I’ll have to blog later.  I had a long day with a long drive despite my cold climaxing with fever chills.  I need sleep. 

This morning I faced two challenges: getting up on time and buying a jacket before joining the Urban Issues walk.  The sun warmed me enough that I felt I could cope without a jacket, but I’m glad I persisted and finally found a 55-dollar jacket at the Myer basement after finding Target all out of jackets and all the boutiques stocked with 25%-off reduced-price 299-dollar sportscoats.  Necessity has forced me into youth fashion, a jacket with a stretch collar and rectilinear hem lines. 

I got to Collins Street Baptist just before ten and found nobody there, so I sat down on the steps and waited.  Just after ten, Brent came out and greeted me; the group that had booked the walk hadn’t shown up yet.  We talked and I learned that the founder of Urban Seed studied theology in Rüschlikon in the eighties.  Rüschlikon is also the Swiss town that hosts the IBM research labs where the scanning tunneling microscope was invented, so both Urban Seed and my visit to Melbourne owe a direct debt to Rüschlikon. 

The group did arrive, a wee bit late, but coming all the way from Castlemain that was understandable.  They were a group of TAFE (Teaching and further education) folks that were in social work studies.  They seemed to come from a wide variety of backgrounds and later in conversation it turned out that at least some had been through rough patches themselves, which I’m sure gave them an impetus to study social work. 

Brent started off by briefly describing Urban Seed, which I won’t summarize myself.  If you’re interested to know more, the website will do much better than I could.  He did this on the steps facing Collins street, a thoroughfare with posh brand shops and expensive cars passing by.  We started walking and he told us to look hard at the surroundings.  Two turns later, we stood in a side alley where refurbished apartments faced a dead cinderblock wall.  Ten years ago, living in the city meant you were poor.  Now, it means you’re cashed up.  At eye level on the apartment block a large sign proclaimed that the area was under video surveillance. 

Would you have felt safe there?  The majority of our group felt that the sign made us more insecure than the surroundings themselves.  If there’s a need for video surveillance, then surely it’s dangerous, right?  I also felt that the high windowless and inhuman brick wall and the dead-end alley made the location feel dodgy.  Small alleys are cute if you can tell people live there; they are eerie when they’re bled dry of people. 

We took a short walk to the even more dehumanized alley that leads to the Cafe Credo at the rear of Collins Street Baptist Church.  The alley feels a bit more homely with the graffiti art on one wall, but the visible pipes and gratings and lack of windows give it a mechanized vibe.  Brent explained the dilemma the church faced during the heroin crisis which peaked in 1999.  One reason the users shot up in that alley, besides its seclusion, was that there was a water tap, and they needed water to shoot up.  The church first took the tap away, but the users merely proceeded to draw water from dirty puddles, so they put the tap back in.  Brent went on to tell how the one thing the church could do was provide a community for these marginalised people.  I learned that one of the biggest problems for people in secondary and tertiary homelessness is loneliness, and having a group to regularly meet can make a huge difference in keeping these people in society.  (Primary, secondary, and tertiary homelessness differ as follows: the first means a total lack of shelter, the second means reliance on short-term solutions such as government shelters, and the third means reliance on medium-term solutions such as staying on a friend’s couch – another thing I learned today.)  The Cafe Credo responded and still responds to the drug problem on the harm reduction side, complementing the government’s supply reduction efforts but often running into frustrated police officers in the course of events, because the supply reduction didn’t work.  The supply seems to have more correlation with the opium harvest in Afghanistan (which plummeted during the early Taliban rule and has reached a new high this year) than with efforts toward controlling imports.  An Afghani farmer can feed his family if he grows opium, but not if he grows wheat, which adds another component to the difficult question on how to act effectively and wisely in this matter.  And finally, it seems that while some efforts on the supply reduction and harm reduction sides can accomplish something, the demand for the drugs seems almost impossible to reduce.  A venue to escape our world, be that through drugs, TV, celebrity cults, or adventure vacations, seems to almost be a basic human necessity.  Alcohol alone causes an enormous amount of harm in society, and yet it is legal.  Heroin is not, even though it changes the personality less than alcohol (but it is more addictive).  Illegality leads to a black market, driving up prices and leading to a cycle of for instance prostitution for money for drugs in order to flee the misery of prostitution.  Legality, or semi-legality as with cannabis, leads to more controlled drugs, making the habit less lethal, but also to stronger drugs, making the habit more addictive.  There really seems to be no clear, wise answer to these issues. 

