Ha! Not dead.

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Not even close. How disappointing.

My flight was supposed to leave Wellington at 6am on Monday morning (09/08/10), but no captain - so was closer to 7. Anya Marina's cover of T.I.'s 'Whatever You Like' playing in the airport rounded up a peculiar last hour in NZ.

Then there was a flight, a bus ride, a train ride and 15 minute walk to Braeden's place. After a brief interaction with his leaving flatmate, I was hanging solo from 11am (Aus time), since being awake since 1am (Aus time). Checked out the neighbourhood and tried to shake off that sleep deprivation. Braeden, Georgia (his girlfriend), Aaron and Kim (the briefly met flatmate) all returned in good time and provided a warm welcome to my home for 12 days. Other than a quick kip, I was awake for around 21 hours.

Melbourne IS similar to Wellington. Everyone went on about it while I was in NZ and it's a fair comparison. The suburb I'm staying in, Brunswick, is much like Aro Valley or Cuba Street. Plus Melbourne has been all fuckin cold and wet since I've been here. But NOT windy like Wellington. The liberation from the wind and hills is plenty comfortable for me.

Jim was bang on about the public the transport. It's mean. Basically you pay based on how long you want to be using travel services, eg - 2 hours, daily, weekly, etc. So I've got a weekly pass and can take as many trams, trains and buses as I want. And they usually have at least 2 babes on them.

There's heaps of kickarse buildings and shops and scenery and all that shit, so that's kept me pretty entertained while mah bros've been at work. That, and Braeden's ps3. Lovin' Fifa 09.

Checked out the AFL on Saturday at the MCG. Carlton vs Richmond. We were cheering on Carlton (most adjacent to Brunswick) and they gave the Tigers a good clean rapin'. It watched much like Basketball - really free flowing with plenty of shows of brilliance. The MCG was chur as well; the same sort of shit everyone goes on about (yeah it's real big). Will hopefully check out some cricket there later on in the year.

Experienced the 3rd biggest cinema screen in the world on Sunday. It was also real big. Watched Hubble 3D, which was really quick impressive. It's about this telescope in space that some astronauts fixed last year. It looked super easy but they made out like it was a big deal. The special effects were amazing but the last 20 minutes of the film pretty much just went on about how big space is - 'Now we can see the there's hundreds of millions of galaxies hundreds and millions of light years away, isn't that interesting?!'...No... I get it already, space is very big. Very very big. In fact, abstractly big - my mind can't even comprehend distances and sizes that large so I don't really need to know the precise figures of how big it is...arseholes.

THEN I went to Melbourne Zoo on Sunday. By myself. It was pretty sad, but not because I was solo. The animals were either so dumb and boring that they didn't know they were in captivation, or animals that should be exciting, but have had ferocity dampened by captivation. Stink.

I'm going to California on Saturday. Leaving Melbourne at 8:45am arriving in Sydney at 10:10am. Depart from Sydney at 01:50pm for 13 1/2 hours to arrive in LA at 10:20am local time. I then have a 4 hour bus trip to Big Bear Valley where I will train for the big job.

Should be just shy of 20 hours travel all up. Aaaawesome.

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