More first impressions

Today was our first opportunity to really get to see any of Melbourne other than the little suburban area around the college where we live. It was quite an interesting experience. I’ve found that, quite unwittingly, I have come to have a great many expectations of what the city would look like and the kind of atmosphere it would have. Perhaps not very surprisingly, very few of those expectations were met. One of the first things that I was not expecting was how poor the neighborhoods out here look. It was so strange to ride the train through the different neighborhoods because the houses were a lot smaller than I expected them to be, the yards were not as well kept, factories were right in the middle of subdivisions, and people had sheds made out of rusty corrugated tin in their backyards. I guess one of the reasons I was so taken aback at the appearance of the neighborhoods is that from everything I have heard, Melbourne is a world capital of leisure, and leisure seems to me to require at least some degree of affluence. I didn’t see a lot of things that were conducive to a leisurely lifestyle either, like basketball or tennis courts, parks or swimming pools. I will have to do some more investigation to follow up with this hypothesis, but I was doing some reading that suggested that houses are not seen as the main indicator of a family’s status in Australia. If this is true, than I wonder what are the indicator’s of a person or family’s status? One of the other things that surprised me was the sudden switch and the complete difference between the outlaying areas and the city. The city really was very metropolitan and seemed to be on the cutting edge of fashion and culture, as evidenced by the fact that almost every store that we passed seemed to be selling expensive name-brand clothing. But the shift from suburbs to downtown seemed to happen almost instantly, right after we crossed the river. Also interesting is that the entire city seemed to be almost completely devoid of crowds, except for perhaps the Victoria markets. One can walk down the sidewalks in the busiest part of town and never use one’s elbows to navigate. The areas around Kingsley were basically deserted when we were coming home at four in the afternoon. I don’t know if it’s because this is supposed to be the winter season or because of the time of day we were out or why exactly that was the way it was.

One of the big new concerns that I’ve developed however, is that I will spend the entire trip comparing everything to similar experiences in London, and that everything will be found lacking. So far, I have enjoyed my time here, short as it’s been, but I’ve also drawn so many parallels between this trip and the London experience. I want this experience to be able to stand on it’s own, since really the experiences are completely different and can’t be held up next to each other for the sake of discerning which is “better.” I hope that this will go away in time, as I get to know Melbourne on it’s own terms and have some other basis of experience besides prior travels. But I have got to keep this issue in check, because I don’t really know of anything that can spoil an experience so well as discontent.