Listed below are some of the firsts I noticed from my first twelve hours in Australia:
1. This is my first time in Melbourne—and my first day.
2. The first piece of fruit I ate was a delicious, ripe banana drizzled in maple syrup.
3. The first time I didn’t understand the words coming out of someone’s mouth was with the concierge in the lobby of my hotel. (the second happened when I ordered lunch).
4. This is the first time I have ever really been by myself in a different country.
5. My first hotel is named after an American city—Miami.
6. I ate my first meal at a little restaurant called The Broken Poppy—which is a line from one of my favorite poems and why I chose to eat there in the first place.
7. The first unusual facet of Melbourne I noticed was the intersection of Errol and Victoria Street. Walking through that jumble of intertwining roads filled with left-hand drivers and trolley cars, I felt like I had not just spent twenty two hours flying around the globe but stumbled into the breezy streets of New Orleans instead. The buildings are low here—only two stories—and multicolored. They have that old French Quarter appeal, the kind which would seem caricature-ish if you didn’t know there was something natural in the evolution of the aesthetic design.Â
8. In the center of the intersection, I walked through my first park—a twenty by thirty grassy space with two gigantic lumbering trees. Hanging from every tiny branch in bunches were seed pods that resembled underwater mines. The trees were landmarks on their own. Their leaves were the brightest green I’ve ever seen and from a distance, the trees seemed fluffy. Like the trufaluf trees in Seuss’s The Lorax.
9. In the park, I came across my first random sign. It read:
Male
Female
Unisex
Handicap
Public Toilets down the stairs
This would have been fine, except that the sign watched over a flat piece of concrete, guarding the filled pit where once a stairway existed. This bed of concrete was traced with a beautiful rod iron fence and had two parental companions in the trees; their broad branches protected the lost entrance to the abyss from the prying eye of the sun.
That’s enough for now. I’m going to bed. The city spreads away from me. Tomorrow I will journey into the city with the Melbourne Welcome program and make friends with the streets that will feel and feed the reverberations of my vibrating, living imagination for the next four months.
Anticipate the past.
Jordan
Quote of the week:
“Minds are like parachutes. They only work when they’re open.” - Tommy Dewar
