A Different Drummer

Man, that was some fine 14 days of pleasure.

Being back home was like going to an all-you-can-eat buffet restaurant when you are starving hungry, only you can just keep eating and never feel full. The more sunshine, raw Aussie heat, ocean, driving vast distances and quality times I had, the more I realised that my appetite for being home was far greater than the amount I could consume in two weeks.

And although the food metaphor above was mainly symbolic, I really enjoyed getting to chow down on some intensely good Asian food, great wine, meat pies, fish and chips and all the other great produce that makes Australian eating a singular experience (just ask Jingwei about the our democratic open-society Prawns).

The whole thing is being finished off in stye as well. Yesterday was my last day in Adelaide, and I was treated to the hottest day of the year, peaking out at 42 degrees and staying at around 38 degrees until 2am when I went to bed. Glorious Aussie heat as well, sun with a bite to it, sun that heats up parked cars into pizza ovens, makes bitumen roads go soft and runny, and heats up everywhere, except for the most vigilantly air conditioned supermarkets and shopping malls.

It was a Zen day. Slept in until about 10, woke up and lazed about the house watching the cricket (until Australia put South Africa out of their misery and finished the game around mid-day), went to the beach and stayed submerged in the water as long as humanly possible, made my way into the city for an incredible feast of Chinese food (all the classics, the highlight being an incredible salt and pepper squid) and finished the evening off in the outdoor garden of a great pub, drinking pint glasses of icy cold blended fruit cocktails. The day felt so complete and perfect that I was ready to dissapear, Obi Wan Kenobi style, and become one with The Force.

So now, after a 3:30am wake up to catch a 6am flight, I am in Sydney. Its nice and warm, without being aggressively hot like Adelaide was yesterday, I am guessing around 32 degrees, with a cool breeze. I am planning on bumming around the city today, catching up with some of the worlds finest people, eating some more Asian food (Sydney does it even better than Adelaide...) and then finish off my two weeks of bliss by watching the fireworks in Sydney harbour and hailing in the New Year.

Here to life as it is meant to be lived - and may everyone out there rock the house for New Years eve - the most over-rated of evenings, but still one to be done properly. Cheers!

Happy Birthday Thea.... :)

My internet access has been practically non-existant here, but I had enough time just now to read Thea's awesome post on turning 25. Being a great writer is often about being able to write so freely and truly about how you feel that you can reveal underlying truths about everybody - and her "turning 25" post is just wonderful. This seems just exactly on the money....

"25 is a weird age..... You feel too old to hang out with people 21 down, and too young to hangout with people 30 above, however you feel psychologically torn between wanting to be young again and thus act 21 down and be old an mature and act 30 above..... when you're 25 you have a sort of double personality..... or rather that is how I'm feeling at this point in time.... I want to hang out with my work colleagues, join in the high profile intelligent conversations and enjoy drinks such as rum, brandy and whisky and on the other hand I also want to be able to go to pubs stuff myself with pints of beer, dance like I'm alone and perform acts of drunken foolishness ......"

Just awesome. Anybody else feeling that way about this age? I sure am....

Last night at 8pm I got on a plane at Amsterdam Schipol airport, heading for Tokyo. On Sunday afternoon at 6pm I will be home in Adelaide. Right now I am sitting in the departure lounge in Tokyo Narita airport, getting ready to jump onto the secont 13 hour leg of my flight.

This kind of travel time is part of the whole implicit deal of being an Australian living abroad. It's one of the biggest reasons that I havent made it home in the last couple of years, but I cant wait to go through the ordeal and bust out onto the other side in Paradise, or Australia as these foreigners seem to call it.

Its ironic that the longest stopver I will be doing is in Sydney, only a couple of hours away from my final destination. A couple of hours by plane of course - over land you are looking at a solid 24 hour, 2000 kilometre drive from Sydney to Adelaide, including many long, dry hours crossing the Hay Plains, one of the emptiest places on Earth.

Anyhow, the Sydney stopever, all 8 hours of it on Sunday, will be a good opportunity to spend a bit of time in Sydney, grab a few quality hours with some good friends and generally take the edge of the previous 30 hours of travel. Hopefully my first hours in Australia after quite a long time away won't be spent avoiding vicious race riots - I'll probably spend the whole time in Chinatown anyhway, well insulated from the chaos.

