The wonderful thing about suddenly finding your strings cut is the ability to do whatever the hell you want. No need to dance to someone else's tune any longer, I can just kick the loudspeaker till it cuts out. Anyway, enough wanky metaphors, after a whirlwind day or two of phoning, booking, planning and packing I have arrived in Tasmania to spend the remaining 3 weeks of my holiday climbing.
Tasmania feels almost like Scotland in many ways and as such, arriving here felt almost like going home (but it took about 19 hours less flying time!). The weather in Tasmania is cool, the clouds feel wet and scottish, not plastic and fake, the greenery is really green, not muted brown and yellow and maybe even the feeling of suddenly having hills all over the place and being in a small city, not a mental metropolis brings me calm. It also feels positively fun to be back in the middle of student town at my ripe old age, for I have been generously given free run of Johns flat here right by the university.
Before I stop typing, I should say that if you want to people watch, the front steps of Flinders Street station in Melbourne is a superb location. In around an hour of waiting to meet a friend I listened to a band play better music than on most radio stations, I watched cops come out and try to arrest twelve year old kids who were drinking beer and smashing the bottles directly in front of the "this area is monitored 24/7 by police via CCTV" sign, I smiled a the hare krishnas who arrived as a brightly coloured group and danced and chanted and were eventually joined by groups of girls in green t-shirts and boys in red t-shirts signifying who-knows-what while the whole thing was decorated on the fringes by the comings and goings of a great number of pretty girls wearing almost nothing. Those stairs are also the first time I have seen Muslims recruiting by flyer.
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