After a quick visit in the Cafe we walked through a short corridor next to the church and emerged on bright Collins Street next to a pearl shop.  I’ve never walked such a steep social gradient in such a short time. 

The group left again after some wrap-up questions and discussion, and when I hung back to chat with Brent he suggested I eat lunch at the Cafe Credo.  He took me back there and introduced me to some of the people there; I drank tea and chatted while he left to get some work done.  I met a lot of interesting people there – Naomi, Andy, Dave, Paul, Sarah, two-year-old Isabella, Neal, Damian, Rae, the boss’s daughter, whose name I never found out, and a few others whose names I don’t remember.  Before lunch we sang some songs and prayed.  I sat right next to a guy who couldn’t sing and most of the songs were unfamiliar to me.  Wait, let me rephrase that: he could sing, but he couldn’t carry a tune.  Or rather, he could carry a tune, but it didn’t match with anyone else’s.  No matter: joyful noise, with me fully part of it. 

At the lunch table the discussion began with talk about getting a busing license, which confused me until I straight up asked and was told that they were talking about a busking license.  “Busker” is an Australian term for a street artist, and here they need a license to perform.  Neal wanted one to play the bongo in Melbourne (and he’s a good bongo-man).  Damian was talking about the St. Kilda council getting on his case because of a painting on a meter box in a park advertising the laughing club that he runs as meeting at that meter box.  They get together and laugh – he demonstrated one laughing “exercise” to me and while I think I’m a bit too inhibited for that sort of thing it does look like enough fun to envy the uninhibited. 

After lunch I helped clean up a bit and carried a few metal scrap items around with Dave.  They were to go in a van, but when I went outside one time after cleaning to see if the guy was ready to load the metal, he’d already loaded it and left and suddenly I found myself locked out without having said goodbye properly to anyone except to Brent, who was just then talking to a group of schoolboys. 

I walked out onto wealthy street and had a tea in a coffee shop housed in a bank.  Then, I took a tram to St. Albert Park to pick up my jacket.  I trusted the electronic signage too much that said the next tram was 112, so I ended up getting on a tram number 31 and wondering why it crossed Spencer instead of turning left.  Two stations later the driver walked through the tram and told me it was the last stop.  I said I’d thought the tram went all the way south to St. Albert Park, to which he answered that I needed to get onto 112.  “I’m not on 112?  I thought this was 112.”  Before I could get off and walk back the short distance to Spencer he said he’d drive me there.  So I had a tram chauffeur me two stops, only to turn around right thereafter and go back to the final stop.  I was blown away.  This driver really went the extra mile – under no obligation at all.  If all the drivers in Melbourne offer that sort of customer service, I’m moving there! 

I quickly retrieved my jacket and then sat on a bench by the lake and wrote postcards in the sun.  When the sun vanished and the wind picked up I appreciated having two jackets, but even so I soon felt uncomfortable and left.  I stopped in the public restroom where the writing on the wall said “Smile! You’re on C.C.T.V”  After having Brent make me aware of all the security cameras in Melbourne, I found that quite appropriate. 

From there I took the tram to Richmond to meet up with Tim and Viv and their darling daughters.  There’s nothing like fellowship with friends to combat the inherent loneliness in business travel.  Maybe not only drug addicts need a Cafe Credo for community.  Maybe there ought to be one for businessmen as well. 

I’m amazed how quickly and thoroughly everything that comes to Australia becomes Australian.  Even the President of China becomes Hugh Jintow. 

I woke up without the alarm going off, feeling very rested, and knew something was wrong.  A glance to the hotel clock confirmed my fears: it was already 10:21 and the conference had begun at 9:00.  I’d somehow forgotten to arm my alarm. 