I've loved the experiences I have been through in the last few years, and I am really loving living in Europe right now - but I'll sure as hell be happy to be back in Australia. Even the magical transformation from a cold, dark European winter to a glorious Australian summer will be wonderful. And with all the people I love and miss, the brilliant Australian quality of life and some fine, fine beaches, I'll be on a pretty dreamy holiday. Holiday it is, only two weeks, and I think the time is going to fly by much like a holiday in any other country.

So, farewell Rotterdam. Its been a good host, reliable and consistent, and welcoming, in that special Dutch way. Rotterdam is trying, actively building a new city in front of your eyes, and in the mean time, it feels like you are in a construction zone for a vast new planned city that hasnt really taken off yet. I think it has been in this state for quite a while, but for a city rebuilt and repopulated from utter devastation, it is a testament in many ways to transition and change. It is all over the place, and nowhere in particular. It desperately lacks a centre, physically and culturally, but its people lead good lives and it sits in the middle of very rich, densely populated country, so its prospects are obviously better than most places.

Living in such a central place, just hours on the train from plenty of great European capitals, and hours by plane to almost anywhere, is a blessing. It really shows up how close and interconnected this part of the world is. So, so different to Australia, where a couple of hours by train gets you from Noarlunga to Salisbury.

Its a great standard of live in Europe all up, they really have their thing going on here. Getting to live in Cairo really put me in a great position to see exactly how well things are working here - as well as how much you lose when you move from an "old fashioned" society to a new one. Everywhere has something to learn from everywhere else, and the last two years of my life have really illustrated this to me. I'm certainly going home to Australia with a hell of a lot more perspective than I left with, and I'm looking forward to seeing how that impacts on my experience there.

Tokyo Airport is pretty cool. I think it is possibly one step down from a fully fledged Tokyo - you can tell the place was built a long time ago and has had mainly superficial improvements. But it is still a Tokyo experience, complete with vending machines that sell everything, strange robotic doors that open when you wave your hand towards them, and a bizarre "shuttle" system that moves you between terminals - you are walking down a normal looking carpeted hallway, press a button for what looks like an elevator door, but then the door opens and you are actually catching a little mini underground metro style tram, for an absurdly short distance. Truly techy for the sake of techy.

Well, the boarding call is happening now. One thing that I have never understood, maybe a reader can illuminate me in comments, is why do people que for 20 minutes before boarding time? You have a seat allocated, so its not like you are going to get a better one by being first on board....And for sure you are more comfortable in the departure lounge. So why stand in line for 20 minutes? I make it a point to stay reading my book or typing away until the line is gone - and then I pretend that I am some kind of high roller with express entry service - no lines, no-one in your way - Mr Gara, enjoy your special premium NoQue service.....

But he's right on the money here...

"I do not accept there is underlying racism in this country. I have always taken a more optimistic view of the character of the Australian people."

For every dickhead on the beach singing the national anthem and every dickhead in a car with a baseball bat going to get some revenge, there is many many more Australians who just want to put all the dickheads on an island far far away.

Seriously can we just send these fuckers to New Zealand or something?

After having your nice little pretend-democratic fiefdom overrun by the Islamic Brotherhood in your first Washington-encouraged attempt at "free" elections, I cant imagine this news going public is going to come as a welcome development.

"Following the uproar in Europe over the alleged torture of CIA prisoners in prisons on European soil, Washington is reported to have moved the prisoners to "somewhere in North Africa" well ahead of US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice's trip to Berlin and Brussels. While no concrete country is named, it expected that the CIA torture victims are now held in Egypt and/or Morocco."

I wonder if the Islamic Brotherhood members of parliament will raise a bit of a fuss about this. It is an ideal opportunity, the perfect issue to frame themselves against the government - US torture camps! Within our own territory! It is like a gift from the sky.

Mubarak is in a shitty position. There is 1.8 billion reasons why he is obliged to stick with the US on this one. And there is about 75 million reasons why supporting the US on this is popularity suicide in Egypt.

Don't know exactly what to make of this, but it seems cool....

"Two Saudi businesswomen have swept to a surprise victory in chamber of commerce elections in the first polls in which women stood as candidates in the conservative Muslim kingdom..........."

Step by step I suppose.