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Unfinished Melbourne: Day 5
Soundtrack: “My Bag”, Lloyd Cole and the Commotions There’s always mixed feelings about the last day. The knowing that I’ll be heading back to the 6.30am alarm, getting ready to go to work, the daily commute traffic, the junkie-like fix of the morning coffee, salad for lunch, the daily routine, the torment of only being able to dream of travel to come. Then there’s being home with L, the comfort of familiar surroundings and sleeping in our own bed, getting to know our two new feline overlords, the comforting stability of being home while dreaming of travel to come. The alarm kicked me out of bed at 6.30am so I’d…
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Unfinished Melbourne: Day 4
Soundtrack: “Unfinished Sympathy”, Massive Attack Today was kind of a rest day, in that I had definite leg tireds so hoped to not walk so much. I decided that if I wasn’t going back to the old breakfast favourite cafe, I’d be totally promiscuous and not even go back to yesterday’s spot. Instead I crossed the laneway to a place offering middle eastern style eggs. These came out in a scorching hot dish, swimming with meatballs in a tomato sauce, along with some creamy labneh. With a couple of fingers of crusty bread on the side it was a decent way to start the day. Probably not every day, though…
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Unfinished Melbourne: Day 1
Soundtrack: “Hong Kong Garden” Siouxsie and the Banshees New trip, 5 days in Melbourne to shop, eat things, and most importantly, see Massive Attack. An early morning, and much inclement weather on my drive to the airport (the airline sent an email the night before advising of possible delays). It took some time to find a parking spot some distance from the shuttle bus, and I was a little damp by the time I got to the stop. After checking in and security, I settled in for an expensive coffee and breakfast based on a croissant (in the same way movies are based on a true story — Paris has…
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Five flavours: Day 4 Hue
Soundtrack: “The Lovecats”, The Cure Five flavours: sweet, salty, sour, bitter, spicy. I must admit that over the last few years bitter and sour had become almost synonymous for me, thanks to flavours like bitter lemon, I’ve been using bitter to mean sour, and sour to mean bitter. Call it getting old and lazy. So I went back and looked it up: lemon juice/citrus is sour, coffee is bitter. Sour is related to acidity, bitter is more about the other chemistry. It gets confusing with things like beer: beer is acidic, but with the addition of hops it’s bitter. Lemon juice is sour, but lemon rind is bitter. A whisky…
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7NNT25: Day 35 – Singapore
Soundtrack: “Holiday”, Madonna Waking and checking social media, it turns out that if I’d stayed in the basement parking lot of the first venue for another hour or so, I’d have spent all that time sweating and queueing but at least seen Lady Gaga, who turned up and did a few minutes in the club. I still probably wouldn’t have got in, but I could have done the star spotting thing. Oh well. My body really didn’t like waking up today, but I’d arranged to meet Singaporean-native pal D and have lunch and catch up so out I went. Lunch was at Pizza Express, the Singaporean version of a UK…
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Baltics24: Day 13 – Vilnius
Vilnius (though the locals barely pronounce the second i) the capital of Lithuania (which is spelt locally as Lietuva) is an interesting place. It’s the second largest city in the Baltics, with just a few less people than Riga, Lithuania is the most populous of the three countries, and as Laura told us yesterday, has a more spread out population (of the 6 cities with more than 100k pop, 4 are in Lithuania). This morning was the obligatory wander to see where things were, it was also about 30 degrees so a part of the wander was just to find patches of shade. There was an occasional breeze which helped.…
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Vietnam the third: day 17, Singapore
It’s kinda weird to be back in a place where people speak English, signs are in English, cars drive on the left all the time, intersections are controlled, people queue in an orderly fashion, yet at the same time looks and feels foreign. Singapore, somewhere I’m yet to spend enough time in to gain anything but a surface understanding of: organised yet still South East Asian; both incredibly multicultural with multiple significant minority populations, yet to a degree lacking integration with each population having their own little enclave, and it seems that the upper-echelons are confined to a single group; a somewhat progressive country yet also quite conservative. The contradictions…
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[NY Day 9ish] World Fantasy Convention part final
This is brought to you by a grant from the Western Australian Government Department of Culture and the Arts. This isn’t quite a convention wrap-up, but I am writing this as the train speeds south to New York City along the Hudson River, with Saratoga Springs behind me. But I’ll do a proper wrap up later. I’ll start by saying how chuffed I am that pal and Aussie Angela Slatter won a World Fantasy Award for her collection Bitterwood Bible. It was a strong field of 5 fabulous works this year, and it’s great that she came away with a trophy. I’d say that the dealer room is the elephant…
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[NY Day 7ish] World Fantasy Convention part 2
WFC Day 3 Brought to you by a travel grant from the Western Australian Department of Culture and the Arts. There’s no hiding from it: the dealer room this year is quiet. Too quiet. The talk around the room is that it’s among the quietest ever. It’s not that people aren’t buying, more that people just aren’t coming into the room to browse. I’m told that this con has full attendance, so around 1,000, but I’v seen busier rooms at cons of 200. The crazy part of the low sales is that, comparatively, we’re doing okay. We’ve sold out of a couple of titles that started with 6 or so…
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[NY Day 3] Heading upstate
Today’s the heading out of NYC to Saratoga Springs Day. Go north young man and all that. I didn’t necessarily feel so young dragging all my suitcases across the road to Penn Station, and through the crowds to where I had to board. When it comes to finding and boarding cross country trains, I think the UK does it better: their stations are better sign posted, and platforms are more easily found. I managed to walk past the right queue while I was looking for where I had to go, because a random queue next to an escalator going down doesn’t immediately say “this is where I board the train”…