In half an hour I was at my booth and scooping up the second half of the morning tea break.  Apparently there had not been much happening before the tea break anyway, and I have no trouble believing that after witnessing the dead times between the catering breaks.  I used that time to talk with other exhibitors and the exhibition organizers, although I got the feeling that a number of exhibitors were also in the sessions. 

It’s still cold here, at least compared with the 30 degrees in Korea.  When I’m outside, temperatures hover around 10 degrees.  I finally asked the hotel reception if it was at all possible to heat my room and found out that I needed to turn on the air conditioning for that.  A bit counterintuitive, but it works.  I feel a lot better now in my room. 

I purchased 1 hour of internet time to keep me from staying up too long and from going online tomorrow morning instead of packing my suitcase.  The starbus should pick me up at 6:00.  So it’ll be writus interruptus in about seven minutes. 

Today was also an early day that started with some time online and the realization that in fact the air conditioning does work, if the little switch on the power outlet is turned on.  I now know how to operate Australian power outlets, something I thought wouldn’t take any learning at all. 

I had a morning meeting, a burger for lunch at a sandwich place in an industrial area, a taxi ride to another meeting, and a train ride back to the city.  In the city I bought enough bottled fizzy water to make a Melbourne garden envious, returned to a cool hotel room, and called Tim Davey.  This gave him a bit of an excuse to leave work and I got another fabulous evening with Alice/Caitlin, Isobel, Tim and Viv.  Alice/Caitlin and Tim together put the toppings on the pizza dough Viv had made, a traditional division of labor with delightful results. 

During the bedtime reading, Caitlin asked what it meant to kill.  It’s weird how we take acquired meanings for granted, meanings and concepts we once did not understand in the least. 

Tomorrow I’m off for Japan and hoping that next time I’m in Australia I’ll have enough sense to book a few days of vacation…

The A/C at the Victoria Hotel isn’t up to snuff, at least not in my room.  It blows with a tender, soothing sound of distant seashores, impervious to the controls on it, and with all the raw power of a man trying to blow a tuft of cotton across a table without puffing up his cheeks. 

So I think of my apartment at home and what it’s like in summer and will answer any questions about my hotel room as follows: “It’s better than a poke in the eye with a burnt stick.” 

I spent my first day checking e-mail, calling a friend, and eating dinner with Tim and Viv Davey and their two beautiful daughters.  We had a barbie, which means barbecue, not an über-endowed plastic doll, and pear-and-plumb crumble with vanilla ice cream.  More importantly, we caught up on what’s been happening in the last three years, how our gray hairs have increased, how being a Jedi master requires dedication and sacrifice, and how a Padowan’s apprenticeship can be difficult.  I learned that Caitlin was Alice that day, but would be Caitlin again the next.  It was heartwarming to hear Caitlin/Alice answer my question if she liked Isobel with “I lovver” and see in the course of the evening how she dotes on her little sister. 

Today I met with a contact and visited the RMIT for a laboratory tour.  It was cool to see the instrumentation and less cool to know that none of it was ours.  We’d have good stuff to supplement it! 

In the afternoon, before meeting with other contacts, I went opal shopping and met with success, but the details I must shroud in mystery.  We went out to dinner on Lygon street at Da Mattina’s, where I had a Moreton Bay Bug.  Dennis never told us why they’re called bugs, but who cares, when they taste great and come with a nice cool Sauvignon blanc with a Stelvin cap.  Dennis recommended the Bundaberg rum, because it’s supposed to have a smoky, woody taste, so back at the hotel after too much food I walked to the nearest bottle shop and bought a 50ml-bottle of Bundaberg.  It’s rum, it burns, it doesn’t hardly taste at all.  But that experiment only cost $5.00. 

What’s really expensive are the half-liter bottles of soda or water at the convenience stores.  Three dollars a pop – twice as much as in Japan! 

And while I’m on a roll, let me complain about the Kimberly-Clarke toilet paper dispensers at the Sydney and Melbourne airports.  Whoever suggested that all a person needs is an 8×4 rectangle of diaphanous EZ-rip material ought to be condemned to lifelong deprivation of decent toilet paper, if the Geneva conventions allow for that.  (Incidentally, if they do, perhaps the US could use that as a information extraction technique to replace waterboarding.)