saturn returning

i am coming home in a few weeks. yes that's right, i am heading back to my beloved melbourne. it's been almost one year since i chucked the city life in and moved to a quieter, and some would say somewhat confusing, little hamlet called heidelberg. don't get too excited mum and dad, i am only coming back for two weeks before heading off once again to my new adopted hometown. in flight terms, that's 14 days i'll be out of germany and three or four of those days will be spent travelling. (i still haven't worked out time zones and flight schedules. there's a reason i studied english lit and publishing and gave my old nemesis math the boot.) so all in all, i guess i'll be home for about ten days. it's good enough for me, for even though i love germany and the whole european thing (my on again/off again love for germans not withstanding) there are a few things from australia, particularly melbourne, that cannot be beat.

1. i love my coffee and german coffee is not that good, or at least no where near as delicious as melbourne coffee.

2. oh how i long for things such as cordial, a sausage roll, a lamb roast and a good ol' fashioned aussie bbq. (i went to a french bbq here one weekend and was disgusted. there was no no meat, just little bits of chicken wings and no real beer. who has a bbq without 2 slabs of beer and half a cow?)

3. family and friends. even though i've made some brilliant friends over here who i love and i will be friends with for a long long time, there is no substitute for those nearest and dearset who you've known for what seems like forever. plus, not having any family here has been hard at times. not too hard, cause they're only a phone call away, but a voice on the other end of a phone is one thing, an actual face is another.

4. my foriegn dvds. i know it's a trite entry, but i have gone a year without being able to watch anything that isn't in english. i can't watch my asian martial arts movies, manga/anime, french and italian horror movies and i can't even watch anything in spanish or portugeuese that alexis wants to show me, cause the germans either dub everything or only have german subtitles. grrrr... of course this would be sort of okay if i actually could speak german, but even then i don't want to have to pause a film to reach for my dictionary. (although i did watch a film that was half english/half german a few months ago and i didn't do too bad. i understood what was going on, not explicitly what was said, but i could follow it.)

5. and of course my dearest love melbourne. god how i miss that city.

but all of this will go away the instant i get up the morning of my flight. as i board the train to frankfurt i know that i'll start missing heidelberg, maybe not as much as melbourne, but there'll definately be a little something in my heart that's left behind here. even if it is for only two weeks. or ten days.

my home town

i thought i'd write a little about my home town, melbourne. i love this city. so far it is the one place that i really consider home. most people who know me don't realise that even though i grew up all over the place; sydeny, brisbane, the sunshine coast and a small stint in ballarat, i was born here. some of my earliest memories of life are in melbourne. (NB some of these dates are probably wrong, memories are designed to fade and with them the accuracy of time)

i can remember being in grade one at mill park primary and it snowing. getting half the day off from school to build a snow man with the neighbour's kids and when it started to melt we decided to try and eat him. i still have a picture of that snowman somewhere. crooked nose, demented eyes and a lopsided head that made him look sassy and slightly angry. i can remember sitting in the backyard one night with mum and dad watching a comet fly across the night sky. this was in the early eighties and i want to say it was haley's comet, but i don't know much about astronomy and it could have been frank or sandra's comet for all i know, but for now i'll say it was haley's comet cause that makes it seem less like a faded memory. i also have these remembrances of good ol' franco cozzo's furniture add. anyone who's ever lived in melbourne should know this man and love him. he's the old school john so. i can remember him inviting everyone down to his shops in bruns-a-wick and foot-as-gray. i was delighted when i moved back to melbourne after 15 years missing in action to find him still trading his wares on the tv, even using the same quote, 'megalo megalo megalo! grand sale, grand sale!' (if anyone can tell me where to find a copy of his ad i would be in heaven)

now though, i have different memories of melbourne; going out to some funky underground club and coming home at 10am, working in the centre of the CBD and the craziness that seems to go hand in hand with it, brilliant coffee in little laneway cafes that could rival anywhere in the world, finding sweet-as fashions in a strange tucked-away stores. ahh... melbourne - king of all that a city could offer. there's a reason it won the world's most livable city, not once, but a few times.

the reason i'm posting about melbourne is that i went photo-taking the other night around the CBD to show my german friend where i live and just to have some photographic memories when i leave and it made me feel so homesick. there's just this vibe you get walking around melbourne that is unlike anywhere else i have ever been to. brisbane makes me wish it were bigger and more exciting, ballarat takes me back in time, the sunshine coast always made want to reach for sunscreen and sydney always made me wish i was in melbourne. (sorry sydney, but IMHO i'm not a big fan. i like my cities with character, not an obvious need for global attention.) there's just this general feel in melbourne that's full of wonder and excitement. something to do with the fact that the longer you're here the more you realise that there is way more to find, see and do and that you've only just scratched the surface.