apartment seemss as if there was some sort of monumental mistake in construction. Now, we’re in Melbourne, where if you’re lucky you might get 3-4 months of real summer weather per year. Jana’s apartment has an outdoor area that is seriously bigger than the whole interior apartment. It’s not like it’s a massive apartment either. Jana’s room is tiny, and yet outside you have about 40sqm of balcony! I think in construction they just put the walls in and then stood back, realised their mistake and just hoped nobody would notice.

I went into Prahran with Jana as she needed to return some shoes and earrings. We grabbed a bite to eat and then I left her to go meet Marnie before the football. It was Richmond versus Carlton tonight and the game had been hyped up by the Cousins versus Judd angle. Unfortunately the game was a complete letdown as Richmond once again went out of their way to make their opposition look better than they actually are and got thumped by over ten goals.

Marnie and I had fun though as Marnie had smuggled in some beers and a bottle of wine. Obviously this means I have started drinking again after going for 25 days without touching a drop. I decided to break it earlier than the end of March as most of the people I will be seeing on this trio I wont see again for 4-5 years.

As we walked into the MCG Marnie had a bit of a conniption as there were security guards were going through people bags at the entrance. Fortunately she got through without a check. I guess she mustn’t look at dodgy as we had first imagined. We were seated next to to girls who had just come over from Portugal a month earlier. They were studying Sports Law and were trying to understand the game, hence I had to go through many of the rules with them. We then inevitably spoke about soccer, and while they understood my hatred of Cristiano Ronaldo, they did not agree with it.

After the game Marnie and I met up with some of Marnie’s friends; Ali and Daisy. We all went out for a drinks. Along the way Marnie stole a dudes scarf, and while running around trying to get away from him, jumped into a recent model BMW which was sitting on the side of the road with it’s door open. Surprisingly the people in the car were not actually waiting for Marnie and they quickly asked her to get out.

We went to the James Squire pub, where Ali left after a drink. Then on to Red Hummingbird, where along the way Daisy picked up a jacket of a park bench and wore it the remaining few blocks to the bar, which was unfortunately pretty dead, so Daisy left us and the jacket and went home. Marnie and I then went to the Carlton Club, which was really good and not at all affiliated with the football team.

Eventually Marnie left me by running off without warning down St Kilda road toward her house which was about 5 kms away, while I was trying to convince her to get in a taxi and I’d drop her off on my way home to Jana’s.

She wondered why her feet and legs hurt the next morning.