Melbourne

Melbourne Tuesday Oct 17th.....clear skies (they need rain massively!) and about 72 degrees....lovely!

I liked Melbourne more and more and it is the most user friendly big city in my experience. Examples: a central farmers' market where luxury crops (asparagus/leeks/chives even "designer" olives) are raised ON THE SPOT for sale. Fabulous old fashioned trams which, gratis, rumble about the the 20-odd block edge of the central business district. Passing about 2/3rds of the must see sights of the city with a canned, intelligent narrative...one simply gets on and off....(the city is largely in a fairly regular grid and is densely served by sleek trams...the most social of all means of urban transoprt?...though there is also a subway and train service frequently to the near suburbs)......the AGE, the morning paper which Jenny Smyth's (her family name was Fairfax) started in 1856 is one of the world's truly great papers....infinitely better than the AUSTRALIAN from Sydney. It would hold its own with the TIMES, LE MONDE. the WIENER STANDARD etc....

Central Melbourne sits along the Yarra about 3-4 miles inland from a splendid bay of the Pacific Ocean...there are lovely beaches in the near-southern-suburbs.....more parkland than any city I can think of save perhaps Vancouver....restaurants which glom together on certain streets here and there offering wonderful walks to smell, look at the posted menus and choose.....and this is Australia's most ethnically diverse place.....last night, for example, I could have in a 4 block stretch Korean, new Aussie (they call it "Oz"), Turkish, Italian, Greek, French, Vietnamese, three kinds of Chinese, Malayan, Argentine (!) and McDonalds to choose from. I opted to dine at the grand old Windsor where I am staying: local oysters served with a little jelly bean sized pellet of frozen lime/vodka......on to a rolled chicken breast around ecrevisse......lemon crepes.....a local Riesling (within 20 miles of the city are major vineyards)....about US$75 served with lovely panache....

One should travel to sniff out differences rather than similarities I figure.....Some differences here: I like the spoken word in urban Australia...(and most of Australia IS urban): it is generally richer than our argot and there are certainly more beguiling twists of phrase....ABC the Australian BBC is slightly lighter than our PBS and doesn't have those annoying long commercials by sponsors who support programs....people seem much fitter but everyone says morbid obesity is on the rise....on Sunday it was as though the whole city was working out doing SOMETHING.....there is infinitely more ethnicity than I remember before....Melbourne feels as "ethnic" as New York....just the mix is different: almost no black (the Aborigines seem to prefer to live together in the north and west)...tons of Southeast Asians, Italians, Greeks, Irish, Turks and Yugoslavs.....a large and rather powerful Jewish community (owning Myer, the largest dept store in the world today I am told among other high profile businesses).

I haven't been here long enough to sense the urban prejudices though they surely exist......the new architecture is extremely exciting....a new 92 story apartment tower, the tallest in the world, has just started receiving its tennants. Those on the higher floors admit a bit of seasickness when the wind is up: it looks like a knife blade though one which curls slightly as it ascends....like Gehry a bit but my take on him is that he doesn't deal much in the vertical...

I wandered in the Botanic Garden...artful, lovely spacious place with the damnest combination of tropical (many healthy palms), semi tropical (oleander and gardenias and azaleas...remember it is spring here) and temperate (fabulous roses, different pine trees)....all coexisting as the peoples of this city seem to. There is a "fringe" festival on...new music, experimental theatre and the like. I will try to snare some tickets to something. It is difficult to rein in my enthusiasm for this quite thrilling world city. I like it FAR best of any of the Australian places I have seen.