It's so strange to be back in Australia. I could have easily stayed in South America for another few months - there's so much to see and do, and I would have loved to work on my Spanish a bit more. I had a bit of a rude introduction to Australia - for some reason I always get hassled by the border guards (i.e. immigration, not customs/quarantine) whenever I try and enter the country. The guard decided to play what seemed like 50 questions with me over such things as me not supplying an address (I'm temporarily homeless) despite vagrancy having not been a crime for over forty years.
It's the type of thing that really annoys me - I questioned the border guard as to the relevancy of his line of questioning and got a very curt response about myself being a "high risk traveller" and Santiago (in Chile) being a "high risk port" and so on. On his first point, I'd like to know exactly how the Department of Immigration defines high risk, but his questioning was (in my opinion) irrelevant as at the end of the day, I can't, as an Australian citizen, be denied entry to Australia. The officials don't really like it when you point this out - perhaps they're used to most people in this country being sheepishly compliant when dealing with authority figures.
Anyway the guard eventually relented, so I caught the Skybus into town then took the tram for the short hop out to Richmond where I'm staying with Mike for a little while until I get myself sorted out. After a quick shower and some coffees on Bridge Rd (not to mention vegemite on toast, I couldn't help myself!, and to any British people watching yes it is different to (and better than) Marmite), we met up with some of the usual suspects to catch the tram down to St Kilda for the St Kilda Festival. On such a sunny day it was a great re-introduction to Melbourne, although we didn't really get to see any of the live music there because we kept bumping into people and stopping to chat. Nevertheless a great day and it was great to see so many friends again after the year away.
So it begs the question, what now? I've been back a week - I've stopped having to stop myself from speaking Spanish to waiters/waitresses in cafes; and have taken care of much of the administrivia of being back. I've finalised my enrolment at uni - classes start in about two weeks, so I'll have something to do until I find a job and so on. Finding a share house is proving slightly more difficult, as the market is really tight at the moment, but I'm hoping to having something more permanent than Mike's couch sorted soon.
As for this blog, I'm not sure what I'm going to do with it. I might post musings and observations from time-to-time but I guess for the most part my life will start to settle down into a routine before too long - so there might not be much of interest to write about unfortunately. I'll probably use the blog again to write about my travels in the future. I'd love to go to India for a few months at the end of the year and maybe tack on a trip to Jordan at the end of that, but whether or not I go depends on so many variables (money, job, uni timetable etc) so nothing is locked in.
I will though be posting photos with some sort of regularity to my Flickr photostream so feel free to check that from time to time. Since I've been back in Melbourne it's mainly photos of friends and so forth, but I'm hoping to get some proper camera hardware again soonish so I guess I'll post some more creative type stuff at that point. Until then, ¡Hasta Luego!
N.B. The photo of the Kangaroos is by пан Бостон-Київський used under the GNU Free Documentation Licence.
- Location:Melbourne
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